Introduction
"This sport will take off. There is absolutely no way that it will not bypass everything else. This country will be the center of world soccer. In the 80s there will be a mania for the game here. There will be three to five million kids playing it. The North American Soccer League will be the world's No. 1 soccer league. And it will be the biggest sports league in the USA."
-North American Soccer League Commissioner* Phil Woosnam, 1977.1
No one ever accused the North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam of lacking optimism. It was, after all, the former Aston Villa forward's drive and diligence that had rescued the nascent professional soccer league from the brink of extinction after just one year of play in 1968. Less than ten years later under his stewardship, the League was not only succeeding and expanding beyond the wildest of expectations, but was turning into a roller-coaster phenomenon that really might fulfill Woosnam's brash and bullish forecast: number one sport in America, number one soccer league in the world. Yet again, the Yanks were coming with their arrogance, their money, their revolutionary vision and their self-belief, sweeping aside a century of tradition as they stormed forward into a shiny future that was splashed with character, color and cool.
A few months after Woosnam's bold forecast, the New York Cosmos beat the Fort Lauderdale Strikers 8-3 in a sold-out NASL playoff game at Giants Stadium, New Jersey. The attendance was 77,691, and the Cosmos starting line-up featured Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia. The NASL was at its zenith, and this single game sums up everything the League stood for-a huge crowd, tons of goals and some of the biggest names in world soccer. There were celebrities in the stands and leggy cheerleaders on the touchline. What could possibly go wrong? It's easy to ask that question now with a knowing smile. Arguably of more interest are the things that went right.
In the 1970s, Pelé, Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, George Best, Gerd Müller and Beckenbauer all played in the same league. Forty years later, that legendary constellation seems almost unreal. Yet, this was the product which the NASL attempted to sell to a skeptical audience-the world's greatest players representing start-up teams unknown both at home and abroad. The NASL was a project way ahead of its time. It was a big-money glamour league that aimed to entertain, while generating cash. In that respect, it was the Champions League and the English Premier League rolled into one. Pelé had already retired from soccer in 1974, but he chose to come back the following year for one league only. The pugnacious NASL offered the kind of outrageous, multi-million dollar deal that no European team had the courage to put on the table, yet it pointed to the eventual path of European club soccer at its highest level.
European attitudes toward US soccer have always been informed by a sense that the Yanks don't know what they're doing when it comes to any sport that won't stop the action for commercial breaks. It was no different in the 1970s. The British press looked down on the pom-pom presentation, the plastic pitches, the garish uniforms, and the alien points system that was set up to encourage more goalscoring. More goals? How distasteful! When the NASL declined, there was a sense of both relief and schadenfreude in Europe, shared by a majority of the professional sports establishment in the USA. The NASL was up against incredible odds-it had to compete against American football, baseball and basketball at home and with the conservative soccer traditionalists abroad. Yet its vision of the game has persevered, while at the time it flourished for a few short years in conspicuous contrast to the grim European game. In Britain especially, crowds were plummeting thanks to widespread hooliganism, while tactics were increasingly geared toward results with little thought paid to thrilling the fans.
Woosnam's fantasy may have been realized if the NASL had had the money and the management to carry the League through for just a few more years. After all, the National Basketball Association struggled through the same decade before establishing itself in the mainstream of US sport and culture in the 1980s. The National Football League, despite gridiron's long history, had only recently become a massive, major-league movement thanks to a lucrative television contract and the ease of air travel. In the post-Second World War years, the most popular US sports were baseball, boxing and horseracing, all followed avidly on the radio, but the latter two had declined in popularity as American football rose. As far as soccer was concerned in the 1960s when plans were first discussed for a new professional league, the North American sports market was an open field with a large share of the cash and the audience still up for grabs. If it had pulled through, we could now be looking at Woosnam's alternative: a league firmly established as the best in the world, whose success has carried Canada and the US to the top of the international game. Players flocking to North America from Europe, Africa and Latin America to play for the globally known brands whose games are transmitted to Europe, Africa, Asia and South America by satellite every weekend from February to November. The League having stolen a jump on the old capitals of soccer, baffled as to why they didn't feel the imminent gusts of change. FIFA having begrudgingly upped sticks and relocated to midtown Manhattan, was dwarfed by the NASL's 24-floor tower across the road on Sixth Avenue (with a pneumatic chute installed beneath for the efficient transfer of brown envelopes).
If you were designing a prototype for a brand new, modern soccer league, you would place the most image-conscious, most skillful, most brand-friendly players with the clubs in the biggest, most glamorous cities. The ensuing media coverage would guarantee the crowds, and so sponsorship revenue and a fat television deal would automatically follow. Celebrities and politicians would start to show their faces in the stands as sure as ticks on a stray dog. Your league might look like the Premier League, or the periodically mooted European Super League. It would look something like the top half of North America's first division in the late 1970s, a league that got too much right to ignore.
"In Britain there is certainly room for radical thought about a more modern approach to the needs of the fans, better communication," wrote the Sunday Mirror journalist Ken Jones in the late 1970s. "The United States will one day emerge as a major power in the soccer world. There is a lot to be done, a lot to learn, a long road to travel, but please send up a few fireworks along the way. Light the sky with your ambition, energy and initiative. Soccer needs America."2 In The Observer, Hugh McIlvanney also pleaded the US case: "It would be foolish to look upon soccer in the US as a sort of threat," he wrote in 1977, "when it might so easily provide a marvelous infusion of freshness. Given the present condition of British football, we should be the last people to take an excessively didactic attitude about what is happening here."3
These were rare positive voices to be heard about US soccer in the supercilious European media. They recognized the potential in America's verve and hunger, and the fact that Europe badly needed a few "fireworks" up its backside to liven up its act. Such perspectives have been lost in the standard narrative of the NASL as a failure, or through contemporary assessments by the likes of the Guardian's David Lacey, who dismissed the NASL as "a glossy but third rate competition."4 Like Elvis, though, the NASL only ended up a failure-there was plenty of good and influential material long before the Vegas years and the body found in the bathtub.
In the quick-fire, instant-image era of the internet, there's a standard photograph that tends to turn up whenever there's a discussion about the NASL-a picture of the shirts worn by the Colorado Caribous during the 1978 season, the ones with the leather cowboy fringe all the way across the chest. Ha ha, that's how stupid the NASL was. Remember the league that beat its chest in the 1970s and told the world to watch out, then crashed like Lynyrd Skynyrd's private jet? What's missing from that facile summation is the life of the North American Soccer League, and its crucial role for both US and world soccer beyond the 1970s. The stories of the myriad players who moved thousands of miles to start up a brave new league at a time when most players stayed firmly put in their home countries. What it was like to play with and against Eusebio and Pelé, or to share a dressing room with a domineering character like Johan Cruyff. What it meant to be thrown into a world of six-lane highways, five-hour flights to away games, and to take to the field on the back of an elephant while trying to remember the instructions you'd only half understood from your Yugoslavian coach. Then, after the game, you'd get to meet a famous rock star. "People assume that my greatest thrill last year was winning the [NASL] championship," said the New York Cosmos' young English midfielder Steve Hunt in 1978. "They're wrong. It was meeting Mick Jagger."5
The NASL introduced the idea that a soccer game could be an event and a spectacle, not just two teams meeting to compete for points. You weren't herded into the stadium by policemen waving wooden batons. You were a customer, not a criminal or a public nuisance. You arrived at the stadium two or three hours early to grill hot dogs and chug down beer with your mates in the parking lot while listening to a ramped-up radio. Then, well refreshed and whooping in that way unique to hyper-enthusiastic US sports fans, you'd enter a newly constructed, futuristic, multi-purpose stadium-the same impressive dome where the city's baseball and American football teams played. The players were introduced by name and were greeted with raucous music and dancing girls as they ran out on to the field, one by one, waving to the crowd. There might be a soul star singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" (Lou Rawls was a regular part of the NASL's pre-game routine) before the cheerleaders raised their well-honed legs in formation, some rockets decorated the night sky, and the match ball descended in the arms of a man with a parachute on his back, dressed up as a clown. Manufactured atmosphere, some might argue. Others might argue in return, innovative marketing techniques aimed at wooing a new generation of sports fan.
Once the game started you could watch a version of soccer easily recognizable as the real thing, but which promoted scoring, played down defensive duties, and refuted the virtues of a hard-fought 1-1 draw. That's why the NASL instigated the shootout-not because drawn games were "un-American," but because they were unsatisfactory to a US crowd. Why bother going to a game if neither side was going to win? Why deny the fans that moment of climactic glory or crushing disappointment? Then if a cheerleader congratulated the biggest name on the soccer planet with a kiss after he won the game with a coolly taken shootout conversion ... hey, relax dude, that's just how we roll with the game here.
Woosnam and the NASL had the courage to initiate a new way forward for the game. It took two decades for the rest of the world to embrace, but then the biggest soccer leagues on the planet became an extension of what the NASL had begun. The redevelopment of European club soccer owes a substantial debt to what is commonly disdained as North America's farcical, hubristic attempt to found its own national league. During the NASL years, television revenue became an indicator of a league's health. The League abolished the price ceilings for what players could earn. For better and worse, it revolutionized the idea of what a soccer club could be. It played games in modern, all-seater stadiums. In the Cosmos, it created an all-conquering giant that everyone loved to hate. In an era of bleakness, austerity and violence in Europe, it found a way to make professional soccer fun. That it took FIFA, UEFA and the biggest European leagues so long to catch up demonstrates just how out of touch they were. The NASL at its brief peak might have been a product of the brash, loud and shameless 70s, but then and now it's the league of the future.
Copyright © 2014 by Ian Plenderleith
Forword Copyright © 2014 by Rodney Marsh