This is surely the most overlooked trophy in the trophy case. Some of it is that it wasn’t that exciting of a team. They had the second-stingiest defense in the league, allowing just 32 goals in 30 games, but they finished 6th out of ten in goals scored, with 40. They finished with more ties (13) than wins (12.) And, of course, they had one of the frustratingly spectacular playoff flameouts in MLS history, missing two penalty kicks in a 1-1 home draw with New England, thereby losing the series 2-1 on aggregate.
I get all that, but some of the criticism is unfair. Let’s start with the obvious. Whatever their real or perceived shortcomings, they were still better than everyone else in the regular season. After 30 games, they came out on top. Nobody did it better. That’s just a fact. First place is first place. They earned the trophy.
Part of it is also that the 2004 Crew prevailed in a tightly-contested season. From year to year, there are variations in how the talent and results are distributed. Some years, it’s like a typical bell curve, with a few good teams, a bunch of average-ish teams, and then a few bad teams. Some years skew with a couple outliers at the top but no real outliers at the bottom. Other years have some outliers only at the bottom, pushing all manner of points up the table. And, of course, some years just have more ties than others, which impacts the number of points that are available across the League, thereby making it tighter across the board.
2004 was one of those years where everything was bunched together. Columbus lost the first three games of the season, then lost only twice in the final 27. The last loss occurred on June 26, after which Columbus finished the year on an 18-game unbeaten streak, going 8-0-10 the rest of the way.
There were a lot of ties, but that was true of the League. 31% of the games ended in draws, so points were getting sucked out of the table left and right. Only three teams finished with fewer than nine draws that year, so Columbus was not alone in that regard. With so many ties League-wide, the magnitude of each win and loss became even greater, and that’s where Columbus excelled.
If there were three points awarded, they always did the taking, never the giving. At 8-0-10, they took 34 points and only gave 10, meaning they accrued a surplus of 24 points. Had they gone, say, 11-6-1 over the same stretch, they would have earned the same 34 points with three more wins, but they would have given away 19, for a surplus of only 15 points. The 2004 Columbus Crew was a boa constrictor, slowly and calmly tightening its grip on the Supporters’ Shield.
And then the other thing is that the whole League was in such an abnormally tight race. From 1996-2003, the Shield winner outpaced the median team by 16 points on average, and topped the bottom team by an average of over 31 points. In 2004, Columbus was 16 points better than last place Chicago. What was normally the gap between the top and median was instead the gap from the top all the way to the bottom of the League. Columbus also finished just 8.5 points better than the median team, which was another all-time low at the time.
The narrow 16-point gap between top and bottom is a record that still stands to this day. Through 19 seasons, that gap now averages over 32 points per year. The 8.5-point gap between the Shield winner and the median has since been eclipsed by the 2013 New York Red Bulls, who were 8.0 points better than the median team. But they were 43 points better than last-place D.C. United, so there was still some overall separation. Through 19 seasons, the gap between the top and the median is still over 15 points on average.
So the 2004 Columbus Crew in some ways are victims of winning a hard-fought and extremely tight race from top to middle to bottom, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in MLS before or since. (Well, that and the playoff debacle.)
And for all of their lack of goal scoring excitement, it’s pretty funny that goals scored is what earned them the Shield. They finished tied on points and goal differential with Kansas City, but scored two more goals on the season to claim the tiebreaker, 40-38.
And one last thing about the 2004 Supporters’ Shield. Columbus needed a draw (and preferably at least one goal) in the final game at Colorado to clinch the Shield. On October 17, 2004, the Black & Gold got the 1-1 draw. That goal was scored by Duncan Oughton. Cheers, mate.
