Joining Major League Soccer as an expansion team has become a lucrative business opportunity, but the league’s 19th franchise, the Montreal Impact, has found that building a roster from scratch remains a perilous and uncertain process.
Of the four teams that have been added to the league in the last three years, none have made a bigger splash on and off the field than Seattle, which tapped into an astounding fan base when the Sounders joined the league in 2009 and pack more than 38,000 fans per game into CenturyLink Field.
Passionate Northwest support followed in both Portland and Vancouver last season. The Union have also been a welcome part of the Philadelphia sports scene the last two years, especially with a brand new PPL Park, which will host this year’s MLS All-Star Game in July.
| up next |
| Impact at D.C. United |
| When » Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. |
| Where » RFK Stadium |
| TV » CSN+ |
But long are the days since Chicago captured the MLS Cup in its inaugural 1998 season. Seattle and Philadelphia both reached the playoffs but didn’t advance. Vancouver and Portland each missed the 2011 postseason.
After winning seven regular-season titles and three championships in previous incarnations in the APSL, A-League and USL First Division, the Impact (1-5-1, 4 points) are off to a slow start in MLS ahead of their first visit to RFK Stadium. D.C. United (2-2-2, 8 points), unbeaten in four straight games, is once again in search of its first two-game win streak since 2009.
“Putting together a full season is extremely difficult for guys that have never played together before, a coach that has never really worked with any of those players before, doesn’t know how to get the most out of them right off the bat,” United defender Robbie Russell said.
Impact coach Jesse Marsch didn’t help himself when he used the first pick of the expansion draft — a mechanism meant to give new teams a chance to pick from current teams’ rosters — on Houston forward Brian Ching, who didn’t want to leave the Dynamo. Montreal had hoped to leverage Ching into obtaining Canadian defender Andrew Hainault. Instead, Ching was eventually traded back to Houston for almost nothing, a conditional 2013 draft pick.
It hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm in Quebec, where a record crowd of 58,912 at Olympic Stadium saw the Impact’s first game in March. They’ll move to 20,000-seat Stade Saputo this summer.
“First of all, I think for Canada soccer, it’s great to have another team in MLS,” said United forward and Canadian Dwayne De Rosario. “Secondly, Montreal and Quebec is a huge soccer community. To see the impact that it’s had — they’ve had a great run in the A-League, great success as an organization, and for them to have an opportunity to play in MLS, it’s a testament to their success.”
