But the number of Californians who knew his name was considerably less than those in New York who had heard of the other fellow. Compounding difficulties were the expansion plans of the ASL, a league which had broken into the west coast in 1976 and contributed three of the five aspiring professional teams in the Los Angeles area. (In addition to the NASL's California Surf, who played in nearby Anaheim, there were the AS Us Los Angeles Skyhawks, Santa Barbara Condors and the California Sunshine, in the promising location of Villa Park, near Anaheim. Apart from the Aztecs, all folded within four seasons.)
On his league debut, in midweek against Rochester, Cruyff could not entice 10,000 to the Rose Bowl; a week later, just 5,900 saw him play in New England. Michels soon turned the Aztecs back into a contender, but could do little about the empty seats. Average gates rose to a club record 14,000, but this was still only a third of what the Cosmos pulled in on a typical day at the Meadowlands. Cruyff, for all his impressive performances on the pitch, proved to be no Pacific-coast Pele. By the end of the season the Diplomats, having failed in their bid to tempt Trevor Francis away from Nottingham Forest, took him to Washington. It scarcely transformed their own attendance difficulties, and by 1981 Cruyff was out of the league.
The departure was probably hastened by his well-known aversion to artificial turf- it may even have influenced his decision not to sign for the Cosmos - which by the late Seventies had spread across the country with abandon. For British veterans whose careers had been built on strength and aggression and who felt at home in ankle-deep mud, playing on a carpet laid over concrete was a challenge. Others considered it downright treacherous. Beckenbauer missed 12 weeks of the 1979 season with a knee injury he blamed on the Giants Stadium pitch. Others wrestled with shin splints, ingrown toenails and ugly abrasions. But it would be years before ailments such as 'turf toe' passed into the American sporting vernacular, and gridiron and baseball teams had not yet begun to attribute serious injuries to their playing surfaces. Astroturf was still seen as the future, particularly in stadiums expected to cope with more than one sport." Winning in the NASL now meant not just overcoming the Cosmos, but coming to terms with their pitch as well. Of the 20 teams who reached the championship game (or series) after the first Soccer Bowl in 1975, 13 played on plastic. Of the 20 losing semi-finalists, 16 played on grass.
Or part-grass. The NASL was no more successful than its predecessors at addressing the familiar problem of laying a soccer pitch over a baseball diamond. The Chicago Sting's relief at leaving Soldier Field was tempered by their need to use baseball parks. Six other clubs shared their home with teams in the major leagues, leaving them to cope with dirt infields and awkward sightlines. Some struggled to accommodate a rectangular pitch, a limitation even the mighty NFL had recognised and compromised over. (When Milwaukee's baseball stadium hosted Packers games the corner of one end zone was lopped off slightly, sending the occasional touchdown-scorer crashing into the perimeter wall.)
The problem was far worse for the NASL. American football required a field exactly 53'/3 yards wide, a distance set nearly a century earlier because it was all Harvard University's new stadium could accommodate. The dimension had been hampering soccer ever since. Rochester played on a pitch 65 yards wide, Minnesota just 63. Though a field of 100 by 50 yards passed muster with FIFA, the minimum for international matches (110 by 70) was - suspiciously - only just met by most teams. Soccer played on pitches marked out for gridiron, with all manner of lines, numbers and graphics stencilled across the field, helped to reinforce notions of inferiority, and even provided moments of low comedy when inexperienced players failed to interpret the lines correctly. It was clear the NASL needed its own homes, or at least more sympathetic ones, but the league was not prepared to plant its roots to such a depth.
Not much thought, and certainly little media attention, was given to this particular growing pain. While some Cosmos players complained about the dimensions and surface of Giants Stadium, the two-time champions were in no mood to leave what they now regarded as their home, frequented as it was by the likes of Henry Kissinger and Mick Jagger. Soccer was hip, and it was hippest in the Meadowlands. They had become an international phenomenon, touring the world and filling stadiums from Indonesia to Ecuador. Almost 40,000 turned up at Stamford Bridge in 1978, the Cosmos boosted by the addition of Cruyff as a guest player, during a season when Chelsea averaged barely half that.
Not all the attention was favourable. FIFA, happy to bless bold experiments like an 18-yard offside line for an anonymously tiny league, had begun to feel differently now that the NASL had apparently grown up. Their strongest objections were to the use of three substitutes instead of two and the 35-yard offside line, both of which contravened its laws of the game (the Shootout and elaborate points system did not). As early as April 1978 FIFA threatened to blacklist the NASL if it did not start toeing the line and warned the USSF that staging the World Cup or other large tournaments would be out of the question. But the league did nothing.
This was not the only source of heat. The huge salaries offered to foreign stars increasingly dwarfed those that even the best native talent could hope for. In the late 1960s and early 1970s pro baseball and basketball players had beefed up their unions (or 'player associations') to gain a much greater share of the television riches. Baseball's salaries more than doubled between 1967 and 1975, while basketball's increased five-fold to an average of $107,000. These facts were not lost on NASL players, particularly native ones. Yet as the 1970s drew to a close they had yet to even obtain union recognition from the owners. Frustration reached simmering point as the 1979 season began. Scarcely had a ball been kicked than the NASL Players Association declared a strike, in the emphatic belief that a majority of colleagues would support it. Indeed, 69 per cent of players had voted for action. Even the Cosmos, who ostensibly stood to gain the least, voted overwhelmingly in favour. But the owners refused to back down and ordered coaches to begin searching for 'replacement' labour as a contingency.
The issue was clouded by the federal government's stance on resident aliens working during a recognised labour stoppage (an issue which certainly set the NASL apart from the country's other professional leagues). At first, it seemed the foreign players might be deported if they continued to work. Then the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, influenced by the Justice Department, changed its mind. Three-quarters of the players crossed picket lines, including the entire Cosmos team, who were in the middle of a three-match road trip. Only a few clubs, such as New England and Portland, found themselves dependent on new labour. When 72,000 turned up for the Cosmos' first home game - a new national record for a regular-season match - any chance the strike had of success evaporated. `A majority of the foreigners really don't care about the league or protection of the players,' concluded Bobby Smith, the Cosmos' union representative who found himself traded to San Diego by season's end. It was true that among the foreign imports who, enthusiastically or otherwise, promoted the game through endless public appearances and freely dispensed advice to young team-mates, there were many who had come to the NASL for an easy life. Spending a few lazy summers earning a hefty paycheque alongside some of international football's household names, before a largely naive public, was a lot more comfortable than toiling in the Football League.
The Cosmos and their nemesis Tampa Bay seemed the likeliest candidates for Soccer Bowl 79 and both turned in strong seasons. Gordon Jago had bravely parted company with most of his British contingent, save for Rodney Marsh and Tottenham full-back John Gorman. Oscar Fabbiani arrived from Chilean club Palestino to worry Chinaglia at the top of the scoring charts and average crowds in Rowdiesland exceeded 27,500. But the reigning champions remained a step ahead of everyone else. They lost just two of their first 14 games and scored in every regularseason match. In fact, the club's greatest enemy seemed to be itself, its list of egocentrics topped by the irrepressible Chinaglia. New York's impressive start did not prevent Eddie Firmani from being sacked just
two months into the season. While the club blamed his departure on a failure to develop the younger players, most believed he had fallen out with the one player he could least afford to. Firmani disappeared, briefly, into the obscurity of the ASL, replaced by a New York college coach, Ray Klivecka, and a 'technical director', Julio Mazzei, whom most had known as Pele's interpreter.
Chinaglia's 26 goals once again made him the league's top scorer, and his temperament was still very much in evidence. During one mid-season practice he jumped into the stands to fight with heckling members of the clean-up crew at Giants Stadium, an altercation which left one man in hospital. As a goalscorer, though, the NASL knew no equal. In 100 matches over four seasons, Chinaglia scored 94 times. Even more impressively, he managed 20 goals in 20 play-off games. The following season he scored seven in a match against Tulsa.
Few expected the Cosmos to come unstuck in their semi-final against Vancouver, even if the Whitecaps had beaten them twice, by considerable margins, during the regular season. Tony Waiters, a former England goalkeeper, had become Vancouver's coach in 1977 after parting company with Plymouth Argyle and quickly replaced a team of Canadians with a blend of experienced and ambitious English pros. In mid-season he acquired Alan Ball from the flagging Philadelphia Fury to solidify an already impressive midfield. Canadian fans responded in record numbers: the Whitecaps' average attendance of 23,000 was nearly twice what it had been two years earlier.
The first leg in Vancouver produced a crowd of nearly 33,000, and ample evidence of the Cosmos' petulance. Carlos Alberto's famously explosive temper earned him suspension from the second leg after he assaulted a linesman and Eskandarian received a similar fate after being sent off in the dying seconds. Trevor Whymark and Willie Johnston scored in a 2-0 Whitecaps' win. Three days later, the return match produced what many regard as the jewel of the league's history. Ahead 2-1, the Cosmos seemed to have the match wrapped up until Johnston headed a last-minute equaliser. Fifteen minutes of extra time produced no further score, leaving the match in the hands of the Shootout, which the Cosmos won. The outcome of the tie now depended on the 30minute Mini-Game. Though both teams had apparent goals disallowed - New York's in the penultimate minute - neither scored. Left with a new Shootout to determine the winner, the Cosmos' hopes came to rest on Nelsi Morais, a seldom-used Brazilian defender, who failed to get his shot away within the five seconds. After three and a half tense hours of soccer of varying descriptions, Vancouver had upset the Cosmos to reach the Soccer Bowl.
As their fans scowled, the losers did little to dispel their reputation as prima donnas, claiming the officiating in Vancouver had been 'inadequate' and bizarrely suggesting that the referee should not have been selected for the match because he was Canadian. 'I think this is the way the league wants it,' Mazzei sniffed. 'I don't think they wanted the Cosmos in the final.' The sense of persecution was acute enough for the club to consider legal action over what they deemed an 'anti-Cosmos feeling' among NASL executives. The league's preparation for Soccer Bowl 79 suggested otherwise. It had again chosen Giants Stadium as the venue, in the reasonable expectation that the home team would be there to fill it. But 16,000 fans who had bought tickets now decided to bin them. Only 50,000 turned out to see Vancouver take on Tampa Bay, who had seen off San Diego in a Mini-Game of their own.
The final thus became something of an anti-climax. Rodney Marsh made his last appearance for the Rowdies, his career coming to an end with an ignominious substitution 12 minutes from time. Vancouver claimed a 2-1 win, but when Woosnam and Kissinger, the league's nominal 'chairman', stepped forward to present the championship trophy, chants of 'Cosmos' filled the air. Boos cascaded from the stands as the Whitecaps attempted their victory lap. It was like, "forget the rest of the NASL, it's only the Cosmos",' Waiters complained.
Is it time to break up the Cosmos? one New York newspaper asked, inviting San Diego manager Hubert Vogelsinger and Woosnam to argue whether the franchise had grown too big for the league. Vogelsinger said yes:
The plan was for a slow, gradual development of the teams and the league, a soundly-based plan that wouldn't cause some owners to lose their shirts. Now the whole thing is upside down. The player market has been totally upset by the Cosmos, whose owners have been going around the world luring players to New York with outrageous salaries ... The creation of a team like the Cosmos violates a basic American axiom - fairness.
Woosnam, not surprisingly, defended the Cosmos partly with references to pro gridiron:
I think the rate of achieving success always varies within the league, as demonstrated with the American Football League in the early 60s. Initially the (Oakland) Raiders and (Kansas City) Chiefs made the league go. Then, ultimately, other teams like the Patriots, Broncos, jets - everyone caught up.
The NASUs catching-up process had a long way to go. While average gates broke 14,000 for the first time, it was not the resounding figure the NASL had anticipated, and a few warning signs began to appear. Crowds had dropped significantly in Minnesota even though the Kicks continued to field one of the strongest teams in the league. In Houston, Finnish-born Timo Liekoski, who had been Al Miller's successor at Hartwick College, had turned the Hurricane into division champions, yet they entertained crowds of only a few thousand. Other big-city clubs - Detroit, New England, Chicago, Dallas and the woeful Philadelphia Fury - played to similarly empty houses. ABC's television ratings compounded the disappointment. Viewing figures for the Soccer Bowl were hurt by the absence of the Cosmos, but even when the club had been featured during the regular season, audiences were small. There was no evidence that the NFL-style divisional line-up had transformed the NASL's appeal, and still no sign that all those children meant anything to the box office.
When the 1980 season began with exactly the same teams from the season before - an unprecedented feat - many assumed the league had stabilised. But five franchises had changed owners and a number of clubs were on shaky ground, some to the tune of several million dollars. Calls for austerity fell on deaf ears. Even the reasonably pragmatic Lamar Hunt found himself signing Bundesliga scoring ace Klaus Toppmoller from Kaiserslautern for $1 million and moving his Tornado back into the enormous Texas Stadium. The Cosmos' thirst for top-class international talent now extended into management. They brought in Hennes Weisweiler, the architect of Borussia Monchengladbach's rise to German football supremacy, who more recently had led Cologne to the West German championship. It was their sixth managerial change in less than four years and, combined with the arrival of Cor van der Hart at Fort Lauderdale, meant British managers were no longer in the majority.
While Toppmoller's contribution in Dallas proved less than spectacular, an influx of Germans had transformed the Tornado, and did much the same for Chicago. The Sting's new hero was Karl-Heinz Granitza, the top scorer for high-flying Hertha Berlin who had arrived on loan in 1978. Dick Advocaat, the future manager of Rangers and the Dutch national team, also joined. They and other imports finally helped the Sting attract a modicum of attention, not only from the city's disinclined soccer fans, but also from success-starved Chicagoans. Inevitably, though, attention centred on the Cosmos, and whether their new manager could exert enough influence on his charges to stop them from self-combusting. With the rampant Chinaglia scoring 32 regular-season goals, an average of one a game, and the elegance of Beckenbauer and Bogicevic, New York swept into Soccer Bowl 80 with little resistance. But in moving Beckenbauer back to his familiar libero role, the manager had affronted Carlos Alberto. Left out of the 3-0 win over Fort Lauderdale in Soccer Bowl 80, Alberto vowed never to play for the club again. The following season he joined the California Surf.
Kaiser Franz departed too, back to the Bundesliga to win another title, this time with Hamburg. Though his spell in New York drew plaudits - he made the league's all-star team in each of his four seasons - he was not the successor to Pele the club had hoped for. Beckenbauer considered his style of play too subtle for his new audience:
The Americ
ans loved it when a guy dribbled around three or four people. Then they would be very nice and disregard that the fifth man took the ball away from the guy. They'd cheer like crazy. In Europe, you'd be whistled out of the stadium for that kind of foolishness. Reversing the flow of play, building a rhythm, consistency ... these are harder things to get excited about.
Of course, one could no more blame American fans for their lack of sophistication than blame Germans for not understanding how a baseball pitcher worked the strike zone. But Beckenbauer's point was largely lost on an American soccer media which saw little point in insulting its audience, regardless of how accurate his claims were.
The 1980 season proved to be the NASL's watershed. Sonny Werblin's Diplomats, whose average attendance had exceeded 19,000 - far more than Washington had produced before - lost $5 million in two years. Jimmy Hill later claimed the entire three-year budget of his Detroit Express, about $3 million, had been spent in the first 12 months. In total, the 24 teams were said to have lost about $30 million over the season. Average crowds increased only marginally - in New York they fell by 4,000 - and television coverage was a flop. ABC declared it was no longer interested in the NASL and would show only the Soccer Bowl in 1981.
Owners spent the winter squabbling over strategy. Werblin advocated consolidation, weeding out the weaker teams and smaller markets and giving the Cosmos more of a run for their money. Clandestinely, some of his colleagues agreed, and even hatched plans for a 12-team league. But there would be no breakaway and, since decisions to reduce the number of participants required the consent of all the owners, no radical restructuring. So Werblin pulled out. The Diplomats turned in their franchise certificate, with Rochester and Houston following suit. The Lancers ended an 11-year affiliation with the league, their demise hastened by competing sets of owners seeking to gain control of the team. One faction had hired Ray Klivecka from the Cosmos; the other sacked him just hours after a match against Toronto.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 26