There’s a line in nearly every job posting you see these days, a catch-all for employers looking to extract maximum value from their employees: “Other duties as assigned.”
To those of us who are tethered to desks and chairs, the term doesn’t mean much. To Mark Mello and Ryan Haines — members of the Philadelphia Union’s grounds crew — “other duties as assigned” can sometimes feel like their entire professional existence.
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“When you have a job such as ours,” says Mello, with just a hint of exasperation, “’anything and everything’ is in your job description.”
Yet nothing could’ve prepared the two for the “other duty” they would be called upon to perform a few weeks ago during the Union’s match against New York City FC.
About 20 minutes into the first half, the referee blew play dead as a pitch invader made their way over the ad boards and onto the playing surface. This was not your run-of-the-mill interloper, an overzealous fan seeking a selfie or an autograph. With a mask over its eyes and trotting at a leisurely gate, this invader felt distinctly more… mischievous.
Ah, the common raccoon. ‘Procyon lotor’ to the science crowd, ‘trash panda’ to the rest of us. Racoons, once wild creatures, have become ubiquitous in urban landscapes, occasionally wreaking havoc as they root through dumpsters, trash bins and the like. And at Subaru Park — the Union’s home, south of Philly in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania — they’ve made themselves right at home.
“We’re very lucky to be on the banks of the beautiful Delaware River,” says Mello. “We have deer, we have eagles, foxes and groundhogs here around the stadium. We just coexist, that’s our thing. We have plenty of grass for them to munch on outside the stadium. It’s just a fluke one of them made it inside. Maybe they smelled some of the delicious concession food.”
Nobody is sure where this raccoon lived or how it made its way onto the pitch, but the stadium was sent into an absolute frenzy when fans realized what was happening. Players and coaches steered clear of the animal as it cut a path across midfield and streaked towards Philadelphia’s goal. Play-by-play announcer Calum Williams offered an assurance to those tuned in on Apple TV: “We promise you that you are not watching the nature channel right now. We’re told that pest control is on the way to remove a rather adventurous raccoon from the field.”
RACCOON ON THE FIELD!!!
MIDWEEK @MLS AT ITS FINEST pic.twitter.com/tO8AJUrkJw
— Andrew Wiebe (@andrew_wiebe) May 16, 2024
Pest control, it turns out, was not on the way — not in any qualified sense, at least. The experts who handled this situation were Mello and Haines, along with nearly every other member of the Union’s ops crew.
“I don’t have nets or anything like that,” says Mello. “So I looked into the stands for anything we could use. I sent somebody over the railing and into the stands to grab a trash can. Our boss John grabbed the other trash can from our shop. It’s what we had. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how long it would go on. Our job is just to help make sure the game gets played.”
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The raccoon had traversed the length of the field by the time it intersected with Mello, who was now in a full sprint toward it. Mello looked understandably out of steam as he made his best attempt to trap it.
“I was gassed,” he says. “I ran from the visitor’s bench to the other side and I was just… done. I had to get someone else to carry the trash can because I was simply not built for speed.”
Racoons aren’t, either. But what they lack in pace, they make up for in a form of chaotic resourcefulness that’s made them one of North America’s most adaptable animals.
“Raccoons are a generalist species,” says Laura Dudley Plimpton, a PhD student at Columbia who has spent years researching raccoons and other wildlife that have gained a foothold in urban landscapes. “They are amazing at using an anthropogenic (human-inhabited) area, using the resources in it and populating it beyond what that place can often sustain. That’s why you see really large, often high-density populations of racoons in these urban landscapes — like stadiums.”
Eager to evade capture, the raccoon — who league broadcasters went on to affectionately dub “Raquinho” — continued its lap around the playing surface. By now, the interloper had lost a step and, after a few unsuccessful tries, Union ops personnel finally trapped it between two trash cans. And just like that — after an industrious, crafty four-minute shift on the pitch — they whisked Raquinho away.
Which is where things probably would’ve ended years ago. But in the modern era, when highlights are clipped and instantly shared on social media, the incident began to draw interest. Significant interest, the kind MLS sometimes struggles to generate with their actual product.
Raquinho, along with the Union employees who wrangled him, became a bit of a sensation. By the time comedian Stephen Colbert shared the clip during his monologue on The Late Show, the little raccoon had firmly ingrained itself in the weird, wild history of MLS.
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“I came to grow grass at a high level for professional sports,” says Mello, who feels more than a little uncomfortable with all the attention he received. “People aren’t talking about the grass, they’re talking about what’s on the grass. No matter how you spin it, it’s good for our team.
“And we’re putting a product out there, too, that can host such a fine animal.”
As for what happened to Raquinho? A Union spokesperson says the animal was turned over to the team’s corporate pest control sponsor and released “off campus”.
“Rest assured,” said the Union, “our new friend was released unharmed.”
Raquinho might be MLS’ newest raccoon, but he may not be its most famous.
By the time D.C. United moved into RFK Stadium in 1996, the venue was already an aging, concrete goliath, primitive even by MLS standards. United, though, made the most of the place, filling it with some of MLS’ most dedicated fans and winning a mess of trophies in the club’s early days.
Even when it was open, RFK was a bit of a wildlife sanctuary. There were the run-of-the-mill city dwellers — mice, rats, cockroaches — but there were also stranger residents. The stadium, which sits on the banks of the Anacostia River, had become a bit of an avian sanctuary, with herons, ospreys and kingfishers circling overhead. Occasionally, fans would arrive to find a dead fish in their seat, dropped from the talons of a bird above.
In general, RFK was one giant circle of life. The rats ate the cockroaches, the birds of prey ate the rats and D.C. United’s fanbase took it all with a grain of salt. Until the raccoons came and set up shop. They were in it for the long haul.
>Nathan Fry remembers all of this well. As United’s director of merchandising, Fry oversaw the team store, an aging, decrepit space on the stadium’s west side. The store had a drop ceiling, one of those charmless, foamboard grids that curse a ton of American office spaces, and one day Fry noticed something a little concerning: several of those tiles were badly discolored.
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Fry didn’t think much of it at first, assuming it was a run-of-the-mill water leak — the entire stadium, at that point, had become one giant water leak. Slowly, though, he grew suspicious.
United’s front-office staff began to speculate. Fry and several associates thought it might be “caramel, or some other restaurant thing” leaking from the Capital View Club, a disused space directly above the team store.
Eventually, Fry got a broomstick and very tepidly pushed the access panel aside, hoping to get a better look. Before he could even stick his head into the void, though, a fully-grown raccoon leaned through the opening to get a better look at the landscape below. The old bandit locked eyes with Fry. And quickly, something else became apparent: this raccoon was not alone. There were maybe a half dozen other critters living in the ceiling.
“That,” says Fry, “is when we realized that what was leaking out of the ceiling and onto our stock was urine. It was raccoon urine.”
These raccoons were newer residents, but those who worked at the stadium had a long history with them. Longtime D.C. United president Kevin Payne, who founded the club and passed away in 2022, would frequently come across them and sometimes hear them in the walls of his office. Payne, and others at the club, recalled arriving at work one day to find a stray cat tangled up in one of the goals on the stadium’s playing field. The cat survived — losing a paw in the process — and was eventually adopted by a stadium employee who named it (what else) RFK.
The cats probably only helped control another wildlife problem at RFK. A whiteboard across the hallway of Payne’s office was full of tally marks — they represented the number of mice and rats the staff had managed to kill. By the time 2010 rolled around, Payne, who was long the primary driver of United’s efforts to leave RFK altogether, was ready to surrender to the wildlife.
“We spent more money trapping animals sometimes than we did on a lot of other stuff,” Payne told The Athleticin 2022. “I would see raccoons everywhere. I remember just really being ready to find a new facility and let them have the run of the place.”
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Fry, though, couldn’t afford to do so. He started by discarding products in the team store which had been ruined by the urine. Fry recalls Judah Cooks, a former United player who had become a coach in the club’s academy system, attempting to pry the product from his hands. Times were lean at D.C. United.
“Despite his best efforts,” Fry says, “he was not allowed to have those jackets.”
As for wrangling the raccoons themselves, this was above the pay grade of any mid-level employee at an MLS club, so Fry, along with D.C. United’s CEO at the time, Mike Williamson, called in some professionals. They rounded up the raccoon, along with its family, which included a couple of babies, Fry remembers. They popped the access panel back on and just like that, RFK had five fewer residents.
Just hours after they were captured, Williamson — who most recently became the CEO of Welsh side Wrexham — was at his home, which backed up to Rock Creek Park, a huge, sprawling expanse of nature in Northwest D.C. Peering out his back window, he spotted a van belonging to the animal control company he had called only hours earlier. They were releasing a family of five into the woods.
“We couldn’t really escape them,” says Fry.
The legend of the RFK raccoons has persisted and D.C.’s fanbase embraced the raccoons as being emblematic of the state of the club as a whole. United, at that point, were MLS’ trash pandas, scavenging through the garbage in search of scraps.
D.C.’s fans even created a bit of an unofficial mascot out, dubbing him ‘Ronnie Raccoon’. One supporter made Boy-Scout-style pins bearing Ronnie’s likeness. “RFK Nature Club,” they read. In 2022, a few years after United left RFK for Audi Field, the club announced that it would be making Ronnie its secondary mascot.
Audi field, which sits on a plot of land not far from where the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers converge, has its own collection of wildlife. Many of the same birds that patrolled the skies over RFK cruise right over the club’s new home, plucking fish out of the river. Occasionally, fans will still find a fish waiting for them in their seat. And in spirit, Ronnie lives on, serving alongside Talon, the club’s long-time mascot.
Real Salt Lake’s home stadium, America First Park, is among the most scenic venues in MLS. Tucked into the Wasatch Front, snow-capped peaks and red-faced mountains provide a spectacular backdrop. And like any other place where untouched nature and humans meet, there are bound to be some unexpected encounters. Such was the case in 2022 when a young raccoon made itself at home in the stadium’s press box.
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RSL had already had its own viral wildlife moment. In 2019, a stray cat made its way onto the pitch at America First during stoppage time of RSL’s Leagues Cup Showcase match against Liga MX side Tigres. The hard-charging feline came within inches of the ball at the near sideline during a promising Tigres attack. RSL head coach Mike Petke wanted play stopped, but the match referee allowed it to continue.
Moments later, Petke unleashed a tirade on that same referee, eventually leading to his dismissal as the club’s head coach. In a very short shift, the feline had put in a few touches and ended the managerial career of an MLS head coach.
RSL’s raccoon still managed to cause his own share of chaos. Real Salt Lake director of communications Trey Fitz-Gerald remembers it well.
“There are things in the building that you don’t always know about,” he says. “Feral animals.”
RSL’s Leagues Cup match against Leon was delayed by a torrential downpour, which had made the field unplayable. Fans had fled to the concourse in search of shelter. Up in the press box, a juvenile raccoon had done the same, working its way into the drop ceiling. All of a sudden, it came crashing down.
“It landed on a countertop where we typically have food, game notes and other stuff for media members,” says Fitz-Gerald, who remembers media members “hooting and hollering” as the raccoon ran up and down the table.
“My immediate reaction to this is like, ‘What the f***?’,” says Fitz-Gerald. “This building is too young to have an RFK situation. I texted our ops crew. I said, ‘We just had a raccoon fall through the roof in the press box, somebody please deal with this’.”
Cold and wet, the raccoon made a move toward the warmth of the popcorn machine on the table. Then it searched for shelter behind a photocopier. The media stood by in shock. In a video, you can hear an RSL staffer imploring those in attendance to “OPEN A DAMN DOOR, PLEASE.”
The raccoon, only months old, eventually bolted out of the press box and onto a third-level walkway. A huge throng of fans had already taken up shelter from the rain on the concourse below and were treated to drama unfolding above them: a couple of RSL operations staff hopelessly trying to wrangle the interloper with a broom and a trash can.
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Finally backed into a corner, the raccoon scurried over a railing. At this point, facing near-certain capture, the raccoon cast its eyes on the concourse below. Like Richard Kimball in The Fugitive, he took a leap of faith, plunging some 20 feet onto the concourse.
Fans shrieked in horror and glee. Some gave chase. Eventually, RSL’s ops staff managed to trap the raccoon in a cardboard trash can. Quickly, they whisked it away. The entire scene lasted about 10 minutes, and it would be the most exciting thing anyone would see that night — moments later, the match was postponed.
“If you go a quarter-mile or a third of a mile straight west of our stadium, there is a canal that is part of the Jordan River ecosystem in Utah and that’s where they released the raccoon,” says Fitz-Gerald. “Caleb Turner, who is our beat writer for KSL, he’s leaving the game later that night when we finally canceled it and he sees this family of raccoons down (by where media park), which is close to that riverbed. We’re fairly sure that raccoon was reunited with his family.”
Another happy ending for an MLS raccoon, another animal cemented into MLS lore. None of this is surprising to Plimpton, who has spent years studying the habits of these resourceful creatures.
“Raccoons are notorious for being mischievous,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons they’re so successful. They know how to exploit whatever is around them.
“I had raccoons GPS collared for a while. I tried it on other medium-sized mammals and every one of them handled it great. Raccoons? They tore them off in a day. And traits like that are just inherent in their personality.”
(Top photo: Kyle Ross-USA TODAY Sports)