San Jose Earthquakes
Also written as San Jose.
The club
San Jose Earthquakes were founded on June 15, 1994, and entered play in 1996 as one of Major League Soccer's original ten charter clubs. For their first four seasons they were known as the San Jose Clash before the club reverted to the Earthquakes name on October 27, 1999, reviving the identity of a North American Soccer League team that had played in the Bay Area from 1974. The club's colours have traditionally been blue and black with white highlights, and a 2014 rebrand worked the number 1974 into the crest in red as a nod to that NASL heritage.
The club's history contains a well-known complication. After the 2005 season the then-owner, Anschutz Entertainment Group, relocated the operation to Texas for the 2006 season, where it became the Houston Dynamo. MLS ruled at the time that the Earthquakes name, colours, logo, wordmark, history and competitive records would not travel with the move, so the Houston club started with none of the pre-2006 Earthquakes' honours attached to it and is treated by the league as an expansion franchise in its own right. San Jose then sat outside MLS for two seasons before Lewis Wolff and John Fisher, having received an exclusive option from the league in May 2006 to build a soccer-specific stadium and bring a team back, launched a new San Jose Earthquakes franchise that resumed play in 2008. That 2008 club was ruled by MLS to retain all records, logos, colours and titles of the 1996-2005 franchise and to be a continuation of it. In practical terms this means the current San Jose Earthquakes are the club that owns the 2001 and 2003 MLS Cups and the 2005 Supporters' Shield, while Houston Dynamo, despite being the team that inherited the Bay Area roster and front office in 2006, carries none of that history and is a separate entity in the league's own bookkeeping.
Home matches are played at PayPal Park in San Jose, a soccer-specific stadium with a capacity of 18,000 that opened in 2015 as Avaya Stadium, the first purpose-built professional soccer stadium in the Bay Area; it took its current sponsor name in 2020. Before that the club played at Spartan Stadium and later Buck Shaw Stadium on the Santa Clara University campus. John Fisher, co-owner of Major League Baseball's Athletics, has been the club's majority owner since the 2008 revival; he put the franchise up for sale on June 18, 2025, and no buyer had been confirmed as of the sources read here.
Recent seasons
The 2020s have been uneven. San Jose finished eighth in the Western Conference in 2020 on 30 points and lost in the opening round of the playoffs, then missed the postseason entirely in 2021 (41 points, tenth), 2022 (35 points, fourteenth) and 2023, when they took the final wildcard spot on 44 points but were eliminated straight away. The 2024 season was the low point in the club's history: San Jose finished bottom of MLS, which the club's own history records as breaking the league record for the most last-place finishes by a single franchise; the exact final win-loss-draw split was not established from the sources read here beyond a 21-point total. Bruce Arena was appointed head coach in November 2024, and 2025 brought some recovery, with San Jose finishing tenth in the West on 41 points from an 11-15-8 record and reaching the U.S. Open Cup quarter-finals, though they again missed the playoffs.
Honours and landmarks
San Jose Earthquakes have won MLS Cup twice, in 2001 and 2003, and the Supporters' Shield twice, in 2005 and 2012. The club has never won the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup; its best run in that competition in the post-2008 era was a run to the semi-finals in 2017, with more recent campaigns reaching the round of 16 in 2022 and 2024 and the quarter-finals in 2025. Chris Wondolowski, the club's long-serving forward, became the all-time leading scorer in MLS history on May 18, 2019, scoring four times against the Chicago Fire to reach 100 league goals for his career, a milestone reached by only nine players.
Notable scorelines
San Jose won the 2001 MLS Cup 2-1 after extra time against the Los Angeles Galaxy at Columbus Crew Stadium, Dwayne De Rosario scoring the golden goal in the 96th minute under head coach Frank Yallop. Two years later they beat the Chicago Fire 4-2 in the 2003 final at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California, with Landon Donovan scoring twice to become the first player to score a brace in an MLS Cup final; Ronnie Ekelund and Richard Mulrooney also scored, and Chris Armas' own goal was Chicago's second. Within the California Clasico rivalry, the 2003 first-round playoff series stands out: after Los Angeles won the first leg 2-0, San Jose fell behind 4-0 inside two minutes of the second leg before scoring five unanswered goals to win 5-4 and advance on aggregate, a match widely rated among the best in league history. In June 2012, before 50,391 spectators at Stanford Stadium, San Jose came from 3-2 down at half-time to beat the Galaxy 4-3. A year later, also at Stanford Stadium, San Jose were down 0-2 with ten men and 22 minutes left before stoppage-time goals from Shea Salinas and Alan Gordon completed a 3-2 win, on June 29, 2013 becoming the first MLS team to overturn a two-goal deficit against ten men in that fashion. The rivalry's most recent landmark occasion, the 100th edition in April 2024, went the other way: Los Angeles won 4-3 despite playing the final 27 minutes with ten men.
Head-to-head notes
San Jose's defining rivalry is the California Clasico against the Los Angeles Galaxy, a name borrowed from the Clasico tradition of Spanish and Argentine football and applied to the state's north-south sporting divide. The teams first met on April 28, 1996, when Los Angeles beat the San Jose Clash 2-1 at the Rose Bowl. The rivalry intensified after Anschutz Entertainment Group took sole ownership of San Jose in December 2002, and survived a two-year gap while the Houston relocation played out, resuming when the revived Earthquakes returned in 2008. As of August 19, 2026 the two clubs had met 106 times in all competitions, with Los Angeles winning 51, San Jose 34 and 21 draws; the largest margin has been a 4-0 Los Angeles win on October 14, 2020. The Guardian has called it perhaps the most historic and intense rivalry in MLS, and it remains an active fixture with organised supporter groups on both sides, the San Jose Ultras and the Angel City Brigade, building it up with tifo displays each time the sides meet.
Right now (2026)
Bruce Arena remains head coach. San Jose's marquee close-season signing was the German forward Timo Werner, who joined as a free agent from RB Leipzig on January 29, 2026 and has been described within the club as its biggest transfer in its history; he has scored regularly through the season, including from the penalty spot. The Scottish goalkeeper Angus Gunn arrived as a free transfer from Nottingham Forest on July 8, 2026, with Nate Crockford signed from FC Cincinnati in January as backup.
As of August 23, 2026, San Jose sit fourth in the Western Conference and eighth overall in MLS with a 10-7-3 record for 33 points. The season has been streaky rather than steady: a 3-0 home win over Sporting Kansas City to open the campaign, a 4-1 away win at Los Angeles FC in April and a 5-1 home win over Austin FC have been offset by results such as a 0-4 defeat to Orlando City in late July. In the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup San Jose reached the round of 32 before being eliminated; the club did not qualify for the 2026 Leagues Cup. The full run of results since late August 2026, and any further movement in the ownership sale John Fisher announced in June 2025, were not established from the sources read here.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose_Earthquakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_San_Jose_Earthquakes_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Clasico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_MLS_Cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_MLS_Cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_San_Jose_Earthquakes_seasons
Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.