Review: Why after 26 seasons, I'm no longer supporting DC United

And as we all know it is complaining that makes us truly human

 

Since there is barely any tailgating anymore thats the only real reason we keep going now isn't it.....

 

Don't touch that dial!

 

No. That's like saying "I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a scumbag, so I'll support someone who rapes her." No matter how much you may dislike another team or its fans, some things are wrong regardless of the victim.

 

Didn't notice this thread when it was originally posted.

I never made a conscious decision not to support the team, and I still haven't. I certainly haven't come close to switching allegiances to another MLS team -- that will never happen. That's impossible. Even trying to picture the idea in my head just seems nonsensical, like imagining everyone suddenly having horns coming out of their heads. Can't happen.

But my support for the team is utterly unrecognizable from what it was in the days of RFK, and that is entirely because of the way the organization has been run. Not having season tickets any more is just icing: this last season, I didn't sit down to watch a single match (either in person or on TV), and frequently didn't know about matches at all until the day after when friends on here discussed them. I really don't have words for how inconceivable that would have been at one time. For decades, the only home matches I ever missed were when I was too sick to stand; I spent utterly absurd amounts of money every year on DCU gear; the release of the league schedules always prompted "OK, which road matches do I want to travel to this year" scrutinization. Our Xmas stockings are DCU stockings. My Cat-in-the-Hat jersey is one of my most prized possessions. Now, I barely have any idea at all what's going on with DC United. My "support" feels like it's at the level of "Oh, yeah, right, DC United. How are they doing this season? I hope they're doing well."

But what's interesting to me is that I can articulate the organization's missteps (in my opinion; I think they'd disagree that many of them are even missteps) that got me to this point, and:

1. Not a single one of them appears on the OP's list.
2. Not one of the OP's list played a significant role for me.

Which I suppose is just another reminder that you can take many paths to get to the same (or a very similar) place.

 

There are some things in the USSoccer.com KP article in the other thread that talk about some items that make current DC so much different from what we used to love:

"It sounds like common sense, but at the time I think MLS was more concerned about selling tickets almost in a used car salesman way," he said. "They did so certainly through youth soccer, a lot of group outings. But Kevin built a team that fans wanted to be part of, and he let them be part of it."

"I heard security on his walkie talkie telling them about a problem in the supporter section," he said. "He radioed back and said, 'Well, kick them out.' The general manager told me, 'Well we have some supporters that are throwing confetti.' He kicked them out because they were throwing confetti? Well, that seems a bit a bit much. I told him: 'Don't you want them celebrating?' He said, 'Well, we pay our clean-up cost here at the stadium, so we don't allow confetti.

Payne helped broker an understanding with the RFK security guards.

He understood that type of consistency and what tradition actually meant. You knew that from the very beginning. We were a soccer club, a football club, and that was what was driving us, not being a commercial entity."

He wanted our club to not just be a winning club, one that starts with tradition, but he wanted it to be a family. That's how he went about everything.

The last one about people working for, and even fans, being part of the DCU "family" I think is what most separates today's DCU from KP's generation; why we became so attached to the team and why we are no longer so attached.

Decisions were taken many, many times regarding players, staff, and even fans, based on that sense of family rather than just on business considerations. Some of those decisions fans just never understood but KP stood by that mantra of "what's good for the team/people will be good for business" later on. Decisions that have been public (Santino, Convey, and Gross for example) and some for staff or fans which were never public.

To a large extent I believe that mindset continues among most of senior manglement for the most part (how the Gressel trade or the Lindsey Sampson debacle have been handled appear to be glaring departures but who knows the whole story?) based on conversations I have had with some of manglers where they have said things, "yeah, he is good people" and "we really tried to accommodate" certain things.

But clearly, the mantra is reversed.

 

Maybe Ben can turn Houston around, but they are god awful. You will have the same frustrations with them as you do with United!

 

I attended the debacle Open Cup exit against the Red Balls last season. It was my first visit to Audi Field. (I live several hours away.) I have no particular desire to go back until things change. I'm not hopeful.

 

Your only visit to Audi was for an Open Cup game?? No wonder you don't want to go back.

 

I'm apathetic towards DC United now a days but going to Audi Field is a good time.

 

I agree. Hit up a brewery or bar in Navy Yard before hand, walk to Audi, get pupusas if I haven't already eaten, watch a game, head back to Navy Yard, then head home. It's always a good time for me. Except maybe that Philly home game last season.

 

The Philly game almost was special. My wife and I and the couple next to us were rooting for an eighth Philly goal so we could at least claim we were there for the worst beat down in MLS history. Instead we just got a damp squib.

 

I largely stopped following in 2014/15. After I had a meeting with Hunt and Levien about how they wanted to run the club. It was real eye-opening. I didn't want any part of it. I haven't been to Audi Field, a thing I was super excited for happening. But nothing about the Levien, Hunt regime indicated to me that they could run a successful club or in a manner that I wanted to pay to be a part of and every time I check in (because I could've been wrong) I reminded of why I stopped supporting.

 

I'm still a STH, but it's going to be hard this season because so many of the players on the roster are new. I don't expect to recognize half of the starting eleven. I suppose I will come around, but it will take time.

 

I could recognize all of them last year and I also recognized that they weren't very good.

 

Hunt was a tool, but he's been gone since the Hype Man fiasco at the AF opener.

 

All right.

(ASIDE: I will refer to Levien, or McFarland/Chang before him, or Anschutz before them, as owners. In doing so, I will ignore the fact that they don't and didn't "own" DCU. MLS owns DCU. They have or had "operating rights" for DCU as investors in MLS. Legally, Levien is not the owner of DCU any more or less than he is the owner of Seattle or Atlanta or Houston. However, because his operating rights give him the power to make decisions about DCU that are analogous to what owners do in more traditionally structured sports leagues, he might as well be called an owner. Plus it gets distracting to type or read "investor/operator" all the time.)

TL/DR: it's not about performance on the pitch for me. It's about their destruction of the sense of family I had.

I did not attend DC United matches purely for the soccer. I love the sport; but there are other things in this world that I love, and there are other ways to watch soccer. There are even other ways to watch live soccer around D.C. -- not at the same level, of course, but that by itself is not going to get me to spend big money on season tickets and travel to watch away matches and so forth.

And I certainly did not attend DC United matches for the opportunity to buy overpriced concessions, or "participate in a fan experience" as the team would put it. Go to a game, grab a beer, sit and watch, go home. Treat it like watching a TV show. One can certainly experience DCU at that level. But there's an infinity of things one can do that are engaging at that level.

I became a DC United supporter because of the feeling of belonging I got out of it -- the sense that I was a member of a family, a family that I felt lucky to be a part of and was happy to be connected to. This existed on every level: my sense of my relationship to other fans, other members of supporters groups, the players, and the staff of the organization. Everyone. And that deepened as time went on: every time I went to a match, I saw perhaps hundreds of people that I knew and that knew me, to the point where I felt at home in Lot 8 and at RFK as I did at, well, home.

How much of that was real? Well, I think my connections to individual people, on a one-to-one level, were as real as such things ever are in life; I have no reason to think otherwise. And if the aspects of that feeling which relate directly to the DC United organization and its personnel were to any degree illusory -- if they were nothing more than a business who saw it in their best interests to fool me into thinking we were all a family -- well, honestly, it doesn't matter, since sports fandom is fundamentally irrational to begin with. I mean, getting emotionally wrapped up in your connection to a business? Who gets passionate over Charmin vs. Quilted Northern? We may have opinions about whether Burger King or McDonald's or Wendy's is better, but who feels a sense of extreme joy or sadness from the thought of being right or wrong about it? Who puts up posters in their office trumpeting their allegiance to their favorite mayonnaise or household cleaner? We do these things with sports teams because we connect to them emotionally in a way that's pretty unique. The closest thing I can think of is how I went to see the original Star Wars movie 10 times in the theaters during its first run back in 1977, back when I was 12/13 years old. But even that did not create the sense of belonging to a family that sports teams can, and for me DCU did, create.

And that sense of family carried me through times that ran off the people who didn't feel that way. Through the Soehn years, which I found disappointing and naively imagined were the bottom of the pit, through the debacle of 2010 and then 2013, it never occurred to me to stop going to games. Yeah, the team totally sucked, but *so what*? Yes, it seemed plagued by bad decision-making, but *so what*? It was my family. You might be disappointed in a member of your family; you might get mad as hell at a member of your family; but you don't just abandon them. Or more correctly, it takes a lot to make you want to distance yourself from a member of your family. The poor performance on the pitch, and the reasons for that poor performance on the pitch, wasn't going to do it.

What makes my reasons for losing my enthusiasm for DC United different from yours is that mine are all about the ways in which, during the Levien era, the organization has repeatedly and consistently made deliberate choices and taken deliberate steps to destroy those kinds of connections, to eradicate that sense of family. And the word "deliberate" is intentional: they knew the effect it would have, and they wanted that effect.

The sense of family is IMO related to the perception of a team as a community asset, and not simply something that one rich person or some asset management group or whatever owns. Other American sports leagues don't think this way -- it's a foreign concept in American sports management. But soccer teams around the world, and their fans, routinely do think this way. In fact, this has historically been the norm in world soccer, and many of the convulsions taking place around the world in the sport (from Barcelona club members reporting their own club's management's financial hijinx to their government, knowing they'd be penalized; to fan protests against the briefly proposed European Super League; to supporters' sections in England making scathing protests over the new owners of Newcastle) stem from the sense that ownerships and leagues around the world are abandoning their history in favor of an American point of view: squeeze every penny out of this year's bottom line, regardless of how it looks.

This difference between American sports and the soccer world is something that Kevin Payne got. He viscerally felt that sense of family himself, and many of his decisions were made on the basis of fostering that sense of family; and amazingly, Anschutz let him do it. In the early years of the league, I'm not sure how many other leadership figures got it. Maybe Peter Wilt did, I dunno. I'm not the best person to comment on him. By now, some other MLS teams' leaderships have evolved into getting it. Garth Lagerwey seemed to have taken what he learned here and applied it brilliantly at Seattle. But under Levien, DCU abandoned it. Levien, and Hunt and everyone that's followed Hunt, did not and do not get it, and more importantly, did not and do not want to get it. They emphatically do not see themselves as custodians of a community asset. They do not see themselves as members of a family, or even as heads of a family. They see themselves as "owners" of DCU in the same way that someone owns Wawa or M&M/Mars or Enterprise Rent-a-car, and the only point of owning some entity is to make as much money as you can out of it, and the only measure of failure is losing money, or not making as much money as you could.

When that's your perspective, it makes sense to want fans whose relationship with the team is purely transactional: those who own the team provide an entertainment service, and we pay money to be entertained, and that's it. And why would that seem strange to them? That's the way it works with all the other big time sports leagues in the United States. With this view, people who think the club has any responsibility to them are a liability, not an asset; and so long as fans spend money, they're interchangeable and replaceable. So they made decisions to dismantle that sense of family.

Here's just a few of the things that have stood out to me in this regard:

1. At some point, someone with the team must have said to others or to themselves, 'Paying attention to the history and tradition of the organization costs money, and its return to the balance sheet is unclear; so let's get rid of it.' Any newcomers to the team -- fans or players -- know who Marco Etcheverry or Jaime Moreno or John Harkes or Danilo Diron were? Any know how impressive this team's trophy case is despite not having won MLS Cup or a Supporter's Shield in donkey's years? When you go into Audi Field, what do you see -- either outside on the concourses or inside around the pitch -- that tells you anything about the history of the team? And hey, did you know that before the revamp of the team's website, video highlights were available on the old website from every single match the team had ever played, ever? That's all gone. And they didn't just remove it -- they actively deleted it, threw it away, so they couldn't put it back up even if they wanted to. Which they don't.

2. Historically, the supporters' groups existed as a segment of the fanbase that, as far as attendance was concerned, was more immune to the team's dips in performance than was the fanbase at large. That's not to say that supporters group turnout wasn't affected at all by the team's suckitude -- photographs of the loud side of RFK from 2007 vs. 2017 would clearly show otherwise. But they provided a lot of people that weren't going anywhere, no matter how badly the team performed. They provided the lion's share of the visible fans for the team at away matches. They also provided a sizeable chunk of the atmosphere at home matches, something the team was happy to exploit in e.g. promotional images and the occasional TV commercial. Based on these things, you'd think that the team would see the supporters' groups as assets -- which it very much did during the pre-Levien era. But during the Levien era, and with Tom Hunt as the leader in this perspective, they saw the supporters' groups as adversaries rather than partners, something to either be brought under the team's control like an official fan club, or to be eliminated entirely. And they directly communicated that disdain to the groups -- telling them in meetings that they were too small a percentage of the team's revenue stream for the team to care about them. Who does that? Who tells a bunch of absurdly loyal customers "I don't make enough money off you to care about you"? Who does it while continuing to use their images in promotional materials?

3. Traditionally, the supporters' groups bought tickets for their sections as a block from the team, and then resold them at a small markup. In addition to this being a revenue source for the groups' activities, it also made it less likely for folks who weren't interested in what the groups did to end up in those sections. Under Tom Hunt, the team hammered away at this arrangement, and abolished it entirely in the move to Audi Field. The result was that at Audi Field, a substantial fraction of the people in the supporters' sections were/are people who bought those tickets online simply because they were the cheapest. Then these people showed up, got mad because they didn't know the sections were treated as general admission, got mad because people around them were standing, got mad because people around them were singing all the time, got mad because people threw beer up in the air when goals were scored, and got mad because someone near them would frequently encourage them to join in and sing/chant. Sometimes these angry people start fights with supporters about these things. A supporters' section where half the people in it are supporters, and half are not and see what the supporters are doing as ruining their night, is at best not going to work as a supporters' section, and at worst is a recipe for disaster. This was made clear to the team; the team didn't/doesn't care.

4. During the early years of the search for a new home after RFK, KP et. al. emphasized how important it was to them to allow something analogous to the Lot 8 tailgating culture to occur. This was an important part of planning for both Poplar Point and the Prince Georges'/Morgan Blvd option. Once the team settled on Buzzard Point, that was obviously going to be a lot harder to do. And so there were discussions: could some of the surface parking neighboring M Street SE be used this way? Could areas around Anacostia Park, on the other side of the bridge from the stadium, be used this way? There were issues to solve, but they were not insurmountable. But then the team decided not to support or help pursue any of them, because food and drink consumed while tailgating is food and drink not purchased from vendors inside the stadium. It was always going to be hard for something as wonderful as Lot 8 to survive the move; but the team decided they actively wanted it to die.

I can go on, but this is already way too long a post.

For me, one of the funniest things about this is that any number of times in recent years, executives of the team have stated in conversation that they wanted to have the level of passion from supporters and casual fans that they saw with other teams in the league like Portland or (amazingly, for those of us who remember the Wiz in Arrowhead) with Sporting KC -- an absurdly ironic thing to say in that it completely ignores the fact that that existed here at one time. But when asked if the organization was willing to do the kinds of things that those teams did, or that DC United did in the past, to encourage those kinds of connections, they emphatically said "No."

 

Spot on @Bootsy Collins

 

Thank you @Bootsy Collins!

 

Leave it to @Bootsy Collins to clearly state the situation and the problem with our current owner/operators. My only add or at least my own wrinkle is the FO seems to be actively working to eliminate the "old heads". Many of my DC friends that are 96'ers are so much less invested even if they retain season tickets. It is now "a day out" not the "must go" imperative. All of which goes back to the above explanation that I could never articulate so cogently.

 

Dude, not that old...