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Acrimony F.C.: M.L.S. Teams and Fan Groups Navigate a Rocky Marriage

Members of the Viking Army, a longtime Red Bulls supporters group, cheering their team during a victory on Thursday night. In many of the league’s markets, the oldest such groups — some of whom predate the league’s 1996 debut — see themselves as the true keepers of the institutional memories of their teams.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

For more than two decades, Major League Soccer and its most ardent fans have had a unique, if sometimes uneasy, relationship.

Using quick-cut video montages filled with colored smoke, swirling flags and scarves held aloft, M.L.S. has long trumpeted its passionate supporter culture as evidence of its health and long-term viability — proof that the match-day spectacle of M.L.S., if not the standard of play, now rivals some of the most prominent leagues in the world.

In this arrangement, the fans are cast as de facto evangelists for the league, supporters in every sense of the word. But that lens conveniently obscures the fact that the most independent among them routinely — and publicly, and loudly — disagree with any heavy-handed policing and ham-handed ownership decisions that trouble them as the league’s self-perceived conscience.

But still the fans turn up. No story of a new M.L.S. franchise is complete without a breathless account of season tickets sold and stories of paradigm-shifting instant fan bases. No recent season has ended without a news release boasting of a record for attendance, with crowds of more than 50,000 in Seattle soon overtaken by attendances of 70,000-plus in Atlanta.

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Atlanta United’s record attendances were a major story line in the team’s inaugural season in 2017. Twice, the team drew more than 70,000 fans to Mercedes-Benz Stadium.Credit...Adam Hagy/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

The fans generally love the attention. The league loves the validation.

But as M.L.S. kicks off its 23rd season this weekend, emerging from a troubling off-season that exposed deep divides within American soccer, the relationship between some teams and their supporters groups has never been more charged.

In Columbus, Ohio, home to one of the league’s original franchises, fans are in open conflict with their club’s owner, who is threatening to move the team to Texas. In Washington, D.C. United’s recent announcement that it was entering into a “strategic partnership” with one of its supporters groups has infuriated a different one, Barra Brava, which issued a blistering open letter accusing the team of squeezing out their Latin-American-inflected voices in favor of “suburban homogeneity.”

And in New Jersey, the Red Bulls in January took the extraordinary step of revoking official recognition of one of their oldest supporters groups, the Garden State Ultras. The Red Bulls said the decision — the G.S.U. claimed it was a first for the league — followed repeated disciplinary infractions, culminating in an episode on the last day of the 2017 season in which the team said a G.S.U. member dropped a flare into the family section of a rival team’s stadium.

The G.S.U. disputed the team’s account, and noted acidly in a statement on Facebook that, “We, along with billions of other soccer fans, are impassioned in both our love for our team and dislike of our opponents, and we disagree with attempts to mold a passive fan base that sits quietly, eating and drinking its overpriced concessions.”

Every M.L.S. team has at least one official supporters group. Most have several. Often, the groups are run by an elected committee, and they enjoy exclusive privileges: block seating behind the goals; allotments of tickets for away matches; and the right to bring nominally banned items like flags, musical instruments and giant banners into stadiums.

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The Red Bulls’ three main supporters groups have long occupied the three sections behind one goal known as the South Ward. But one section was noticeably thinned on Thursday, the first match since the fan group that normally sits there, the Garden State Ultras, was banished by the team.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

In a few of the league’s newest arenas, even the architecture itself — steep banks of seats, safe-standing areas, roofs pitched to amplify chants — has the hard-core fan experience in mind, often in consultation with supporter groups.

Yet the relationships between teams and their supporters have always had a certain tension built into them. The supporters groups of the original M.L.S. teams in particular — a group that includes Columbus, D.C. United and the Red Bulls team originally known as the MetroStars — are proud of their independent histories.

As the league plants its flag in new markets — a 23rd franchise, Los Angeles F.C., will join M.L.S. this season, and expansion teams in Nashville and Miami were recently approved — many of the oldest groups see themselves as the true keepers of the institutional memories of their teams, and even of the league itself.

The Columbus story in particular highlighted that sense of ownership. When it was revealed on the eve of last season’s playoffs that the team’s owner, Anthony Precourt, was working behind the scenes — with the league’s aid, if not blessing — to move the club to Austin, Tex., Crew fans mutinied. A grass-roots opposition was formed to lobby city and state leaders to keep the team in Ohio, and a hashtag campaign — #SaveTheCrew — quickly spread from social media to banners in other M.L.S. cities, and even in other sports.

The message to Precourt and the league was clear: Columbus fans would not abandon the decades of cultural capital they had expended without a fight.

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Fans of the Columbus Crew, one of M.L.S.’s original franchises, are in a loud, public fight with their team’s ownership, which is threatening to move the team to Austin, Tex.Credit...Steve Russell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

“It’s the basis of my longest standing friendships in this country,” Graham Randall, an English expatriate member of the Crew Union supporters group, said of his relationship with the team. “Now I see it through the eyes of my 11-year-old son. The news that the team might not be here at some point made me realize I would lose a huge thread in my life in the last 13 years.”

Since the missteps of the league’s early days, when M.L.S. acquired a reputation for gimmickry that it struggled to shake, the emergence of a genuine independent supporters culture has been viewed as a necessary step toward credibility, and it remains vital to the league’s vision of itself. But managing the dance between “organic” support and a strong league office can be delicate.

“The supporters groups are really smart and creative — I mean, you see the work that goes into the giant tifo displays alone — and they have smart leaders who communicate really well with the clubs and basically police themselves,” said Mark Abbott, the league’s deputy commissioner. “We don’t have to do much, though we do set down guidelines for acceptable behavior.”

Yet that desire for authenticity and passion often yields only symbolic displays of these qualities. It is one thing for fans to emulate a banner style imported from Italy, or the capo-led nonstop singing of South America, or the pop-parody chants of English soccer. But any organized fan groups that might actually feel and act on any of the enmity toward their rivals swiftly comes up against the realities of how the American sporting experience is managed and policed.

It also can make for absurdities on both sides, with teams who cultivate an “ultras” culture punishing anyone who runs afoul of an explicit code of conduct published on the league’s website. (“The use of streamers and confetti as an expression of fan enthusiasm is not prohibited,” one section of the code reads, “but will be kept under review.”)

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Members of officially recognized M.L.S. supporters groups are granted privileges not available to other fans, like the right to bring in everything from banners and flags to musical instruments.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

And it doesn’t help that even notionally unified fan sections can end up Balkanized. The Garden State Ultras, for example, were one of three main Red Bulls supporters groups housed in what is known as the South Ward at the team’s stadium, Red Bull Arena. Yet collective sympathy for the G.S.U.’s loss of its official status was tempered by the differing flavors of support that make the adjacent Empire Supporters Club and Viking Army as much rivals for attention as natural allies.

Still, where there is a point of agreement among league, teams and fans, it is that there is little desire for fan groups to emulate the worst types of hooliganism seen in other parts of the world. If anything, today’s M.L.S. fan groups emphasize a positivity that would look gauche to some of the groups they notionally emulate: charity fund-raisers, clothing drives and events supporting social issues from anti-racism initiatives to gay rights.

Even studiedly provocative groups like Philadelphia’s long-suffering Sons of Ben, known for their occasional contempt for their team’s management but also for a “No one likes us, we don’t care” chant borrowed from the infamously hostile supporters of the London club Millwall, regularly show a softer side. The group maintains a philanthropy tab on its website that charts, among other initiatives, money and goods raised in an annual community food drive for the residents of Chester, Pa., which is home to the Union’s stadium.

Corey Furlan, one of the Sons of Ben founders, said of the apparent paradox: “Look, we’re Philadelphia sports fans — loud, obnoxious, whatever — but the type of people who care deeply about our team also give their energy, care and passion in other aspects of their life. We didn’t just want to drop into Chester for 17 home games a year. We wanted to put down roots.

“I mean, players and coaches come and go, but we’re the people who are going to be here forever.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SP, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: M.L.S. Faces Its Fiercest Critics: Its Biggest Fans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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