In 1996 Major League Soccer held its first game. This is the sixteenth year of competition.
ALL TIME MLS TABLE:
There have only been a brave few that have tried to make sense of MLS history. Some say that it is the first step down towards insanity so before I jumped in I looked for others that made attempts at classifying it. The best I’ve found is Dave Clark’s piece titled The Eras of MLS (Sounder at Heart, August 13, 2009). In it he divided up MLS history into 3 parts, aptly labeling them 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. A good read.After spending some time with the MLS history I found that it might be served better with the inclusion of two additional eras. With Respect, they happen during Mr. Clark’s 2.0 Stable State years.
You can click on each era below to see each team and its average rank in the table for those years. I've combined the conferences and for the early years I excluded “shoot out” wins and losses and turned them in to Draws so as to compare seasons as apples to apples and not cheese to chalk.
1996-1999: League Inception, (North) Americanization
2000, 2001: Dark Age, Failed Table Changes and Expansion
2002, 2003: Middle Age, Contraction and Stability
2004-2006: Donavan Dempsey, Birth of United States Soccer
2007-Present: Modern Era, Designated Player
Between Dave Clark’s post and Wikipedia you can get a good understanding of league history. If you would like my thoughts and argument on MLS Eras you can click HERE and read descriptions under each table. Just click the "next" button on the upper right to travel through history.
If you click on the Modern Era link, you'll notice that the Crew are the winningest franchise since 2007 and have the most hardware. In that time the team has not only racked up the most points but also made the playoffs 3 times (2008, 2009, 2010), won a MLS Cup (2008) and the Supporters' Shield (2008, 2009) trophy twice.
One of the things I looked at in cracking up MLS history into parts was average league attendance per game. Maybe it's a good topic for a post another day. I've only got one day off work here! One note, 2011 attendance is projected with 50% of the season in the books already.“Crew Candle” refers to my frustration with Crew fans as of late. They’ve turned their back on the team this year to the tune of -28% less fans attending games this year over last. I’m burning a candle for this year’s team in hopes that other fans might see it and realize that they are watching a good team on a historic run.
