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

by David Wangerin

  The amendments were slight compared with the rule changes American college soccer would soon consider in response to its own anxieties. Fewer than 4,000 attended the 1991 NCAA Division I final, the event's 14th consecutive year of four-digit gates. 'Our game is dying in almost every spot in the world,' claimed Cliff McCrath, a university coach and secretary of the NCAA's ever-industrious soccer rules committee. The means by which McCrath's committee took it upon itself to resuscitate the game were scarcely credible.

  It proposed a battery of radical and horribly ill-conceived rule changes, including: restricting defensive walls to four players at free-kicks; no more than five players in the penalty area at corners; no offside once the ball passed a 35-yard line; and even a remedial NASL-style 'shoot-out' for any foul which thwarted a goalscoring opportunity. College soccer had already sanctioned a time-out in the middle of each half for matches with a television audience, and rescinded an earlier attempt to restrict substitutions. Now they threatened to create virtually a new sport. A flood of protest thwarted the most radical proposals - at which point the rules committee defended itself by claiming it was only playing devil's advocate.

  It was hard to take college soccer seriously. The 1989 championship final sent the Universities of Virginia and Santa Clara of California to New Jersey in the middle of December. Under arctic conditions (a temperature of minus six degrees and a wind chill of minus 23) and only a day after each had won their semi-finals, the teams shivered to a 1-1 draw, then contested four additional 15-minute periods without further score. With the rules committee apparently oblivious to the fact that even staid FIFA now settled some of its matches on penalties, the result was declared a draw and the sides shared the championship. The entire gelid afternoon had been a complete waste of time.

  While the college system continued to spawn many of the country's top players - Meola, among others, had played in the icy championship - their international pedigree was still in doubt. The prospect of several abbreviated seasons of college soccer compared unfavourably with learning the profession elsewhere. Meola left Virginia prematurely to try his luck overseas, while the most Ramos could say about his days at North Carolina State University was that `maybe my workrate got better'.

  The 1990 World Cup paved the way for many of the best performers on the national team to play in Europe. Ramos signed for UE Figueres of the Spanish second division. Midfielder John Harkes was sold to Sheffield Wednesday, full-back John Doyle played for Orgryte in Sweden, Caligiuri returned to Germany and Steve Trittschuh joined Sparta Prague, where he became the first American to play in the European Cup. Yet the young man for whom the greatest success had been predicted, Meola, soon ended up back home. Unable to attract the widely predicted interest of Italian clubs, he ended up with Watford and was released. All the signs I have received suggested he is not near the mark,' claimed manager Steve Perryman.

  The trickle of American players moving overseas would have huge ramifications in the long-term, but the most immediately significant event that year took place at a hotel in Florida, two months after the team returned home from Italy. The USSF's lack of progress on the 1994 tournament - in particular, its inability to sell the event to corporate America and the dour, intransigent leadership of Werner Fricker - had infuriated FIFA to breaking point. In Orlando that August Fricker stood for re-election as president, and the world governing body took a sudden, unprecedented interest in the outcome.

  Initially there was only one opposition candidate, Paul Stiehl, one of the engineers of the 1994 bid, a former friend of Fricker now turned bitter rival. Stiehl placed the blame for the lack of World Cup progress squarely on Fricker's shoulders, even going so far as to accuse him of financial improprieties (an odd claim, given that Stiehl was the federation treasurer). Ten days before the election, though, a third entrant announced his candidacy: Alan Rothenberg, the man responsible for the 1984 Olympic tournament which had so impressed FIFA, but a rank alien to the cliquish USSF. Claiming to possess a 'fresh perspective', Rothenberg made his election platform abundantly clear. The next World Cup was America's last chance to become a soccer nation, and it was being squandered. 'I have maintained my relationship with FIFA,' he declared, 'and they continually express their concern of the USSF leadership. It's just not up to the task.'

  Predictably, the presence of a high-powered Los Angeles lawyer among the federation's old-country stalwarts and grass-roots enthusiasts attracted suspicion. Yet behind Rothenberg - whose association with soccer included vice-presidency of the short-lived Los Angeles Wolves and two seasons as part-owner of the LA Aztecs - stood a number of familiar and influential figures: the kingpin of the LA Olympics, Peter Ueberroth, folk hero Kyle Rote jnr and even Pele. The biggest name of all emerged on the morning of the election when Stiehl, given the floor to address the delegates, revealed that he had received an early-morning phone call from a FIFA official asking him to stand down and back Rothenberg. Stiehl refused and, complaining of a 'hostile takeover' of the federation, made a last-minute plea to the voters not to 'surrender the castle'. A sympathiser expressed similar disdain. 'If the United Nations told us who to vote for in the presidential elections,' he thundered, 'American people would be very quick to tell them where to shove it.'

  But Fricker had created too many adversaries. Perceived by many as aloof, and criticised for excessive loyalty to old friends (some could not believe he had not dismissed Gansler immediately after Italy), he had fallen out of favour with many of the state and regional associations who wielded considerable power, and who were warming to the idea ofa housecleaning. In the most pivotal election of the federation's 77-year history, the outsider was elected by a convincing margin. 'Together, we will take soccer in the United States closer to the goal we all share of worldwide pre-eminence,' Rothenberg proclaimed. An embittered Fricker was left only to conclude that a large majority of members were not interested in the sport. No one could accuse him of the same - nor, for that matter, of running an unsuccessful regime. He had begun his six-year reign by rescuing the federation from its latest flirtation with bankruptcy, and ended it watching the United States at the World Cup.

  The humble USSF was going corporate. Rothenberg wasted little time in making sweeping changes to an organisation still heavily reliant on volunteers. Many were shown the door, replaced by salaried administrators with business acumen and experience in the burgeoning discipline of 'event marketing'. The new federation secretary, Hank Steinbrecher, had once coached at Boston University, but it was his most recent role, as marketing executive for a sports drink company, that secured his appointment. 'Our world is so incestuous,' he said, cocking an oblique snook at the old guard. 'Soccer needs new blood and new vigour.'

  On a six-figure salary, rather more than any USSF administrator had ever drawn, Steinbrecher wasted little time in making his mark, declaring in the familiar argot of his profession: 'What we want is mom and dad, family income of $40,000 with a minivan and two kids who play on Saturday.' Inevitably, the federation fell prey to a 'rebranding' exercise and began referring to itself as 'US Soccer'. It discarded its 'old and busy' logo with one more akin to those of American sports teams, a soccer ball zooming skywards in front of a patriotic assembly of red stripes (a change Steinbrecher mysteriously hailed as 'a must if we were to convince people we were for real').

  Of course the principal issues had little to do with names or insignia. Creating a viable professional league, for one, was a challenge no one seemed capable of meeting. By 1991 it was clear the American Professional Soccer League was anything but, with its merger of east and west coast teams sparking no renaissance. The 22 clubs who participated in 1990 had dwindled to just five by the end of 1991, with teams such as the Miami Freedom trying to survive on gates of a few hundred.

  The change of guard that brought Steinbrecher and others to power also included the incomprehensible appointment of Earl Foreman to the federation's 'outdoor development committee', the group supposedly responsible for getting th
e new league off the ground. Foreman was still commissioner of the enterprise most responsible for distorting America's perception of 'soccer', one which had hideously rebranded itself as the Major Soccer League, and about which he had once boasted: 'We don't give two shits about outdoor soccer.' That he was now being asked to give at least one shit was attributed by some to a political favour owed to him by Rothenberg. Bizarrely, Foreman's eight ersatz-soccer franchises controlled one-third of the entire USSF vote, and they had cast their ballots en masse for the lawyer.

  Yet by the summer of 1992 the MSL, with its Cleveland Crunch, Baltimore Blast and San Diego Sockers - whom Ron Newman had led to countless league championships - was bankrupt, ravished by rivals and the absence of meaningful television exposure. Foreman soon disappeared from the radar, but the damage had been done. Words such as 'technically infeasible' and 'impractical' kept cropping up whenever talk of a new outdoor league surfaced. Prospective owners were thin on the ground, many no doubt frightened by the collapse of Foreman's enterprise. If the all-American indoor game couldn't survive, there seemed little hope for any less synthetic alternative.

  A year after his election, Rothenberg boasted of his regime: 'I really don't know how we could have accomplished more', and claimed US Soccer had 'totally dispelled the worldwide cynicism re our ability to stage the 1994 World Cup' (except for 'the British tabloids, who seem to want only scandalous, negative, cynical material'). Certainly, he had delivered the sort of high-flying leadership FIFA expected. He had also given short shrift to Chyzowych and Gansler, removing the former from his position of authority with the national team and accepting the latter's resignation a few months later. But the question most often asked by the soccer world had yet to be answered: could he make the American World Cup work?

  8. Revenge of the Commie Pansies

  The World Cup comes to America

  I can foresee that the World Cup here will meet the conditions established by the Winter Olympics for pointlessness and trivia enhancement. It is well known in the media that the Winter Olympics are when you go to incredible inconvenience to cover a local competitor in an event you wouldn't normally cross the street to see. Biathlon. Luge. Soccer. Three of a kind.

  Cleveland Plain Dealer

  n July 21, 1991, a crowd of 31,871 came to Giants Stadium for a New York Cosmos reunion. Fifty-two players, representing every period of the club's roller-coaster 14-year history, laced up their boots and turned back the clock to a happier time for soccer in America. Franz Beckenbauer withdrew because ofstomach trouble and Giorgio Chinaglia was ensconced in Italy, but Vladislav Bogicevic, Johan Neeskens, Carlos Alberto, Rick Davis and a host of others turned out - as did Pele, who waved to the crowd but didn't play. Absence, it seemed, had made hearts grow fonder. In their final season seven years earlier, the Cosmos had not attracted a single gate of such a size.

  Older fans might have looked back with wistful nostalgia, but most of the country had distanced itself from the Cosmos, the NASL and soccer's failed bid for 'sport of the Eighties'. A Sports Illustrated survey released that year asserted that only nine per cent of the public 'followed' soccer, a dismal figure that sent vested interests scurrying to the sport's defence. The Soccer Industry Council ofAmerica claimed its own research showed that more children under 12 played their game than gridiron, baseball or ice hockey, and that soccer was third behind basketball and volleyball among under-18s. Yet the council, like many before them, missed the point entirely: participation was one thing, 'following' quite another. It had become a standing joke that the reason so many Americans played soccer was that it enabled them to avoid watching it.

  Eight months after Italia 90, just 6,261 showed up in Los Angeles for a North American Nations Cup tie with Mexico. Searching for a successor to Bob Gansler, the federation hankered after Franz Beckenbauer, but came to discover that the new manager of Marseille was, according to one source, 'willing to accept challenges, not fight lost causes'. Meanwhile the country's lone excuse for a professional league, the APSL, trundled down its anonymous path.

  None of this deterred 27 cities from submitting their applications to stage 1994 World Cup matches, nor did it prevent Alan Rothenberg from predicting unprecedented success for the event. Bora Milutinovic, the Serb who had steered Mexico to the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup and Costa Rica to an improbable second-round berth four years later, was appointed as coach, some said on Beckenbauer's advice. Orphaned by the Second World War, Milutinovic had joined Partizan Belgrade at 17 but soon became a footballing vagabond, trying his luck with three French clubs and FC Winterthur in Switzerland before moving to Mexico and marrying there. He finished his playing career with UNAM Pumas, then guided them to the league championship in 1981.

  More willing than his predecessor to look outside the colleges for talent - talent that didn't need to be a generation removed from the manager, as seemed the case with Gansler - Milutinovic scoured the country for an infusion of fresh blood, casting an eye over not just the cream of the college crop, but APSL stars, indoor league veterans and even a Polish emigre playing in an ethnic league in New England. But what differentiated him from his predecessor wasn't so much the players he chose as the way he coached them. 'Most coaches explain what they want,' said centre-half Marcelo Balboa. 'Bora shows you.' Doug Cress observed in Soccer America:

  He does it with little walks around the field with his players, his arm draped around their shoulders, the voice of reason in their ears. He does it in practices and just before games - not with every player, only a select few. And they have responded.

  They responded, too, to his deceptively light-hearted approach to training sessions, where he usually played alongside them ('the best part of coaching', he confessed), and his insistence on keeping the game simple. The media responded sympathetically, referring to him as 'Bora' far more often than they had ever called Gansler'Bob', and delighting in his disarmingly rudimentary command of English. It left the fraternity of clipboard-wielding American coaches bemused. 'Why does everybody ask me about my style?' Milutinovic cried. 'There are many books on soccer style - read those. If I wrote a book about my style, nobody would buy it.' Within a few months, this self-effacing approach inspired the US to its first triumph in a senior tournament of any consequence: the Concacaf Gold Cup, a newly devised championship for the nations of North and Central America, staged in the summer of 1991.

  The Gold Cup owed its existence largely to a momentous power shift within Concacaf. The previous year had seen the removal of Joaquin Soria Terrazas, the 80-year-old, nearly blind Mexican who had presided over the federation for as long as anyone could remember, and the installation of Trinidad's Jack Warner as his replacement. Warner wasted little time in making extensive changes, even moving the federation's headquarters from Guatemala City to Manhattan. But his election, and the appointment of other English-speaking officials to senior positions, alienated the Spanish-speaking bloc. With Mexico threatening to abandon Concacaffor South America, and the Central American countries keen to form a federation of their own, the Gold Cup was a tool to keep everyone within the fold as well as make money. The old Concacaf championship had certainly never done that. Since its demise in 1971, when the US did not even take part, the World Cup qualifiers had been deemed to provide the regional champions. The Gold Cup also marked another step in the US's march toward international respectability, receiving its baptism not in Mexico City, but in Southern California.

  The Americans quickly took to the new competition, beating Honduras in the final on penalties to finish off a punishing fixture list of five matches in eight days, and producing the first fruits of Milutinovic's more attacking style. The US scored eight goals in their three group matches and beat Mexico 2-0 in the semi-final, the first meaningful victory over their southern nemesis since the 1934 World Cup and one which ushered in a new relationship between the two countries. The Mexico coach Manuel Lapuente, who resigned in the wake of the defeat, was reduced to a daunting, if face-saving,
admission: 'We have to understand now that we are almost at the same level as the United States. Even though they don't have a professional league, they have established themselves.'

  By the end of 1991 the absence of a pro league had prompted almost half the World Cup squad to pursue careers overseas, most with fairly meagre success and rarely with the opulence of home. Desmond Armstrong spent a few months living in a hotel room while playing for Santos; Steve Trittschuh found that life with Sparta Prague, the champions of Czechoslovakia, didn't entitle him to a familiar standard of living ('once the weather started getting cold, there wasn't a whole lot of food available'); and Paul Caligiuri ventured into East Germany to help Hansa Rostock to its first double in the final season before reunification, waiting ten weeks for the club to find him somewhere to live. It was furnished with 1960s furniture from Russia,' he recalled, and it was something my wife and I accepted to prove that we could live with their standards. We didn't want to be termed "rich Americans".'

  John Harkes found life in Yorkshire somewhat less onerous. An injury to Roland Nilsson gave him an opportunity to break into Sheffield Wednesday's first team, albeit as a right-back instead of a midfielder, and it did not take long for the US sporting press to draw attention to their country's rare soccer export. Sports Illustrated noted that Harkes's new environs were rather more demanding than those of the USSF. The 'savagely intense practices supervised by [manager Ron] Atkinson', it observed, 'make the US team's pre-World Cup workouts look like rehearsals for an amateur production of The Sound of Music.'