Northern Kentucky researchers, led by Dr. Joe Cobbs and Western Carolina professor Dr. David Tylor, oversee the Know Rivalry Project, which attempts to measure fans’ perceptions of their team’s rivals. They run KnowRivalry.com, posting the results of their surveys across the NFL, NHL, MLB, and college sports.
In the spirit of MLS rivalry week, they added Major League Soccer to their list of surveyed leagues, and you can see the results of their surveys up now.
They polled 738 MLS fans, asking each to allocate 100 “rivalry points’ to up to 10 opponents of their favorite club, based on their perception of the rivalry’s intensity. The researchers then aggregated the mean scores for each team, and calculated the main rivals of every club based on the polled fans’ perception. You can see the results for MLS, where you can click on individual teams, here.
Alongside clubs’ main rivals, the survey also decided upon the most intense rivalries in the league. This was decided according to the combined average scores between the two teams; a rivalry’s maximum score would be 200, if both teams’ fans gave one opposing team an average score of 100. Six of the top 10 rivalries will be contested this week, including the top three. These are those six, in order of their scores:
As you can see, the Houston Dynamo-FC Dallas matchup came out as the third-most intensive rivalry. Montreal Impact-Toronto FC — which has seen a revival as the two clubs played a highly-contested and entertaining Eastern Conference finals series last season as well as the final of this year’s Canadian Championship — was first, while the San Jose Earthquakes-LA Galaxy Cali Clasico was second. The Clasico is one of MLS’s longest-standing rivalries, going back to the 2001 MLS Cup Final.
Fourth on the overall rankings was D.C. United vs. New York Red Bulls, another longtime matchup dating back to the MetroStars days. Seattle-Portland, which kind of speaks for itself, was fifth, followed by Chicago-Columbus, a former expansion team matchup of Orlando-NYCFC, Colorado-RSL, the New York Derby pitting NYC and the Red Bulls, and finally Philadelphia-NYRB.
These rankings are not the definitive guide to MLS’s biggest rivalries. Most would agree the Cascadia matchup of Seattle-Portland is the league’s biggest and most well-known, while the NYRB-NYCFC duel, while younger, should probably rank higher in intensity. It is likely that some fans split points between rivals (Portland and Seattle with Vancouver, NYRB with DCU and Philly) while the highest-ranked rivalries featured teams without other adversaries that could be considered at a similar level as their primary one.
But this is an interesting list, and one that tells a lot about how profound some rivalries are.
For the record, the Dynamo fans polled gave 51.80 points (on average) to FC Dallas, 27.20 to Sporting Kansas City, 15.20 to the Galaxy, 2.20 to San Jose, and 0.84 to the New England Revolution. The Revs were the Dynamo’s MLS Cup opponent in 2006 and 2007, with both editions won by Houston. FCD and SKC fans included Houston as a main rival as well.
Agree/Disagree? Debate the Dynamo’s biggest rivals in the comments section.