Our world would be a scary place without numbers.
Without numbers, getting a good deal at the grocery store would be less about perusing flyers and more about bringing a heavier bat to the bartering table than the store manager.
Take away numbers and society has no sense of time. Without numbers there’s no such thing as quantitative information. Heck, a numberless world means the STEM disciplines are all write-offs.
Numbers, for the most part, bring order to our world.
Major League Soccer is currently in the midst of one of these numerical anomalies, an “anniversary paradox” if you will. 2015 marked the 20th season of Major League Soccer play, but April 2016 marks 20 exact calendar years since MLS’ inaugural clubs first kicked off. Ignoring me and the other five people who made this nitpicky observation, MLS turned a blind eye, and the league and its clubs have to varying extents celebrated both milestones.
But tonight, Sporting Kansas City gets in on the fun. For the thousandth time since 2011, they set the bar somewhere over the rainbow high and leave fans as giddy as Dorothy and the Scarecrow as seen in the GIF of the Week:
Sporting Kansas City’s Midwest Marketing Wizardry
Sporting Kansas City host the Colorado Rapids and Children’s Mercy Park tonight, exactly 20 years after the two sides kicked off their respective MLS histories on April 13, 1996.
In honour of the anniversary, the home team is going heavy 90s retro with in-stadium audio-visual elements. They’ll also be stepping into the time capsule and unveiling their All-Time Best XI as voted on by fans.
But to put a cherry on top of it all, the club formerly known as the Wiz will be bringing back one of the most iconic looks in MLS history:
Paying homage to their original rainbow kits, Sporting KC players will wear these black jerseys with a modernized rainbow graphic during warmups before tonight’s match:
Image Credit: The Kansas City Star – http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mls/sporting-kc/article69923152.html
During the match, Sporting will don their white third kits, but instead of the usual metallic silver numbers, the back of the shirts will feature the rainbow-on-black pattern as well:
Image Credit: The Kansas City Star – http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mls/sporting-kc/article69923152.html
In the era of the “Sporting” moniker, Kansas City’s MLS team has been an absolute on and off-field machine. When every other club came to the branding fight with steak knives (the Seattle Sounders came with steak knives AND megaphones, mind you), Sporting Kansas City trotted in with a wrecking ball. No other club, let alone a “small market club” like Sporting, has been able to put the seemingly increasingly tighter Adidas merchandising brandcuffs to shame with such consistency.
I used Seattle’s special Halo 5: Guardians kits as a case study in this space back in October. I said at the time that MLS clubs needed to make like the Sounders and start following the tracks of the innovators. Sporting Kansas City don’t need to heed that advice. They’re the ones that, with shirts like these, are making the tracks.
So far this month you’ve probably been inundated with “MLS has come so far” messages. Instead of giving you another one, I’ll give you a screenshot, taken from Sporting Kansas City’s website, from that inaugural match on this day twenty years ago. Be thankful that MLS team names and uniforms are no longer so bad they induced (half-laughter/half-“get me out of this league”) urination:
Image Credit: Sporting Kansas City – http://www.sportingkc.com/post/2016/04/11/inaugural-match-kc-wiz-vs-colorado-rapids-april-13-1996
But let’s look at the famous picture of the 10 original MLS home kits. Put these guys in some MLS 3.0(?) era shirts and the first thing you’d notice is that three of the players pictured are dangerously close to flashing back at the cameras. Put them in some Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat-inspired get-ups and it takes a minute or two to spot the near triple foul play:
Image Credit: Sports Illustrated – http://www.si.com/longform/2015/mls/img/bg2.jpg
There are only two shirts in that lot that deserve to be remembered two decades on, and the rotated bars and tone of the Kansas City Wiz is one of them. The other, the D.C. United (top row, player in the middle) strip remains arguably the most identifiable in league history and puts even the Wiz’s look a very distant second.
The 2016 remake isn’t perfect. The reflective sky blue cloth on the sleeves and right shoulder has been replaced by a matte black. The rainbow pattern isn’t as edgy and in-your-face as the original was. But from the rainbow-patterned “20” jock tag, to the 90’s Internet looking “Ivy Funds” font, to Adidas’ three stripes returning to their classic home on the shoulders, this modernized version more than makes up for the replication errors.
The game jerseys aren’t as attention-worthy as the warm-up shirts. But hey, unlike the regular metallic grey used on the SKC third kits (pictured below), you can now actually tell who’s who from more than a foot away!
There’s just one downside to all of this Midwest marketing wizardry: none of the 20th anniversary merchandise will be available online. I understand Sporting KC wanting to preserve the exclusivity appeal of the apparel, but put it on MLS’ online store and those LAFC hats (which, full disclosure, are growing on me) would have a fight to stay top dog.
But then again, online shopping probably wasn’t a thing 20 years ago, nor was the idea that Sporting Kansas City, or Major League Soccer, could one day have a product that was easy on the eye.
But it happened, and MLS has finally found some order. And that’s something I would count on sticking around for a long time yet.
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