Owners of Sockers Dream a Big Dream : Soccer: Team going after superstar Diego Maradona. A suspension makes it unlikely Sockers’ fantasy will come true.

Smelling salts to the Sockers’ front office, on the double.

Oscar Ancira, the Sockers’ managing general partner who recently was appointed head of the MSL’s marketing committee, would like to replace the committee with Diego Maradona.

Yes, that Maradona, the catalyst of Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship team, the same Maradona who is under suspension until June 1992, as ordered by FIFA, the sport’s governing body, for what Ancira termed “pharmaceutical problems;” the same Maradona who was arrested last spring in both his native country and in Italy for cocaine possession.

The same Maradona who could single-handedly solve the MSL’s attendance woes.

Ancira thinks the best way to get him to do that is to put him in a Socker uniform.

“With someone like him on the field,” Ancira said, “there’s not much else we really can do to put people in the seats.”

True enough, but FIFA says it’s not going to happen, MSL Commissioner Earl Foreman says his league will abide by FIFA regulations, and Ancira admits partners in Mexico trying to court the superstar have been unable to get through to him.

“He is not allowed to play,” FIFA spokesman Guido Tognoni told the Associated Press from Zurich, Switzerland. “The ban applies to all nations who are members of FIFA, so he has no possibility to play in the United States.”

Nevertheless, the Sockers and the league are pressing forward.

“I’ve talked to the federation and I’ve asked them to advise me as to the specifics of Maradona’s suspension,” Foreman said from his home in Maryland. “I have received some material already and it is somewhat sketchy and incomplete. I am not satisfied enough to make a decision. We are members of FIFA and we will adhere and follow their mandates without equivocation. But right now I’m in a fact-finding mode. I’m just looking into it. Yes, there is a suspension until 1992, but I don’t feel anyone will deny me the opportunity to get the facts together.”

If Maradona is to pull on a Socker jersey, the MSL would have to bypass some of its own rules as well. The league’s salary cap of $550,000 per team and $60,000 per player certainly does not have any room for a Maradona-size paycheck.

Maradona earned between $2 million and $3 million per season with Napoli.

Ancira, however, said money will not present an insurmountable obstacle.

“There’s a salary cap for players,” he said. “But not for marketing directors.”

Ancira would not name which member of the Sockers’ ownership is trying to arrange a deal with Maradona, other than to say “the one in Mexico City.”

That would be Alejandro Burillo, whose business would stand to reap a tidy profit should the impossible happen. Burillo is an executive vice president of Televisa, a Spanish-language TV network.

Back in reality, Ben Collins became the seventh player signed by the Sockers for the upcoming season when he signed a one-year deal for $39,000.

Collins wasted no time making it known he is unhappy with the financial arrangement and with the Sockers’ plans to move him from defense to the midfield.

“Management always gets what it wants,” Collins said.

Also signed are: goalie Victor Nogueira, defensive runner Wes Wade, midfielder-forward Tim Wittman, and defenders Alex Golovnia, Kevin Crow and Dave Banks.