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

by David Wangerin

  These were far from the only losses. The New England Tea Men, who in 1979 had been forced out of their NFL home, returned in 1980 but under a restrictive lease which forced them to play most of their matches on Saturday afternoons or Monday nights. When gates promptly slumped the owners moved the club to Florida, christening them (with little regard for history or logic) the Jacksonville Tea Men. In Philadelphia, new coach Eddie Firmani sent the club's top scorer, former Scottish international striker David Robb, to Vancouver, and loaned the charismatic Frank Worthington to Tampa Bay. Neither was adequately replaced, consigning the Fury to another last-place finish. With gates now approaching 2,000, the showbiz owners baled out, selling the franchise to a Canadian brewery, who moved it to Montreal. The Memphis Rogues, who had once sought to be the second franchise in New York - a move inevitably vetoed by the Cosmos under the league's `territorial rights' provisions - also fled the country after being bought by Nelson Skalbania, a self made Vancouver millionaire who seemed to collect sports franchises as a hobby (he would later be convicted of embezzlement). His Calgary Boomers, with Al Miller as manager, went bust after a year.

  Though fingers were pointed in all sorts of directions, many of them were suddenly aimed at Woosnam. Owners had been happy to collect the handsome entrance fees that rapid expansion had brought, but they were less thrilled with seeing their clubs playing before four-digit crowds, particularly when wage bills had soared. Those who did not share the commissioner's obsession with the NFL and network television pointed to the survival of ice hockey's NHL for decades with minimal national television exposure.

  'Americanisation' was another bone of contention. A generation of Americans had now grown up with soccer balls at their feet, yet none had really progressed to the highest level. The Cosmos had touted a Denverborn college product, Rick Davis, as the country's next superstar, and featured him in almost all their matches in 1979. But injury limited his appearances in 1980, and the best American performance that season probably came from St Louisan Steve Moyers, whose 13 goals in 26 matches for California didn't even place him among the top ten. The NASL had increased the minimum requirement for North Americans on the pitch from two to three, but it was a change most clubs easily accommodated with their cadre of naturalised citizens. In their semifinal play-off with the Cosmos, the Aztecs fielded a team consisting entirely of foreign-born players, while Fort Lauderdale's Soccer Bowl 80 representatives contained just one player born in the US.

  This did not point towards a fruitful national team, and neither did the 4-0 defeat with which the US began its qualification for the 1980 Olympics in Mexico (where the teams lined up to the strains of the German national anthem instead of The Star Spangled Banner). They ended up qualifying for Moscow through the back door, after Mexico were banned for fielding professional players, but never played there because of the American boycott over the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

  In 1976, the federation had hired only its second full-time manager, Ukrainian-born Walt Chyzowych (brother of Gene, who had been in temporary charge a few years earlier), naming him to lead both the Olympic and full national team. Denied a trip to Moscow, Chyzowych focused on qualification for the 1982 World Cup, which began only a few months after the Olympics. With 24 nations now invited, including two from Concacaf, the United States no longer needed to finish ahead of Mexico, a hopeful note soon to be soured through the usual arcane machinations of the USSF.

  Some were baffled as to how Chyzowych had managed to keep his job after the US failed to reach Argentina four years earlier with a reasonably well-prepared team. USSF officials had even lobbied Standard Liege to release Hungarian-born Gyula Visnyei, whom NASL fans would soon recognise as Julie Veee, probably the only player in the world whose name featured three consecutive identical vowels. Before Veee's arrival, the Americans had taken a point in Vancouver against Canada and held Mexico to a goalless draw, with the USSF once again effectively conceding home advantage by staging the game in Los Angeles (the crowd of 33,171 set a national team record). The group ended with all three teams on the same number of points. Mexico advanced to the final qualifying round with a superior goal difference, but Concacaf ordered a play-off to separate the other two - in Haiti, three days before Christmas.

  The federation had begun to pay attention to all those reports it had written which implored its World Cup teams to be given time to train and play together. In preparation for the showdown in Port-au-Prince it arranged a series of test matches, including three against the full Haitian team, all of which ended goalless. After witnessing Canada's feeble 3-0 warm-up defeat to that country, a confident Chyzowych boasted: 'I think the score could be 3-0 to us.' Instead, the Canadians took a surprise first-half lead when one of their efforts struck an American defender, then a post, then the crossbar and then the net. The US's familiar lack of scoring punch was exposed as Canada marked Veee out of the game and scored two late goals to win 3-0.

  Three years later Chyzowych was still at the helm and the USSF was more than $1 million richer from sponsors such as Coca-Cola, which had invested heavily in the nascent World Youth Cup (the Under-20 championships). The US played host to the Concacaf qualifying round of the 1981 competition, the first time it had staged an international tournament of any consequence, and qualified for the finals, where the team flopped. When it came to qualifying for the 1982 World Cup the federation again contributed to the team's downfall, this time by securing a sponsorship deal requiring national team players to wear Adidas boots for a preparatory European tour. Many players refused, since they were under contract to rival firms, and had always kept such money for themselves. When they demanded compensation, USSF officials flew over from New York, told the players no more money would be made available and advised those who were unhappy to pack their bags. Bobby Smith did. Those who stayed were still divided, over what amounted to a few dollars a day, and a helpless Chyzowych found his plans in tatters.

  The tour drove a wedge through the team. The US began qualification with a damaging 0-0 draw against Canada in Fort Lauderdale, then lost the return in Vancouver, which all but eliminated them before they had even faced the Mexicans. A 5-1 rout in Mexico City doused remaining hopes and Chyzowych bore the brunt of the criticism. His regime had generally produced defensive, regimented teams rife with poor discipline (three sendings-off in nine qualifying matches, two of them for the captain, Steve Pecher). In most other countries the dismissal of a national team manager who had failed in two World Cup campaigns would be inevitable, yet the USSF seemed to think progress had been made. Less than a year earlier, the performance of the Olympic team led Chyzowych to boast: `People think we are bad, but I've got news for you: look out for us, because we've arrived.' Now, in the aftermath of Mexico City, he was left to mutter: `Let's not have illusions - we're not even close.' At times his team selection reeked of desperation. He played Davis, a midfielder with the Cosmos, at centre-forward against Canada, then moved him to sweeper for the Mexico game. The Cosmos stepped forward to accuse Chyzowych of destroying progress, with Chinaglia, never short of an opinion, leading demands for his resignation.

  Chyzowych retorted that the NASL hardly offered much ofa foundation for his team, since clubs had failed to develop American players. Nor did it help to have a Cosmos official appear in the dressing room immediately after the Canada match, tickets in hand, to take players away for a winter tour. The coach duly departed, but his points remained valid. For all the NASL owners' pronouncements, their attitude towards a foreign competition which earned them no revenue and merely ran the risk of injuring their employees could be easily surmised (some clubs even bridled at excusing players from a training session in order to play for their country).

  While the Cosmos featured more native players in their team than most, they also stood accused of hoarding American talent, acquiring players just to keep them away from other clubs. In 1980 they signed a Maryland high school prospect, Daryl Gee, tipping him to become America's first black
soccer star, then waited two years before putting him in the team. Larry Hulcer, named the league's Rookie of the Year in 1979 with Los Angeles, was traded to New York in 1980 only to sit on the bench. By 1981 he was out of the league altogether. Boris Bandov, Angelo DiBernardo and David Brcic were important parts of Chyzowych's set-up, but with the Cosmos all three were usually second-choice.

  If the NASL was failing to bring along American players, it was faring even worse with American coaches. Including the NPSL of 1967, 112 men had been in charge of NASL teams for at least part of a season, yet only ten were American-born and three of those had been in charge only briefly. The country remained pitifully short of quality coaches. Yet there was little incentive for them to leave the relative safety of a college empire, often built over many years, only to discover, as Ray Klivecka had at the Cosmos, they had very little influence on team affairs.

  NASL budgets now started to tighten, and by 1981 most teams found themselves struggling. The league could have made things easier by requiring them to use more American players, but it still believed imports created a more attractive product. Consequently, while some marquee names departed, new talent continued to arrive as if nothing was wrong. San Diego signed the Polish international Kazimierz Denya; Fort Lauderdale picked up three-time South American Footballer of the Year Elias Figueroa of Chile and West German international Bernd Holzenbein; and Montreal brought Manchester United's Gordon Hill back into the league after a five-year absence (he had played for Chicago in 1976). Brian Kidd left Bolton Wanderers for Atlanta while Steve Daley, Britain's record signing two years earlier, joined Seattle for nearly $1 million. No one seemed willing to contemplate what might lie ahead - certainly not the Cosmos, who were said to earn $1.2 million a year from their close-season international tours, and whose participation in a `Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup' during the early part of the season drew more than 60,000 for a Giants Stadium double-header involving Vancouver, Roma and Manchester City.

  Sensing a loss ofinterest, some owners -among them Freddie Goodwin, now president of the Minnesota Kicks - pushed for more radical changes to the game. Winter meetings saw wild ideas bandied about by Goodwin and others, including an even more confusing scoring system which allowed teams to claim 15 points by winning a match with at least three goals in open play. This was voted down, as were proposals to widen the goals, or even narrow the posts, reduce matches to 70 minutes to permit time-outs for coaching (and television commercials) and, interestingly, to restrict back-passes to the goalkeeper.

  Much of the reluctance to experiment further could be traced to threats from FIFA, which remained unyielding towards its laws. The NASL's rejoinder was that it produced more goals - 3.37 a game - than any other league in the world (the English First Division average in 1979-80 was 2.51, but the Bundesliga was up to 3.39 a year later) and attributed this in part to its 35-yard line and extra substitution. By 1981 FIFA had grown tired of such rationalising. It demanded the NASL scrap the two changes by March 31 or the federation would face expulsion.

  But the NASL counted in its ranks plenty of headstrong owners who did not take kindly to ultimatums from foreign lands. The season approached without any changes. Caught in the middle was the USSF, which pleaded with the league not to take FIFA for fools'. Finally, with the first of the new season's matches just hours away, the NASL capitulated - if only for a fortnight. On April 9 it received a message from FIFA President Joao Havelange which it claimed gave the league permission to revert to its own rules for the rest of the season. That was debatable - the message was confusingly worded and led some USSF officials to claim the NASL misconstrued it on purpose.

  The NASL did rescind the two rules for 1982, and restricted most of its future tinkering to infrastructure. The NFL-style divisional formats and the Mini-Game were scrapped in favour of five divisions and best-ofthree play-off series; a 32-match regular season eliminated only six of its 21 clubs. But none of this halted the decline in attendances and growing uncertainty over the league's very existence. Almost every club reported a drop in gates: the Cosmos were down to less than 35,000, their worst average in four seasons, and Minnesota's had alarmingly fallen below 17,000. Vancouver, its list of goalscorers headed by 20-year-old Peter Beardsley, lost 3,500 a game after four straight years of increases. The Aztecs moved out of the Rose Bowl and back into the Coliseum, only to find even smaller crowds - 2,300 at one point - watching a reasonably successful team under the former Brazil manager Claudio Coutinho. Neither party would survive another year: the Aztecs folded and soon afterwards Coutinho drowned in a fishing accident off Ipanema Beach.

  The happy exception to the misery was Montreal, where the new Manic played to enthusiastic crowds which grew steadily over the course of a promising season. A play-off encounter with Chicago drew more than 58,000, better than anything the Cosmos could manage that year. The Manic finished with the second-highest attendance in the league, a badly needed sign that all hope was not necessarily lost. Chicago ended the season as champions, but the city only took an interest once a title loomed into view: 39,600 saw the deciding match of their play-off semifinal with San Diego. At Soccer Bowl 81 - held outside the US for the first time, in Toronto - fewer than 37,000 saw the Sting beat New York in a Shootout after a 0-0 draw, becoming Chicago's first professional sports champions since 1963. The match took place on a Saturday night (Toronto's Canadian Football League team occupied the stadium the next day) and since the television contract specified a Sunday kick-off, ABC did not show it live. Still, 7,000 fans greeted the Sting on their return from Canada as soccer reached the front page of that city's newspapers for perhaps the first time. The adulation would prove short-lived.

  In fact, the afterglow began to fade the next day, when three clubs announced they were folding and two others agreed to merge. The deaths of the flagging Atlanta Chiefs and California Surfwere no great surprise, but the demise of Washington set alarm bells ringing. After Gulf & Western's withdrawal the Diplomats had been rescued by Jimmy Hill and other owners of the Detroit Express, who had folded that club after three seasons of empty seats. In spite of the losses incurred in Michigan, Hill daringly invested 1500,000 of Coventry City's money in his new team. But with Cruyff playing only five times in 1981 and the club stuck in the same division with New York and Montreal, the Dips struggled. By June they were up for sale and in August the New York Times reported that Hill was virtually bankrupt (his son Duncan, the club's general manager, claimed: `All we have left is our home'). Hill angrily denied this, insisting he had lost only the money he had earned in Saudi Arabia, and that Coventry's stake in the Diplomats - a figure described by City's secretary as 'sizeable' - was only equivalent to `a moderate player'. But it was gone, and so was the franchise.

  So, too, were the Minnesota Kicks, who only three years earlier had averaged more than 30,000 but whose 1981 season was played out against a backdrop of uncertainty. Their multipurpose home, shared with the baseball Twins and gridiron Vikings, was about to be demolished - eventually making way for the largest shopping mall in the world - and the club had not secured a right to use the new domed facility being built in central Minneapolis. Chairman Ralph Sweet, a former executive at Notts County, accused the Vikings of complicity, but the stadium was only half the story. The ticket discounts and giveaways had failed to create the expected mass of loyal fans, or any income. The club's last home match, a play-off defeat by Fort Lauderdale, took place in front of fewer than 12,000.

  The cruellest blow of all came with the demise of the Dallas Tornado, lone remnant of the league's first season. Lamar Hunt's pleas for austerity had fallen on deaf ears. His suggestion that each club's losses be kept to a maximum of $400,000 contrasted sharply with the $35 million the league was said to have lost in 1981. The Tornado's season, in which they won just five matches, rivalled the Kap/Spurgeon regime for futility. Merging Dallas with Tampa Bay, Hunt became a Rowdies director for a time, but in effectively folding his tent the man who had helped prop up the league duri
ng its darkest hours in 1969 and who had always forecast sunshine for soccer, now sent dark clouds scuttling across the skies. There would be no more expansion teams in the NASL, only casualties.

  Where had all the fans gone? Why was the league losing its appeal when soccer continued to encroach on the conventional pastimes of American youth? The league's exposure had never been greater - ABC might have all but given up on it, but two national cable networks and numerous local stations had put more matches on the air than ever before. The summer of 1981 had even produced a strike by major league baseball players, handing the NASL seven weeks of undivided summer attention. But the league had neither been able to attract bored baseball fans nor increase the size of its TV audience. Pro soccer seemed to have been a fad. Attending a match had always carried a certain novelty appeal, particularly when tickets were cheap and the atmosphere was festive. While the NASL produced a clique of native fans who warmed to the game, and even embraced it, the result wasn't nearly enough to fill bigleague stadiums. The awful truth was that most of the 77,691 who had packed Giants Stadium that famous August evening in 1977 were never potential season ticket-holders. Many, in fact, were not likely to pay to watch a soccer match again.

  All of which left Phil Woosnam in a precarious position, particularly after his disastrous decision to play the Soccer Bowl on Saturday night left the league without live TV coverage of its showcase game. Though he stayed on as commissioner for another season, the owners created a new post of league president which effectively displaced him. The position was filled by Howard Samuels, a 62-year-old New York entrepreneur whose greatest sporting success had been as chairman of the city's new and hugely successful Off-Track Betting Corporation. 'It's absolutely true that soccer hasn't made it commercially here,' Samuels admitted, 'but I'm sure it will make it - and I say to the NFL, watch out because ten years from now we'll be the leaders, on the field and on television.'