The air inside San Jose’s Spartan Stadium on April 6, 1996, was thick with the suffocating cynicism of a thousand American sportswriters. It had been twelve grueling years since the North American Soccer League (NASL) collapsed under the weight of its own financial excess, leaving first-division outdoor soccer in America dead, buried, and forgotten. But on that spring afternoon, the silence officially ended.
In this episode of BenchMarks, Callan McClurg takes you back to the definitive watershed moment for the beautiful game in the United States: the chaotic, experimental, and brilliant 1996 inaugural season of Major League Soccer (MLS). We track the journey from Eric Wynalda’s legendary, physics-defying curling strike for the San Jose Clash to the mud and rain of Foxboro Stadium, where Bruce Arena's D.C. United laid the first brick of an American soccer dynasty.
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