All-Stars Share Stage With World’s Finest

It is one of the curiosities of Major League Soccer’s inaugural season that its showpiece event--today’s MLS All-Star game at Giants Stadium--is really not much more than a warmup act.

That is not to say that the game between the best in the MLS Eastern and Western conferences does not have its share of name players, merely that there are more illustrious personalities to follow.

For reasons best known only to itself, the league chose to combine its first All-Star game with FIFA’s own All-Star event--a match pitting the reigning world champion, Brazil, against a world All-Star team.

As a result, while MLS’s opening act can boast of featuring at least 16 present or former U.S. national team players and almost as many international stars, the main event can point out that it has such World Cup winners as Germany’s Juergen Klinsmann and Lothar Matthaeus and Brazil’s Bebeto and Ronaldinho, amid a host of famous names.

The combination has been enough to assure that the double-header will be a 77,000-seat sellout. By Saturday evening, with showers still lingering in the New York area but sunshine predicted for today, only 3,000 tickets remained.

Brazilian Coach Mario Zagallo has elected to bring what is essentially his Olympic team to take on the world. It will be the final warmup for the South Americans before they begin pursuit of the one honor the country has never won--the Olympic gold medal.

Opposing Zagallo as coach of the world All-Stars will be Richard Moeller-Nielsen, former Denmark and current Finland national coach who led the Danes to the 1992 European Championship. He will be assisted by Steve Sampson, coach of the U.S. national team, and Bora Milutinovic, Mexico’s national coach.

This will be the third FIFA All-Star game to be played in the United States, following the 1982 event at Giants Stadium and the 1986 version at the Rose Bowl. The most recent game was played in Munich in 1991. Proceeds, expected to top $1 million, will go to the FIFA Youth Fund, whose principal beneficiary is the SOS Children’s Villages organization.

For the MLS game, Galaxy Coach Lothar Osiander is in charge of the Western Conference, which includes Galaxy players Dan Calichman, Jorge Campos, Mauricio Cienfuegos, Robin Fraser, Eduardo Hurtado and Cobi Jones.

John Harkes, captain of D.C. United and the U.S. national team, is the only American player on the world All-Star squad. He and Campos are expected to play in both games. Campos, however, will not repeat the feat of playing two full games that he accomplished at the Rose Bowl on June 16. He will split time in the MLS game with Dallas Burn and former U.S. national team keeper Mark Dodd, and in the FIFA game with Chile’s Nelson Tapia.