An unofficial history of MLS in 25 scandals, pranks and improprieties (2024)

It feels far off now, but whenever sports return and MLS gets into the swing of its 25th season, we’ll likely see an abundance of “best-of” lists and compilations of memorable events from the league’s history: glorious, iconic moments like Eddie Pope’s winning goal in extra time of the first MLS Cup, the arrival of David Beckham and, later that season — 2007 was a very good year — Ricardo Clark mercilessly stomping on Carlos Ruiz.

There is an entirely different set of memories, though, that you won’t hear about: the spats and the pranks and the not-for-your-grandma’s-ears traditions, the stories involving strip-club buffets, the destruction of a local TGI Friday’s and Frank Lampard playing beer pong.

During these difficult times, when all of us could use a little bit of levity, those are the stories we want to hear. So we’ve compiled 25 of them, culled from interviews with current and former MLS players, coaches and administrators. Names are sometimes excluded to protect future employment opportunities, marriages and the like, and each story is recounted by the interviewees — often through the haze of decades gone by.

1. The original MLS anthem almost featured lyrics by Alexi Lalas

This season, MLS introduced a new anthem by film composer Hans Zimmer, replacing the music to which the teams walk out onto the field. Zimmer’s anthem is a lot less, uh, anthemic, than the old anthem, sounding more like the score to an action movie trailer.

What you might not know is that the original anthem, introduced in 2007, almost had lyrics. Written by Alexi Lalas.

“I remember sending (then-MLS deputy commissioner) Ivan Gazidis a lyrics sheet,” said Lalas, who was working as the general manager of the LA Galaxy at the time. “I recorded a version and sent it to him. It never saw the light of day. The anthem is sort of a pomp-and-circ*mstance number, so I wrote something sort of old and traditional.”

Ladies and gentleman, I give you “Gather Us All,” the lyrics, printed below, are ostensibly about unity, but could also potentially be talking about MLS’s single-entity structure. Enjoy.

GATHER US ALL

Gather us all together / Gather us all as one / Gather us all together / Gather us all everyone / Moments matter, moments last / Moments coming, moments past / Gather us all

2. Cuauhtémoc Blanco’s wad

As a player, Cuauhtémoc Blanco had the touch — and the name — of a god, not to mention a nearly-divine status in his native Mexico.

His teammates in Chicago in the late-aughts, though, speak of Blanco in more human terms. He remained in the trenches. He was approachable, kind and exceedingly generous. Most everybody who played for the Fire has a story about Blanco’s largesse.

“Blanco would take us all out constantly,” recalls one of his former teammates. “And he had pretty expensive taste in general.”

One Sunday night, Blanco — flanked by a trio of teammates and his personal bodyguard — arrived at a Chicago-area club. The Mexico legend requested a table in the corner, but it was roped off and reserved for another VIP. Blanco, used to getting his way in his home country, was surprised when his demand was rebuffed.

“He pulls out his wallet,” the teammate recalls, “and I have never, ever seen so much cash in my life. Maybe $10,000. Could have been more.”

Immediately, the club cleared the table and made room for Blanco and his crew.

“Why are you carrying around so much cash?” asked one of his teammates. “Why don’t you just get, like, an (American Express) black card?”

“Because,” replied Blanco, who is now the governor of the Mexican state of Morelos, “credit cards are for poor people.”

3. “El Pibe” and Ivan McKinley duke it out at RFK

D.C. United die-hards still talk about the July 12, 1996, match between their club and the Tampa Bay Mutiny. It was a raucous, back-and-forth affair between two of the best teams in the league, and it took place in a downpour at RFK Stadium. The 1-0 win was the turning point in United’s inaugural campaign and, to some, it marked the beginning of MLS’s first real dynasty.

Or, as former Mutiny head coach Thomas Rongen puts it, “This was really the game that put MLS on the map. It was Marco Etcheverry vs. El Pibe (Carlos Valderamma). This was a real f*cking game.”

Midway through a tense second half, Etcheverry broke the game open, running onto a cross and smashing home the eventual game-winner. RFK erupted, and during the celebration, things really fell apart for the Mutiny. Valderrama and Tampa midfielder Ivan McKinley were at each other’s throats, blaming each other for the goal, and, as Rongen recalls, the two took turns smashing the ball off of each other. In the middle of all this, McKinley would later say, Valderrama spat on him. The two were eventually separated by their teammates and play restarted.

“I pull them both out of the game — double substitution,” Rongen says. “And both of these guys just walk off the field, into the locker room, straightaway.”

McKinley took the usual route any sub takes off the pitch, trotting toward the sideline. But Valderamma had something else in mind. He trudged clear across the length of the field, pausing every now and then to salute the fans in attendance, some of whom were cheering, others jeering. Two minutes after play had stopped, Valderrama finally disappeared into the tunnel.

Things got worse after the match.

“I get (into the locker room), and these two guys are just f*cking slugging it out,” said Rongen. “There is blood everywhere, literally on the walls. Cle Kooiman, finally, gets between the two of them and breaks it up.”

Later, when the Mutiny returned to Tampa, Rongen realized he would have to fine both players.

“But I couldn’t fine them equally,” he recalls, “because Pibe made so much more than everyone on the team. I fined Pibe $10,000 and fined Ivan maybe $150.”

The players accepted their punishment. Rongen recalls Valderrama telling him that no coach had ever dared pull him out of a game that early. For his part, McKinley told Rongen that everything was going to be fine.

“Don’t worry about us,” he said, according to Rongen. “We’re best friends.” Valderrama, a legendary partier with a penchant for Johnnie Walker Black, had taken a liking to his teammates in Tampa Bay. “He brings us all over to his house after every home game,” continued McKinley, “and we all get f*cked up. He just pours whiskey down our throats. And then he throws all of us in the pool, basically.”

“‘And after every training,’” McKinley said, “we all go to lunch at Mons Venus.”

4. Falling in love at Mons Venus

Mons Venus is not your run-of-the-mill strip club. This is the kind of place you might hear referenced in a Motley Crue song, or a local politician’s sworn affidavit. Alexi Lalas describes the establishment, located just down the road from the Mutiny’s old stadium in Tampa, as “a place that celebrated the beauty of the human form.”

“And,” Lalas chuckles, “the spirit and emotion and passion of music.”

The place wasn’t just a frequent haunt of the 1996 Tampa Bay Mutiny, as McKinley told Rongen. It was a regular stop for nearly every MLS team that passed through town in the league’s early years, either for preseason training or a game against the Mutiny.

“Tampa is known for many things,” says Lalas, “not the least of which is adult entertainment. Conveniently, the hotel where many MLS teams stayed when visiting the Tampa area was directly across the street from Mons Venus.”

Surely players were lured in by what Mons Venus describes as its workforce consisting of “the most beautiful women in the world,” but Lalas is quick to point out its other benefit, one that appealed to the many players making the league’s minimum salary, some of whom were still working second jobs to make ends meet.

“It was an incredible value,” he remembers. “It was dinner and a show. It was affordable. I will never forget going in there after the league had gone on for a few years and literally seeing the walls of this establishment covered with the pennants and jerseys of all of the various MLS teams that had been there. Branding is important, you know?”

If the walls at Mons Venus could talk, they might tell you the story of one former USMNT standout who fell in love with a dancer at the place, taking their relationship out of the club and into the real world. We’ll save that one. For now.

5. The Shorewalk Villas

Nowadays, the average MLS preseason is a pretty monotonous affair, and MLS players have tightly-regulated schedules, curfews and the like. But in the league’s early days —and maybe even more so in the early 2000s, when the league was near collapse — things were a lot wilder.

At one point, when the league had been reduced to 10 teams, more than half of them spent their preseason in the exact same place: the Shorewalk Vacation Villas in Bradenton, Fla.

“The place was a madhouse,” says one former player. “Every night, basically, you’d walk across the street to the supermarket and buy your beer for the evening. We’d walk back, set up in the courtyard; you’d have, like, Jaime Moreno or Marco Etcheverrry grilling up steaks, every team had a sort of player-turned-cook on staff. You’d spend the evening with players you’d just been kicking the sh*t out of hours earlier, and now you were sh*tfaced with them.”

“In the meantime,” the player continues, “You’d have MLS managers above you on the balcony and you could literally hear them cutting their roster down to size. Deals got done in the place — a player got traded from D.C. to New England, once, right there in the middle of the party. He literally just moved his sh*t to (New England’s area) across the courtyard the next day.”

Players from all teams, though, often converged on a local bar — one ex-player said he couldn’t remember the name but that “it may have been something as sad as a f*cking TGI Friday’s” —and turned the place upside down.

“It’s possible,” he says, “any number of illegitimate children have been conceived at the Shorewalk Villas.”

6. Hristo Stoichkov’s 18-foot fishing pole

Philadelphia Union head coach Jim Curtin, at the time a fresh-faced rookie straight out of Villanova, recalls his first experience with the Shorewalk Villas very well.

“It was the absolute weirdest place,” Curtin recalls. “Some people lived there — it was like a retirement home. And then you’d have random tourists, and then these elite athletes. And on top of all of that, you’d randomly have Amish people passing through.” (The villas are not far from the largest Amish enclave in the state of Florida.)

“No bullsh*t, my first night there, I walk out of my room — I’m rooming with Chris Armas and C.J. Brown, these dudes are like idols to me. The first thing I see is Sigi Schmid just speaking German to some random old German dudes who lived there; they’re playing shuffleboard. I look over and see Bruce Arena, just playing tennis on the court next to him. Behind all of this, you just see random Amish kids running around. I look out at the pond in the middle of the place, and I see Hristo Stoichkov.”

Stoichkov had forced Curtin to tote around his 18-foot fishing pole all preseason as some sort of weird initiation ritual, and now he was using it to fish in a man-made pond with Dema Kovalenko.

“These dudes were just pulling out these bright, colorful, exotic fish, like koi fish, that probably cost $1,000 a piece, and just chucking them in a trash can,” Curtin says.

Did Curtin clue Stoichkov in to the fact that what he was doing probably wasn’t entirely kosher —or legal, maybe?

“Are you kidding?” Curtin says. “I didn’t talk to him. I was terrified of him.”

The Bulgarian would go on to celebrate his love of the rod and reel in a memorable goal celebration later that same year:

Stoichkov, a former FIFA world player of the year, was also the club’s de facto van driver.

“We’d all load into these 15-passenger vans and he’d be tearing around the place,” Curtin recalls. “I can tell you that those vans got puked in nearly every night after they shuttled all of us to any number of places we probably shouldn’t have been.”

7. Teaching Frank Lampard and David Villa how to play beer pong

Stoichkov isn’t the only huge name who has wowed MLS players with some off-field antics.

Columbus Crew center back Josh Williams was with New York City FC during their inaugural season of 2015, and he remembers Frank Lampard giving him and his teammates a glimpse of the superstar lifestyle that first preseason.

That year, NYCFC held a training camp in Manchester, the home of parent club Man City. Lampard was then on loan to the English club, where he was set to stay for the duration of the Premier League season before moving to New York. He had gotten to know his future teammates a bit during their trip to Manchester, however, and he took the entire team out on their final night. Head coach Jason Kreis approved of the evening in advance. His only instruction? Don’t be late for the bus the following morning.

The night started at Rio Ferdinand’s Manchester restaurant. Lampard had rented out the entire top section. Upon walking in, the NYCFC players saw two massive coolers of beer.

“Immediately, I’m like, ‘This is gonna be a sh*tshow,’” says Williams.

The team had “an amazing dinner,” after which Williams went up to Lampard and asked him about the plan for the rest of the night. Lampard told Williams and an unnamed teammate, who Williams was rooming with at the team hotel, to come with him. Williams couldn’t believe it. One of the best players in English history wanted to party with him, a part-time MLS starter who had gone undrafted out of Cleveland State in 2010?

Lampard instructed Williams and his roommate to go downstairs, where a black Mercedes-Benz was waiting for them. They went outside, passed a crowd of paparazzi, hopped in the car and looked “at each other like, ‘Holy sh*t!’” Lampard joined them five minutes later and they rode to a club.

“There’s a line of people waiting right outside,” Williams says. “He stops the car and he goes, ‘I want you to pick out three girls.’ My teammate was married, and I was single at the time, so I’m like, ‘I got this.’ I pick out three girls. We pull around back, there’s a side entrance. We go in the side, (and) these three girls are waiting at the table that we’re at.

“This place is packed, multiple levels. And as soon as we walk in, you could see everybody recognize Frank. And it’s just me, my teammate and Frank and all the energy is just on him. He picks up a bottle, this huge bottle of Grey Goose, picks it up, opens it, just starts downing it. Passes it to me and goes, ‘Boys, we’re not putting this down until it’s f*cking gone.’”

The trio passed the bottle around three times, when, mercifully, the rest of NYCFC showed up.

“I’m just thanking god,” says Williams. “I remember telling Frank, I’m like, ‘Frank, I want to remember this night.’ And he goes, ‘f*ck it, you’ll remember.’ Thankfully the guys came, and I was able to pass it off.”

After about an hour in the club, Lampard approached Williams and asked him about “that game you Americans play where you throw the little balls — he’s talking about beer pong.” Lampard wanted Williams to teach him how to play. They walked over to a large table in the middle of the floor.

“So it’s me and Frank against David Villa and, I can’t quite remember, but I want to say it was David Silva,” says Williams. “And I remember my buddy comes over and he’s like, ‘Do you know what’s happening right now?’ And I’m like, “Man, I am fully aware. I’m showing these legends how to play beer pong.”

After a couple more hours of partying, the DJ announced that the club was closing. Anyone who wasn’t with NYCFC had to leave.

“We’re sitting there looking around, and I look over (and) this guy has his arm around what I presume to be his girlfriend, and the girl is looking back at us, I swear to god, the girl is looking back at us, and she looks at us, looks at him, and is like… uhhh,” says Williams. “And she turns around and joins us, and the guy leaves the club alone. Brutal.”

Eventually, the night ended, and Williams and his teammates made it back to the hotel.

“I remember waking up, and I wake up to the sound of water running,” says Williams. “I look over and there’s the silhouette of my buddy in the window. He’s just peeing all over the desk. As soon as this happens, it’s like a scene out of a movie: ‘Bam, bam, bam’ at our front door. I go answer the door, and it’s (former MLS goalkeeper) Josh Saunders. And he’s like ‘Hey, we gotta go. You guys are 15 minutes late to the bus.’”

Half an hour later, the pair made it downstairs, where a death stare from Kreis was waiting for them.

“I ended up apologizing to Jason, to the team, but man, that was one for the history books,” says Williams. “One of the best nights of my life. One of the worst mornings of my life.”

8. Too much fun on Fire Island

That’s not the only story from NYCFC’s inaugural season. Later that year, right around Labor Day, the team had a weekend off and a crew of players headed out to Fire Island for a few nights of partying. The plan was to head back on Sunday afternoon ahead of training on Monday, but one unnamed player decided that he wanted to extend his weekend. A teammate offered to pick him up from the ferry on Long Island on Sunday night, but he resisted so long that he missed the last boat.

The teammate was staying the night on Long Island, and agreed to pick up the player from the docks on Monday morning. He got off the boat in rough shape. He had “a massive dip” of chewing tobacco tucked into his lip, and tossed a crushed beer can into a trash bin as he stepped off the boat.

It was early in the morning. He hadn’t slept much, and revealed to the teammate upon getting in the car that he’d accidentally FaceTime’d Kreis from a bar the previous night. The teammate was incredulous. He offered to stop for bagels, a Gatorade, something to help the player push through before they drove to the training ground north of New York City. He refused, and practiced later that morning as if nothing had happened.

9. That’s not water

A Saturday afternoon away game usually means one thing for MLS teams: Saturday night is going to be a hell of a party.

On a trip to San Jose in the late ’90s, a couple of Kansas City Wizards reserves weren’t interested in waiting until after the game to get started. The players filled some water bottles with vodka and sipped from them during the game — a mid-game pregame, if you will.

Late in the match, a player went down injured. As the trainers tended to him, players from both teams went to the bench to grab a drink.

That didn’t go so well for Preki. The star Kansas City attacker, now an assistant coach with Seattle, unknowingly grabbed one of the water bottles filled with vodka. And instead of taking a sip, he sprayed it all over his face.

“He goes down on the field, rolling around, screaming,” says one person who was on the field for the incident. “Everyone’s like, ‘What the f*ck?’ And he’s down there just screaming: ‘I’m blind! I’m blind!’ And the guys on the bench are just dying laughing. I mean, the guy just sprayed vodka right in his eyes. They had to stop the game.”

10. Scouting via video game

By the time Thomas Rongen arrived at Chivas USA, his coaching resume was already long and distinguished. Tutored by the likes of Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels, Rongen’s coaching CV already included an MLS Cup, MLS coach of the year award and a four-year stint as head coach of the U.S. U-20 men’s national team.

He seemed a safe bet, then, to take the helm at Chivas USA in 2005, the club’s inaugural campaign. After just a week on the job, he quickly realized that something was very, very wrong in Carson.

Rongen says that Jorge Vergara was the owner everyone had heard of, but “the guy who put all the money in was Antonio Cué. And Antonio ran the organization, pretty much, with a lot of his family members.”

Rongen attended a meeting shortly after arriving at the club and surveyed the landscape: two of Cué’s brothers, an uncle, some other random assorted family members. In the corner sat Cué’s nephew, who was around 10 years old at the time and playing the latest edition of EA Sports’ FIFA video game.

“I’m telling them as we’re talking how I want to build this team,” Rongen says, “how I want to approach it, how I want to play systematically, what guys I’d like to get from Chivas’ first team.”

From the corner, Cué’s nephew interrupted the proceedings. “How about this guy?” he said, motioning toward the game. “This guy has really good marks.”

Vergara and the elder Cué walked over and peered at the screen.

“I’d spent weeks trying to explain to them about the guys we wanted to get,” Rongen says, “and then this kid is in the corner and they’re listening to him talk about, ‘This guy has an eight or a nine or whatever when it comes to his shot.’ Talk about a sh*tshow, you had the owner of the team listening to a child telling him what players to sign based on their FIFA score.”

Rongen wouldn’t have to worry about Chivas for long: the collection of talent the team’s owners assembled, with input from video game ratings, according to the coach, did not serve him well. He was sacked after beginning the season with a record of 1-8-1.

11. Gazza’s week-long stay in MLS

Paul Gascoigne was perhaps the most talented English footballer of his time. Yet he is tragically just as notorious for his off-field antics, and in 2002, Gazza brought his circus stateside.

At 35 years old and desperate for another chance, Gascoigne arrived in the nation’s capital for a trial with Ray Hudson’s D.C. United squad. From the start, the club, coach and even the league expressed their hesitation about the potential move. Very quickly, it became apparent why.

On his third night there, Gascoigne ended up at a local bar, one frequented by United’s fans. It also happened to be a popular spot with local police officers.

“There were a bunch of folks who recognized him there that night,” says one person in attendance. “Couple of English guys; a Scottish guy buys him a beer, and man, it all goes downhill from there.”

An employee at the bar phoned the manager of the place, expressing his concern. “You gotta get him out,” he said. Quickly, arrangements were made to extract Gazza from the situation as discreetly as possible. And that’s how he ended up getting a ride back to his hotel in Northern Virginia in the back of a police cruiser.

From behind the divider, Gazza poured his heart out, laying bare his desire for a fresh start in the States and expressing his own disappointment at having to be hauled back to his hotel, albeit voluntarily. When he arrived, he asked the driver how much he owed him. Gascoigne thought he had been riding in a taxi cab. “I’m just doing someone a favor, man,” the officer said, before helping the English international up to his hotel room.

Gascoigne, though, wanted to show his appreciation for the gesture, and insisted that the officer accept a fare for the ride, stuffing some cash in his pocket. The next day, when the cop checked his uniform, he was astonished to find $1,500 in his hands.

12. Tab Ramos’s stolen car

Tab Ramos was the first player to sign an MLS contract, but his obligations to Mexican club Tigres forced him to arrive late for the 1996 season.

When he finally did make it to his first match with the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, things didn’t exactly go as planned. Ramos, now the head coach of the Houston Dynamo, had purchased an Acura NSX, which is often considered the first Japanese supercar and remains a collector’s item to this day. He got into town on a Friday, picked it up, went to training and then drove straight to the hotel where the team stayed the night before all home matches. He left the car with the valet; behind him in line was a teammate, Peter Vermes, now Sporting KC’s head coach.

“The next morning, I get up to go to the game, my first game in MLS, and although the car was valet parked, we start looking for it and the car’s not there,” says Ramos. “And we look at Peter’s car, and somebody broke into Peter Vermes’ car and moved it out of the way so they could steal my car!”

Indeed, with Vermes’ Honda Accord blocking the real prize, the thieves had broken into both in order to steal Ramos’ NSX. The police ended up recovering Ramos’ car about a week later, but it had been ruined.

“That was my start in MLS — that was my first game — and here I am on the way over, Peter is driving me, and I’m, like, calling the police, calling the insurance company,” Ramos says. “It’s just wild.”

13. A very Metro telling-off

That wasn’t the only absurd story from the MetroStars’ 1996 season.

One Monday morning, as his players gathered for their first training session after losing a sloppy match on the preceding Saturday, head coach Eddie Firmani was preparing to lay into them.

He never got the chance. Just as the former New York Cosmos boss began to address the group, an old man walked into their locker room at Kean College (now Kean University) and began berating them in a thick Irish brogue.

“A guy just comes in, old Irish guy, and he’s like, ‘You bastards, you guys are terrible, all of you are terrible,’” says Vermes. “He’s going off on us more than the coach would’ve, and all the players are sitting there thinking, like, ‘What the hell is going on? Who is this guy?’ Everybody’s kind of stunned, but as players, we’re thinking, ‘Do the staff know this guy? Did they bring him in?’ And all of a sudden, finally, one of the coaches, Ralph Perez — he was an assistant — and he was like, ‘Hey, get the hell out of here!’ And they’re trying to get the guy out and he’s like, ‘You guys suck! You’re an embarrassment!’ I mean can you imagine? You can see the difference in the times. Unbelievable.”

14. “Go away. Go away. Leave me alone.”

A former LA Galaxy player remembers walking through the Dallas airport the morning after a game against the Burn. He was heading to the gate for the team’s flight back to LAX when he saw a body behind an empty check-in counter.

“A real body,” he says. “Laid out flat. I seriously thought this guy was dead. So I wandered over to see what the hell was going on. There was this stretcher cot, like a small medical bed behind the counter in the area where you board the plane. And I walk over, and it’s a teammate of mine.

“I’m like, ‘f*ck, man. What happened? Are you OK? And he was just like, ‘Go away. Go away. Leave me alone.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, we are boarding in a different terminal and we leave in 20 minutes.’ And he’s like, ‘I’m not going anywhere. Leave me alone.’”

The teammate didn’t get on the flight back to California. The player who found him figured he wouldn’t be at training the next morning either, but when he pulled up to practice, there was the teammate, looking no worse for the wear.

“Turned out he was just completely wasted. Like, blacked out at 7 a.m.,” he says. “He was walking through the airport and said he saw a place to lie down and that was it. Couldn’t get back up. Said he slept in that same spot all day and into the evening and took the last flight home.”

15. Demolition derby… with geese

Pranks are a fixture of pro sports that transcend team, league, country and culture. And sometimes they get a little bit out of hand.

Former MLS defender Brian Dunseth remembers one such occasion. It happened in Bradenton, Fla., during Real Salt Lake’s training camp ahead of their first season, in the winter of 2005. One of the younger players told Dunseth that he wanted to play a prank on the team’s trainer, and Dunseth, now a broadcaster for RSL matches, pointed out some nearby geese.

“I go, ‘Well, why don’t you grab these protein bars, leave a trail of crumbs and lead the geese up into his room?’” says Dunseth. “And he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea.’ So he starts leading the geese with these protein bars into the trainer’s room. This is the trainer’s own personal room, the room he’s staying in.

“He’s got a flock of geese inside of the room. I mean, legit, a flock of geese. And they’ve been eating these protein bars. And he’s like, ‘What do I do now?’ And I go, ‘I don’t know, but if I were you, I’d probably just lock them in here. Listen, you don’t have to do it, but that’s what I would do if this was my prank.’ I’m thinking this kid’s not dumb enough to actually do this. But he does it!”

At that point, Dunseth and his teammate went to training, leaving the geese in the room. Two hours later, after practice ended, the birds were still there. By then, guilt had set in. The younger teammate sprinted to the room. He found an aviary hellscape.

“I started to feel really bad, because I know what it’s gonna be: It’s just demolition derby in there with a bunch of geese,” said Dunseth. “I sh*t you not, when we walked in, it was like the cave in Ace Ventura 2. It was like guano was f*cking everywhere. And he’s literally with a hand towel from the bathroom, trying to scrub it out of the carpet. And the trainer just walks in and just goes, ‘What the f*ck, man?’ It was pure panic diarrhea stuff. And the trainer is just like, ‘Oh, you’re cleaning all of this.’ And to his credit, he did a pretty good job. Took him like three hours, but he finished cleaning it all.”

16. A peaco*ck and a double-wide in Dallas

RSL isn’t the only team that has had a run-in with birds. During the early years of the league, Dallas Burn players trained at Greenhill School, a suburban K-12 private school that, for some reason, had a peaco*ck on the grounds.

“There was a f*cking peaco*ck, like a real peaco*ck, and you had to dodge the peaco*ck on the way to practice,” says one former player. “It wasn’t like a dick or anything like that, but that was part of your routine.”

In those days, Dallas operated out of a double-wide trailer parked on school grounds. The coaches, who had to time training so that it would end before recess began, had a small office in one corner, which they took care to keep locked when not present. But the players, who wanted to discover the starting lineup before the staff planned to tell them, found a way in.

The ceiling panels in the trailer were removable, so the players would take one out and hoist kit man Kevin Harter, known to the players as “K-Dog,” into the ceiling. K-Dog, who is not a big man, would scurry across the interior of the ceiling, remove a panel over the coaches’ office, drop down onto a desk and shout the starting lineup to the players on the other side of the locked door. Those who weren’t in the XI would have no compunction about hitting the town in the days before the game.

17. Sports science with Peter Nowak

For reasons both good and bad, Peter Nowak is a legend in MLS. The Pole was a dominant force as a player whose time as a coach in the league ended in scandal involving allegations of hazing and a wrongful termination lawsuit. But his tumultuous days as a manager were way off in the future in 1998, when he captained the Chicago Fire to the MLS Cup and U.S. Open Cup double in their expansion season.

Sports science wasn’t all that advanced in the late ’90s and this was especially true in MLS, where the budgets were very tight. Still, Nowak had a peculiar regimen. According to multiple players from the early Fire teams, he would go into the showers at halftime of most every game, turn on the water, sit on the ground, sometimes in full uniform, and light up a cigarette or two.

Then he’d go out and play the second half, often very well.

18. How MLS teams used to do analytics

In today’s MLS, with all manner of performance data available to coaches at the swipe of a finger, players can’t hide. If they’re not fit, their bosses will know. Back in the ’90s, that didn’t exist. Sometimes, players could cheat the system and fool their coaches.

Kansas City players nearly achieved this one preseason, when head coach Ron Newman assigned the players a timed two-mile beach run during training camp in Florida. Newman and his assistants were with the team at the starting line, then drove down the beach to the finish, where a staffer was stationed with a stopwatch. But the players, who had partied a little too hard the night before, had gotten to the timekeeper. Led by Mo Johnston, they convinced the staffer to start the clock a couple of minutes after Newman called to inform him that the run had begun.

It worked —a little too well. The man with the stopwatch waited too long to start the timer.

When the first Wizard crossed the finish line, the clock read 8:30. Newman was amazed. But he bought it. Hard.

“He’s like, ‘Lads, this is the fastest team ever. I can’t believe this. This is amazing!” says a Wizards support staffer who was on the beach that day. “So we played the Richmond Kickers the next day, and he changed our formation. He moved the left back, who finished first in the run, to forward. So we’re getting there, and we’re like, ‘Oh sh*t. What do we do?’ We go to play the Richmond Kickers and we get our asses kicked. Ron Newman pulls everyone together after and he’s like, ‘Lads, I don’t know what happened. Maybe we were too tired from the run. This might be my fault.’ And so I finally said, ‘I think there was a problem with the timer.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, that makes a lot of sense, because the left back couldn’t even move up there.’”

19. What happens in Vegas…

LA has always been a popular party destination when teams arrive to play the Galaxy, Chivas USA (RIP) or LAFC. But for those willing to go the extra mile, Las Vegas is only a short flight away.

In the early days of the league, immediately after playing the Galaxy on a Saturday, visiting players would head from the Rose Bowl directly to LAX. They would catch the quick flight to Vegas, where they would launch into a full-on bender. They would party all Saturday night and through the morning on Sunday before catching a plane back to their respective home cities in time to make training on Monday morning.

This being the early days of MLS, they had to do Vegas on a budget. Often, the players wouldn’t even get a hotel room. Meals were at the cheap buffets. Drinks were free in the casinos. The stakes… Well, the stakes were high.

“You’re gambling your rent money,” said a player who made the Vegas trip a few different times. “Some trips, you’re paying for a couple months. Some trips, you were gonna miss that rent in three weeks, so you better go home and coach some little kids.”

20. What if it was Spring Break… for two whole months?

The Miami Fusion had only a brief run in MLS, lasting just three years before they folded after the 2001 season. The team was a mess for most of that time. They were actually based in Fort Lauderdale, putting a group of young men in their 20s with lots of free time smack in the middle of spring break mecca.

“It was spring break from mid-February until April, like two whole months, and we would get super fit in preseason because you had to be able to just f*cking go,” said one former Fusion player. “The bars were open until 4, so like once or twice a week, half a dozen guys were showing up to training on less than two hours of sleep. That was just normal. Everyone did it. You’d stay out, maybe you’d go home with a girl, and you’d train, sweat off like 10 pounds because it’s 100 degrees every day and you’d go home and go to bed, sleep until 6 or 7 p.m. and then do it again.”

The team’s unofficial meal plan didn’t exactly help matters. The club was sponsored by Hooters, which offered every player a discount on meals. MLS wages were low, and the players ended up eating wings and downing beers a few times a week. Those beers would lead to more beers, which would generally lead to the strip club, several of which were within walking distance of the area where many players lived.

“After spring break ended, the routine changed,” said the player. “You’d go to Hooters for lunch and then you’d drive home and walk to the strip club. It just wasn’t the real world. That’s what you did, because the strip club knew you. That was MLS royalty; you could get into a strip club and they wouldn’t charge you a cover. That was our perk. And we wouldn’t even do anything, we would just sit there and hang out. There wasn’t champagne rooms. We didn’t have that money. We just sat there and hung out.”

21. Why stop at the foot?

After the Revolution’s 2007 U.S. Open Cup final victory over FC Dallas, the team hit the town to celebrate. Players, coaches and staffers alike dispersed from their beer-soaked locker room and headed to a series of strip clubs, with the evening culminating at a particularly questionable establishment one former Revs staffer now calls “a really dank, seedy, awful place.”

An unnamed player threw his credit card down upon arrival, and as the night wore on, the tab went up. By the time the team left in the wee hours of the morning, the bill (which included the team’s drinks and other, unspecified entertainment) had reached $13,000 — about half the league’s minimum salary at the time.

The festivities next moved to the team hotel, where Revs striker Taylor Twellman manned a piano in the hotel’s lobby. Players were everywhere, including on top of the piano itself. At one point, someone spotted an open supply closet down the hall. The hotel staff were in the process of putting up Halloween decorations and had left it open.

This is all to say that several members of the Revolution walked into the closet and emerged with what one staffer now describes as a “$1,000, five-foot-tall easter bunny.” They stole the bunny, which accompanied the Revs on their subsequent trip to Chicago a few days later, where it was issued a training top and placed on the sideline during a training session ahead of the match.

The bunny was given its own locker at Toyota Park on game night, a match the Revs went on to lose. Days later, the club gave its imperfect good-luck charm its own locker at Gillette Stadium, where it was present for another loss. By then, the superstition grew dark, and the players turned on the bunny, destroying it ahead of the Revolution’s season finale against Toronto FC, one which ended in a draw.

22. You’ve got the wrong man

Ahead of the 2011 season, Revolution head coach Steve Nicol and GM Mike Burns spent weeks working with a network of scouts in Africa to locate and sign a player who could help the Revs in the upcoming season.

When the player arrived, however, Nicol couldn’t believe his eyes. This wasn’t the player he had scouted, but someone else entirely: an 18-year-old Nigerian midfielder named Michael Augustine. Hoping to avoid the ridicule that would have accompanied publicly admitting their error, the Revs took a quick look at Augustine and inked him to a meager deal.

If you have never heard of Augustine, it’s probably because he never played in a single league match. His one appearance for the Revs came in a U.S. Open Cup game. And there’s a reason for that, aside from the whole mistaken identity thing.

Later that summer, Augustine was accused by a teammate of stealing a watch out of his locker. Augustine denied it up and down, which satisfied the team. That is, until the 18-year-old posted a photo to Facebook of himself wearing the watch. The club terminated his contract in June, and Augustine never played professionally again.

23. A drug test? For me? Noooope.

MLS, at least the old MLS, had more than its fair share of stoners. The league tests for marijuana, but there are ways around that, and there are stories about some of MLS’s more prolific weed-smokers warning each other in advance about impending drug tests, even today.

That’s the methodical approach. Sometimes, spontaneity is the name of the game.

One former Crew player remembers a time when he arrived early to training only to find out that the players would be tested after practice. A few of his teammates who regularly smoked hadn’t yet shown up, so he made his way out to the parking lot to head them off. Three of them arrived in the same SUV. All three had sunglasses on. All three looked a little lit up.

The player told his teammates about the test. The driver, who hadn’t even turned off the car, immediately let out a loud “Nooooope,” spun the car around, steered over a concrete parking barrier and hightailed it to the nearest GNC. Whatever they bought there was apparently enough to get past the test, as they never did hear about the results.

24. One of those nights

Midway through the 2014 season, Real Salt Lake held the rarest of events: A ticketed reserve game. That season, MLS reserve teams played several “Reserve League” matches against USL sides, with the games counting in the USL standings. This night saw RSL host the Pittsburgh Riverhounds at Rio Tinto Stadium.

One team was up for it. The other was not. Salt Lake got thrashed 5-2 by Pittsburgh, going down a man thanks to a straight red in the fourth minute and conceding three penalties over the course of the game.

Afterward, according to one former RSLer, Salt Lake GM Garth Lagerwey came into the locker room and reamed out the players. In the best of circ*mstances, it would’ve left the young, unproven players feeling a bit awkward. This was not the best of circ*mstances.

Some of the players had bought tickets to go to a Tim McGraw concert immediately after the game. They had booked a party bus to pick them up from the player and staff parking lot and take them directly to the venue. One problem: Lagerwey also used that lot. If he saw the players getting into a party bus immediately after excoriating them — well, that couldn’t happen. So, one of the players took matters into his own hands. He took off and tracked down the bus before Lagerwey spotted it, asking the driver to wait in a different lot on the opposite side of the stadium.

The ploy worked, and the players were able to down a couple of beers on their way to the concert. Country music is good for drowning sorrows, right?

25. Hole in one

In 2009, MLS was still in the midst of Beckham-mania. He made the Galaxy a traveling circus. Everywhere they went, the cameras followed.

In the middle of it all was Bruce Arena, the Galaxy’s notoriously cantankerous head coach. The day before a match at Kansas City’s CommunityAmerica Ballpark, he decided to bar cameras from training.

“That stadium,” says USMNT head coach Gregg Berhalter, Beckham’s Galaxy teammate at the time, “has a hole in the (batter’s eye). And it’s set back pretty far — maybe 30 to 40 yards from the sideline.”

Alan Gordon, who was not known for his accuracy, thought he’d take a shot at hitting a ball through the hole.

“He tried, and he didn’t even come close,” recalls Berhalter. Gordon, he recounts, failed to even put a ball into the bleachers adjacent to the opening. “He totally underestimated how far of a shot it was — it was 30 yards away but then it’s high up, so you probably have to hit it 50 yards.”

David Beckham spotted Gordon hopelessly trying to find the target and stepped up next to him.

“David puts the ball down,” Berhalter continues, “kicks the ball, it’s on a dead straight line going for the hole, at the last minute it goes up and drops right through the hole. Didn’t touch anything. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

Everyone in attendance was shocked, even Arena, who, according to one staffer present, looked around in amazement before offering up the following question:

“Where are the f*ckin’ cameras?”

(Photo illustration: The Athletic/Getty Images, Unsplash)