Vancouver Whitecaps were founded 40 years ago today. Happy birthday Caps.
On December 11th 1973, the Caps were born and in the 40 years since, they have become the most successful football team in Canada, with a string of championships to their name and a host of great players who have pulled on the jersey over the years.
We wanted to do something special to mark the occasion here at AFTN, so today we're launching the start of our <b>Vancouver Whitecaps All-Time Greats</b>, an interactive series allowing everyone (fans, media or whoever) to vote for the best Vancouver Whitecaps (and Vancouver 86ers), position by position, from the first forty years.
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Five years ago, the Whitecaps marked the occasion of their 35th anniversary with a season long celebration of past glories, inviting back old favourites and producing a series of commemorative collectors cards. You can be certain that there will be similar 40th anniversary celebrations in 2014.
With a new away strip scheduled for next season, don't be surprised to see some nod towards the old days with either a return of the famous hoop or something in the blue and yellow colours of the 86ers.
So, what exactly is our <i>Vancouver Whitecaps All-Time Greats</i>all about?
Well we need to take you back to Scotland in 2006 and the Scottish arm of AFTN to give you some of the background (no, don't stop reading!).
East Fife FC celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2003 but many of us felt it was a little lacking in some areas from a Board of Directors we detested and were soon to remove through fan protests.
Towards the end of 2006 we decided to launch our <i>East Fife All-Time Greats</i> on AFTN, to properly honour some of the best players from East Fife's then 103 year history.
The idea was simple. To vote for the best ever East Fife goalkeeper, right back, left back and so on, and to honour some of the most legendary player to have worn the black and gold.
With such a long history, most people that remembered East Fife's 1938 Scottish Cup winning side or the three League Cup winning squads from the 40s and 50's, weren't still around unfortunately, or if they were, they weren't using an online forum!
So to try and give things a bit of an equal balance, we split the voting into two teams: a pre 1970 XI and a post 1970 XI.
Players could be voted in for whatever reason people saw fit that merited them being part of East Fife folklore. Best ever in that position, a key contributor to the club's history, length of service, etc.
After first voting on a formation (we went with 4-3-3 to honour a fair split of midfielders and strikers), every week we ran voting on the AFTN forum to decide who would represent each team in each position. There was a lot of fun discussion and debate about the various merits of each player compared to others before all the votes were tallied up and the two XI's were selected.
We then worked with the East Fife Supporters' Trust, the East Fife Mail local paper and the Club itself to get the views and the votes from the wider fanbase and those non internet using fans to select the best All-Time XI from the two sets of teams.
The whole thing caught everyone's imaginations and with the voting complete, a huge celebratory dinner was put on to honour all 22 players and 2 managers selected. All 24 were represented, either by themselves or for those sadly passed on, by remaining family members.
Awards were given out to each Best XI, and then further trophies presented to the final All-Time Greats XI.
It was a wonderful occasion, a great year of discussion about the club's history and a fitting tribute to it.
And now we're bringing it to Vancouver and today launch our <i>Vancouver Whitecaps All-Time Greats</i>, which we'll kick off in full force in January and run for much of the Whitecaps' 40th anniversary year.
Although we can't promise pulling off a celebratory dinner here, we do want to pick our best XI's from the Whitecaps first 40 years and honour those that have gone down in Vancouver folklore.
We're going to do it a little bit differently from the Fife version however. There will be no year cut off date to select the initial teams. Instead we will split the teams into three eras, including those under both the Caps and 86ers names, and select the best XI from the <b>NASL days (1974 to 1984)</b>, the <b>D2 days (1986 to 2010)</b> and the <b>MLS days (2011 to present day)</b>.
Now we know it's going to be tricky. Three different sets of fanbases, in numbers and memories. We're still putting the finishing touches to some logistics.
You don't have to have experienced the early days to vote, just be aware of the Caps storied history and we'll help you with suggestions along the way.
To try and avoid too much of a MLS bias (and frankly there are not many of the current era that you would expect to be in the final All-Time XI at this point in time but maybe when we do it again in ten years time), we're going to try and canvas the views of as many people as possible across a variety of means.
With 22 Whitecaps and the 1979 Soccer Bowl team in the Canadian Hall of Fame, a host of other non Canadian players picking up individual awards and recognition over the years, and a host more who deserved to but didn't, it's a large field to make your selections from.
Every week we'll run an article on here to vote for a certain position for a certain team. Each team's position will be allocated an article and a week to itself.
We'll kick things off in the first week of January with the NASL goalkeeping position, week two will be the D2 goalkeeper, week 3 the MLS goalkeeper, and then week 4 goes back to right back in the NASL team and so on.
Plan is to have three individual team articles for: Goalkeeper, Right back, Left back, Central Defenders, Midfield, Forward line and then select a manager for each team. We'll then run another seven articles to narrow down the all-time team from the three era selections to just one all-time winner.
We should be looking at this running for around 28 weeks or so in total, barring any changes as we go along. This will also lead in nicely to AFTN's own celebrations of our 25th birthday in August.
We'll include votes in the article comments, on Twitter, on Facebook, on the Southsiders forum and possibly via a couple of other sources that we'll be working on, including possible local newspaper involvement again. We'll also be speaking to the Whitecaps about the whole idea to see how we can maybe work with them on a few things.
Hopefully we'll generate some good discussions, memories and stories of players from the past and present. It's the latter I'm most looking forward to.
Watch for it all kicking off in the New Year.
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