I have a small ask today: Reach out to someone you share the Timbers with.
Send them a photo, a quick written note, or a video they’ll instantly recognize of a time the team brought the two of you together into one moment that allowed you to feel the same feeling at the same time.
Just do that one thing, and you’ll be honoring the ethos of our club.
I say that because today is the Portland Timbers 50th birthday, and I can’t think of any better way to celebrate than to share the stories that have brought us together around the team, around each other. After all, it’s our stories, our culture—our connection to each other—that we’ve not only earned over the last half century, but that will keep us here well into and beyond the next.
Even if it’s only for a few seconds, find a little way to connect to each other today, through the shared love of our club. To say, Happy 50th Birthday, Portland Timbers.
January is not just the birth month of the club, but also the first manager to lead us onto the pitch at Civic Stadium (Vic Crowe, January 31) and the one who will do so in our 50th Anniversary Season at Providence Park (Phil Neville, January 21) .
Vic Crowe (who managed the Timbers at both ends of our NASL existence, 1975-76; 1980-82) came here to build the game, to connect the new team to the community. And to win soccer games. He arrived just 6 weeks before the team’s first match, to a club with no players signed. When he eventually got a roster, they found quick success. And they shared it with those who supported them on that journey. Crowe once had the players leave a 1975 training session at Civic Stadium to run around the stadium and applaud the fans lined up to buy playoff tickets. By the end of the season, he helped give Portland the game, each other through it, and, of course, “Absolute Pandemonium.”
Our current gaffer gets it, too. Take his pre-match speech to the team in the last regular-season match of our 49th year, away up north:
“Courage to play. Courage to fight. Courage to be disciplined. Courage to stick to the plot,” he told the team they’d need to compete on the road in the match that would decide the 2024 Cascadia Cup.
“Courage to show belief in each other,” he continued—advice that applies to us all. “We win tonight, we build momentum. We have belief.” And then he hit exactly on what that badge means and has meant since 1975:
“And we go home with the Cascadia Cup. That’s the most important thing. We’re playing for the fans in the corner [of Lumen Field]—who have come, who have paid, who have sacrificed, who have fought all week to come and support the Portland Timbers. That’s who we play for.”
Look, we nearly weren’t here at all. At the end of the 1974 NASL season, when the league was looking to expand, Oregon Soccer, Inc. saw deadline after deadline to secure franchise confirmation pass. They even missed the 1975 NASL draft.
The league expanded by 5 franchises for the 1975 season, and the other 4 (Chicago Sting, San Antonio Thunder, Tampa Bay Rowdies, and Hartford Bicentennials) followed a somewhat conventional timeline for preparing an expansion entry, with Portland’s potential omission leaving the league lopsided at 19 teams across 4 divisions.
For a little added context, this was our only shot with the growing, about-to-get-ridiculous NASL. Pelé signed with Cosmos in 1975, and in the following years the league’s new-franchise fee would go up massively. The NASL also stated they would only consider expansion in major television markets moving forward. As each day passed without an announcement, our already-small window for what we have now closed a little more.
[To learn more about this and our first year as a franchise, please read Michael Orr’s The 1975 Portland Timbers: The Birth of Soccer City, USA.]
And then it happened:
On January 23, 1975, from the league offices in New York City, NASL Commissioner Phil Woosnam announced Portland as the 20th league franchise.
The next day, Don Paul and some others from Oregon Soccer, Inc. addressed the gathered press at the Multnomah Athletic Club to share the good news. He announced “the new game in town,” stressed the team’s desire to involve the community, and did us a solid by dreaming big: “Hopefully, we are here forever,” he said.
We’re 50 today, and that’s no small thing for a soccer team in North America. I’m looking forward to the coming season, to celebrate this. To celebrate us. I love that who we are today is who we’ve been from Day 1—and that we take that seriously.
We have to.
We’re all temporary, and therefore only temporary caretakers of the club and the badge. Yet when we share our stories and keep connecting with each other through this team, through how it’s brought us together, we continue the culture of Soccer City, USA.
And we will be here forever.
Happy 50th Birthday, Portland Timbers.
#RCTID