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

by David Wangerin

  But fans were taking matters into their own hands. Two men from Buffalo, New York, added to the international roll-call of fanzines with Bookable Offense, whose pages teemed with the home-brewed mixture of passion, irreverence and indignation more commonly found overseas. By the time of the 1995 US Cup their efforts had helped to produce a band of red-shirted fans calling themselves (Uncle) Sam's Army and offering the kind of noisy, passionate support which in America had traditionally been confined to visiting teams. Another influence, and one too readily overlooked, was the internet, which allowed American soccer's relatively affluent fan base to create networks and information channels that effectively bypassed the mainstream.

  The Hartford Courant sportswriter Jerry Trecker hinted at this seachange in the wake of America's performance in Uruguay:

  A few years ago you couldn't find a soccer score in an American newspaper or expect a highlight on ESPN's SportsCenter. Copa America turned into proof that there is a demand for soccer information. The fans obviously let the media know that and the media responded.

  After Uruguay, few could deny that Sampson had earned his chance at managing the team for good. Yet the USSF offered him the job only begrudgingly, its president perhaps disappointed not to have his ego stroked by a more famous name. 'As I told Steve, "Suppose the best thing happens and you do phenomenally well. You'll still have all of a ten-game international career",' Rothenberg confided before the Copa. 'Do we think that is enough to put an awfully huge responsibility on him when there are people who have hundreds of games of international experience?' His players seemed to think it was, and they helped end the intercontinental talent-hunt.

  In August 1995 Sampson became the national team's first native-born, full-time manager. His route to the top had been unconventional, to say the least. He had never coached or played for a professional club (he had torn up his knee in college) and had been an administrator at the 1984 Olympics and 1994 World Cup. When a reorganisation, induced by FIFA, stripped him of a job - but not a contract - he was hastily assigned to Milutinovic's staff. Reservations over his appointment as national coach were understandable. The largely self-contained milieu of college soccer in which he had flourished, while producing swarms of coaches with impressive win-loss records and offices festooned with awards and certificates, had not made an especially welcome contribution to the sport. Its season was still ridiculously short, and the decision of the NCAA to ban all instances of 'outside ball' - playing for club teams, even in the close-season - bordered on the shameful. College soccer still tended to produce dreary, combative teams that prized workrate above all else.

  One pleasant exception was the University of Virginia, which by the mid-1990s had become not only the most successful college team in the country, but also one of the most attractive. The typical diagramplotting American coach would have been unnerved to hear a Virginia player declare, as one did on the eve of the national championship game of 1994: '1 can't say we don't have any tactics, but basically we just go out and play.'

  The source of this inspiration, coach Bruce Arena, was an unlikely muse. Much of his career had been divided between keeping goal for Cornell University and playing lacrosse for them, in which he earned national honours. Drafted by the Cosmos in 1973, the Brooklyn-born Arena never played in the NASL and instead joined a professional league in his other sport. When that collapsed he returned to soccer, hooking up with an ASL team in Tacoma, Washington, and coaching at a nearby university. Appointed to head the Virginia programme in 1978, Arena soon moulded the Cavaliers into a stylish soccer power. Future national team mainstays such as John Harkes and Jeff Agoos were kitted out in the school's orange, which seemed an appropriate reflection of their manager's philosophy. 'If we're playing well and confidently,' Arena claimed, 'we don't have positions.'

  In preparing for the 1998 World Cup, Sampson pinned much of his hopes on a recent Virginia product, New Jersey-born Claudio Reyna, a midfielder gifted enough to have been courted by Barcelona. Widely touted as the creative force around which a US team could be built, Reyna's post-college career began frustratingly. He earned a place in the 1994 World Cup squad but was kept out by a hamstring injury, then signed for Bayer Leverkusen and never appeared in the first team. His performances in a US jersey were plagued by inconsistency - attributable, some claimed, to the shortcomings of even the best college programmes.

  Reyna's departure did not stop Arena leading the Cavaliers to a fourth consecutive national championship in 1994. But to some fellow coaches his candour and self-assuredness bordered on arrogance. 'I'm not the most popular figure at the cocktail parties, and they're a major feature of the soccer scene in this country,' he maintained. 'Too much happens behind the scenes at social and political gatherings rather than on the field. Everyone's constantly working on protecting their turf. Maybe that's why I'm an asshole, why a lot of people feel threatened by me.'

  If the USSF had ever felt threatened by Arena - and its own coaching ranks were no less incestuous - by the winter of 1995 it had summoned enough courage to appoint him coach of the Olympic team. By then he had also become a target of Major League Soccer, which finally settled on its complement of clubs less than a year before kick-off.

  The line-up featured only ten clubs, not 12, and the investment target had been reached only through a last-minute phone call from Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz. A grateful league agreed to place a team in Denver, near his base, even though both the city's NASL franchises had swiftly crashed. MLS also decided to stick its neck out in Kansas City, where Phil Woosnam's league had last trodden in 1970. The selection of New York and Los Angeles was more conventional, but the next five largest cities in the country (Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego and Detroit) were passed over in favour of smaller, if more familiar, markets such as Tampa and San Jose, as well as the virgin professional territory of Columbus, Ohio, whose supporters had pledged to buy more than 10,000 season tickets. The established big-league markets of New England, Dallas and Washington DC completed the line-up, leaving the one-time NASL stronghold of the Pacific northwest conspicuously without representation.

  To have unearthed $75 million worth of interest in professional soccer was no small achievement, but ten clubs did not really constitute a major league, and as the investors began writing cheques, an air of fallibility lingered over their project. Few seemed prepared to gamble millions of dollars on soccer in an era when America's appetite for exhibitionism and spectacle had given rise to wildly successful sport-entertainment hybrids such as the X-Games and the World Wrestling Federation, whose 'shows' were much more likely to attract the neutral's attention than anything which might end 0-0.

  Not surprisingly, MLS sought FIFA's permission to spice up the rules, an appeal which drew a far more sympathetic response from Zurich than anything the NASL had ever garnered. Gamely, the humble USISL agreed to serve as a guinea pig, piloting such distinctively American innovations as stopping the clock each time the ball went out of play and offering a shootout-style chance at goal after a team had committed a certain number of fouls. In some of its regions goals were made larger, traditional corner kicks were replaced by shorter ones and free-kicks were defended from 15 instead of ten yards.

  Purists, of which America has its share, pointed out in horror that the best-attended matches in US history had been those played under conventional rules: World Cup and Olympic tournaments, replete with draws, time-wasting, feigning injury and the other unsavoury elements of the game as it stood. That MLS should risk losing the interest of a committed audience in search of a more transient, thrill-seeking fan seemed a dubious strategy, one which also hinted at an alarming inability to learn from the mistakes of the NASL. But the threat was mitigated by an important factor: for once, a pro league and the USSF were essentially on the same side, both effectively answerable to Alan Rothenberg. This demanded that owners show a healthy respect for the game's wider world and recognise the value of a symbiotic relationship with governing bodies an
d the national team. Indeed, the latter had produced MLS's most marketable commodity, Alexi Lalas, whose return from Serie A was heralded by the league as one of its most significant acquisitions.

  In the end, deviations from what one official termed 'the classic rules' were few, though MLS was far less restrained when it came to its principal obsession: marketability. This was never more apparent than at the official unveiling of team names, logos and strips in October 1995. A generation earlier, such relatively trivial disclosures would have been met with overwhelming indifference, but a sports merchandising tidal wave had subsumed North America and millions of dollars now rode on a choice of name, colours and jerseys. A year earlier, the owner of the NBA's expansion team in Toronto confessed the decision to use the nickname Raptors - a dinosaur, of all creatures - had been driven by a desire for 'an aggressive, intimidating image and a logo that would sell merchandise'. An unprecedented $20 million worth of Raptors gear disappeared in the first month alone.

  As other NBA clubs furiously 'repackaged' themselves, MLS sensed the opportunity to appeal to the fan as a consumer. In fact 'MLS Unveiled', as the event was christened, struck many as an outright capitulation to the creative excesses of designers, with no one on the soccer side brave enough to channel their creative juices. The league's franchise in San Jose appeared to be named after a pop group, the Clash (one of their songs wailed from the loudspeakers as it was revealed), with what might have been a lobster - or was it a scorpion? - on its badge. Dallas's entry was called the Burn, whatever that was, its logo a fire-breathing horse. If there was an association between the word 'burn' and a horse, or 'clash' and a crustacean, nobody seemed prepared to make it. Nike, responsible for both creations, had apparently moved on from such quaint notions.

  Equally strange was Tampa's entry, the Mutiny, its logo featuring a sort of bat; and the scatological connotations of Kansas City's nickname, the Wiz - surely not an oblique reference to The Wizard of Oz, since the club's home was Kansas City, Missouri, not Dorothy's Kansas. 'We expected to receive some chiding from the name,' a club official admitted, before drawing attention to the 'great creative springboard' the three letters provided: 'Our youth programme will be known as the WizKidz, our mascot could be the Wizard and one of our premium giveaway nights may be Wizbees.'

  The mind boggled at premium giveaway night opportunities for New England's team, the Revolution (Molotov cocktails?), or the creative springboard offered by the first syllable of the Los Angeles nickname, Galaxy (cheerleaders called the Gal-Gals?). Denver chose to call themselves the Colorado Rapids, more of a geographical feature than a team name, while fans in the league's biggest market would be saddled with something called the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, perhaps the most ungainly sobriquet in the history of American sport (soon thankfully shortened to MetroStars). Washington settled on the distinctly un-American designation of DC United, a choice which had finished second to 'Force' in a fan poll even though it hadn't even appeared on the ballot. Some sportswriters insisted on referring to the team as the United'. The Columbus Crew's shadowy logo featured three men in hard-hats, arms menacingly folded, an image which seemed rooted more in A Clockwork Orange - or, more charitably, the Village People - than professional sport.* Mutiny, Revolution, Clash and Burn - family entertainment, or subliminal apocalypse? Meanwhile, the nickname with perhaps the greatest brand leverage of all, Cosmos, was left undisturbed.

  The creative people were also permitted to run amok with the playing strips, described by Soccer America as having been 'stolen from the most deranged of designers of skateboarding attire' and fashionably heavy on black, the worst colour to wear in the heat of summer. Even colour schemes reeked of self-indulgence: Tampa Bay's were listed as 'chlorophyll green, midnight navy, chrome yellow and tropical blue', San Jose's a nightmarish 'celery green, forest green, red, light teal and black'.

  Though the league had resisted the temptation to tamper too much with the rules, it proved more impressionable when confronted by the fact that soccer matches often end in a draw - and in particular the chilling possibility that a television commentator might utter a final score of 0-0. Wedded to the conviction that contests in America should never end level, it dusted off the NASL's Shootout. To fit matches into a precise, network-friendly timeslot, it also opted to dispense with extra time, so that everything might finish inside two hours. Traditionalists shook their fists, but further nods to the old league were few: there would be no bonus points for goals, no smaller offside zone, no extra substitution and no Mini-Game.

  Nor would there be artificial pitches, a condition the league adhered to with surprising rigidity. While America's fetish for simulated grass had diminished significantly since the NASL's heyday (though a new generation of synthetic surfaces was about to make its mark), a number of cities still swathed every desirable venue in some variant of Astroturf, effectively keeping them off the MLS shortlist. One exception - or partexception - was Giants Stadium, which in spite of its plastic remained the logical home of any soccer team from the area with major league ambitions. The MetroStars announced they would wheel in expensive Silverdome-like trays of genuine turf, which they could use until the jets and Giants began their NFL exertions. This meant finishing the season on a different surface to the one they had started with, and one no other team possessed.

  Though most had expected Rothenberg to elevate himself to the position of league commissioner, as kick-off loomed it emerged that the $7 million man had ruled himself out of contention, a decision which sent many a corporate sponsor and much of the American soccer public into a mild state of panic. Rothenberg, though, had never demonstrated much appetite for the detail required of such a role, and in FIFA and Concacaf there were other rainbows to chase. Yet suspicions also festered that, having brought the USSF into the corporate milieu and American soccer onto the sports pages, he could only lose with MLS, and that his ego would not tolerate such embarrassment.

  The man chosen to head the league was Doug Logan, a 52-yearold marketing executive who had made his name in sports and event promotion and was apparently sensitive to soccer's working-class appeal. Born in New Jersey, Logan had been raised in Cuba, where his grandfather owned a baseball team and delighted in rubbing shoulders with his patrons, displaying a common touch that would leave a strong impression on his grandson ('The biggest piece of garbage in American sports is the luxury box, with its couches faced away from the field, facing a huge colour television set with everybody eating sushi'). The bilingual Logan had spent two years working in Mexico - credentials ideally suited to a league openly courting Latino fans - and owned a minor-league basketball team in San Diego. As a promoter, he had flogged tickets for everything from rock concerts to ballet.

  Logan's ability to generate large sums of money was naturally his most desirable skill but, with parallels to the ill-fated pro ventures of three decades earlier, his negligible soccer pedigree was dismissed by his employers as an irrelevance. As in 1967, MLS seemed ominously dependent more on a belief in the power of marketing than any passion for the game. As well as Anschutz, Rothenberg had recruited John Kluge, one of the wealthiest men in the country (Forbes magazine estimated his worth at $5 billion) and the Kraft family, owners of the NFL's New England Patriots and about to build them a new $325 million home. None of them could really be described as 'soccer people'. When the Krafts' elder statesman, Robert, declared, 'What my family really likes about soccer is that it's a game played by young boys and girls, and is coached by fathers and mothers,' one was left to wonder what it was about a professional venture that attracted their interest.

  The one executive with a firm grounding in the sport was a Columbia professor of economics named Sunil Gulati, a USSF executive who was appointed as Logan's deputy. Born in India, Gulati's appreciation of the international game and his prodigious intellect - he had worked at the World Bank and for a time was the national economist of Moldova - served him well at the federation. He emerged as the most powerful man in MLS, res
ponsible for populating the rosters of all ten clubs. Balancing the league's aspiration to recruit talent worthy of its name with single-entity pragmatism was a difficult tightrope to walk, but by the time MLS kicked off in April 1996, Gulati boasted that the league's entire playing roster had cost him just $15 million, about three-quarters of what Newcastle United paid to acquire Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers that summer.

  Inevitably, the deputy commissioner became reviled, not just among clubs frustrated by a lack of control over their playing squads (Gulati assigned all the designated 'marquee' players himself), but also among the players, who bridled at his take-it-or-leave-it approach to salary negotiation. Of course, home-grown players - many unable or unwilling to obtain an overseas work permit - had little choice but to sign up, even if the $25,000 minimum was rather less than what the typical NBA bench warmer might spend on his wardrobe. Gulati succeeded in wooing most of the national team stalwarts: Harkes, Caligiuri, Klopas, Wynalda, Jones (who had 50 caps before signing for his first professional team) and Balboa (who had reached 100 without ever appearing in a first division). Heading the list was Lalas, the man referred to by at least one excitable investor-operator as 'our Michael Jordan - no one else comes close'.

  An NASL-style haven for journeyman Brits it was not. Arrivals from anywhere in Europe proved exceedingly few. Milan's Roberto Donadoni, who had helped Italy reach the World Cup final two years earlier, was the most celebrated, and while British internationals such as Chris Woods and Maurice Johnston surfaced during the season, only one bona fide Englishman, Norwich City's Ian Butterworth, appeared on an openingday roster. Gulati stressed that his league's desire to produce 'attacking, entertaining soccer' meant focusing recruitment efforts on Latin America, whose talent also happened to come more cheaply than most of Europe's. Even better value, of course, were the products of the US's own melange of leagues - indoor, outdoor, college, semi-professional, ethnic - which would represent 75 per cent of each squad. Clubs were limited to four non-citizens, a regulation which offered an unprecedented opportunity for hopeful native talent.