Jaime Moreno will play his final game for D.C. United on Saturday. And in many ways, it feels like a big part of the club itself will be going with him.
Moreno played 14 years for United. (To put that in perspective, Major League Soccer has only been in existence for 15 seasons — Moreno spent the one year he didn’t play in D.C. battling injuries in New York.) The list of Moreno’s on-the-field superlatives is, in a word, long. Moreno is the league’s all-time leading goal scorer, with 122 tallies. He was a driving offensive force during each of United’s four league championship campaigns. Moreno made the league’s Best XI team five times. His combinations on the field with fellow Bolivian Marco Etcheverry were the beautiful game at its finest. Even though Moreno struggled with injuries at the mid-point of his career, he rebounded with an incredible period of performance between 2004 and 2006, winning a title and making the league’s all-star team three years straight. On AP writer dubbed Moreno “the Babe Ruth, the Michael Jordan or the Wayne Gretzky of Major League Soccer,” which sounds like hyperbole, but is actually spot on.