Sports Reference Blog

Major League Soccer's first season was in 1996, and since then the league has expanded to 24 teams playing in this 2019 season, and has the Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC preparing to face off in the MLS Cup on November 10. (Editor's note: congratulations to the Sounders on their 3-1 victory and the 2019 MLS title!) With that, FBref is happy to announce that we now have match reports and player match logs available for the league's entire history.

The first MLS Cup was held on October 20, 1996, where DC United defeated LA Galaxy 3-2 in extra time. Our reports include substitutions, cards issued, time played, goals, assists and missed penalty kicks.

With the addition of match reports comes having match logs for all players in MLS history. Carlos Ruiz had an amazing debut MLS season in 2002 for the LA Galaxy, leading the league with 24 regular season goals. Ruiz's 2002 match log shows you quickly that he scored in each of his first 4 games of the season. We also have his postseason logs, which included 3 multi-goal games en route to Los Angeles' MLS Cup victory over New England that season.

We want to give a big thanks to SportDirect, Howard Hamilton and Jay Hutchinson for their work and research done for this particular project. FBref will continue to expand its historical offerings for the various leagues we currently cover. You can keep up with the latest additions of competitions coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 8th, 2019 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Announcement, Data, FBref, Features, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.