FOXBORO — The past and present will collide at Gillette Stadium on Saturday night, as the New England Revolution honors three decades of club history with an alumni event featuring some of its all-time greatest players — alongside a regular season clash with longtime rivals DC United.
Among the honorees are the club’s all-time leading scorer and national soccer commentator Taylor Twellman; Matt Reis, who owns most of the Revolution’s goalkeeper records; Joe-Max Moore, a veteran of three FIFA World Cups with the U.S. national team as well as the Revolution’s first true scoring threat; longtime left back and current assistant sporting director Chris Tierney; former captain Joe Franchino; inaugural team member, two-time FIFA World Cup competitor, and current Fox Sports soccer analyst Alexi Lalas; and U.S. national team veteran, club ambassador, and national soccer commentator Charlie Davies.
In all, the club will honor at least 20 former players in-person with a ticketed pre-game event and a ceremony at halftime of the DC United match.
“I think it’s important for the club — more so to show the different generations of players who have been here,” Twellman, who scored 101 regular season goals for the Revolution from 2002-10, told the Boston Herald. “And there’s another part to this: Most of my generation isn’t going to be there. I think that’s a tribute to the kind of professionals they are and the roles they today have: assistant coaches, head coaches, GMs, people in the media. They’re all over the league.”
Indeed, several notable names are missing from the list of attendees. That said, many of these absences are excused.
A contingent of former players are today coaches across Major League Soccer: Steve Ralston, the former club captain, U.S. national team midfielder, and MLS “iron man” who retains the second-most assists in league history (135), is today an assistant coach with the San Jose Earthquakes, which hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps Saturday; Shalrie Joseph, another of the team’s longtime captains who is widely considered among the best central midfielders in league history, is also an assistant on San Jose’s staff, as is Aidan Brown, New England’s goalkeeper in the 2002 MLS Cup final.
Pat Noonan, Twellman’s longtime strike partner, is today head coach of FC Cincinnati, which hosts Charlotte on Sunday; former midfielder Jeff Larentowicz also works alongside Noonan, as Director of Cincinnati’s Player Pathway; Lee Nguyen, the team MVP in 2014, serves as an assistant coach with NWSL’s Seattle Reign FC, which visits the Portland Thorns Sunday.
Other former Revolution standouts are on to careers in executive leadership and the media. Clint Dempsey, who the Revolution drafted as a rookie and is tied for the most goals in U.S. national team history (57), is currently an analyst for CBS Sports. Former right back and Revolution head coach Jay Heaps is the president and CEO of Birmingham Legion FC in the USL Championship. Michael Parkhurst, widely regarded as the best defender in club history, is today a co-owner of Rhode Island FC.
To go through this catalog of names is a lot like sitting through the end credits of the movie “Miracle,” which lists, by name, the members of the 1980 Olympic Gold Medal U.S. hockey team and their illustrious career stops in their post-playing days.
The club is highly decorated, even if lifting the MLS Cup eluded different eras of the team. Some of the greatest players in American soccer history wore a Revolution jersey, and many continue to shape the sport.
“The first team I had a chance to follow was the Revolution,” Davies said. “We didn’t have cable growing up and didn’t have access to a lot of channels… I watched the Revs before I ever saw Arsenal or Real Madrid. Into the mid-2000s, when you think about guys like Reis, Heaps, Ralston, Twellman, Joseph, Dempsey, and Parkhurst — that was a squad… to be counted among some of those greats today, it’s pretty special.”
Much of the credit for assembling a majority of New England’s best players belongs to former head coach Steve Nicol and his assistant, Paul Mariner. Not only were the duo a strong one-two punch tactically — Nicol with his toughness as a former Liverpool defender and Mariner with his flair as a former England striker who scored in the 1982 FIFA World Cup — but they also had a knack for identifying future stars without a scouting department, youth academy, or much roster flexibility in place.
Utilizing the college draft and shoestring budgets, the duo built the foundations of championship caliber teams. For their efforts, New England produced titles in the 2007 U.S. Open Cup and the 2008 Superliga, a today-defunct tournament featuring a handful of American and Mexican teams.
Despite the lack of trophies, the Nicol-Mariner era teams that reached the MLS Cup finals in 2002 and from 2005-07 are among the best in league history.
“(The Revolution) had about 1,200% less money to work with, so yeah, maybe there were fewer teams, but Stevie saw talent right away,” Twellman said. “You don’t even need to name names — someone’s always going to be left out. But if you were a great player, you’d find a way in any era.”
The current squad has major work to do to reverse its record this season. Saturday night won’t just be a showcase of the Revolution’s all-time greats — it will also feature a major protest by the Rebellion, one of the club’s main supporters groups. It has announced plans to sit in silence, wearing all black, behind the south-facing net for the first 20 minutes against DC United in objection to the team’s recent form and the front office. The Revolution (6-11-7, 25 points) are looking to snap a nine-game winless run, which includes a seven-game home win drought at Gillette Stadium.
The club has experienced fan ire and result ruts in the past. But adversity also carried former teams to greatness. In the past, the team found ways to sustain hot streaks and bounce back after crushing defeats. Despite losing four MLS Cup finals in six years, the players rose up as contenders each time in the following year, a phoenix from the ashes in MLS’s earliest days.
Those experiences continue to shape former players, most of whom remain in touch.
“Talking with your old teammates, it’s always special,” said Reis, who is today on the coaching staff of MLS Next Pro’s Tacoma Defiance. “When you all get back together like this, it really transports you back in time, to when the Revs were a really good soccer team playing in championships. We just didn’t win that one big game. A lot of people couldn’t make it because of their current commitments, and I think that says a lot about the group — how many have gone on to do big things in coaching, in soccer, and in life.”
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