Cosmos Weren’t Enough for NASL
The Cosmos were what put the North American Soccer League in prime time. Now, as the first summer in 18 years without professional soccer draws to a close, the franchise that Pele built is being linked with the league’s demise.
League officials, owners and club officials acknowledge that the NASL and its members made numerous mistakes, but several say the beginning of the end came the day in 1975 when the Cosmos signed the Brazilian soccer legend Pele.
The NASL first kicked off in the summer of 1968, combining the United Soccer Association and the National Professional Soccer League, which had played the summer before.
Between 1967 and this spring, when the NASL announced it was going belly-up, the league ran through 60 teams in 41 cities. The list includes such entries as the California Surf (1978-81), the Colorado Caribou (1978), the Hartford Bicentennial (1975-77), the Philadelphia Atoms (1973-76) and later Fury (1978-80), and the Los Angeles Wolves (1968) followed by the Aztecs (1974-81).
Washington, D.C., one of the few cities to have lost a Major League baseball team twice, saw four NASL teams come and go.
“The Cosmos signed Pele in 1975. A year later they signed (German Franz) Beckenbauer,” said former NASL Director of Operations Ted Howard. “From then on it was like everybody was trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
“We put all of our eggs in one basket,” said Tampa Bay Rowdies General Manager Rodney Marsh. “When Pele retired nobody came to take his place. The standard of play rose immensely. But then you had a lot of players who were highly overpaid, the standard of play dropped and nothing to support those salaries.”
But Lee Stern, who bought the Chicago Sting in 1974 and still operates the club in the Major Indoor Soccer League with two other NASL refugees--the Minnesota Strikers and San Diego Sockers--says neither Pele nor the Cosmos were the problem. He lays the blame with the “so-called foreign soccer experts who conned ‘innocent’ owners into giving a flood of foreign has-beens big contracts.”
The Cosmos won five titles in all, but only one, the 2-1 victory over the Seattle Sounders in the 1977 Soccer Bowl, brought Pele, Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and Shep Messing together.
Stern said that after the celebrated game, foreign players who had been signed to part-time contracts poured into the NASL and were signed to big salary deals. To compound the problem, the NASL expanded to its peak of 24 teams in 1980 at the urging of then-Commissioner Phil Woosnam.
By 1983, half of the teams folded and by this spring, only two were left.
“In the last five years there were two overriding disputes,” said Clive Toye, the last commissioner of the league. “Were we going to play indoors? First we made it voluntary, than we made it mandatory, then we made it voluntary and back to mandatory again. Every six months we were changing our minds. And then whether we were going play within the soccer family.
“We changed the rules and risked being excommunicated from FIFA (soccer’s world governing body). We spent three-quarters of our time arguing over those issues when we should have been trying improve marketing and cutting costs.”
Additionally, the United States was eliminated in the early qualifying rounds for the 1982 and 1986 World Cups. And Howard Samuels, the New York businessman and politician hired as a commissioner in the early 1980s to try to put the league on financial feet, died in early 1985.
Professional soccer in the United States is now a jumble of three outdoor teams and three indoor-outdoor teams. Tampa Bay, the Toronto Blizzard and the San Jose Earthquakes have held outdoor exhibitions this season with the Strikers, Sting and Sockers playing in the MISL.
Most experts say a professional outdoor league will rise again, but estimates range from one to five years.
“The NASL abused its credibility,” Marsh said. “Our recommendation is to play a series of four to six games with your expenses meeting your revenues and build the credibility back up.”
“You have to learn from history,” Stern said. “Enough mistakes were made in the NASL. If the owners are willing to learn and put aside their personal preferences, the league will succeed.”
