MLS Cup continues to grow

In this town, the soccer boss is a recognizable face. People in Seattle love their Sounders FC and know Major League Soccer, including league commissioner Don Garber.

Garber and company are in town for the MLS Cup final, to be played Sunday at Qwest Field, featuring Real Salt Lake and the Los Angeles Galaxy. Everywhere the commish and his staff turn, there are signs that point to Seattle's excitement about having a successful team and having the championship of the league played here. Rain, or ... rain.

That wasn't always the case in still-young MLS. After 13 previous championship matches played in both mammoth stadiums and smaller soccer-specific venues around the country, the MLS Cup's profile has risen as the sport has gained more in relevance and fan support among the American sports audience.

"That leads up to a championship game that has a bit more national awareness and recognition than it ever has in the past," Garber said Thursday. "The fact that you can go into a host site that isn't in the home of any of the two participating teams and have 40,000 fans come, probably sitting in the rain, and experience a celebration of our two best teams, I think that's a statement about where soccer has come."

Jamie Clary can speak firsthand about how much the game has grown and how bigger of a deal the final is today than in 1996, when the first one took place at old Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts. Bigger every year, even though more than 57,000 fans showed up in the rain at RFK Stadium for the 1997 final that involved hometown D.C. United.

Clary, a 41-year-old project manager for a land-use consulting company who writes "good bathroom reading" books about soccer, has been to every MLS Cup, and he left his native Nashville, Tenn., on Thursday for the Pacific Northwest. He'll be in the 200 level at Qwest on Sunday.

"In 1996 you had a couple of mentions of the game, the day of the game and the day after," he said. "And here we are 14 years later a week before MLS Cup, and it's big-time in the national news."

Clary also credited the groundswell of hype for the game to the fact that it is in Seattle, where MLS was a huge success in 2009, and that Galaxy megastar David Beckham is playing.

"There's just more people that pay attention now," said Clary, who isn't a fan of any single MLS club but a huge supporter of the U.S. men's national team. "A lot of people don't understand where soccer was 15 years ago. This is the celebration that says, 'It made it.' "

Galaxy coach Bruce Arena guided those D.C. United teams in the early years of MLS, when they were often in the final. He said that back then, the league had the momentum of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. Now, the sport is much more accepted.

"I cannot expect after 14 years in other [professional sports] leagues that they came close to the progress that we've had," Arena said. "The growth has been tremendous."

José Miguel Romero: 206-464-2409 or jromero@seattletimes.com