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

by David Wangerin

  Only a few months after France claimed its gold medal in the Rose Bowl, the NASL kicked what proved to be its last ball, casting big-league soccer into the wilderness. By 1987 the humble Western Soccer Alliance had stretched itself as far south as San Diego, but its abrupt, ten-match season, playing to crowds often bettered by local college teams, was little more than a modest refuge for those fans and players who found the MISL's idea of soccer wanting. In May, Toye announced that a new league would begin on the east coast in 1988. Yet the enterprise, a third incarnation of the American Soccer League, was of limited ambition and not surprisingly found itself playing to rows of empty seats and indifference from the national media.

  Yet however depressing the professional collapse might have been, it did not leave the US where it had started. Too many youngsters had grown up with the game - an entire generation - and for some of the most talented it had become their preferred sport. With improved funding, facilities, and coaching helping to expand the talent pool, by the mid-Eighties some of the best players were able to contemplate a modest career overseas. During the decade, their ranks grew, helping to sustain the credibility of the American game and ultimately to bring it back home.

  As early as 1974, Bobby Smith of the Cosmos had spent a winter with the Irish side Dundalk. The Cosmos' reserve goalkeeper David Brcic went to Morton in 1978, where one Scottish newspaper named him 'player of the day' after his debut against Motherwell. But these were loan spells rather than career decisions. Things were different by 1987 when the country's top college player, John Kerr, a Canadian striker who had helped Duke University to its first national championship, chose to pursue his career with England's semi-professional Harrow Borough. (Kerr's father, an eight-year veteran of the NASL, had been born in Glasgow, which allowed his son to play without a work permit.) Kerr eventually signed for Portsmouth, but after a few appearances and a loan spell at Peterborough he returned home and joined the ASL, leaving as his English legacy the doubtful honour of being the first substitute in the First Division to be substituted himself (against Watford in September 1987).

  That same year another top collegian, Paul Caligiuri of UCLA, signed for Hamburg, a feat momentous enough to be featured by Sports Illustrated -though apparently not momentous enough for the magazine to spell his surname correctly. Having been named the Most Valuable Player in the Western Soccer Alliance the previous summer, Caligiuri was invited to play alongside Diego Maradona and others at a benefit match at the Rose Bowl, an event which put him in touch with Hamburg officials. Arriving in Germany he found himself loaned to lower-division Meppen, where he played creditably for two seasons. Not until 1995 did he crack the Bundesliga - the first American to do so - with Hamburg's local rivals St Pauli.

  Both Caligiuri and Kerr featured in the US team which seemed to stand a fair chance of reaching the 1986 World Cup finals, particularly since Mexico qualified automatically as hosts. But again the campaign ended in failure. It began nervously on a pitch devoid of grass in the Dutch Antilles, where the Americans produced few chances and came home with a pitiful goalless draw. In the return leg their modest opponents finished the match with only nine men, but kept the score at 0-0 until the second half, when the US eventually found the net four times.

  In the second round the Americans were drawn against Costa Rica and Trinidad & Tobago, with the winners progressing to a final group of three. Two victories and a draw left them needing only a point at home to Costa Rica, but they were betrayed by a rare error from veteran goalkeeper Arnie Mausser, whose failure to reach a low cross yielded the only goal of the game. Moreover, the largely hostile crowd of 11,800 in Torrance, California, provided a familiar lack of home advantage. 'We were down in the locker room at half-time and we could hear the music,' one player recounted. 'We were wondering, "What the hell is this? Are we in Costa Rica, or what?"' George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times:

  In the litter of empty soda cans and empty dreams, Gregg Thompson had a question burning across his face. The young defender from Minnesota strode across the rudimentary locker room and blurted at the American soccer coach, Alkis Panagoulias: 'When are we ever going to play a home game?' The answer from Panagoulias was equally blunt: 'Never.'

  Next time, a USSF official promised, they would play in Alaska. Yet the defeat had much less to do with the fans than with the collapse of the NASL and rise of the MISL, a lethal combination which riddled the team with players ill-equipped for international duty. Panagoulias refused to be drawn into talking about the indoor league and its commissioner, 'because I'll say bad things about them'. Three of the starting line-up in Torrance still played for university teams but the others - apart from Mausser, who was without a club at all - were beholden to the MISL.

  The ignoble exit came just two days after the Heysel Stadium disaster, which, combined with the fire at Bradford City's ground a few weeks earlier, prompted the American media to develop a certain road-crash fascination with the perils of soccer, reporting in some detail on the events in Belgium and the strange breed of fans who were drawn to such occasions. Though one sociologist had counted more than 300 sportrelated riots in the US over a 12-year period, and after-match disturbances on the streets of Detroit the previous autumn had visibly marred the Tigers' World Series victory, such domestic outbreaks rarely received the kind of sensational coverage reserved for soccer's woes. The game was being kicked when it was down. Even ESPN, which had secured the rights to the crucial Costa Rica qualifier, opted to show it on videotape. On the east coast its broadcast ended just before 2.30am, leaving only the odd insomniac to observe how the Americans had dominated play but once again lacked a clinical finisher.

  Its hopes of a World Cup payday dashed, the impoverished federation declined to renew Panagoulias's contract, and that of its director of coaching, Karl-Heinz Heddergott, the former manager of Cologne. No full-time successors were appointed. Panagoulias's eventual replacement, Lothar Osiander, continued to work as a waiter in a San Francisco restaurant. Born in Germany, Osiander had led the GreekAmerican club of San Francisco to Open Cup success the year before his appointment. Now he had to get the Olympic team to South Korea with virtually the same players who had failed in the World Cup. The IOC's increasingly relaxed stance on amateurism had effectively turned the US's qualifying rounds into full internationals.

  Though the state of Alaska was not called upon, the federation did schedule most of its home fixtures in a small, soccer-specific facility just outside St Louis, where appreciable numbers of visiting fans were less likely to venture. The biggest transformation in America's fortunes came in the form of Brent Goulet, the Western Soccer Alliance's Most Valuable Player that summer. Heralded as the country's first natural goalscorer since Billy Gonsalves - for those who had heard of him - Goulet's finishing scaled impressive heights during qualifying, and his hat-trick against Trinidad & Tobago was only the third an American had managed in 80 years of Olympic competition.

  Yet the team struggled at first, losing the away leg of their first-round tie with Canada 2-0. Only an unlikely 3-0 win in Missouri put them through to the group stage. Goulet complemented his hat-trick with another two goals against El Salvador as his team went on a rare scoring spree, netting 13 in four games against the Salvadorans and Trinidad & Tobago to qualify comfortably. By that time the ambitious young striker had left Portland for Bournemouth of the English Second Division. '1 was a first-round pick in the MISL draft, but that wasn't what I wanted,' he declared. 'You don't know how much I love the outdoor game.' His stay at Dean Court was brief. As with Caligiuri in Hamburg and Kerr at Portsmouth, Goulet found it difficult to force his way into the first team. Briefly loaned to Fourth Division Crewe (for whom he scored three goals in three games), he found greater success in Germany, where he remained for several seasons.

  The American performances in Seoul (or, more precisely, Taegu and Pusan) were respectable, if not stunning: a 1-1 draw with Argentina which they might have won; a goalless encounter with the hosts, play
ed to an often eerie silence from a crowd of 30,000; and a comprehensive 4-2 defeat by the eventual winners, the Soviet Union, by which time Goulet's form had faded badly enough to relegate him to the bench.

  Five MISL clubs folded in 1988, suggesting the wheels were starting to fall off Foreman's juggernaut, but it did little to help proper soccer. Though the two emerging pro leagues, one on either coast, agreed to pit their top teams against each other in a sort of national championship, interest remained modest. The following year they merged and took to calling themselves the American Professional Soccer League - although 13 of the 22 clubs promptly folded. Officials promoted this as a necessary housecleaning, but there was only so much attention a league devoid of franchises in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other metropolises could command. While APSL officials remained convinced that big-time soccer needed to be built slowly from the ground up, the way the major leagues in other sports had done, critics argued that sport in America didn't work that way any more. This, they insisted, was a country which now responded only to the big time. Television's obsession with the major leagues had helped to decimate the number of minor-league baseball clubs and semi-professional gridiron leagues, and it would hardly be any kinder to a modest soccer undertaking.

  There was at least one big-time event that US soccer could look to for salvation, and as the Eighties progressed the chances of landing the World Cup developed into a near-certainty. With Europe due to stage the 1990 tournament and the blossoming of Japanese football still some years off, American competition for 1994 was limited to two shaky prospects. Brazil had submitted a proposal which its own government refused to support, while Morocco's stadiums existed largely on paper. Colombia's embarrassing withdrawal as hosts of the 1986 tournament left FIFA in no mood to take any chances on bids backed by doubtful economies or rickety infrastructure. The Americans, on the other hand, had included in their application a supportive letter from President Reagan - a feat which one USSF official claimed had 'stunned' both the selection committee and the international media - and a shortlist of 15 of the country's best gridiron facilities, all apparently soccer-sympathetic. So FIFA's announcement, on Independence Day, 1988, seemed a foregone conclusion. In the weeks leading up to the decision, American officials oozed confidence, although as it turned out their bid defeated the North Africans by only ten votes to seven. Yet however predictable, the decision was still momentous enough to reach the front page of the New York Times.

  The success of the tournament, on the other hand, was far from certain. This was a nation which had not qualified for a World Cup in 38 years, and one without a genuine professional league. Most of its inhabitants exhibited at best indifference and at worst cold-blooded hostility to what they still saw as a foreign game, one they had never seen played to any standard. FIFA, with options limited, found itself committed to a tournament that would have to be run in part as a brazen promotional tool.

  It did not take long for cynics to flinch at the thought of how the game might be compromised for the sake of the native population. Rumours of larger goals, of play being split into quarters, of time-outs and other indigenous fetishes soon appeared in the international press. FIFA's primary concern, though, was not to win over the American infidels. Nor was it, as its secretary Sepp Blatter claimed, to help get a professional league off the ground - had this been true, FIFA would not have summarily rejected the US bid for the 1986 tournament, at the very time the NASL was listing. On the contrary, the choice of host reflected the prevailing attitude towards top-drawer sport. As one member of the Brazilian delegation noted: 'A lot of people can make a lot of money if the games take off.'

  A lot of people had made a lot of money in 1984, when the Olympics came to Los Angeles and the IOC had to rewrite its constitution to sanction a privatised organising committee. The Games quickly became a hostage to commercial enterprise. Corporate tie-ins and media deals left the LA organisers with a 'surplus' of $200 million (from which the president ofthe organising committee, Peter Ueberroth, awarded himself a bonus of $475,000). The following year, the IOC began selling the rights to display its five interlocking rings on nearly anything that could be bought. With scarcely a whimper of protest, the Olympics became an event geared to realising maximum commercial gain. FIFA had been heading in a similar direction since the election of Joao Havelange as president in 1974. The 1986 World Cup turned a profit of more than $30 million, but in the hands of powerful Yankee entrepreneurs such a figure was bound to pale.

  On the field, reaching Italy in 1990 was now imperative if the US were to carry any credibility as a host. The Americans began their qualifying campaign in Jamaica with Goulet missing through injury. After a worryingly impotent 0-0 display in Kingston, the team was left needing a return-leg victory to avoid an embarrassingly early exit. Three weeks later, with less than half an hour to play in St Louis, the Americans stood on the brink of elimination, their opponents clinging to a 1-1 draw. Only a late flurry of goals, sparked by the second-half insertion of Hugo Perez, produced a comfortable 5-1 victory - and a radical change to the operation of the national team. Five of the starting line-up in Missouri, including captain Rick Davis, were without a club, a situation largely created by the contraction of the MISL. Within hours of the victory the USSF announced that it would sign players to contracts of its own, assuring them of a modest salary and committing them to the national team, though still allowing them to be loaned to other clubs. `Playing regularly on the highest level is of the utmost importance for the players,' maintained Werner Fricker - an aphorism uttered by many of his predecessors which, at last, seemed more than simply rhetoric.

  However different it may have been to the way other national teams operated, the arrangement had its advantages, notably in guaranteeing the availability of key talent. It also enabled the US to create a busy fixture list, with a team as experimental as it wished. The month before the draw in Kingston had seen American teams of varying strengths contend with a frenzied schedule. One squad represented the US at a tournament in South Korea while another was engaged in a series at home, playing seven times in a fortnight. Four dozen players earned caps.

  This was too much for a part-time manager, particularly one unwilling to give up his day job. Osiander resigned, and the USSF handed the reins to its Under-20 coach, 47-year-old Hungarian-born Bob Gansler. Gansler's father had been imprisoned by the Soviets during the Second World War before the family fled to Germany, then to Wisconsin. As a teenager, the young immigrant tried his hand as a baseball catcher before earning a master's degree in German and teaching history at a local high school. His performances at centre-half for Milwaukee's Bavarian club helped earn him the captaincy of the 1964 and 1968 Olympic teams and several international call-ups, and in 1968 he joined the NASL's Chicago Mustangs. By 1984 Gansler had taken charge ofthe team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a position he was now forced to relinquish.

  Though well known in the guarded circles of the USSF, Gansler's international pedigree was limited. Admittedly, his Under-20s had reached the 1989 World Youth Cup finals in Saudi Arabia and finished second to Brazil in their group, as good a performance as the US had ever produced. He had also filled in for Osiander when the manager couldn't be excused from his restaurant work. Yet the bulk of his coaching experience had been at college level, where he had been only moderately successful. This was perfectly acceptable to Werner Fricker, who ruled out an approach for a foreign manager and cited Gansler as the only logical candidate. It was also good news for Walt Chyzowych, whose failings as national manager had not stopped Fricker, a fellow Philadelphian, appointing him as national director of coaching. Gansler and Chyzowych had often worked together, most visibly in getting the US to the 1981 World Youth Cup. Now the duo would lead the senior team through its most conspicuous campaign yet.

  The US got their best break before the group stage even began, with the expulsion of Mexico for fraudulently using overage players at the 1989 World Youth Cup (a breach helpfull
y exposed by the Mexican federation's yearbook, which listed their real birthdates). Conspiracy theorists suggested FIFA's harsh punishment was designed to help the Americans. If so, they certainly looked as though they needed it. Over the next 12 months the US stumbled through a qualifying group lacking not only the Mexicans but also Canada, who had been eliminated by Guatemala in a preliminary round.

  Thrust into the unusual role of favourites, the Americans' incoherent and sluggish play produced a string of disappointing results, while fans struggled to provide the team with any sort of inspiration. After losing 1-0 in Costa Rica, the US found itself playing the return fixture before 1,000 or so visiting fans among a capacity crowd of 8,500 in St Louis. The raucous support for the visiting Ticos even produced pleas from the public address announcer to 'remind the players what country the game is being played in'. The hosts produced little worth shouting about, escaping with what one writer termed a 'nightmare victory' only after goalkeeper David Vanole blocked a last-minute penalty. Two weeks later, an 88th-minute goal handed Trinidad & Tobago a share of the points in California, a match again enlivened by boisterous support for the visitors.

  Gansler came under fire for his team selection and ultra-cautious tactics, which favoured protecting narrow leads and restrained counterattacks. In fairness, he was hampered by injuries to key players, including captain Davis, whose knee troubles put a sorry end to a frustrating career, and Goulet's alarming loss of form. There were other irritations: a bootendorsement dispute turned acrimonious enough for several players to file suit against the federation and a feud between Fricker and Hugo Perez resulted in one of the team's most gifted players refusing a new national team contract in favour of one with Red Star Paris of the French Second Division. ('Fricker told me to take it or leave it,' Perez complained. 'It was like he didn't need me.')