For more than two decades, Major League Soccer and its most ardent fans have had an unusual, if sometimes uneasy, relationship.

Using quick-cut video montages filled with colored smoke, swirling flags and scarves held aloft, MLS has long trumpeted its passionate-supporter culture as evidence of its health and long-term viability — proof the match-day spectacle of MLS, if not the standard of play, rivals some of the most prominent leagues in the world.

In this arrangement, the fans are cast as de facto evangelists for the league, supporters in every sense of the word. But that lens conveniently obscures the fact that the most independent among them routinely — and publicly, and loudly — disagree with any heavy-handed policing and ham-handed ownership decisions that trouble them as the league’s self-perceived conscience.

But still the fans turn up. No story of a new MLS franchise is complete without a breathless account of season tickets sold and stories of paradigm-shifting instant fan bases. No recent season has ended without a news release boasting of a record for attendance, with crowds of more than 50,000 in Seattle soon overtaken by attendances of 70,000-plus in Atlanta.

The fans generally love the attention. The league loves the validation.

But as MLS kicks off its 23rd season this weekend, emerging from a troubling offseason that exposed deep divides within U.S. soccer, the relationship between some teams and their supporters has never been more charged.

In Columbus, Ohio, home to one of the league’s original franchises, fans are in open conflict with their club’s owner, who is threatening to move the team to Texas. In Washington, D.C. United’s recent announcement that it was entering into a “strategic partnership” with one of its supporters groups has infuriated a different one, Barra Brava, which issued a blistering open letter accusing the team of squeezing out their Latin-American-inflected voices in favor of “suburban homogeneity.”

And in New Jersey, the Red Bulls in January took the extraordinary step of revoking official recognition of one of their oldest supporters groups, the Garden State Ultras. The Red Bulls said the decision — the GSU claimed it was a first for the league — followed repeated disciplinary infractions, culminating in an episode on the last day of the 2017 season in which, according to the team, a GSU member dropped a flare into the family section of a rival team’s stadium.

The GSU disputed the team’s account and noted acidly in a statement on Facebook that, “We, along with billions of other soccer fans, are impassioned in both our love for our team and dislike of our opponents, and we disagree with attempts to mold a passive fan base that sits quietly, eating and drinking its overpriced concessions.”

Every MLS team has at least one official supporters group. Most have several. Often, the groups are run by an elected committee, and they enjoy exclusive privileges: block seating behind the goals; allotments of tickets for away matches; and the right to bring nominally banned items like flags, musical instruments and giant banners into stadiums.

In a few of the league’s newest arenas, even the architecture itself — steep banks of seats, safe-standing areas, roofs pitched to amplify chants — has the hard-core fan experience in mind, often in consultation with supporter groups.

Yet the relationships between teams and their supporters have always had a certain tension built into them. The supporters groups of the original MLS teams in particular — a group that includes Columbus, D.C. United and the Red Bulls team originally known as the MetroStars — are proud of their independent histories.

As the league plants its flag in new markets — a 23rd franchise, Los Angeles F.C., will join MLS this season, and expansion teams in Nashville and Miami were recently approved — many of the oldest groups see themselves as the true keepers of the institutional memories of their teams, and even of the league itself.

The Columbus story in particular highlighted that sense of ownership. When it was revealed on the eve of last season’s playoffs that the team’s owner, Anthony Precourt, was working behind the scenes — with the league’s aid, if not its blessing — to move the club to Austin, Texas, Crew fans mutinied. A grass-roots opposition was formed to lobby city and state leaders to keep the team in Ohio, and a hashtag campaign — #SaveTheCrew — quickly spread from social media to banners in other MLS cities, and even in other sports.

The message to Precourt and the league was clear: Columbus fans would not abandon the decades of cultural capital they had expended without a fight.

“It’s the basis of my longest-standing friendships in this country,” Graham Randall, an English expatriate member of the Crew Union supporters group, said of his relationship with the team. “Now I see it through the eyes of my 11-year-old son. The news that the team might not be here at some point made me realize I would lose a huge thread in my life in the last 13 years.”

Even studiedly provocative groups like Philadelphia’s long-suffering Sons of Ben, known for their occasional contempt for their team’s management but also for a “No one likes us, we don’t care” chant borrowed from the infamously hostile supporters of the London club Millwall, regularly show a softer side. The group maintains a philanthropy tab on its website that charts, among other initiatives, money and goods raised in an annual community food drive for the residents of Chester, Pennsylvania, which is home to the Union’s stadium.

Corey Furlan, one of the Sons of Ben founders, said of the apparent paradox: “Look, we’re Philadelphia sports fans — loud, obnoxious, whatever — but the type of people who care deeply about our team also give their energy, care and passion in other aspects of their life. We didn’t just want to drop into Chester for 17 home games a year. We wanted to put down roots.

“I mean, players and coaches come and go, but we’re the people who are going to be here forever.”