Columbus Invaders

National Professional Soccer League (1996-1997)

Tombstone

Born: 1996 – The Canton Invaders relocate to Columbus, OH
Moved: August 1997 (Montreal Impact)¹

First Game:
Last Game:

NPSL Championships: None

Arena

Battelle Hall

Marketing

Team Colors:

Ownership

Owner: Moh Hassan

Attendance

Tilting your mobile device may offer better viewing.

Print Download

Source: 1999-00 St. Louis Ambush Media Guide

Background

The one-year existence of the Columbus Invaders of the indoor National Professional Soccer League was a sad coda to the story of the Canton Invaders, a minor league soccer dynasty of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

The Canton Invaders began play in 1984 as one of the original franchises in the American Indoor Soccer Association. In the beginning, the AISA was an Upper Midwestern bus league. A handful of clubs knocked about in minor league hockey rinks and agricultural exposition centers in places like Kalamazoo and Toledo. Canton, Ohio and its tiny 4,200-seat Civic Center fit right in. The Invaders dominated the carpet, appearing in each of the AISA’s first six championship finals and winning five of them.

By the end of the 1980’s, the AISA grew more ambitious and became an air travel league with an expanded footprint across the United States. In 1990, the league re-branded itself as the National Professional Soccer League and began playing in big city arenas like Atlanta’s Omni and Denver’s McNichols Arena, among others. Canton became a small market anomaly within the league. Crowds – never great to begin with – dwindled as the Invaders’ championship form receded sharply after 1992.

One & Done in Columbus

In the summer of 1996, Moh Hassan purchased the Invaders and moved the club 125 miles south to Columbus. The Columbus Invaders proved to be a shadow of what the Canton Invaders once were. The team was inexperienced and overmatched in the NPSL. It relied heavily on young players from a local 3rd division outdoor team called (absurdly) the Ohio Xoggz. After a 4-18 start, Hassan fired original coach Drago Jaha. He replaced him with player-coach Solomon Hilton, one of the few experienced indoor veterans on the team. That hardly improved matters, as the team fumbled away 17 of its remaining 18 matches to finish with a league worst 5-35 record.

The Invaders’ humiliations included a March 1997 home loss to the Cleveland Crunch by a score of 52-18. (The NPSL had a wacky scoring system consisting largely of 2-point and 3-point goals). It was the most vicious beating in the 17-year history of the league.

Owner Moh Hassan barely promoted the club. Local soccer diehards who might have sought the Invaders out on their own already had the brand new Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer to get excited about in 1996. The Invaders’ proclaimed averaged attendance of 1,588 per at Battelle Hall, a sterile downtown convention center, was the worst of the NPSL’s 15 clubs.

To no one’s surprise, the Columbus Invaders ceased operations in the summer of 1997. The owners of the Montreal Impact of outdoor soccer’s A-League purchased the franchise rights of the moribund club that August and entered the NPSL. For the next three seasons, the Impact played both summer outdoor soccer in the A-League and winter indoor soccer in the NPSL, becoming the only North American pro soccer team to play year-round during the late 1990’s.