The self-assured Furphy (who the New York Times noted had often been accused of being `domineering and confident, almost to the point of arrogance') unsurprisingly brought in a collection of no-nonsense English veterans, among them Tony Field, Terry Garbett, Dave Clements and Keith Eddy. The Cosmos also signed Bob Rigby and defender Bobby Smith from the fading Atoms and a small contingent from South America, headed by Ramon Mifflin, the former captain of Peru.
The biggest acquisition, and probably the most significant in the league's history, came after the start of the season. Word reached Furphy that the Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia, who had led Lazio to their first championship in 1974, had become disillusioned with Italian football following the death of the club's manager, Tommaso Maestrelli, whom he had befriended. Though only 28, Chinaglia's international career had ended abruptly at the 1974 World Cup after he made an obscene gesture upon being substituted against Haiti, and it was clear he did not figure in Enzo Bearzot's plans for Argentina. Furthermore, his American wife had returned to the US and wanted to raise their children there. For $750,000 ('the cheapest purchase in the history of the game', boasted Toye) Warner Communications had found not just a player capable of stirring New York's Italian fans but a first-rate striker who could feed off Pele's creativity. Still the idol of the Biancocelesti, with a personal fan club said to consist of 21,000 members, Chinaglia took out a full-page advert in Corriere dello Sport outlining the reasons for his departure, and took up residence in a 14-bedroom mansion in New Jersey. The money, he claimed, was secondary to the opportunity for a new life in America, though his $80,000-a-year salary - about an eighth of Pele's - was said to have been paid in advance.
Few other NASL clubs could afford that level of expenditure. Geoff Hurst, now 34, left West Bromwich Albion for Seattle on a free transfer, and a disenchanted Rodney Marsh cost Tampa Bay no more than $80,000. Other British stars also turned up for the 1976 season, some in very unlikely places. The close-to-anonymous San Antonio Thunder, a second-year team owned by potato crisp heir Ward Lay, took Bobby Moore, 35, on loan from Fulham and Scotland goalkeeper Bobby Clark, 30, from Aberdeen.
The acquisition of such ageing international talent may have improved the quality of play, but it had little impact at the gate, as the Thunder quickly discovered. Few Texans had heard of Bobby Moore, and if they had it was bound to be the one who played wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings and changed his name to Ahmad Rashad. The English Moore found himself answering to a soft-spoken New Mexican coach named Don Batie, who had spent eight years at humble Chico State University in California and tried to instil an effusive collegiate spirit into his largely British troupe, gathering them into gridiron-style 'huddles' where they held hands and exhorted each other to victory. Neither Batie nor the Thunder, with its lurid tricolour playing strip of lightning bolts, stars and stripes, remained in the league for long. Two seasons spent wandering among high school football stadiums in search of fans proved enough for Lay, who packed his franchise's bags for Hawaii.
The fortunes of another ex-college coach, Terry Fisher, entering his second season in charge of the Los Angeles Aztecs, proved less fleeting. The 26-year-old Fisher had developed his interest in the game while working in Europe. Now his responsibilities included George Best, still not yet 30, who had apparently walked away from the Cosmos because the prospect of living in New York frightened him. Enticed to less terrifying Los Angeles duringa month-long stint at Stockport County, some expected Best to transform Fisher's Aztecs into a sort ofwest coast Cosmos -though it was of course anyone's guess as to which George Best would turn up in California. In between signing for the Aztecs and arriving for pre-season training, he had been released by Cork Celtic of the League of Ireland for a 'failure to show any enthusiasm'. His debut season in LA proved a happier story. Touted by the owners as the second highest-paid player in the league, Best played in every match but one and finished among the NASL's top scorers, while demonstrating that much of his skill remained. Mercifully, his flamboyance had been given a sympathetic home (Elton John part-owned the franchise) and in Fisher he found an understanding coach. Nevertheless, crowds still failed to exceed 10,000 for any of the 12 home matches.
In Tampa Bay, the Rowdies offered Marsh a similar platform for his showmanship, and a much larger audience. Fannies continued to respond to the club's marketing nous; a record 42,611 saw their team dismantle Pele and the Cosmos 5-1. Eddie Firmani fashioned what was probably the country's best team that season. Tampa scored 58 times in 24 matches, with a league-leading 20 from Derek Smethurst, a South African who had played briefly for Chelsea. At the back they were shored up by the celebrated hard-man Tommy Smith, on loan from Liverpool, and Brooklyn-born goalkeeper Arnie Mausser, the former Hartford Bi.
In Seattle, performances were largely eclipsed by the Sounders' move into the city's imposing new Kingdome. Few could have imagined that in the club's first appearance there, a pre-season friendly with the Cosmos, the national attendance record set by Hakoah Vienna 50 years earlier would fall, but the gate of 58,128 exceeded the figure comfortably. Soccer had the novelty of the Kingdome more or less to itself that summer, and Seattleans responded in record numbers. The Sounders averaged nearly 24,000, a figure unembellished by a league visit from Pele's team. Not far behind were the Kicks, who drew more than 46,000 to see the Cosmos and 42,000 for the visit of the Aztecs.
As in other apparently soccer-mad communities, much of the attention in Minnesota was generated by clever marketing and a loss-leading sales philosophy. The family-conscious Kicks sold tickets cheaply and offered free car parking, discounts from local merchants, and even complimentary soft drinks for fans queuing for tickets. 'Don't tell me this is a soccer city and this one is not,' insisted president Jack Crocker, a supermarket tycoon who had never seen a professional soccer match before he bought the club. 'You have to do things for people, and that's what we have done in Minnesota.' By the time of the Kicks' play-off showdown with San Jose, few were prepared to argue. A crowd of 49,572 squeezed into Metropolitan Stadium and, after an emotional victory, carried their new heroes away on their shoulders. That Minnesota, with a modest soccer heritage, had produced the second-largest gate the American game had ever seen seemed incongruous, but to the NASL it was inspirational.
Despite success on the field, and their natty outfits, the imported Scots of Bethlehem Steel never won the hearts of their home town. Here the first genuinely professional team in the US marks its i-o win over Fall River Rovers in the igi6 National Challenge Cup final.
Thomas Cahill with Thomas Swords of Fall River Rovers, the first captain of the US. Though his efforts ended in frustration, Cahill could claim credit for the first real governing body, the first professional league and the first serious steps of the national team.
''`UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT, LOVE)OY LIBRARY. SIUE
The prolific Archie Stark, above, hit 253 goals in 293 ASL matches mostly for Bethlehem. Billy Gonsalves, far right, may have been even better. His best days came after the league had passed its peak but, unlike Stark, he played in the first two World Cups.
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Bert Patenaude, right, in action during the 3-0 win over Belgium at the 1930 World Cup. Patenaude scored four goals in Uruguay, including the tournament's first hat-trick, more than any American has managed at a World Cup since.
They stunned England in i95o, though the result did little for US soccer in the long term. Back row: Bill Lyons (assistant manager), Joe Maca, Charlie Colombo, Frank Borghi, Harry Keough, Walter Bahr, Bill Jeffrey (coach); Front row: Frank Wallace, Ed Mcllvenny, Gino Pariani, Joe Gaetjens, John Souza, Ed Souza.
Harvard and Princeton illustrate the irrelevance of college soccer in 1963, with the referee dressed as a gridiron official (and signalling a touchdown), a goalkeeper in a sweatshirt, and at least one spectator responding with profound indifference to the winning goal.
Slick marketing, i96os-style, failed to win over the public in Baltimore,
whose Bays folded three seasons after the optimistic rebirth of professional soccer in 1967. The baseball scoreboard was in no danger of becoming redundant.
Glentoran line up before a match against the Vancouver Royal Canadians (also known as Sunderland) during their turbulent summer masquerading as the Detroit Cougars. John Colrain, the central figure in their controversies, is second from the right.
Steve Hunt celebrates with Giorgio Chinaglia and Pele after his cheeky goal for the Cosmos against Seattle in the 1977 Soccer Bowl. Pony footwear gets a namecheck too.
Only the NASL could have brought together Henry Kissinger and Rodney Marsh, seen here getting a consolation after his final game for the Tampa Bay Rowdies, the 1979 Soccer Bowl, ended in defeat.
Franz Beckenbauer relaxes on the artificial turf of Giants Stadium. The Kaiser's performances for the Cosmos were suitably imperious, but he was disparaging about American fans and blamed the plastic pitches for his injuries.
Even God cried, they said. Pele survives with dignity intact despite the hype, hoopla and hangers-on at his farewell match between the Cosmos and Santos in 1977. But his departure turned out to be the high water mark of the NASL.
New Jersey's finest come under cultural attack during the 1994 World Cup, which inspired welcome enthusiasm among neglected soccer fans, but provoked derision from many devotees of America's other sports.
John Harkes and Jeff Agoos of DC United claim the first MLS Cup after their rain-soaked triumph in 1996. Alan Rothenberg, left, entrusted with the creation of the league, has reason to smile too.
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By the end of the 19gos the days of US teams facing hostile crowds at home were largely over. The transformation owed much to the creation of Sam's Army, on display here in Washington DC at a World Cup qualifier against Guatemala, September 2000.
Fans give Bruce Arena some helpful advice as his team defeats Portugal 3-2 at the 2002 World Cup finals, a victory that kickstarted the most successful tournament for the US since 1930.
Lamar Hunt, the perennial optimist of US soccer, who began his involvement by bankrolling the Dallas Tornado in 1967 and was still around to see FC Dallas move into their own stadium in 2005.
i Young female fans clamour for the autograph of their idol, Mia Hamm. But the demand for women's soccer did not prove strong enough to sustain a professional league.
For every well-supported club, though, there were twice as many in various states of distress. As the Philadelphia Atoms disappeared from view, the league runners-up in 1974, Miami, found themselves similarly endangered. Worst of all was the situation in Boston, whose owner openly gave up on the Minutemen and threatened to fold them in mid-season. Offloading former Portuguese World Cup winger Antonio Simoes and Bayern Munich midfielder Wolfgang Siihnholz among others helped to keep them afloat, but coach Hubert Vogelsinger had left in despair, as did most of the fans. Just 583 witnessed the season-ending defeat by Miami, a dismal note on which the Minutemen rode off into the night.
It was, then, a two-faced NASL, far from the 'phenomenon' some proclaimed, and one which had yet to conquer New York. By leaving Downing Stadium the Cosmos nearly doubled their average gates, but at just over 18,000 they still lagged behind the likes of Portland and San Jose. In June Gordon Bradley returned to replace Furphy, which galvanised the team enough for them to win eight of their last ten matches, though it wasn't enough to overtake Tampa Bay in the division. Still, under the league's protracted championship play-off- seemingly devised to ensure even a middling Cosmos performance would land Pele in the play-offs - New York were able to reach the quarter-finals before losing to the Rowdies.
Though not an outright embarrassment, the elimination of the Cosmos represented a disappointment to a league desperate for its principal star to be put on show. The regret was compounded by the fact that the winners of Soccer Bowl 76 were one of the least popular teams in the league, the Toronto Metros-Croatia, whose unashamed ethnicity all but ensured them of a limited audience. Far from the proponents of attacking football the NASL's points system supposedly encouraged, the M-Cs scored just 38 times in 24 league matches, at one stage going seven games without a goal yet still earning 21 points for winning three times on penalties (tie-wins now being worth six points). Eusebio, acquired from Boston during the winter, offered some inspiration, producing 16 goals in his 22 appearances and scoring in an improbable play-off semifinal victory at Tampa.
The more marketable face of the game, Minnesota, won the other semifinal, meaning that a first-year team had reached the championship match four years running. Discovering that Freddie Goodwin had come unstuck at Birmingham City, the Kicks lured the former Generals manager back to the US, but the melting-pot recruitment tactics that had plagued his time in New York were consigned to the past. Almost the entire Minnesota team was English, and its top goalscorer was a Middlesbrough reserve, Alan Willey.
The league hired the spacious Kingdome for Soccer Bowl 76, but CBS insisted on a 11am kick-off to accommodate other programmes. Embarrassing though this was, the match produced 25,000 fans, and one of Toronto's most measured performances of the season. Eusebio's delightful free-kick opened the scoring, with two further goals taking the championship to Canada for the first time. Celebrations were short-lived: both Eusebio and Si hnholz, the man of the match, found themselves offloaded to other clubs and the humble M-Cs quickly reverted to the more familiar status of also-rans.
If the Soccer Bowl was still a relatively undistinguished event, a tournament earlier in the year with tenuous connections to the nation's 200th birthday gave fresh rein to the more fevered imaginations of the sport's proponents. The NASL and USSF arranged for the national teams of Brazil, Italy and England to square off with a multinational NASL selection erroneously billed as Team America in a 'Bicentennial Cup'. Press boxes, desolate places for even the most keenly anticipated NASL contest, groaned under the weight of foreign journalists, while overseas television obsessively tracked the progress of the visiting entries, pausing occasionally to deride the synthetic nature of the host team.
It turned out to be a feast for even the most discerning fan, the first time three top national teams had converged on American soil. In Washington 33,000 turned up to watch Italy overwhelm the 'home' side 4-0. The result came as little surprise, since Team America's hotchpotch of naturalised citizens, fading international stars and token Americans - the NASL in microcosm - had never played together before. Marsh and Best withdrew from the squad, reportedly because they had not been guaranteed places in the starting line-up (though Marsh later claimed he thought only Americans should have been selected), but Pele, Moore and Chinaglia all turned out. Team America also lost 2-0 to Brazil in Seattle and 3-1 to England in Philadelphia, but the opposition seemed to be selling most of the tickets. England returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time since their infamous 1953 rainout and drew a crowd of more than 40,000 for a 3-2 win over Italy.
The Bicentennial Cup clearly illustrated the guarded - if not contemptuous - attitude both the NASL and USSF had taken towards the development of the American player. Only four natives were selected for Team America (or 'USA' as it said on the jerseys) and two were goalkeepers. Citizens of ten other countries, most no more yankee-doodle than the teams they lined up against, were granted places in the squad. Though the real US team faced crucial World Cup qualifying games later in the year and would unquestionably have benefited from run-outs against top-class opposition, it didn't play a single game that summer.
The only area in which American players seemed to be advancing in any numbers was in goal. Heading the list was the Rowdies' Arnie Mausser, soon to become a national team mainstay. Shep Messing had come through the Olympic ranks to become Boston's first choice and was now snapped up by the Cosmos, where he replaced an injured Bob Rigby. Half a dozen others found regular spots in the NASL, among them local product Dave Jokerst at St Louis (in competition with the Englishman Len Bond, who was permitted to wear jersey number 007). By 1976, only St Louis
could be said to have fielded anything approaching an Americanflavoured team, and they again finished with the worst points total in the league, playing to worryingly small crowds. The Stars survived just one more season, unable to keep pace with the rise in quality of the imports. While league clubs had been ordered to increase the number of North Americans in their squads to at least six, there were no constraints on `naturalised' citizens making up the numbers, and no requirement for any of the six to appear on the pitch.
The league's Americanisation efforts seemed to be focused more on the laws of the game than the nationality of its participants. Having increased the number of substitutes to three, and added 'sudden-death' to its tie-break procedure, the NASL now unveiled its wildest innovation yet: a reworking of the penalty kick tie-breaker which it hoped would generate more excitement and show off more skill. The device was to be called the Shootout, and it was perhaps the most flagrant indication yet that the league had no intention of capitulating to international protocol. The Shootout arose partly as a result of work the Washington Diplomats had carried out for the league, filming various interpretations of ice hockey's penalty shot, in which the attacker was permitted to bear down on goal before trying to score. Officials were excited by the prospect of a scoring attempt in which the goalkeeper played a more active role, and where the shooter needed to do more than merely pick his spot. So in 1977 they moved the ball out to the 35-yard line and allowed the attacker five seconds to find the net, with the goalie free to come off his line.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 23