then eviscerated them by 6-2 on aggregate over two legs of the Eastern Conference final (the playoff format back then was a mess, and probably worth a separate column of its own). Against D.C., they were 1-3 with a -4 goal differential. Tampa Bay were 19-9 with a +19 goal differential against everyone else in the regular season. Agoos and Richie Williams were MLS lifers and USMNT players to one degree or another, and Diaz Arce was a goal poacher extraordinaire. Pope was one of the best CBs at the Olympics, Harkes, an EPL veteran, and Sanneh, a future Bundesliga starter and USMNT star. Etcheverry was 25 and had finished third in Conmebol Player of the Year voting, and Moreno was just 22 and still considered a high-level prospect despite flaming out of the Premier League. team: They were the blueprint for what MLS teams are doing now.
You could see the genesis of modern soccer in this group, with overlapping fullbacks, build-outs via the back point of the diamond, and Etcheverry creating chance after chance while playing underneath Moreno and Diaz Arce. But what became the story is that once they settled into that gorgeous 4-4-2 diamond and started knocking the ball around, building more chances via actual purposeful possession and coordinated off-the-ball movement than anybody else in the league, they were a beacon of how the game could and should be played here. At the University of Virginia, Arena had been easily the most successful college soccer coach of the previous two decades, and they seemed to be loaded with talent.
stunk for the first two months of the season. United and LA would meet in the inaugural MLS Cup, which remains the most incredible and dramatic in league history: Then in August of that year they got Jaime Moreno from Middlesbrough, and both Arena and Eddie Pope came back from the 1996 Olympics, and it was suddenly "oh man, these guys are light years better than everyone else," save for Pibe's Mutiny and the LA Galaxy. Bruce Arena's team was mid-table by the middle of the season, and had gotten there by playing significantly more soccer than what the rest of the league was doing. Not right away, anyway.īut over the course of the season it slowly, slowly got better. It should've been good, but it definitely wasn't. They had Harkes, and they had Raul Diaz Arce, Jeff Agoos and Tony Sanneh, and they had, in Marco Etcheverry, the best player of the league's first half-decade. United won none of their first four games, and just two of their first nine. The closest thing to modern soccer was found elsewhere in the Eastern Conference.ĭ.C. It was brilliant and beautiful and unlike anything resembling modern soccer. He walks, they run, they score, they win. Technically that won them the Supporters' Shield, though that wasn't actually awarded until a few years later because the Shield did not technically exist until after the 1998 season.īut yeah, I'm not diminishing the other players or the work of head coach Thomas Rongen when I say no player in MLS history has more completely defined a given team's style than Pibe, who was the alpha and omega of the 1996 Mutiny and absolutely deserving of the first-ever league MVP award. Tampa Bay's gameplan was also effective, as they were easily the best team in the regular season with 58 points, nine points better than the second-place Galaxy. But often it was, as Lassiter scored 27 goals, a league record that would stand for 22 years ( Chris Wondolowski in 2012 and Bradley Wright-Phillips in 2014 matched Lassiter's total) until Josef Martinez's 2018 season. Often it wasn't, as Lassiter was offside a staggering 70 times in 1996, the third-highest single-season total in MLS history. Tampa Bay's gameplan in 1996 was simple: 1) Get the ball to Pibe, 2) Lassiter makes his run, 3) through-ball, 4) hope it's all onside.
That included future USMNT World Cup star Frankie Hejduk, the great Steve Ralston – still second all-time on the MLS assists chart – and the Big Dog himself, Roy Lassiter. Valderrama was the sun and the other guys were the nine planets that orbited him.
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