A tanker truck spilled highly corrosive sulfuric acid at Thousand Oaks & Wurzbach early Saturday evening, blocking traffic to the San Antonio FC playoff game for an hour.

It was bad, but it wouldn’t be the worse thing to happen in that neighborhood that night.

Four hours later and a few hundred yards away, SAFC was eliminated from the United Soccer League playoffs 4-1 on penalty kicks, a jarring end to a season that held so much promise.

And it would get worse two days later, this time involving soccer and highly corrosive rhetoric.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff has asked District Attorney Nico La Hood to investigate Major League Soccer for, well, being the organization I’ve been telling you about for 18 months.

Wolff wants to see if MLS broke the law or a contract when it encouraged the county in 2015 to buy Toyota Field and bid for an expansion franchise while knowing Anthony Precourt, chairman of the Columbus Crew, had obtained contractual dibs on Austin in 2013.

The letter and any subsequent investigation will act as sulfuric acid. It will burn all bridges between the city and MLS. And it will forever scar the souls of soccer fans who now realize MLS had no intention of ever coming to San Antonio.

Major League Soccer is a money grab at best. It needs suckers, which is why it came to the city 12 years ago looking for free cash.

In the city’s first encounter with the League That Economics Forgot, Phil Hardberger killed a sweetheart deal that would have netted nearly nothing for the city. Knowing what we do now about MLS, the city should rename every city park, building, hospital, highway and landmark after Hardberger.

Was MLS holding a grudge over that? Who know? Who cares? As details have emerged, it becomes clear the “L” in “MLS” stands for “Lyin.’”

The trustworthiness, or lack thereof, of MLS isn’t news. The business plan is a Ponzi scheme, based on a $150 million expansion fee that keeps the league afloat. Most sports teams lie about attendance, but MLS is the J.R.R. Tolkien of bogus ticket sales. The national soccer team, in this MLS-centric nation, is now worse than it’s been in years.

Not all blame falls on MLS. San Antonio bears some responsibility.

The Spurs — stop me if this sounds familiar — weren’t sharing information about their efforts with anyone, a source says. Not Wolff, not Mayor Ron Nirenberg, nor anyone in the city’s civic, political or business communities knew what was going on. Ergo, there was no united, city-county-business muscle behind the pitch.

Local officials were too passive. They needed to hammer or publicly shame the Spurs for being tight-lipped. Officials could have taken matters in their own hands. Other towns have been more aggressive courting the league, practically camping out in MLS offices.

If this went down as Wolff suspects — a good faith effort by the locals and craven chicanery by MLS and Precourt — this turn of events tarnishes the Spurs’ image as the gold standard of sports management.

Did they let this one slip? Didn’t anyone at the AT&T Center get suspicious when they heard MLS began kicking the tires on Austin last summer, meeting with city officials and conducting surveys? Why didn’t a Spurs enforcer go to New York 10 months ago, kick Garber’s office door in, pound a fist on his desk and scream bloody murder?

Thing is, we know the Spurs aren’t incompetent. They saw the signs. Maybe they did nothing because neither they nor any of the town’s other Big Cigars really cared.

American soccer has been marketed to and adopted by millennials. They vote and will one day drive the city economy. Elected officials wanted a piece of that — the votes and the growth — so they backed soccer publicly.

And the Spurs? Had San Antonio won an expansion team, the Spurs would have made MLS work here. Even without MLS, however, the Spurs still come out OK.

The company still controls professional soccer here, albeit D2. The contractual penalty for failing to land MLS will be a paltry $5 million, which is what the Spurs paid Tim Duncan last season to not play.

In return, the Spurs get to protect their market and use a stadium for $100,000 in annual rent. They will be happy to run a top-flight USL club that contends every season and draws 7,000-8,000 loyal fans for every match.

Maybe MLS lied. If it did, it should be hammered in court.

San Antonio, however, should be grateful for whatever MLS did because it means the city will dodge that overpriced bullet.

rbragg@express-news.net

Twitter: @roybragg