Charlie Stillitano (Vice President and General Manager, NY/NJ MetroStars): Sunil and Rothenberg were bringing in all these investors, doing this dog and pony show, saying, You can build a little stadium for $30 million.

hunt: The original prospectus envisioned soccer-specific stadiums. It was the right idea but the timing was wrong. Also: the dollar amount was wrong by a factor of 20.

Kraft: Alan realized we weren’t gonna get 10 or 12 of those done up front, and he wanted to get the league off the ground.

Marla Messing (MLS Senior Vice President, 1994–1997): Soccer-specific stadiums and single-entity [ownership of the league]—everything spun out from those two things.

Rothenberg: In pro wrestling, the league owns everything, and they sign up the wrestlers. But as far as a more traditional league, no [single-entity] had been done.

hunt: The single-entity structure was a big selling point for us and, frankly, everyone else who came in after the fact.

rothenberg: [Single-entity ownership] had been rattling around in my head since the 1970’s when I was a young lawyer for the NBA. I remember kicking it around with some other lawyers, saying, “Boy, it would’ve been smart if [the NBA] was originally structured as a single entity.

hunt: The league was trying desperately to round up a group of owners. Other than Stuart Subotnick and John Kluge [who would own the MetroStars], the Krafts and my dad, they were really having a hard time getting others to commit.

Ivan Gazidis (MLS VP): The guy who had not yet committed, but if he committed everyone was in, was [entrepreneur] Phil Anschutz. Phil dialed into a conference call from an airplane and said he was in, but he wanted that guy who did the bicycle kick at the World Cup for his team in Colorado. So we had to get Marcelo Balboa. It was an incredible negotiation because Marcelo was doing great playing in Mexico. But I don’t think Marcelo fully realized the leverage he had. The whole league depended on that signing.

The league did sign Balboa, and Anschutz was in. The league would need his presence to survive.

Messing: We still had two units to sell. A family called in and agreed to buy either a unit or the last two units. There was absolute euphoria in the office; I think Alan was smoking a cigar. It was awesome. Two days later they pulled out.

kevin PAYNE (President, General Manager, D.C. United): We needed $50 million. Everybody’s initial commitment was $5 million and we were stuck at $40 million, so we had a meeting. We literally said, “We’re not going to be able to do it. We can’t go forward. We don’t have enough money.” I said to Stu Subotnick, “You have indicated that you’d like at some point to own a second team. How about you buy an option for a second team, and $5 million as a pledge? He thought about it for a minute and said, “I’ll do that.” Then he said, “Phil Anschutz will do that, too.” Either Mark [Abbott] or Clark [Hunt] turned to me and said, “Congratulations, you just saved the league.”

With ownership set, the nascent league began determining just what things would look like on the field. Despite the World Cup’s success, soccer was still an outsider’s sport in the U.S. To counter that, the league considered some drastic measures.

sunil Gulati (MLS Deputy Commissioner, 1994–1999; Current U.S. Soccer President): We had a number of think tank meetings to talk about what we could do to make the game more interesting.

gazidis: Of course some of the ideas sounded crazy, but it wasn’t clear at that time whether there was enough of a core audience that loved soccer the way it was. I found the debate not a stupid one.

doug logan (Commissioner, MLS, ‘96–99): Everyone thinks we were the crazy Americans and FIFA was the restraining reins, but nothing can be further from the truth. FIFA thought this would be a great laboratory. If the experiments worked, wonderful—and if they didn’t, they could blame it on us.

bruce arena (Coach, D.C. United): My first meeting in the league was at the opening scouting combine. We were told that MLS had requested from FIFA that we could be experimental. Then we were told that they were going to tell the linesmen not to call offside if a call was close. I remember asking, “What the hell did we get ourselves into?”

logan: They had another proposal to make throw-ins kick-ins.

messing: I remember a meeting between Alan and Sepp Blatter. Alan did his whole song and dance about bigger goals, which would lead to more scoring. Human beings—goalkeepers in particular—had gotten bigger and bigger over the years, making scoring much harder. And Sepp Blatter just looked at him like, ‘Everyone across the world would have to buy new goals; do you realize what you are contemplating?’ He was just shaking his head.

Craig Fujii/AP

kraft: If the goal was a foot larger on either side, visually I don’t think you’d know. And you’d get people taking shots they otherwise wouldn’t, goalies making more interesting and athletic saves.

payne: I had a fundamentally different belief about why the league was going to work. I believed people wanted something that looked like what they saw in Europe or South America, and from watching the World Cup. They didn’t want some kind of crazy, Americanized version of it.

kraft: In retrospect, bigger goals would have been a huge mistake. I want to be clear so it doesn’t get written that I am a proponent of that, but it was definitely discussed. That’s what happens when you have a bunch of people sitting around a table, thinking about a sport, trying to introduce it to a country that at the time hadn’t fully embraced it.

gazidis: The issue wasn’t really throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what stuck. It was quite a philosophical question: What is our potential audience? How far do we have to lean into the American audience? In the end we came to a reasonable place, which was basically the traditional game with a couple tweaks, including the shootout and the countdown clock.

But even those two rule changes were seen by players and aficionados as radical departures: Instead of the official time being kept on the field by the officials, each half ended with a buzzer. Instead of counting up to 90, the clock counted down to zero. And there would be no ties; shootouts started from 35 yards out and players had five seconds to dribble and shoot.

logan: FIFA were truly intrigued by the shootout. To them, had that worked, it might have worked well.

kraft: The shootout was a mistake. It was exciting but it was a mistake.

eric wynalda (Forward, San Jose Clash): I hated it. You had the rest of the world going, “What the hell are they doing?” All of my friends in Germany would just laugh at us.

brad Friedel (Goalkeeper, Columbus Crew): In one of my first games we drew 1-1, so I walked off the pitch and into the locker room. The equipment manager came in and said, “What are you doing? You have a shootout; nobody told you?” I did know; I had just completely forgotten. I had to put my shirt back on to go back out.

wynalda: I actually got hurt! That was the injury that really knocked my career off the rails, when I ran into [Kansas City Wiz goalkeeper] Garth Lagerwey during the shootout.

friedel: I hated the count-down clock too. Time should be kept on the field by officials. It was very easy when you were winning by one goal to run the clock down in MLS.

gazidis: Twenty years later, a lot of things have changed, including the sophistication of the U.S. soccer audience. When you talk about the ideas that were considered, they sound much wackier now than I think they were at the time.

Marty Lederhandler/AP

The same can’t be said for most of the league’s debut logos, jerseys and team names.

logan: I told them before they hired me that they’d made two immense mistakes: Putting teams in Florida and the preposterous arrogance of putting “Major” in their name. How can you start something by saying you’re major? Let somebody else come to that conclusion down the line. All of a sudden you’ve gotta live up to Major League Baseball.

Rothenberg: When we came up with our name, MLB sent a cease and desist letter. Then I think they realized they were overreaching by a bit, and it died right there.

randy bernstein (Executive VP, MLS): If they had lost that lawsuit it would have been detrimental to their exclusivity on their licenses. So yeah, that went away very quickly.

messing: We did this whole show called MLS Unveiled where we paraded out the uniforms. We had music and models, and we couldn’t have been more excited. Then we got hammered by everyone.

payne: Some of the worst uniforms in the history of sports came out of that early exercise.

hunt: The league, in its infinite wisdom, allowed the apparel companies to have beyond-significant input in the naming and the branding of the teams, which was very unusual.

bernstein: Our senior executive team decided that there are no smarter, better people when it comes to branding and licensing and understanding the idiosyncrasies of certain markets—so we had Nike, Adidas and Reebok doing this.

payne: They wanted looks that were reflective of skateboard culture. They were very taken with the idea that this was a counterculture sport, whereas my feeling was exactly the opposite—this was the most traditional of sports. People in the United States liked what they saw overseas.

gazidis: When I was a kid I was imbued with the soccer culture of England and Europe. Obviously this stuff looked very strange to me. But what did I know? I’d only lived in the U.S. for a year or so. I didn’t know enough about the audience and what was going to appeal to them.

alexi lalas (Defender, New England Revolution): If you didn’t come from a soccer culture and you were asked to brand a new sports team in the mid-’90s, of course you were going to go crazy. And they did—they went crazy.

payne: I told them, “I don’t get this [Tampa Bay] ‘Mutiny’. What’s with the symbol?” They said, “Oh, it’s a mutant bat.” “Okay, what does that have to do with Mutiny?” “You know—Mutiny, mutant.” I said, “Those are two different words with completely different meanings. They just share some letters. What are you doing?”

thomas rongen (Coach, Tampa Bay Mutiny): What the f---? A mutant bat? What are we representing? Nike must have had a few guys smoking dope, coming up with the craziest things.

STEVE RALSTON (Midfielder, Tampa Bay Mutiny): The jersey material wasn’t wicking away sweat. It was more like you were in a sweatsuit.

wynalda: Nike tried too hard. That away jersey from the [San Jose] Clash is just. . . . Someone threw up on a shirt.

payne: One of the three principal colors for the Clash was “celery.” Who gets emotional about celery?

GIOVANNI SAVARESE (Forward, NY/NJ MetroStars): The Galaxy’s shirts—you could count the colors that weren’t in there easier than the ones that were there.

hunt: In Kansas City, we had a couple problems with the Wiz. There was actually a company in a different industry that had that name, and it wasn’t long before they sued us to protect their trademark. (The Wiz changed their name to Wizards after the inaugural season for this reason.)

garth lagerwey (Goalkeeper, Kansas City Wiz): I was the guy who had braids and colored rubber bands to match all the colors in that [Wiz] logo. For me, it worked out very, very well. It gave me lots of ways to be creative with my horrible hairstyle.

payne: The league office ran with a lot of this stuff and by the time it was shown to the owners it was almost too late.

hunt: Beyond D.C. United, which was a very traditional soccer name, the rest of us were really scratching our heads.

The next trick: finding players to wear those (mostly) ugly uniforms. When team names were unveiled in October 1995, the league had signed only 53 of its eventual 180 players.

j. todd durbin (MLS Director of Player Personnel): It’s June, July 1995, and we know we’re going to launch in March. Not only do we not have any players, we don’t have any coaches, any club presidents. . . . Sunil was primarily in charge of signing all the big high-profile players—the Etcheverrys, the Valderramas, the Donadonis.

gulati: I went to four countries in one day and had meetings in all four of them. I had a morning meeting in Germany with Andy Brehme, who scored the winning goal for Germany in the 1990 World Cup. Then a meeting at the Milan airport with [Italian star] Roberto Donadoni. I flew from Milan to London, where I met with Bobby Houghton at Heathrow because Colorado was thinking about hiring him as the coach. Then I flew to New York, where I had dinner with Alan Rothenberg and Doug Logan.

messing: We were trying to sign Jorge Campos, who was a huge star at the time. Mexico’s national team was playing in San Diego and we could not get to him.

rothenberg: We met with him as surreptitiously as we could. We snuck off in the back hall in the stadium in San Diego. It felt like we were doing a drug deal.

messing: The Mexican team comes out and Sunil grabs Campos. He says, “I need to talk to you about MLS.” We literally stopped him on his way to go play this game.

gulati: It was semi-well-planned chaos. We would put up on a grease board what a team might look like, and that would include a couple of players from the U.S. national team, a couple foreign players, and the compensation level of those players, and how it would add up to whatever the cap was in year one—I think it was $1.1 million. We did that a number of times, seeing what could the league look like.

rothenberg: We wanted to place players in the appropriate place. So Jorge Campos—I don’t think we would have been smart to spend money on him and send him to Columbus. So we brought him to L.A.

rongen: I knew there would be a Latin player designated for Tampa because we were the southernmost team. We weren’t the first choice [for Carlos Valderrama], but we convinced Sunil that this would be a good situation for us.

lalas: I was one of the lucky guys who was able to say, “This is where I would like to go.” I had this romantic view of Boston based on trips I had taken with the national team where we would go out and I just had so much fun. So I based my selection on the bars of the city.

Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

andrew shue (Forward, Los Angeles Galaxy; Actor, Melrose Place): Mine was a player-marketing deal. I was a spokesperson for the World Cup and had gotten to know people like Mark Abbott and Alan Rothenberg; I made it clear that I wanted to play in MLS.

durbin: I faxed a contract to Andrew’s house; three days later, it was signed and mailed back to me. I open it up and I’m looking at it, and I can’t figure out what it is. I’m reading, “bill: what are you doing tonight. alison: i’m not sure.” Why am I reading the script for Melrose Place? Then I turn it over and on the other side is the contract. Apparently Andrew ran out of paper.

shue: I didn’t actually tell anybody [at Melrose Place]. I didn’t have an official conversation with Aaron Spelling: “Oh, by the way, I’m trying out for the Galaxy.” They just kind of found out about it when there was something in the paper. They were a bit concerned. I came in limping one day and they realized, “Wow, you could actually get hurt. What happens if you get a black eye?” I told them, “We’d write it into the script.”

Courtesy Everett Collection

durbin: Then there was a whole group of players that no one even knew whether they were even going to make the team—the players at the bottom of the pay scale. Those were the guys I was signing. Dave Dir had gone out and scouted the domestic player pool pretty aggressively.

dave dir (Coach, Dallas Burn): We had guys in Europe, the indoor leagues, outdoor leagues, Canadian leagues. I traveled 51 weeks that year and I watched everybody. I looked under rocks. It really was a comical process.

RALSTON: I didn’t have an agent. There was no negotiating. A guy from [Tampa’s] front office picked me up and I signed my contract on the hood of his car.

durbin: We had a lot of all-nighters, working like crazy to get all these players signed and into the combine.

The MLS combine was the first time that many of the league’s coaches had a chance to scout the players who would make up the bulk of their inaugural rosters.

rongen: Most of the coaches were overwhelmed after two days. They looked at 80 players and just said, “What’s going on?”

Chris Armas (Midfielder, Los Angeles Galaxy): There were tons of players at the combine. I just wanted to play. Just show yourself and hope someone saw something.

gazidis: On Day 1 a guy comes up to Sunil Gulati and me and says, “I have a player.” We said, “No, no—invitation only.” He said, “Look, this guy is a refugee from Bosnia. He’s brought his own boots and he used to play with the Bosnian national team.” The guy handed us a picture of the player in a Bosnian newspaper. He had this ratty old pair of boots. We looked at each other and said, “OK, we’ll see what we can do.” His name was Said Fazlagić.

Based largely on those combine performances, MLS held its first player draft. The first pick, in a prearranged move between Hunt’s Crew and the league, was American striker Brian McBride. But thereafter, things got fuzzy.