As Major League Soccer kicks off its 25th anniversary season this weekend, Adam Whittaker Snavely recalls how "weird and wonderful" it was when it started out.

Since its debut in 1996, the league has added 16 new teams for a total of 26.

All three Canadian MLS teams — Toronto FC, the Montreal Impact and the Vancouver Whitecaps — will open their campaigns this Saturday.

Aside from its expansions, the league has become more conventional compared to some of the oddities it featured in the '90s, explained Snavely, a writer for The Athletic.

Weird team names and a 'fever dream' fashion show

MLS introduced itself to the world in 1995 by hosting a fashion show-like event in New York City.

"It looked like this fever dream from the Matrix, where there were all of these television screens," Snavely said. "It looked like a weird spaceship — a futuristic set."

The league used the event to unveil the names of the inaugural 10 teams. Most of these names followed the North American "state plus noun" naming style for sports teams (e.g. Toronto Raptors or Minnesota Wild), as opposed to the traditional naming style for soccer teams which affixed "FC" or "United" to a neighbourhood (e.g. FC Barcelona or Manchester United).

This resulted in some peculiar team names, such as the Dallas Burn and the Tampa Bay Mutiny.

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The league also unveiled each team's inaugural jersey, many of which were real attention-grabbers.

"These guys all come out in the absolutely loudest jerseys you can possibly imagine, wearing all these weird logos," he said.

Examples include the Burn's fire-breathing horse logo and the San Jose Clash's "weird white and bright yellow split with a blueish-teal" zigzag on each arm.

Hockey-style shootouts

The weirdness continued on the pitch. In its early years, MLS attempted to tweak the sport to suit an American audience.

"I think, in a lot of ways, they didn't trust people to catch on with soccer in a way that they deemed marketable," he said.

One of the ways they did so was by introducing hockey-style shootouts to settle ties, which they borrowed from the defunct North American Soccer League.

Instead of a standard 12-yard penalty kick, MLS players would start from 35 yards away from the net. They would then have five seconds to score a breakaway goal past the opposing goalkeeper.

MLS eventually did away with the shootout and regular season tiebreakers in 1999, despite some players being on board with the idea.

"I understand why they went away from it, but it's definitely one of the more fun things that they did," he said.

Bigger nets for bigger goalies?

Not all proposed rule changes went through. Some, such as the league's proposal to make goals bigger, never saw the light of day.

That idea was fuelled by a claim that "goalkeepers now are substantially bigger people," Snavely explained. So to compensate, "why don't we make the goals bigger to increase the attacking output?"

MLS's proposal made its way up to the International Football Association Board, who determine soccer's rules (literally called the Laws of the Game). They immediately shot it down.

Snavely thinks it was for the best.

"Yeah, that was a terrible idea."

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