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Don Garber had just completed his first full season as Major League Soccer’s commissioner in late 2000 when he and the league’s owners gathered for a meeting at the Colorado ranch of the billionaire Philip Anschutz.
At the time, Anschutz owned three of the 12 teams in M.L.S., making his the single most important voice in American professional soccer. As he and league officials talked, Anschutz was among those wondering if it might be time to shut down the five-year-old league.
“To be frank, we were trying to figure out how to survive,” said Clark Hunt, whose father, Lamar, was one of the league’s founding members.