It’s a match that even many of the most diehard Major League Soccer fans either don’t remember – or pretend not to.

In August 2005, Real Madrid invited MLS to send a select team of players to play for the Trofeo Santiago Bernabéu, an annual friendly held before Real’s first match of the season.

After playing their weekend matches, 18 MLS players (at least one player was selected from each of 12 MLS teams) flew to Chicago on Sunday before continuing on to their final destination, Madrid, where they arrived on Monday morning local time.

Many of the players, accustomed to the spartan travel arrangements typical of MLS in that era, couldn’t believe their luck when they looked at their plane tickets to Madrid.

“Right before we flew other there, all the players were like, ‘Whoa! We’re on business class!’” remembered Frankie Hejduk, then playing for the Columbus Crew after spending half a decade in Europe. “When you think about it, it’s like, I’d hope we were [in business class] when we were playing a team like that two days later.”

In 2005, MLS was still hemorrhaging money. Of the 12 MLS teams, only two – the LA Galaxy and Columbus Crew – played in their own homes, with FC Dallas moving into its own home stadium in August of that year. Over half of the teams in the league were owned by just two parties, the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) and the Hunt family.



While the league averaged over 15,000 fans per match that season, half of the teams averaged fewer. The Kansas City Wizards – since rebranded as Sporting Kansas City and now boasting 67 consecutive sell-outs at their home stadium Sporting Park – brought up the rear, averaging less than 10,000 fans a game in 79,451-seat Arrowhead Stadium.

Before the 2005 season, though, MLS began its first expansion phase since contracting to 10 teams in 2002, with Real Salt Lake and Chivas USA the newest entrants. Perhaps it was only a coincidence then that the same year in which a team called Real entered MLS, their world famous namesakes would ask the league to send a team to Madrid.

Wizards left back José Burciaga, who found out he had been selected to the MLS roster only five days before the game, had misgivings about the match from the start, feelings that have only become sharper in the decade since.



“I think if MLS was really serious about showing that we were good enough to compete with anybody, it would have done justice for us to be there at least a week, a week-and-a-half to train together and get used to the time change,” he said.

Instead, the MLS Select Team had just two days to prepare against a Real Madrid team still very much in its galacticos heyday and hungry to reclaim what it felt was its rightful place atop the La Liga table. Despite losing midfielder Luis Figo earlier that summer, the 2005 roster still featured Zinedine Zidane, Roberto Carlos, Raúl, David Beckham, and Ronaldo.

“We got set up for failure, there’s no question,” Conrad said. “Even if we had a week to prepare for those guys and were there to get acclimated to the time change, we still would have struggled, but we wouldn’t have struggled as bad as we did.”

Worse, MLS officials failed to communicate the agenda to players from almost the moment they landed in Madrid.

When Jimmy Conrad and his wife arrived for their tour of the Bernabéu Stadium, they were greeted by a contingent of Real Madrid staff, all of whom were formally dressed for the occasion.

By contrast, Conrad, his wife, and the three other MLS players who were there with him, were dressed like tourists ready to tour Madrid. Landon Donovan, for example, then just 23 years-old, was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Conrad, the former Kansas City Wizards defender, suddenly found himself standing in the offices of one of the most storied clubs in world soccer, posing for pictures in shorts and a T-shirt.

“Whoa, what have we got ourselves into here?” Conrad remembers thinking.

Many of the MLS players – some of whom had only ever played their home games in front of sparse crowds in cavernous NFL stadiums – were also in awe of the size and atmosphere of the Bernabéu.

“What I loved about the stadium [is] you walk about 60 stairs down, there’s like a chain-link fence that separated you from the Madrid players,” explained Conrad. “Once you get down to the bottom then you have to walk 10 or 15 steps up to the field. That vision – and it will never leave me – the lights and the fans … you can sense how big it is and what you’re about to walk into. Almost gladiator-ish.”

For the players who had spent their entire careers in the American league, the experience of walking into that environment and standing across from living legends of the game – players they had only ever seen on television – was surreal.

“As you’re going through pre-game warmups and you’re out there kicking the ball, you see thousands of people in the stands already and the game hasn’t even started,” recalled Burciaga. “One of the things I told myself [was], ‘Just live in the moment. Enjoy it. They breathe the same air you breathe. The only difference is their pocketbook is a little thicker than ours.’ That’s the mentality you have to take in and the mentality you have to use to get up for these big games.”

Steve Nicol, designated coach of the MLS squad, tried to take some of that pressure off of his players, urging them before the game to just enjoy themselves and have fun. According to ESPN’s Doug McIntyre, Nicol told his charges to stay disciplined and to “bring yer fucking bollocks out there.”

Jason Kreis, centre, now the NYC FC coach. Photograph: Armando Franca/AP

Galvanized by Nicol’s instructions, the team was ready to rush out of the locker room and on to the field. However, before they could do so, FC Dallas midfielder Ronnie O’Brien turned to the entire group and said something that seemed to suck the air right out of the room.

“As long as we don’t lose by more than three goals,” O’Brien told the team. “That would be a win for us.”

When O’Brien said that, Conrad remembers, the mood in the room immediately shifted. “Of course I forgive him for it,” Conrad said. “But I’ll never forget it.”

Yet after 45 minutes of play, it looked as if the MLS Select Team might actually keep the scoreline respectable. Aside from some spectacular moments of brilliance from Beckham and Ronaldo which made the score 2-0 to the hosts, Real Madrid had looked sluggish and uninterested. While the MLS squad failed to create any meaningful scoring opportunities, they had managed to stay compact and organized.

Then, in the second half, the MLS Select Team began showing signs of life. Substitute Jeff Cunningham started to use his speed to get in behind the Madrid defense and the midfield began stringing together four, five, six passes at a time, an improvement from a first half in which the team had little or no passing rhythm. Still, Real appeared to be teasing their opponents, conceding possession before striking quickly on the counter.

In the 70th minute, the MLS Select Team was passing the ball around in its own offensive half, when a misplaced pass intended for Cunningham deflected to Zidane. In less than a second, Zidane turned and played a perfect 30-yard diagonal ball right into the path of Ronaldo. The Brazilian used his considerable bulk to muscle Conrad off the ball and powered a shot into the top corner of Matt Reis’s goal. In six seconds, MLS had gone from possession to concession.

“The speed of the game is so fast that if that isn’t second nature – if you don’t play with each other every day, all the time – you have to take that extra split second to pick up your head or maybe hold on to the ball longer than you’d like and at that point, when you’re playing against the quality of players that we were playing against, they close space down so fast that you don’t have that [time],” explained Conrad. “Then you lose the ball and then you’re playing defense again and it’s just a vicious cycle.”

Even down 3-0, though, few of the MLS players were willing to sit back and concede defeat.

“I remember crushing Guti,” Hejduk said. “Sorry Guti! I was like, ‘eff this.’ I just got him from behind. It probably should have been a red card. But I was still competing. I wasn’t in awe of that situation. I was there to compete and win. So I was pissed more than anything.”

But as the final 15 minutes of the match ticked away and as Nicol began to run out of fresh legs, Madrid’s fitness and quality overwhelmed the visitors. In the 81st minute, Guti cut back on his left, sent his defender sprawling to the ground, and curled a beautiful right-footed shot around a helpless Reis. Raúl added a fifth in the final minute of the match on a gorgeous give-and-go with Javier Portillo.

At the time, the 5-0 scoreline was the most lopsided in the history of the Trofeo Santiago Bernabéu since 6-1 defeats of Everton in 1987 and Chilean club Colo Colo in 1991. Since 2005, only two other clubs have matched or exceeded the MLS Select Team’s ignominious record, Colombia’s Millonarios, who lost 8-0 in 2012, and Qatari club Al Sadd, who lost 5-0 in 2013.

Far from feeling embarrassed by the result, though, most of the MLS players were thrilled by the warm reception they received from the Real Madrid fans and the chance that they had to play against, in Matt Reis’s words, “a collection of some of the greatest players of all time.”

“It’s not every day you get to be chosen to fly across the world and play in one of the top stadiums in the world to play against the top team in the world against the top players in the world,” said Burciaga. “This is just not an everyday occurrence.”

The Wednesday after the game, the MLS players were herded back to the airport and sent home to empty Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City or crumbling RFK in Washington to play MLS matches that same weekend. It felt about as far from Los Galacticos and the Bernabéu as you could get.

“I was in Columbus one day, then two days later I was playing in Madrid and then I was back in Columbus,” recalled Hejduk.

“It was just a dream: the good, the bad, and everything in between.”