Real Salt Lake, Sporting Kansas City, FC Dallas, Toronto FC — What do these team names have in common? For starters, they represent a long growing trend within Major League Soccer of faux-European team branding, a marketing ploy to reach a snobbish demographic of soccer fans within this country who may support the likes of Arsenal, Bayern Munich or Man United, but regard MLS with great disdain. In my opinion, this trend reached critical mass recently, when soon to be expansion team New York City FC or NYCFC, released their team’s crest—one which they claimed was steeped in New York tradition but, in actuality, was a blatant cribbing of the aesthetics of our friends across the pond.
When MLS began, the league aimed to create a truly American league, one they hoped would appeal to average sports fans across the country. The name couldn’t be more American. For starters, this was Soccer, not Football, and the name Major League was lifted straight from the most American of past times. The teams too, took on an American flavor, with American style names like the Los Angeles Galaxy, Kansas City Wiz, New York Metrostars, Columbus Crew, New England Revolution, Colorado Rapids, San Jose Clash, and Tampa Bay Mutiny, with D.C. United being the lone faux-euro outlier, although being located in the nation’s capital did give DC’s chosen faux-euro name far more legitimacy than the subsequent offenders of this fake European wave.
Back then, there wasn’t an FC, Real, or Sporting in sight. Fast forward to today, however, and a lot has changed. Today the league is inundated with names like FC Dallas, Sporting Kansas City, Real Salt Lake, Toronto FC, and most ironically, Seattle Sounders FC and Vancouver Whitecaps FC, for despite each team’s long soccer history spanning multiple leagues and dating back to 1974, each team’s front office felt it was necessary to tack on FC once they made the step up to MLS, presumably to give these names more legitimacy in the eyes of fans.
Fans are not blameless in this either. They eat it up. Take the Portland Timbers, who went a different route than their cascadia rivals and chose not to tack FC onto the team’s historic name which has been in use since the 70’s. Nevertheless, the Portland fans chant “PTFC” at the top of their lungs each game day, anyway.
So, if the fans dig it, you’re probably wondering what the big deal is. Well, let me tell you exactly what the big deal is. The current system markets to a generation of soccer fans who have been isolated from the rest of American sports culture. These fans have embraced soccer almost as a means of counterculture, and thus are more comfortable having their team’s image align more with a European model than an American one. They see team names like LA Galaxy as Mickey Mouse and more European sounding names, like New York City Football Club, as more palatable — more legitimate.
But that’s all about to change. Soccer is growing in this country, as the league’s tremendous growth is a testament to. Young MLS fans growing up today don’t really care if their local team is an FC or an SC. They simply love their local MLS team, and because of the sport’s growth in this country, they are feeling less and less like outsiders for doing so. As the sport goes mainstream, so too will its culture of support. Gone will be the days of the snobbish American fan who feels alienated by the American sports market and embraces all things European. Gone will be the days that teams that have been around since the 70’s will have to add FC to their names, just to gain legitimacy.
In short, these marketing ploys are short sighted and are quickly becoming irrelevant, and as the sport begins to penetrate deeper into the American sports landscape, the day will soon come when the league will be able to go after its initial target market—the casual American sports fan. And when that day comes, it’s going to be hard to win these potential fans over when we are forced to explain to them why their local soccer team is called a Football Club.
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