The new leader spent much of the winter attempting to convince the remaining clubs of the viability of this plan. The Chicago Mustangs decided their future was best represented by their city's National League and opted out. Oakland decided to go part-time as the California Clippers and gained a small measure of distinction a few weeks later when they played host to Dinamo Kiev, the first American visit by a Soviet club. But they, too, would vanish. By March the NASL's numbers had withered to five. 'Like Tantalus reaching vainly for the plums, soccer here has seemed doomed to perpetual frustration,' wrote the New York Times. 'Like Tantalus, though, the soccer promoters keep trying.'
Woosnam's startlingly quick rise to power had surprised many, but by 1969 few had any appetite to prop up what seemed a futile endeavour. Yet his efforts had not been restricted to squeezing blood from the NASL stone. Unlike many of his cohorts, Woosnam recognised and deferred to the authority of the USSFA and this, combined with his international credibility, led him to be given a crack at the national team, imminently facing its 1970 World Cup campaign. The manager was even granted the unprecedented freedom to pick the team himself. For a man who had only recently faced international sanction as a member of a renegade league, it was a surprising reversal of fortune.
America's World Cup hopes were better than they had been for decades. The traditional obstacle of Mexico had been removed by their automatic qualification as hosts, and the USSFA's financial position was bolstered by the hefty franchise fees it had levied on the NASL and USA. At the time of its 1968 convention, the association had about $225,000 sitting in its treasury, probably more than it had ever seen, and it had moved its offices into the Empire State Building. Now it could comb the world for players worthy of a place in national team. The eligibility of Coventry City striker Gerry Baker, born in New York state to English parents, had been known for some time, but during the 1966 qualification series, when Baker was with Ipswich Town, the USSFA claimed it couldn't afford to fly him across. (It said the same to Andreas Mate, a GermanAmerican League player who had joined Hamburg of the Bundesliga.) But in 1968 Baker, nearing the end of his professional career, became the first European first division player to earn a US cap.
Baker was unable to play in the series of warm-up games the USSFA had consented to, and the results suggested they needed him. The Americans lost 4-0 to Israel in Philadelphia and won only 4-2 against an ASL club. Even Baker's presence in the first qualifying match, away to Canada, couldn't prevent a 4-2 defeat. But Woosnam was given the opportunity to keep the team together until the return match ten days later, and in the space of four days managed to stage no fewer than three friendlies against Haiti. Returning from Port-au-Prince to a crowd of less than 3,000 in Atlanta, the US squeezed out a 1-0 victory over the Canadians, keeping themselves in contention.
They advanced to the next stage a month later by making a clean sweep of Bermuda (Baker scored twice in a 6-2 rout in Kansas City), while Canada dropped a point against the islanders. But five months passed before the US faced Haiti in the semi-final round, by which time Woosnam's hands had been tied by the NASL. The job was left to his assistant, Gordon Jago, who himself was still managing the Baltimore Bays. Now there were no warm-up matches, only bad timing: the semi-final fixtures in late April 1969 were too early in the NASL season, and too early for Baker to fly in from relegation-threatened Coventry. In Port-au-Prince, the Americans were overwhelmed and lost 2-0. To reach the final round against either Honduras or El Salvador - whose tie would spark the infamous 'soccer war' - they needed a decisive win in the return match.
The city of San Diego, celebrating its 200th anniversary, had approached the USSFA about staging a national team match; now it was handed one of the most pivotal in the country's history, albeit one which attracted only 6,500 to the home of baseball's Padres. Baker rejoined a US team rather different to the one he had left in November. Several players had been drafted in from the National League of Chicago, while others carried injuries or weren't match-fit. Jago had little option but to throw his team into attack from the kick-off, but the Haitian defence - and goalkeeper Henry Francillon in particular - were in inspired form. The only goal came just before half-time, scored for Haiti by Guy Saint-Vil, who had spent the previous season with Jago and the Bays. Baker blasted a closerange effort over the bar, but it was as near as the Americans came. Once again, they were out.
It is tempting to imagine how a victory in this match - surprisingly unheralded, even in American soccer circles - might have altered the development of the domestic game. Would the US have defeated El Salvador in the final round and qualified for Mexico? If so, who back home would have noticed? Would American television have deigned to broadcast the tournament - and might the public's response to World Cup soccer have picked up where 1966 had left off? And what would the knock-on effects have been for the beleaguered NASL? As it was, only Americans living in big cities saw any of Mexico 70, and then only if they were willing to pay to watch it on closed-circuit television in cinemas. The nation missed out on what many regard as the greatest team the game has produced, captained by the only soccer player it knew, claiming sport's greatest prize only a few hundred miles from its border. The USSFA's post-mortem smacked of despondency:
We are still playing soccer in a country where the native American has little or no interest and we are still largely dependent on ethnic groups as spectators, who, unfortunately would rather go and see foreign teams play than their own United States Team ... Unless we can find a method of acquiring money from other sources in the game, the economics of the World Cup may some day preclude us from being participants.
Keeping the NASL alive in 1969 proved just as daunting, but Woosnam had found two especially useful allies. One was Clive Toye, a former sportswriter for the Daily Express who had come to the US to oversee an NPSL franchise in Hartford, Connecticut, and ended up as vice-president and general manager of the Bays. Like Woosnam, Toye had seen the potential of the American game and thought the original owners had miscalculated in their approach. In Dallas, the Tornado's abysmal season had not tempted Lamar Hunt into folding the club, and his continued presence gave the league some credibility. As for the others, the owners and general managers who claimed to be 'in it for the long run' and who had supposedly braced themselves for early disappointment - they had fled. Hunt, Toye and Woosnam would emerge as the constants of what turned out to be a tumultuous decade.
The five remaining clubs brought in British teams to masquerade as American ones for the first part of the 1969 season. Aston Villa became Atlanta; West Ham United Baltimore; Wolverhampton Wanderers the Kansas City Spurs; Kilmarnock the St Louis Stars; and Dundee United the Dallas Tornado (again). The scheme avoided the need for another winter of hasty signings, but it also meant the season couldn't begin until Britain's had ended. And it did not whet many appetites. The opening contest ofwhat was optimistically billed as the `International Cup' drew a crowd of just 5,000 to see West Ham and Wolves, and it proved to be one of the largest of the competition.
There were other novelties. A season earlier the New York Generals had audaciously petitioned the NASL to scrap the offside rule, claiming it made the game too slow. Now the league seemed to agree. Nodding faintly toward the original ASL's desire for 'Americanisation' 40 years earlier - and desperate to introduce a more attacking brand of play than the catenaccio that was about to send Italy into the World Cup final - they applied to FIFA to waive offside in the penalty area, then settled for eliminating it at free-kicks. The league's own research found that under the rule change '72 per cent of the free-kicks with no offsides resulted in a goal-mouth situation'. It also claimed that 70 per cent of its fans saw the rule change as 'creating more excitement' and 94 per cent as 'creating more action'. Not surprisingly, then, 63 per cent favoured the rule change.
But that was still 63 per cent of not many. The International Cup may have offered soccer of an acceptable quality, but it was played in front of an unacceptable number of empty se
ats (one match in Dallas drew fewer than 200). National media coverage had all but disappeared and the small subset of the local community that embraced their strange new teams did so as much out of curiosity as passion.
With a side featuring Peter Knowles and Derek Dougan, members of the 1967 champions Los Angeles Wolves, Wolverhampton won the Cup for Kansas City, closely followed by West Ham, with World Cupwinners Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Bobby Moore masquerading as Baltimore Bays. Wolves' success, though, did little to strengthen interest in Kansas City when the real Spurs began their campaign. An average of 4,200 filed into the city's Memorial Stadium - the best in the league, but less than one-tenth of what gridiron's Kansas City Chiefs drew to the same venue on their way to a Super Bowl triumph that season. The Spurs ended up laying claim to a peculiar double by winning the 'real' league with their own players - among them such luminaries as William Quiros, Fons Stoffels and Ademar Saccone. But few had noticed.
If this was because the Spurs were chock-full of foreigners, then the approach adopted by the St Louis Stars seemed no more hopeful. The Stars had moved out of high-profile Busch Stadium and on to the unassuming playing field of a local university, hiring a native-born local coach and sourcing players largely from local clubs and colleges. This was a bold move, one that St Louis more than most cities might have been expected to warm to. The season started encouragingly enough with a victory, but only 2,800 turned up, and after a number of embarrassing defeats, interest evaporated. Summers in St Louis were spent supporting the baseball team; the Cardinals had won the World Series in 1967 and only narrowly lost it the following year.
If there was a legacy to the 1969 season, it was probably nothing more notable than the playing strip of the Dallas Tornado, whose 'Columbia blue and burnt orange' had left an impression on Dundee United. After finishing third in the International Cup, United took the burnt orange back to Scotland (blue, of course, being strictly for their city rivals) and added it as 'tangerine' to their traditional black and white strip.
In merely surviving the season, Woosnam, Hunt and Toye had beaten the odds, but with just five teams and no presence in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago - to say nothing of a television contract - the NASL was no longer big-league. Yet it was far from a total failure. Little by little, America was learning the new game. Seeds had been planted by the various community initiatives, where NASL representatives had diligently tried to educate all who would listen on the game's rudiments: how to head the ball, where to stand for a corner. Perhaps more significantly, CBS's coast-to-coast telecasts had taken soccer into virgin territories, and though most of the country had never tuned in, some liked what they saw.
By the end of the 1960s, gridiron had emerged as the new national pastime, a development for which television could take the credit. The flamboyant Joe Namath led his upstart New York jets to a shock Super Bowl triumph, spawning a gridiron frenzy in the nation's media capital. College football produced a much-hyped 'game of the century' between the universities of Texas and Arkansas, with President Richard Nixon, a huge fan, appearing in the winners' dressing-room to offer his congratulations.
But not all of America was swept away by the pigskin. The celebrated counter-culture of the Sixties left its impression on sport as much as any other area of society. Namath himself, a long-haired bachelor, was portrayed as something of an individualist in the manner of George Best, famously 'guaranteeing' his team's Super Bowl victory and threatening to retire when the NFL insisted he divest his interests in a nightclub. Yet his reputation as a rebel paled in comparison with a small group of disaffected players who wrote controversial, soul-searching books questioning their commitment to such a violent and sometimes dehumanising sport. Their views, and those of other critics, came to prominence in the national press. Loosely borrowing from George Orwell's view of soccer, some referred to gridiron as 'war without the killing'- an incendiary simile with the nation knee-deep in Vietnam. How much soccer benefited from such shifting attitudes is difficult to say. Though it was certainly less violent and dangerous than its distant cousin, its appeal in schools and universities rested primarily on the fact that it was cheaper. Yet many parents - to say nothing of their children - approved of a game where every player got a touch of the ball and there was no overwhelming advantage to being bigger or brawnier.
It would be an exaggeration to claim soccer for the counter-culture, yet the sport often found its most fertile soil among those with egalitarian leanings. In 1964 a Californian named Hans Stierle founded the American Youth Soccer Organisation, which treated the game more as a highly participative, fun activity than a competitive sport. Its 'everybody plays' motto contrasted sharply with the win-at-all-costs philosophy of other youth sports. Kids were guaranteed to appear in at least half of every AYSO match, and to avoid lopsided scores leagues spread their talent equally across the teams. Though many perceived this as patently un-American, others were inspired. Soon soccer organisations with similar philosophies emerged across the country, signing up children by the thousands.
Schools and colleges experienced similarly astonishing growth for their more competitive programmes. An NASL survey indicated that the number of high schools fielding soccer teams had grown from 800 in 1965 to 2,800 less than five years later. By 1970, nearly 500 colleges and universities were playing the game at a varsity level, even in the most unlikely states: West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee. A few started to take the game very seriously, offering scholarships just as they did for football and basketball.
There were other straws in the wind. Clay Berling, an insurance salesman in Oakland, California, whose interest was aroused by the NASL, was prompted by frustration with the media's haphazard coverage to create a newsletter, Soccer America, destined to become the nation's most enduring and reliable soccer publication. And in 1971, the largest crowd the college game had ever produced, a match between Harvard and Penn, drew 12,000 to Philadelphia's Franklin Field. Yet this modest figure was still eclipsed each week by scores of football (and many basketball) contests across the country. College soccer continued to be staged on anonymous, vacant fields in front of a handful of onlookers, with none ofthe marching bands or cheerleaders of gridiron. Growth was largely limited to participation. Watching one's son - or even daughter - chasing and occasionally making contact with a ball was one thing; turning up to support the local team out of love for the sport was another. Soccer, it seemed, was wonderful to play, but not so wonderful to watch.
Before the 1969 season had even finished the Baltimore Bays, drawing no more than a few hundred to their modest new home, an inner-city high school football field, told the NASL they were folding, leaving it with just four clubs. As children across the country began fiddling with round, spotted balls and strange new goalposts began appearing in public parks, the league which had done much to help put them there was in danger of disappearing.
5. Moving the Goalposts
Pel@ and the Cosmos
I can't explain how I feel. When we drew the 62,000 1 cried. This I can't explain. You can bring Maracana here and you will probably fill it with people.
Pele, August 14, 1977
'he largest crowd to watch a soccer match in the United States in 1970 was not the 2,000 who saw the Elizabeth Soccer Club of New Jersey beat Los Angeles Croatia in the Open Cup final, nor was it the 5,543 on hand for the deciding leg of the NASL championship game. It wasn't even the 20,000 or so who filled Madison Square Garden and its adjacent Felt Forum to watch Brazil triumph in the World Cup final on closedcircuit TV. It was the 22,143 who squeezed into every available space in Downing Stadium to see Pele and Santos draw 2-2 with West Ham in a meaningless late-summer exhibition.
The man celebrated as the 'world's highest-paid athlete' had become a regular visitor to the US, and his triumph in Mexico that summer only heightened America's fascination with him - especially in New York. This particular September evening on Randall's island found fans perching in the aisles or wherever they could find space
, boisterously chanting Perola Negra! in homage to their hero. Against a West Ham team that included Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, Jimmy Greaves, Trevor Brooking and Clyde Best, Pele was in top form, scoring both Santos goals to send the crowd home happy. New York had seen a number of star players and clubs that season, but only 7,000 watched George Best and Manchester United at Downing Stadium several months earlier, and Milan, Celtic and Racing Club of Argentina had drawn similarly modest crowds. Perola Negra was in another league.
The paradox facing US soccer as it entered the 1970s was obvious: the boom in scholastic and youth participation had not produced much of a response at the box office. The NASL had scraped together enough teams to get it through the 1970 season, but only by raiding the ASL for the Rochester Lancers and Washington Darts, and keeping the demise of the Baltimore Bays quiet through the winter. Its clubs were kept to shoestring budgets. The highest-paid player was probably the one-armed Argentinian striker Victorio Casa, who made $15,000 with Washington, an amount baseball's top earners could blow on a good night out. While Rochester won the two-match championship series against Washington, the NASL's biggest triumph that season was simply surviving.
Radiating confidence and enthusiasm, the triumvirate of Woosnam, Toye and Hunt steadfastly promoted their stripped-down, pragmatic league, now operating out of a spare room at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. 'The people in it this time know the business inside out,' the commissioner claimed. They are the best you can find anywhere.' Only in terms of geography, though, did the NASL represent much of a step up from the ASL and other regional leagues. The biggest ethnic leagues could almost certainly lay claim to stronger teams.
Unable to find a place to play - and with their 1968 average attendance of 8,500 still a league record - the Kansas City Spurs folded in 1970, briefly paring membership to five before the arrival of three new franchises. Two of 1971's arrivals turned out to be Canadian: Montreal and Toronto. The third marked the return of a team to New York, one which would eventually transform the fortunes of the league.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 19