Thursday saw a fun moment for Major League Soccer, as Los Angeles Football Club unveiled its dull, unambitious colour scheme and crest for its inaugural 2018 season. Don’t listen to me, though, I’m from San Francisco and thus reflexively hate all sports teams from Los Angeles. Also, I saw Tool in concert on Wednesday and rocked out to their famous wish that the “great big festering neon distraction” sink into the ocean.

LAFC’s previous go-round in the form of Chivas USA started well enough in 2005, but ended up as the kind of disaster that leads everyone who followed it to just kind of pretend it never happened so we can obliterate all traces, put the whole thing in entirely different hands and start blissfully anew, like Star Wars fans circa 2010.

Conceived as the American arm of Club Deportivo Guadalajara (commonly called Chivas), one of Mexico’s most popular clubs since forever, the project seemed to make perfect sense in a heavily Mexican-American city where the parent club already sported a legion of local supporters who would make up a built-in fan-base for the new Northern wing.

It didn’t work. However bad you remember the Chivas USA situation being towards the end, it was worse. I’ll get into why in Part 2, but just take in this one statistic for the moment: while the Galaxy were off winning another championship, Chivas USA drew 7,063 fans per home game in 2014, which was less than half the second-lowest average attendance in the league, San Jose’s 14,947. They were mercifully put on hiatus at season’s end, to be re-launched with new ownership and a new name in 2018.

So where does this leave LAFC’s prospects of taking Los Angeles by storm the way their predecessors were supposed to? Well, it’s incredibly complex. Everything LAFC faces is a challenge, everything is an opportunity, and history may not be any guide. But fans of the league – even the ones who hate L.A. teams – need to understand the strange history and the crazy landscape that the new club is parachuting into.

PART 1: FOOTBALL IN LOS ANGELES:

American Football, is by far and away the most popular sport in America. For every Major League Soccer fan nationwide, there are literally hundreds of fans of the National Football League. And today the second-largest city in the country has been without an NFL team for 20 years. Picture for a moment a 32-team Premiership without a club in Manchester. For 20 years. Yeah.

Football’s Los Angeles Raiders once helped usher in the Golden Era of Los Angeles sports. After moving 400 miles South from Oakland in 1982, they brought L.A. its first Super Bowl championship the following year, and became a fixture in the city’s culture; their crest, for example, was so closely identified with the burgeoning L.A. rap scene of the ‘80s that decades later, hip-hop fans worldwide still wear it with no idea of its association with an American football team.

Meanwhile, the city was months from hosting the 1984 Summer Olympiad, the Lakers had built the most exciting team basketball had ever seen around Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and baseball’s Dodgers won a title of their own in 1981 and another in 1988.

But all good things must come to an end, and by the time the Rose Bowl in the L.A. suburb of Pasadena hosted the World Cup Final in 1994, sports teams all over Los Angeles were having problems. Eazy-E and Dr. Dre could wear all the Raiders caps they wanted, but they couldn’t get a new stadium built, and it turned out neither could anyone else.

Telling the full story would take years, but suffice to say that by the 1995 season, both Los Angeles area NFL teams were gone, the Raiders back to Oakland and the Rams to St. Louis, 1,500 miles and two time zones away, leaving a stunned L.A. sporting public that was only vaguely aware that this thing called Major League Soccer was getting ready to launch. Those were the circumstances under which, in 1996, the Los Angeles Galaxy played their first match.

Nine years later, with the NFL still not calling, MLS decided to put a team in L.A. that would obviously be second fiddle to the Galaxy forever – as the Clippers have been to the Lakers even when they’re better – and some early on-field success for Chivas USA under future USA manager Bob Bradley never translated into appreciable fan support.

Fast forward to today, when Los Angeles has been waving their petticoats at traffic for years now trying to attract an NFL suitor, it’s working. Just days ago, the Raiders, Rams (now owned by Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke), and San Diego Chargers ALL filed requests with the NFL to relocate to Los Angeles. Raiders owner Al Davis has passed on, but son Mark is looking to do the same thing his father did and move right back down South again. (If you’re starting to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Raiders’ ownership, get in the queue.)

Whether one of these relocation bids is approved is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, the mighty Lakers are an 8-29 disaster, the Clippers’ owner is insane, the last one was insane and also a horrible human being, the Dodgers haven’t won a championship in 28 years and pay their players $5 million a week… are you starting to think Tool has a point? Los Angeles is now a wild, careening reality show in sports as well as on TV, a head-spinning, stomach-flipping soap opera that’s unfolding just in time for – hey, look! Another L.A. soccer team launches in 2018! What were the odds?!

So does all this intrigue make for a dream or a nightmare scenario for LAFC? In a word, yes. There’s so, so much that could go wrong for them (their debut has already been pushed back a year), but so many past mistakes to learn from in such unpredictable times that just maybe, a club starting fresh with money, perspective, and a little luck can play more than an off-key second fiddle, and build their own base of loyal fans.

Can they do it? There will be lots more to explore in Part 2.