It's not Barca-Real Madrid ... but it's gonna be pretty cool

Oh, to be at the brilliant Camp Nou today, where Barcelona and Real Madrid meet in Sunday's El Clásico.

Just a little north of there, Arsenal-Chelsea can’t match the history of a Barcelona-Real meeting, but the encounter at the Emirates is a dandy nonetheless.

In the spirit of these noted rivalries, I thought this was a good time to make note of something happening on our little corner of the soccer universe: in a year’s time, Major League Soccer will add a little more snap, crackle and pop as Vancouver and Portland become the 17^th and 18^th teams in 2011. When you marry those two with Seattle, it will form the hottest little rivalry triangle MLS has seen yet. Talk about six dates each year that will explode with drama, color, passion, flair and flares.

Here’s a little more about the burgeoning rivalry in the Pacific Northwest. This is a story written by yours truly, one that appeared in the MLS Cup match program. So, thank you to Major League Soccer for allowing a few more folks to read about something that will help in the league’s persistent march toward greater relevance. Enjoy. 

By Steve Davis

     So much of the 2009 MLS story was spun from Seattle Sounders FC and its dreamy debut season at Qwest Field. Considering the hubbub over the soccer tsunami that washed over the Emerald City this year, it sometimes seemed as if all things Seattle were presiding over the entire league.

     But no one around the Xbox Pitch should be complacent. In fact, all the terrific Sounders’ loyalists should be warned: The club may have been all the rage in MLS this season, but in a just a couple of years, Sounders FC can’t even count on ruling the continent’s Pacific Northwest.

     They’ll soon be sharing that quirky little corner of our world with Vancouver and Portland – and what a swell little corner of soccer contention it will to be.

     There is a burgeoning rivalry on the horizon in the continental Northwest. Seattle climbed aboard as Major League Soccer’s 15^th franchise this year. Portland and Vancouver are finishing out their time in USL-1, the second tier of domestic soccer. Soon they’ll be on board in MLS as the 17^th and 18^th franchises, with each club’s rowdy supporters importing their own special tribal identities, a part and yet apart from Major League Soccer in a truly unique area of the continent.

     "Our sport is driven by rivalries," MLS commissioner Don Garber said. "It’s part of what makes the sport so special in Europe and Latin America, and it’s what helps make the supporters so passionate about their teams. Now we’re going to have an opportunity to create that in the Pacific Northwest."

     Creating regular clashes between nearby neighbors was always part of Major League Soccer’s plan. But it’s tricky in North America, where the land’s vastness works against a developing league in creating geographical feuds. As the league’s footprint continues to grow – and Garber has been fairly bullish on the expansion lately – more opportunities will naturally develop.

     These regional rivalries have long been woven into the fabric of other U.S. sports.

Consider how much the annual, interstate tug-of-wars amplify fan and media interest in college football. Or consider the animosity and intrigue layered into Red Sox-Yankees or, in another day, Lakers-Celtics. That same rivalry spirit buffers world soccer, where meetings of Manchester United-Manchester City in England, River Plate-Boca Juniors in Argentina and so many others sharpen the edges of fan interest everywhere.

     Obviously, Seattle-Vancouver or Portland-Seattle won’t have the same layers of history. But it shouldn’t take long to match the intensity. In fact, Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson takes good-natured exception with the suggestion that these are "burgeoning rivalries." They are burgeoning only in terms of MLS; the ornery competitiveness and peripheral elements that fuel a good rivalry were arranged long ago in the North American Soccer League.

     "It is an existing rivalry," he said, "and it's only going to escalate when we join Seattle at the next level."

     Just a year ago Major League Soccer had yet play a regular season match in the Pacific Northwest. MLS officials had always looked fondly upon the soccer-rich area, but the time was never right until Adrian Hanauer began campaigning a few years back for the Seattle to make the leap into MLS.  Hanauer was steering the Sounders in USL-1 when Tod Leiweke took over as CEO of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. Leiweke is the brother of Tim Leiweke, president of AEG, which owns the Galaxy.

     "About 15 minutes after he got here, I was knocking on his door, trying to convince him to bring an MLS team to Seattle," Hanauer said.

     Garber helped move things along and, once entertainment and sports luminaries like Joe Roth, Drew Carey and Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen were aboard, Sounders FC was off and running – and a little rivalry stew was starting to simmer.

     So an area that had no MLS representation a couple of years ago will have three beginning in the 2011 season. The good folks of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia will not only have a team to call theirs, they’ll have two clubs to loath as well. Although three or four teams along the I-95 corridor in the American Northeast may have something to say about it, you could argue that the Seattle-Portland-Vancouver rivalry will stand as Major League Soccer’s most fierce three-way mash-up.  

     Seattle Sounders FC manager Sigi Schmid put a finer point on it. "What it does is create another four or six games a year with extreme intensity, where the games are sellouts and where they are going to create a very colorful spectacle for TV."

     What will help make the rivalry extra special is that history of which Paulson spoke. Not only were all three part of the old North American Soccer League, it was the success of clubs like the Portland Timbers, Vancouver Whitecaps and Seattle Sounders 1.0 (they weren’t really called that, of course) that helped create the NASL’s salad days. The North American Soccer League may have failed, undone by its own grand designs and by the drag of the "have nots," but these three were among the "haves" in the high-flying days.

     When the Vancouver Whitecaps join, they’ll be bringing particularly rich stacks of history. The original Whitecaps were founded in 1973 and, by the late 70s, were regularly drawing sellout crowds of 32,000 in into the old Empire Stadium. They rocked the U.S. soccer establishment in 1979 when a workhorse team punched the fabled Cosmos right in the nose, knocking the illustrious, star-strewn club out of the NASL playoffs. Shortly after that, in the 1979 Soccer Bowl, the Whitecaps prevailed against the talented Tampa Bay Rowdies.

     After an initial starburst of early success, the old Portland Timbers weren’t the same force on the field. But, oh, how they rocked Civic Stadium, averaging more than 17,000 a game in 1976, their second year of existence. So passionate were the fans that Portland earned the nickname Soccer City, USA.

     Of course, Seattle had a thing or two to say about NASL history. The likes of

Tony Chursky, Alan Hudson, Jim McAlister and Alan Hinton became big men around town for their athletic feats and ambassadorship of the game. They finished runner-up to the Cosmos and Pele in the 1977 Soccer Bowl. And here’s a dandy dollop of old NASL trivia: The debut event for the mighty Kingdome was a soccer game, as the Sounders faced the Cosmos on April 25, 1976. A crowd of 58,218 fans watched.

     The Sounders averaged 22,578 fans in 1978, right in the middle of the golden era of NASL fame. One of the attendance drivers was the three-way rivalry. So it wasn’t just that three teams existed in this pocket of culturally similar towns – it was that they were all (mostly) good on the field and great at the gate.

     Schmid says he frequently meets supporters in restaurants who wax nostalgic about the Sounders’ delightfully bitter matches against Portland and Vancouver.

     "You can feel it, just tell that it’s going to be something special," he said of the impending rivalry. "And when we played a U.S. Open Cup game against Portland this year, when you went to the park you could feel the rivalry and that it was a different game. We had some guys who had played in that game before, and you could see it in their eyes that this game meant something, that it meant a little more to them."

     Of course, the two emerging MLS entries will have some catching up to do, as Seattle’s wondrous, record-smashing launch in MLS has set the bar awfully high. On the field, the Sounders were the first expansion team to make the playoffs since Chicago in 1998.  Consider that Toronto, the previous club to join MLS, having arrived in 2007, still has yet to taste playoff soccer.

     In the stands, Seattle set an MLS record for average attendance (30,943) as an engaged, impassioned fan base turned Qwest Field into a frenzied, scarf-filled den on match days. Is all that just-add-water instant success ramping up the pressure for the Sounders’ new MLS neighbors to replicate such high achievement? Paulson doesn’t sound worried.

     "We are certainly enthused about the success they've had," Paulson said of Seattle. "We've been having success here, too. And we have every reason to believe that Vancouver and Portland will be models of success in just the same way Seattle has been right out of the gate."

     Of course, it won’t all be streamers and scarves and beautiful pageantry. The proximity will require clubs to make policy choices about security and ticketing. After all, those nearby derbies in Europe and clasicos in Latin America that we hear so much about also come with their own special set of concerns.

     "The organization is going to have figure out if they want a lot of traveling fans," said Dave Clark, author of the blog Sounder at Heart.  "They’ll have a choice, sell more seats to away fans or maintain the strong home town flavor.  But I know when I watched the third round Open Cup match I loved seeing the Sounders fans in such numbers.  I want other fans to have that opportunity. Regional rivalries can only help the sport grow."
     Garber and Paulson say there is already productive dialogue between team officials about how to handle the special demands of traveling supporters. Garber noted how leaders of supporters groups around MLS are engaged in the conversations, as well. Accommodating the frequently disparate concerns of supporters groups and Soccer Moms will require such cooperation.

     "But we’re really fortunate because the leaders of these groups have been very, very supportive and understanding of what we’re all trying to do to build the game," Garber said. 

     That’s a good thing, too, because Clark says he knows of fans already plotting out travel arrangements – for games they won’t see for another 18 months, at least. He likens what is happening in his part of the country to college basketball’s Tobacco Road.

     "It will also be intriguing because where Seattle and Vancouver have histories of on-the-pitch success, Portland had the strongest fanbase at the USL level," he said. "Now though, they have to follow what has happened here for the Sounders, and what businessman wants to chase that story?"