FC Dallas: Islamico, 1990s MLS & remembering the Burn | OneFootball

By J. Sam Jones

Tornado. Lightning. Rockets. Sidekicks. Burn.

It’s a collection that looks like a word cloud from a half-baked superhero movie pitch. In reality, it’s a collection of professional soccer team nicknames in Dallas – from the North American Soccer League to the United States Interregional Soccer League and everything in between – that went up in smoke like Big Tex.

Most of those names and teams have been largely forgotten, but the Burn? The Burn are hanging around.

When FC Dallas revealed their second kit for the 2023 season, they gave us the flame-covered “Burn Baby Burn Kit.” When FC Dallas revealed their second kit for the 2025 season, they delivered the “Inferno Kit,” a nod to the Burn and the Lamar Hunt-owned Tornado of the NASL. When FC Dallas maybe or maybe didn’t reveal their 2025 third kit, they just skipped the whole gentle allusion part altogether.

A dark horse logo

FC Dallas became “FC Dallas” and stopped using the “Burn” moniker, colors and logo back in 2005 when they moved into their longtime home at Toyota Stadium. But the aesthetics have had staying power for a look that Nike delivered with skateboarding on the brain. Phil West laid this out in detail in his excellent book, “The United States of Soccer,” but essentially Japan’s J-League launched with a bunch of team kits inspired by anime (this is real) and MLS wanted to do something similar with their new kits and landed on skateboarding (this is real), and somehow that resulted in Dallas getting a logo with a black and red horse with lightning for legs shooting fire out of its mouth (this is real).

Even at the time, you could call the look “extremely 90s.”

“Well, let me just say it was the mid-90s, and people were trying different things with sports team naming and sports team colors and all of that business,” day one Dallas Burn supporter Dustin Christmann told MLSsoccer.com.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is going to age really poorly, you know?’ But they could have called it something else, and I'd still be cheering for the team. Because it was always all about the 11 guys on the field.”

To be fair, it’s an excellent, extremely 90s look. Other teams – Sorry Tampa and New England – weren’t quite so lucky. Christmann said that even if he questioned the branding at the start, he’s eager to grab that third kit. Still, you can understand why, 20 years ago, folks in Dallas decided a more classic brand might be taken more seriously in a league eager to be taken seriously on the world stage.

Unfortunately, that switch cost FC Dallas an icon.

Horsing around

Imagine for a moment that it’s 1998. You’re all caught up on episodes of something called “Suddenly Susan” and looking for something to do in Dallas. You’ve ended up at the Cotton Bowl waiting for the Burn to take on the Clash, you’re soaked in sweat, the bleachers you’re sitting on are scalding to the touch, and tiny, unmelodic horns called vuvuzelas are blasting in your ear. Suddenly, “Miserlou” kicks in over the sound system and a 1,200-pound, jet-black horse sprints out onto the field wearing a Burn-themed covering and, for a few moments, all of your troubles have disappeared and may never come back again.

Ok, maybe a bit of an exaggeration at the end, but that doesn’t change the fact that the horse is awesome. “Islamico,” who did his day job at Medieval Times, patrolled the sidelines at Burn games for as long as the Burn were the Burn.

“I think it was the absolute best mascot in all of those early teams,” Christmann said. “You know, every other team had basically a furry. But the Burn had this real, live Andalusian stallion with a rider who rode onto the field before games and rode around. I really, I really dug Islamico.”

When “FC Dallas” came around, Islamico moved on to other opportunities. But while he was around, he represented what made that era of soccer in Dallas and in MLS as a whole unique then – and fascinating, if not slightly confusing, to look back on now.

“I tell you what, the guy who rode the horse out there, he was full in character. Man, he was poker face,” Dallas native and Dallas Burn goalkeeper Mark Dodd said. “There was no laughter. He was all business. I loved it. And it was really cool coming down the tunnel and having this big live horse and this guy on it and everything. It was the physical embodiment of the logo. And I think Dallas did a really cool job of that.

“My only one concern about the whole thing was, for the love of God, please do not let this horse start trampling inside my goal box. I want a flat surface and I don't need big old horseshoe tracks inside my six-yard box, you know? So fortunately, they were very respectful and never did that.”

Riding the nostalgia

The Burn logo – and therefore Islamico – do actually have a connection to Dallas beyond simply looking cool. An oil company placed an 11-foot-tall neon red pegasus sign on top of a tower in downtown Dallas in 1931 and it became a symbol of the city. Why does the Burn logo not have wings? Who knows. Why did its creators opt for lightning legs and fire-breathing? Unclear.

However, it is an unmistakable identity tied directly to a specific time and place.

Sure, it had its drawbacks. True story: Members of the Burn once stepped into an elevator with comedian George Carlin on a road trip to face the “Kansas City Wiz.” Carlin aptly named the matchup between the Burn and Wiz the “Urologist Bowl” – but seeing the Burn logo immediately invokes the Cotton Bowl, Islamico and players like Hugo Sánchez.

Sánchez, after years of superstardom for Real Madrid and the Mexican national team, essentially got assigned to Dallas by MLS for their inaugural season. He didn’t join the team officially until a month after their first season began, but he was the main attraction for Dallas on that 1996 voyage. When he arrived, he knew he had to be an entertainer.

“I think we had, I think we had 25 or 28,000 people for his inaugural game, and he didn't disappoint,” Dallas’ first general manager, Billy Hicks, said.

“But he was not out on the field for introduction when he was supposed to be and everybody else was ready. I sprinted up the tunnel looking for him and the locker room is empty. I went in the restroom, and he was in the bathroom in full uniform, up in the mirror, and he was fixing his hair to get it perfect. I was like, ‘Perfecto, amigo. Let's go. We’ve got to get out of here.’ So he was ready to put on a show.”

Sánchez, his hair looking outstanding, delivered a goal and his trademark celebratory front flip that day. He only stayed a year in Dallas, but he’s as attached to that era as any other player. It’s an era where professional soccer in Dallas finally became viable long-term. Now, nearly 30 years after Islamico first stepped out onto the field at the Cotton Bowl, FC Dallas is working on $182 million worth of renovations to Toyota Stadium. The club’s sellout streak is heading toward 30 straight games. And the team’s youth system has become one of the most prolific talent producers in the country.

“I am very nostalgic about those days, because, you know, the league was smaller then,” Christmann said. “I think it was a little bit jankier back then, right. And it was trying to make a foothold in American sports with a sport that had already failed spectacularly once. They were trying to overcome that and try and make their own way. And I think it didn't seem like that would happen sometimes, but it has happened. And so I am nostalgic about the days of yore, but I am delighted about where it's come.”

Lasting legacy

Still, even with the staying power of FC Dallas, the club isn’t trying to escape the Burn. For the folks who were around from the jump and the folks who look back at the league’s past with their head tilted, that’s excellent news.

“When MLS kind of got on this bandwagon of naming teams kind of like European clubs, they were trying to kind of connect more to the world game,” Dodd said. “But there's a certain genericism, right? And Americans had very much, in our sports ecosystem, have grown up with teams and mascots. So, to sort of just kind of abandon all of that, I think that is kind of the reason that the old school stuff resonates with people, is that it is an identity. There's a logo, there's a name, there's a fire-breathing horse. You know what I mean?

“I think the more you can tap into the history, the lineage, the legacy, the better. It just connects the present and the past. And I love it.”