As Sporting KC prepares to play its 20th anniversary game Wednesday, fans have Lamar Hunt to thank for saving Major League Soccer from bankruptcy

Major League Soccer died in 2001. Only five years after the latest in a string of unsuccessful North American soccer leagues started play, its investors wanted out.

That’s how Dan Hunt, president of MLS club FC Dallas explained the situation in a podcast on Soccer Today posted Monday. According to Hunt, the league held a conference call among investors in November 2001, and their decision was clear: After five years of losing money, MLS would fold. All that was left to do was call the bankruptcy attorneys.

One man who wasn’t having it was Lamar Hunt. Hunt, who brought the National Football League to Kansas City and founded the American Football League and the North American Soccer League, worked the phones with the various league investors to try and renew their interest in the top-flight American soccer league. (In MLS, there aren’t really owners of teams, but rather investors who represent various clubs because of the way the league is structured.)

Hunt’s efforts somehow worked. In some way, he convinced the small pool of investors who had lost money since MLS’s inception in 1996 to keep at it. 

The following year, the United States men’s soccer team had its best showing in the World Cup since 1950, advancing to the quarterfinals before losing to Germany by one goal in a hotly contested match in South Korea. The U.S. performance was, in some ways, a validation of MLS’s progress from a scrappy league with gimmicky rules to a league that could develop real talent. Several key players on that 2002 squad (Landon Donovan, Clint Mathis, Cobi Jones, Pablo Mastroeni, etc.) were mainstays for their MLS clubs.

Since Hunt’s rescue of MLS, the league has grown in stature. One by one, most MLS teams built their own soccer-specific stadiums so they could abandon the cavernous, mostly empty NFL stadiums that contributed to the league’s early image as a two-bit sideshow. European players took notice and enlisted with the MLS, starting with English star David Beckham. While some of these European and South American signings are panned as over-the-hill players looking for an easy pre-retirement paycheck, it has helped the league’s prominence. And slowly, MLS teams are eschewing the practice of throwing money at aging stars and instead attracting top-flight players who are in the prime of their careers, such as Toronto FC’s Sebastian Giovinco. In Kansas City, money helped keep stars Matt Besler and Graham Zusi from taking up ranks with the European squads who were interested in both players.

Lamar Hunt died in 2006 before he could see the Kansas City Wizards, one of the three founding MLS teams that he backed financially, survive its own fire escape. Hunt sold the Wizards in 2006 to OnGoal LLC, an entity affiliated with Cerner Corp. executives. Two years later, the Wizards could no longer play in Arrowhead Stadium and were more or less homeless. The team toiled in the outfield of CommunityAmerica Ballpark to a handful of devoted fans before the team could round up enough cash (mostly taxpayer cash) to build their new stadium in western Wyandotte County to coincide with the team’s rebranding to Sporting Kansas City.

Since the opening of what’s now Children’s Mercy Park, Sporting KC has become one of the premier MLS clubs. The team plays regularly to sell-out crowds, and it has qualified for the MLS playoffs each year since 2011. It took home the franchise’s second MLS championship trophy in 2013, and has also collected two U.S. Open Cup trophies along the way (2012 and 2015). It’s not clear to what extent Sporting KC, or other MLS clubs, are profitable enterprises today. (This article in Howler quotes Cerner’s Cliff Illig telling a reporter that Sporting KC is “just barely” making money.) But it clear that MLS, unlike 15 years ago, is around to stay.

Sporting KC’s Wednesday evening match will be its 20th anniversary celebration of its first season in existence. Sporting KC will take on the Colorado Rapids, which represents the same pairing for the Kansas City Wizards’ (then known as the Wiz) first ever match in Arrowhead Stadium on April 13, 1996. The Wizards won 3-0 with the help of two goals from Digital Takawira, one of the early fan favorites in Kansas City (you can watch the whole game below).

Speaking of Digital, he will be on hand for Wednesday’s match. Also making a long-awaited appearance at Children’s Sporting Park will be the return of the Wizards’ famous rainbow colored jerseys, which players will wear during warmups. During the game, SKC will play in its all-white jerseys festooned with rainbow-colored numbers as an homage to those Wizards days.

For longtime local soccer fans, it will be nice to see the club pay respect to its origins. The 2011 transformation to Sporting KC was a smart, savvy rebrand aimed at regaining a foothold in the local sports market. But since then, most traces of the Wizards have disappeared from its stadium and promotional materials. I once watched Sporting Club CEO Robb Heineman implore a devoted fan in the Supporters Section to replace his rainbow-colored jersey with a new SKC version. Seeing those rainbow kits on the players Wednesday will be a nice touch, not just for the local fans, but for anyone who enjoys the league that had perished and again come to life.