Ian Hennessy: Meet Major League Soccer's Cork pioneer who played for MetroStars in 1996

"A totally different era in American soccer. It's starting tonight and the MLS is going to prove just how dramatic a difference it's going to be."

That's how ESPN sideline reporter Bill McDermott set the scene at Spartan Stadium, San Jose with the fading sun illuminating the stands behind him.

The sun might have been fading but the rays were brightening when it came to the bigger picture.

San Jose Clash were welcoming DC United to their home patch as American soccer's re-birth certificate was officially printed out on that April 1996 evening.

Two years on from USA 94 and 10 years and 11 months after the old North American Soccer League had folded, Major League Soccer offered a chance to revive the world's most popular sport on a vast landmass in which it had remained stubbornly peripheral. 

While soccer remains behind the NFL and NBA, as MLS enters its 25th year of existence, the league has grown exponentially and has turned a landscape of 'Big Four' sports into a 'Big Five'.

The 2020 season, which kicks off on Saturday, will feature 26 teams following the entry of Inter Miami CF and Nashville SC. And by the time the 2022 season kicks off, four more franchises will have joined the fray to leave 30 teams in existence across a range of major markets from coast to coast as well as in Canada.

The MLS' decision-makers have not ruled out expanding even further by adding more galaxies to their cosmos – although the eponymous New York Cosmos have been left out in the cold despite that re-born club's potential marketability due to its historic status.

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Either way, it's a far cry from the 10-team league that began life in 1996 – a year one Cork man remembers all too well.

That inaugural MLS season saw two Irish men grace the playing fields of US top-tier soccer.

One was former St Patrick's Athletic, Bohemians and Longford Town player Paul Keegan, who lined out with a New England Revolution side coached by former Ireland striker Frank Stapleton.

The other still lives Stateside to this day. As MLS turns 25, Cork native and long-time University of Delaware head coach Ian Hennessy shared his memories with RTÉ Sport of how he ended up on that adventure in 1996 when he was part of New York/New Jersey MetroStars' maiden campaign. 

Like many prospective Irish soccer players, the road began in England for Hennessy, now 53 and still possessing his native accent.

In the early '80s, the then-teenage Ireland youth international tried to make it at Arsenal but by his own admission was not of the required level to break through at a time when future captain Tony Adams and a certain Niall Quinn were coming through.

"I went to Arsenal but wasn't good enough," Hennessy tells me.

"I have to admit I wasn't good enough for that level at that time. But I do remember being over-awed with even Highbury and Charlie Nicholas and David O'Leary and maybe I didn't have the mental skill-set at that time as well.

"Good enough to get over [to England] and good enough to play for Ireland and the League of Ireland.

"But for that level, you have to have that extra 5-10% that separates you from the rest, which I didn't have."

He adds that Quinn was "wonderful" to him, a "class act that took me under his wing whilst I was over there.

"Niall and I were on the same Under-18 team under Liam Tuohy and Brian Kerr. He was kind of finding his way at the time, if I remember, breaking through, trying to make the grade.

"If I'm honest, I thought Tony Adams at the time was the standout. He was clearly ahead, certainly of me and most of the team.

"Tony was just clearly physically and mentally a great personality. He was easy to spot. He was your shining talent." 

"You were in amongst the men, there were crowds there and it wasn't just young kids.

"There was a real buzz, certainly in 1984 when Cork, like you said, had been the new resurrection of football in a great football city.

"But that was the one I loved the most because it had more meaning and there were leagues to be won or lost, there was relegation and there were FAI Cups and you're playing against some big names. But that was a great birth for me as an apprenticeship into big boy football."

MLS, of course, does not feature relegation, although its birth saw some big names from Europe and other parts of the world add stardust.

But how did Hennessy go from mid-1980s Cork City to lining out for Metrostars about a decade later?

Education was the key. While he was at Arsenal, Hennessy had been offered a place at University College Cork but was unable to take up that opportunity at the time. 

"Those two knew me and recommended me to Eddie to make the jump across."

Jump across he did – the Atlantic that is – and thus began life as a Seton Hall student in the late 1980s while he played soccer for the university.

Outside of the college soccer sphere, "there was a big void" according to Hennessy given the aforementioned NASL had folded after 1984 and no big league alternative in place.

"There were regional, semi-pro leagues that had popped up. So I played and bounced around and did the journeyman thing for a few years," he says.

Among the clubs he represented after the dawn of the '90s were Boston Bolts, New York Fever and New Jersey Stallions in those regional leagues in the north-east.

Big Jack's Ireland, of course, would arrive in the US for the World Cup in 1994, a turning point for soccer in North America. 

Although Hennessy was based in the north-east, taking part in a teaching course meant he was unable to make it into Giant's Stadium, New Jersey for Ireland's games against Italy and Norway (missing the latter was probably for the best given the dire nature of the match as Stig Inge Bjornebye told me last year of the players' perspective!).

However, you couldn't miss the new-found interest in soccer among Americans that the World Cup had generated.

"By 1994, there was a grassroots movement now that maybe didn't exist as extensively as before," says Hennessy.

"Certainly, the seeds were there for smart guys to see and now it's been unbelievable now for the last 25 years."

Two years on from the World Cup, MLS began with obvious fears about how it would survive with the spectre of the unstable NASL still a haunting fairytale-turned-cautionary tale from the not-so-distant past.

Ten teams were created spanning west to east: San Jose Clash, Los Angeles Galaxy, Colorado Rapids, Dallas Burn, Kansas City Wiz, Columbus Crew, Tampa Bay Mutiny, DC United, Metrostars and New England Revolution.

As the new season approached, Hennessy had plenty of other pursuits to occupy himself with. His peak athletic years already behind him, he was studying for a PhD in Molecular Biology at the prestigious Columbia University in New York City.

But MetroStars – now known as New York Red Bulls – came calling and he was among a clutch of players from the old semi-pro leagues who were offered a shot at this new venture. 

While it wasn't a "leap of faith" given his familiarity with some of the players across the rosters, by his own admission, his best days were behind him.

"A lot of players like myself were past it really at that time honestly because I was 30, I was studying as a second-year doctoral student in New York and I wasn't the ideal candidate if we're honest here," he says.

"But that was an opportunity and I said, 'Absolutely, I'd love to play as long as I can.'"

One of the perks for Hennessy was that he would play that 1996 season at the iconic Giant's Stadium where Ireland had stunned Italy just two years earlier.

"But the real odd part then is you throw in the likes of Roberto Donadoni and Carlos Valderrama and that was wild, that really was a surreal experience," he says, referencing two elite names of the 1990s.

It was future Italy manager Donadoni, though, who would be the star turn in the MetroStars team. Just two years earlier, the three-time European Cup and six-time Serie A winner was winning the UEFA Champions League with AC Milan, where he had already been part of Arrigo Sacchi's legendary side. 

But how did that diverse mix all gel together?

"It was odd," Hennessy admits.

"I felt bad for the [high profile players] because they were stronger players. They are essentially full-time pros at this point.

"Some people would call us the Metro Donkeys, not the MetroStars, and I think I was one of the donkeys there with guys like Donadoni who had just come back from the European Championships in Italy.

"So for him, it must have been just as awkward. But he was a class act and the American lads were doing the best they could."

Originally, the head coach was a former South African-born Italy international, Eddie Firmani. But a name familiar to Manchester United fans and readers of Roy Keane's second autobiography, in particular, would take the MetroStars' reins on 28 May 1996. 

"We were being hammered in a game and he lost the rag with us and was throwing a couple of 'F' bombs and he said, 'The problem with you guys is you're all too educated'.

"The dressing room was full of guys who had degrees, law degrees and guys who were studying Molecular Biology at Columbia and couldn't get over the fact that back in Europe basically you could be digging ditches or building houses or whatever if you don't make the grade.

"[Queiroz was suggesting] we didn't have that hunger."

But Hennessy could "100%" understand where his head coach was coming from with that pointed remark.

"This is his livelihood more than ours to be fair," he says.

"So emotionally and psychologically there is an investment then that he makes at that level which he had to, but we didn't make because we didn't have to." 

Hennessy would not play in the MLS beyond that short stint in 1996 but he did manage to make an impact. In eight appearances for the MetroStars, he managed to score one goal against Kansas City Wiz, which he jokingly refers to as "the greatest goal never to be recorded on camera".

"It was a piece of magic. Tab Ramos, who was a World Cup star and probably the best player in the country at the time, beat like four guys, rolled it across the six-yard box and I tapped it in and that was it," he recalls.

While footage of his goal has not survived outside of archives, the MLS did, although Hennessy like many others had doubts at the time about the league's long-term prospects, given the mildly chaotic nature of life behind the scenes in the early days.

"I was torn. It could have gone either way and it really was that shoe-string," he says.

"If you ever get a chance to talk to the business guys and the owners at the time, it really was hanging on by a spider-thin thread. So it could have gone either way."

Given the not-so-lucrative TV deal at the times and the lack of soccer-specific stadia that exist in the MLS today, Hennessy would not have been surprised if the whole structure had gone "belly up" if he had been asked for a prediction back in 1996.

One of the barriers often cited in regards to developing US players at youth level is the "pay to play" model where those whose parents can afford to pay membership fees get the chance to stake a claim on the conveyor belt, thereby restricting the potential player pool.

"It will only change if the business model at the top end changes," says Hennessy of that issue.

"So once these athletes come through – and the MLS has come out and declared itself to be a selling league much like Ajax a selling club – only when that end of the market, the tip of the spear really start to make money will, I think, you'll see more and more reinvested at youth level by the MLS teams.

"It has to be driven by them and the federation. But I don't think as of yet here, even though there are a lot of Americans in the Bundesliga or going to England, they are not going for the valuations that really drives the kind of hero, cult figure, the LeBron level, the Messi level, where people can see soccer really as a pathway that has a pot of gold on the rainbow for you."  

Long settled in the US now with his family, Hennessy does not get back to Ireland as often as he would like but through podcasts and other mediums keeps up to date with developments including at League of Ireland level.

But as Irish soccer undergoes its own reformation – coincidentally with his former team-mate Niall Quinn involved in the process as an FAI executive – how closely is Hennessy keeping an eye on recent turn of events and what does he feel we in Ireland can learn from US soccer's own incremental growth?

"You need a strategy, benchmarks and goals," he says.

"You need backers, it has to be realistic and then you have to manage that.

"So that's one thing the Americans – not that they're better businessmen than anybody else – but they are very good with strategising and setting goals and targets and working the way back from there.

"Also getting the business interest, not just the football interest, to have a really broad strategy. I think the MLS have certainly done that very well and I'm sure Ireland have taken note."