Jake Zivin, former Portland Timbers announcer, is the voice of ‘Messi Mania’

Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1990s, a young Jake Zivin would think up pretend play-by-play calls of buzzer-beaters on the basketball hoop in front of his family’s house. When he and his twin brother, Sam, went inside and fired up the Nintendo 64, Zivin found himself doing the same thing playing Madden and FIFA.

Cut to 2023, and Zivin is in the broadcast booth at DRV PNK Stadium for Lionel Messi’s historic Major League Soccer debut with Inter Miami in Leagues Cup. Cruz Azul and Inter Miami are tied, 1-1, and Messi steps up to take a free kick.

“Messiiiiiiiiii! Could it have been any other way? Magnificent!”

Zivin’s words are immortalized in MLS lore, the moment serving as both a catalyst for the league’s future and a new peak for Zivin’s broadcasting career. After eight years as the play-by-play announcer for the Portland Timbers, Zivin is now a national voice for Apple TV and narrator of the nuclear explosion that was Messi’s landing in South Beach.

Inter Miami hopped on Messi’s back and made a run to a Leagues Cup title, and Zivin was on the call the whole way as Messi and friends dazzled soccer fans around the country and globe. Zivin was the English-language voice of the moments watched by millions.

“As a broadcaster, you don’t root for teams, right? As a journalist, you don’t root for teams or players, but you root for good stories and exciting moments and dramatic games and wonderful goals,” Zivin told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “This Leagues Cup run was all of that to the extreme, one of the most dramatic and compelling moments in American soccer ever. To be able to call that is what anyone in our profession wants to do. It’s certainly the highlight of my career so far, and the goal of everybody working on the broadcast was to meet the moment.”

As a diehard American soccer fan, Zivin was overjoyed with what the moment could mean for the sport’s growth domestically and the league’s reputation on the global stage.

When he wasn’t playing N64, the TV at Zivin’s childhood home was tuned in to the Chicago Fire from the club’s start in 1998. Zivin was also a fan of the Bears, Bulls and Cubs, he said, but soccer was always his favorite sport.

Zivin’s play-by-play career started after he was cut from his high school soccer team his sophomore year. Many of his friends were on the boys and girls teams, and he wanted to find a way to stay involved while doing something else he loved.

“Growing up, I thought that sports writers and sports broadcasters, it’s almost like they won the lottery,” Zivin said. “Anybody would want to do this job. It’s not like you can choose to do it. These are just the luckiest people on the planet, and everybody else just has to go get these normal careers. Around high school, I realized it was actually a career I could pursue. My high school had a local TV station on cable access in Evanston. I got cut from my high school soccer team my sophomore year, so my twin brother and I started calling high school games for the local access channel, mostly soccer and basketball.”

As high school came to a close, Zivin looked at all the big journalism schools — Missouri, Syracuse and hometown Northwestern, to name a few — but chose to attend a small, private, liberal arts school in Minnesota: Carleton College. He was a math major, and he admits Carleton had a bit of a “nerdy” reputation.

While he was a self-described nerd, Zivin was a nerd who loved sports more than most of his classmates. He soon became the play-by-play voice of Carleton athletics, jumping between various sports but still loving soccer the most. During a pair of summers in 2005 and 2006, Zivin interned for MLS spending weekends in the broadcast truck, taking on the most junior position of operating the score bug for MLS Soccer Saturdays.

After college, it was on to local TV sports jobs in Butte and Missoula, Montana, then another TV gig in Eugene, Oregon, followed by Zivin’s big break: calling games for the Timbers.

The third game Zivin called was the famed “Double Post” vs. Sporting Kansas City in the 2015 MLS Cup playoffs. Saad Abdul-Salaam’s penalty kick hit both posts and stayed out, keeping the Timbers alive in a shootout they eventually won, 7-6. Portland ended up winning its first and only MLS Cup that year.

“Being the voice of the Timbers was my dream job. I had achieved it,” Zivin said. “If you asked me in college or high school what my dream job was, I would have said to be the play-by-play voice of an MLS team.”

Before the 2023 season, MLS teams eliminated local broadcasts when the Apple TV deal kicked in. That left longtime local play-by-play voices like Zivin without a home for a brief period, until the league announced its roster of talent for Apple broadcasts. Zivin was on it, a no-brainer for league executives who had watched him chronicle one of the modern era’s foundational clubs in Portland.

Every moment since becoming a national voice has only added to the surreal feeling for Zivin, working in spaces beyond his childhood dreams. Bearing witness to Messi’s individual greatness, and what Inter Miami has been able to achieve already, still has Zivin pinching himself. But being the American soccer lifer that Zivin is, he’s just as thrilled to lend his voice to moments big and small across the league. Particularly those at Providence Park.

Zivin and his wife, Amanda, still live in Portland, and he maintains a small role with the Timbers hosting the “Talk Timbers” podcast and producing some video content.

“Being a national voice would have been the dream that was too big to even think about,” Zivin said. “When I had the opportunity to do it in Portland with the Timbers, the idea that it would be in a situation like this where the MLS team was such an important part of the fabric of the city, where they sell out every game, where the atmosphere sounds like you’re somewhere in Europe, that is something I didn’t think would happen in America as quick as it did.”

— Ryan Clarke, [email protected], Twitter: @RyanTClarke