Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)

by David Wangerin

  There were also, regrettably, the Caribous of Colorado, who played in Denver's 75,000-seat Mile High Stadium. The Caribous would be known not so much for their bizarre logo - a reindeer with an oversized soccer ball stuck in its antlers - as their tan, brown and black strip with a western-style fringe strung across the chest. For better or for worse (certainly worse in the Caribous' case), an unprecedented amount of attention was now being paid to team colours and kits, with fashion designers occasionally roped in to apply the finishing touches. Ralph Lauren inspired the Cosmos to scrap their green-and-white scheme in favour of an all-white ensemble with the shirt collar and socks striped in navy and yellow. Sal Cesarani designed the Philadelphia Fury's shorts to be shorter and the shirts tighter, with three buttons down the front. Club president Frank Barsalona, who managed Frampton and Wakeman, was perhaps influenced by the wife of one of the Fury owners, who professed to being turned on by watching footballers dash about in what she likened to underwear.

  NASL matches had never been especially solemn occasions - some clubs did not give a second thought to offering match commentary over the tannoy or piping in music whenever the noise level dropped. But as the decade neared its end the hoopla scaled new heights, embracing fireworks displays, parachute landings and other sideshows. The Cosmos recruited a troupe of scantily-clad cheerleaders and men dressed as Warner Brothers cartoon characters to patrol the touchlines. Seattle released a soccer ball from the roof of the Kingdome and invited fans to predict how high it would bounce. A Dallas radio station scattered $40,000 across the pitch at half-time and selected six fans to pick up as much as they could in 99 seconds (each of the notes was tied to a small stone to prevent them being blown into the crowd). A lion performed a ceremonial kick-off in San Jose, then proceeded to observe play from behind one of the goals - much to the horror of a player who came close to colliding with it. And in Tulsa, a half-time show featured a man calling himself Mr Dynamite, who locked himself in a wooden box and then blew himself out with a few sticks of well-placed explosive. Everything seemed to go according to plan until the smoke cleared and Mr Dynamite was discovered to be unconscious.

  The most noticeable feature of the 1978 season, though, was how transparent the league's obsession with professional gridiron had become. The NASL saw nothing wrong with copying the NFL's sixdivision, two-conference format, or even its names. The Soccer Bowl, like the Super Bowl, was now to be contested by the winners of the American and National Conferences, each of which consisted of three divisions: East, Central and West. This, Woosnam claimed, provided 'excellent television marketing opportunities', though the networks did not seem to agree.

  The Cosmos, at last, became the team to beat, and invested heavily in foreign talent: $500,000 for Manchester City's Dennis Tueart and a similar amount for Vladislav Bogicevic of Red Star Belgrade. Chinaglia was the league's deadliest striker, Hunt a willing runner, Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto without peer. New York swept all before them, destroying Fort Lauderdale 7-0 to start the season and attracting 71,000 to Giants Stadium for a 5-1 defeat of Seattle on 'Franz Beckenbauer Day'.

  But the league's bizarre new play-off format put their superiority to a strange test. Sixteen of the 24 clubs qualified for the post-season, reducing the 30-match regular season to an almost meaningless exercise. Furthermore, the first round of the play-offs consisted of a single, winner-take-all contest - meaning that a club like Philadelphia, which had finished last in the American Conference Eastern Division, needed only to put together a decent 90 minutes to eliminate the Detroit Express, winners of the American Conference Central Division. As it happened the Express squeezed through by a single goal - but the New England Tea Men, who finished first in the Fury's division, 22 points in front of Fort Lauderdale, lost to the Strikers and went out.

  Then it got much more complicated and even more unfair. The second round was over two legs, but if each team won one of them, the outcome was decided not on aggregate goals but on a further 30 minutes of play immediately after the second leg. The league called this its Mini-Game and claimed it would encourage teams to attack instead of protecting first-leg victories. But it also caused players to wilt. In searing latesummer heat, on unforgiving artificial surfaces, the Mini-Game often made for a grim spectacle. Play could stretch to more than three hours if all the possible permutations were called upon: a draw after 90 minutes of the second leg requiring extra time, then (if scores were still level) a Shootout; if the team that had lost the first leg won the second, then another Mini-Game; and if that did not break the deadlock, one final, winner-take-all Shootout.

  This cumbersome system was a ludicrous outcome for a league that had begun its tinkering to provide a quick winner in every game. It was also manifestly unjust. It meant that the remarkable 9-2 second-round, first-leg win the Minnesota Kicks claimed over the Cosmos - in front of 46,000 delirious home fans - counted for little. Two days later, New York won the return by a less dizzying 4-0. When the ensuing MiniGame failed to produce a goal, the outcome came to rest on the Shootout. Few of the fans in the Meadowlands would forget the sight of Carlos Alberto scooping the ball up with his instep and bouncing it on his thigh as he jogged towards the goal, then letting it fall lazily to the ground and nonchalantly prodding it past the goalkeeper to clinch the victory.

  The Cosmos went on to an emphatic semi-final victory over Portland and a 3-1 defeat of Tampa Bay in Soccer Bowl 78, which the league obligingly staged in Giants Stadium. The Rowdies-Cosmos rivalry had become the most celebrated in the league, with Rodney Marsh and Chinaglia its two most prominent characters. But now Marsh was absent with a shin wound, as was Derek Smethurst (traded to San Diego after failing as a place-kicker with the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers). Up against a partisan crowd, the Rowdies acquitted themselves well, but they were unable to rein in Tueart, who scored twice and set up the third for Chinaglia. It marked a bittersweet return to the US for Gordon Jago, who had left Millwall to take over at Tampa.

  Chinaglia's 34 goals and 11 `assists' secured him the league scoring title, comfortably ahead of an impressive collection of Englishmen obtained largely on loan and in the prime of their Football League careers. Among them were Trevor Francis (Detroit), soon to become Britain's first millionpound signing, Kevin Hector (Vancouver) and Charlton Athletic's Mike Flanagan, whose 30-goal output for New England (including five in one match against California) prompted the league to name him its Most Valuable Player. Minnesota's Alan Willey weighed in with 21 goals on his way to an NASL career total of 129, more than any other British player.

  This reliance on imports, fuelled by rapidly rising salaries, kept Americans off the pitch, or confined them to defensive duties. The top American-born scorer in 1977 was Al Trost, with just ten goals for California, while the fading Kyle Rote managed only six for Dallas. The most American team in the league, the Tornado, now found themselves losing more often than not, and the city's glory-hunting fans drifted away. Enough was enough for some. One of the oldest native-born hands, the Cosmos' Bobby Smith - who was suspended by the club in 1977 after an incident which stemmed from his being left out of the team - pulled no punches when a magazine asked for his comments on the NASL's Americanisation policies:

  We have owners who don't know what's going on, who are being influenced by British coaches and a British commissioner. The British coaches don't feel any obligation to develop American players. They expect an American to walk straight into the first team after he's drafted. If he doesn't do that, they don't want him.

  Smith had a point, but one could not fault NASL coaches for wanting to win matches. Many saw too much risk in giving home-grown youngsters even the most cursory run-out. The Cosmos, who had featured Smith and other North Americans sporadically, were far from the guiltiest party - of the 18 players Portland's Don Megson used in 1978, only two were native-born. The Football League put a stop to the loan practice in 1979, but England remained the most common source of NASL talent.

  US players typically filled perip
heral roles. Virtually anonymous except to the most devoted fan, they usually arrived on the professional stage at 21 or 22, far from polished by their college experience. The college season lasted scarcely four months - fewer than 20 fixtures - meaning that entire university careers often equated to little more than a proper season elsewhere. College coaches continued to exploit the liberal substitution rules, some brazenly adopting `line change' principles similar to ice hockey, where an entire group of players - or even the whole team - was replaced simultaneously. Such crass latitudes did nothing for the development of top-class talent. The NASL persisted with its college draft, but the absence of what Americans came to call 'impact players' was obvious. The Cosmos drafted seven in 1978, but only one ever played for them. The New England Tea Men, situated in probably the most fertile collegiate area in the country, traded two of their four draft choices away; the other two never made a league appearance.

  Thus, the emphasis remained on bringing in foreign players and elite ones at that, whose transfer fees and salary demands were commensurate with major-league crowds and megalomaniac owners. 'The Cosmos have created a monster,' lamented the owner of the Rochester Lancers, the league's humblest team. Now native stars were beginning to demand their share as well, and a few even received it. Oakland agreed to pay Shep Messing $100,000 a year and whisked him away from the Meadowlands. Reports estimated the average NASL salary to be $19,000 - about a third of major league baseball's and a quarter of the NFL's, but considerably more than the $1,500 Kyle Rote had earned in 1973.

  It was a lot of money for a league whose financial viability remained doubtful. The mere signing of famous names guaranteed neither a successful team nor popularity at the gate, as the Philadelphia Fury were quick to discover. The club's racy strip had been handed to some of English football's most familiar names: Chelsea idol Peter Osgood, World Cup hero Alan Ball and Leeds legend Johnny Giles. But Osgood managed only one goal in his 22 appearances, while Ball finished the season as the club's manager but was unable to steer them out of last place. As the Fury's gates suffered (averaging fewer than 8,500) some suggested that post-match concerts from a few of their musical owners might be the best way of filling the empty seats.

  The Chicago Sting entered their fourth season with the poorest support in the league, faced with two major-league baseball teams and pronounced scepticism from the local media and fans. The club's most promising player, Miro Rys, a Czech-born product of the local leagues, was traded in 1977 to Los Angeles, then signed for Hertha Berlin, only to be killed in a traffic accident the day he arrived in Germany. Although they raided the Bundesliga and elsewhere for fresh blood, the Sting began the 1978 season with ten straight defeats, trimming crowds to as low as 1,500. There was hardly any greater enthusiasm for the Sockers, the NASL's third attempt at winning over San Diego. Hispanic fans showed little interest in the club's largely central European entourage, while the only North American to see much action was five-year veteran Alan Mayer, a New York-born goalkeeper who had suffered so many concussions he had taken to wearing a protective, if perhaps illegal, plastic helmet.

  Fan indifference wasn't hard to find. The Memphis Rogues, who parted company with manager Malcolm Allison before the team had even conducted a training session, played before crowds as low as 3,800 in the city's 50,000-seat Liberty Bowl. Houston typically lured no more than 5,000 to watch the Hurricane in the Astrodome. More acutely embarrassing was the situation in Los Angeles, where the woeful Aztecs had moved to the 104,696-seat Rose Bowl and frequently played to more than 100,000 empty seats. George Best served a suspension for failing to turn up for training and no longer seemed to be enjoying himself. Nobody in the team scored more than four goals all season.

  In truth, there were only a handful of teams on which to build a league, and even sensational attendance figures in Minnesota and Seattle had been created as much by enterprising marketing as any passion for the game. Entry to an NASL match often entitled fans to eat cheaply at a nearby restaurant, obtain discounts from local shops or see a post-match concert or fireworks display, and it wasn't difficult to buy tickets at a discount for what was increasingly referred to as an 'experience'. While this helped to fill stadiums, it didn't bring in money, and though the gates looked good in the newspapers, the crowds had often assembled to see matches of no particular significance.

  Still, if some teams wobbled dangerously, it seemed inevitable they would simply be rescued by people with deeper pockets and sharper promotional skills. The Toronto Metros-Croatia entered the 1979 season with a new nickname, the Blizzard (oddly, for a summer sport), having been purchased by the less ethnocentric Global Television empire. Immediately, crowds nearly doubled. Even more promising was the sale of the Washington Diplomats to Madison Square Garden Corporation, a subsidiary of the enormous Gulf and Western conglomerate. In 1963 Sonny Werblin, the corporation president, had bought the New York Titans, the laughing-stock of the American Football League, and renamed them the jets. Six years later, with Joe Namath at the helm, they won the Super Bowl. It was a story Woosnam was intimately familiar with - indeed, he claimed that turning soccer into a big-time sport was 'nothing more than the Titans of '63 becoming the jets of '69'. The Diplomats, until then persistent under-achievers on and off the pitch, suddenly looked capable of competing with the Cosmos. One of their officials boasted: 'I guess you can say we are not held back in anything we want to do because of money.'

  NASL crowds reached 5.3 million in 1978, the best figure yet, and the Cosmos' average of nearly 43,000 was surpassed in Britain only by Manchester United. The syndicated television ratings were largely poor, but in October 1978 a beaming Woosnam emerged with his prized possession: a network contract. ABC announced it would televise nine matches a season, including the Soccer Bowl, for the next three years. While each club received less than $30,000 from the deal - rather less than the $6 million a season each of the 28 NFL teams got from TV - revenue was perceived as less important than 'visibility'.

  Not everyone shared the commissioner's obsession with network television, or the enthusiasm for rapid expansion. The league's planning committee had recommended adding just two clubs for 1978 and then one a year, taking membership to 28 by 1987. In 1979, though, such prudence was made to look over-cautious. All 24 franchises were retained, albeit with the usual assortment of ownership changes and relocations. 'The league appears to have reached a period of consolidation and stability,' observed the New York Times, proclaiming that the NASL had 'enough things going for it to overshadow the few shaky franchises'. The 1979 season began with an unrivalled sense of anticipation: a presence in nine of the ten largest markets in North America (with only Montreal missing), unprecedented levels ofcorporate ownership, big-time national television and a rising tide of famous imports.

  The assertion that the NASL now started to skim off the cream of the soccer world, though, is largely incorrect. Most of the brightest stars of the era - Alan Simonsen, Zico, Mario Kempes, Kenny Dalglish - never set foot in it. Beckenbauer was an exception, not the rule; in Germany, the NASL had come to be known as die Operetten-Liga, a mickey-mouse league. This was a notion largely shared by the British, who viewed the 'razzmatazz' with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. Thus Sweden's evergreen international Bjorn Nordqvist joined Minnesota at 36; Alex Stepney came to Dallas at the same age, after he had lost the Manchester United goalkeeper's jersey to Gary Bailey. Fort Lauderdale claimed West Germany's prolific goalscorer Gerd Muller, but at 34 he was giving way to a promising Karl-Heinz Rummenigge at Bayern. Arsenal's Alan Hudson, though only 28 when he signed for Seattle, had already squandered his English career, while Toronto acquired Peter Lorimer not from Leeds United but more unassuming York City. The backbone of the NASL remained a mix of journeymen and untried youngsters, largely European, primarily British, and almost all unknown outside - or even inside - their own country. Playing alongside Muller and Peru's Teofilo Cubillas in Florida were striker Tony Whelan, who had joined from Rochdale, and Wigan defend
er Maurice Whittle. The club's top scorer, David Irving, came from Oldham Athletic. In Portland, ex-Rochdale goalkeeper Mick Poole began his third season with the Timbers, playing behind the likes of Graham Day (Bristol Rovers), John Bain (Brentford) and Clive Charles (Cardiff City).

  Only the Cosmos - now officially the New York Cosmos again, though they still played in New Jersey - were truly rife with international talent. They had signed the Dutch World Cup pair of Johan Neeskens and Wim Rijsbergen, as well as Andranik Eskandarian, who had come to prominence in the same tournament by scoring an own goal in Iran's draw with Scotland. The signings did little to bring about a more settled side; by the end of the season they had run through 30 players of 14 different nationalities. It was a level of extravagance few other clubs could afford. The one possible exception was the Diplomats, where new coach Gordon Bradley at one stage found himself needing to deny that he would simply fly down to Argentina and buy the team that had just won the World Cup. Bradley did spend a few turbulent days in Buenos Aires trying to sign captain Daniel Passarella, but the club balked at the asking price, and in fact spent relatively frugally that season.

  Los Angeles made the league's biggest catch, luring three-time European Footballer of the Year Johan Cruyff out of retirement and linking him up with his mentor Rinus Michels, the Aztecs' new manager. Everyone had expected Cruyff to sign for New York, since the Cosmos had an agreement binding him to their club should he decide to play again. The Aztecs bought out the agreement for $600,000 and then found themselves fighting off a $1.5 million bid from, of all people, the New Jersey Americans of the ASL, a league still searching for a Pele of its own. Cruyff's decision to play in California seemed at least partly fuelled by self-image, and he made it clear where he saw himself fitting in: The Cosmos drew well when they had Pele, and even after he left they still had a lot of people in the stands,' he noted, 'so I thought my job should be on this coast.'