A Digital Survivor from the Birth of MLS
The complete issue produced around the first Major League Soccer game has not yet been recovered in a clean flipbook format. However, one of its major stories—the Eric Wynalda article—still survives online through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
That surviving article preserves more than a single feature. It shows SoccerMagic.com publishing original soccer coverage during the early years of the web and at the very beginning of Major League Soccer.
Peter Bridgwater called Soccer Magic the “official unofficial magazine of the Clash,” and approximately 15,000 copies were distributed at the inaugural MLS match. Together, the surviving article and the remaining printed material preserve Soccer Magic’s place inside one of the defining moments in American soccer history.
This link opens the preserved Wayback Machine capture of the original SoccerMagic.com page.
From Print to the Early Internet
This article is more than an old story preserved online. It marks the period when we registered SoccerMagic.com and began moving Soccer Magic from print onto the early Internet.
The website was simple by today’s standards, but it gave us a new place to publish original articles, report on local soccer, and connect directly with readers. When the original pages later changed or disappeared, the Internet Archive preserved part of that early work.
That beginning led to something much larger. Rivals.com recruited us, along with Dr. Chuck in Columbus, to help build a network of soccer websites representing MLS cities. SoccerMagic.com became Quake Magic, giving the San Jose Earthquakes their own place within the network.
Earthquakes players joined fans in our Monday-night chat room, supporters exchanged ideas on the bulletin board, and local soccer coverage began moving faster than print had ever allowed. Rivals.com even supplied a new laptop and a Sony digital camera—equipment that made reporting from the field quicker and eliminated much of the cost of traditional film photography.
What began as a basic SoccerMagic.com website became our first step into online soccer publishing, fan interaction, and the emerging digital media world.