Seattle the first to bolt from "Cascadia"

PDX is 'for the birds,' according to Seattle & Vancouver supporters.

Steve Clare writes an exclusive story for GOALSeattle.com about the Cascadia Derby between Seattle, Vancouver and Portland.

Seattle has become the first city in the derby triad to move on to Major League Soccer. Since Sounders FC were announced in November of 2007 both Vancouver and Portland have expressed a desire to join Seattle at the highest level. Those desires took tangible form when both the Timbers and Whitecaps officially submitted expansion bids to MLS a few weeks ago. Visit MLSinVancouver.com and MLStoPortland.com for more information.

Clare talked with Timbers' supporter Shawn Levy about the rivalry:

Needless to say the reaction to the Sounders elevation to the Major League is not being met with unadulterated glee in the Rose City. Shawn Levy is a Portland journalist for the Oregonian and also a respected ‘Elder’ in the Timbers Army, the largest and most influential of the Portland Timbers supporters groups. He looks at the upward mobility of Seattle’s soccer club with a degree of nostalgia mixed in with understandable bitterness. “The Pacific Northwest derby -- Portland, Seattle, Vancouver -- dates back three decades and is easily the most heated in Anglo-American soccer, so one feels a twinge of pain in seeing one of the three teams promoted, in effect, to a higher level and bringing a portion of that history to an end. It's a bit disheartening, too, that it should be the team that has enjoyed the biggest success on the pitch and the *least* support from its hometown fans. Seattle ponied up the money before Portland and Vancouver could get their financial ducks in order; good on 'em.”

Read Steve Clare's entire Cascadia Derby story here.

Read about the Cascadia Cup here.

A Timbers supporters covers up a Ljungberg poster...