Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game by Wangerin David

Author:Wangerin, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Temple University Press

6. Shootout to the Death

The collapse of the NASL

I tell you, those Cosmos were the best and the worst thing that happened to this league.

Atlanta Chiefs official, 1980

Soccer in America had never experienced anything like the late 1970s. By 1978 more than 350,000 boys and girls had registered with youth associations, and 5,800 high schools fielded teams. White, middle-class suburbia provided the most fertile ground for this frenzied growth. Soccer moms and dads fervently pointed out that other sports were often dominated by children with exceptional height or strength, or who had simply matured faster than their peers. In Little League baseball, some players could go through a whole game without touching the ball. But there was no overpowering pitcher in soccer, no sitting in a dugout waiting for the next turn, no being told when to swing or when to run. Just about anyone could kick a ball – and nearly everyone kicked it with the same uncultured naivety.

It seemed inevitable that this innate appeal would soon help to establish the professional game. Pelé’s departure was widely perceived as timely and appropriate, leaving behind an NASL capable of standing on its own feet. ‘The crowds went out to see Pelé in 1975 and 1976,’ Clive Toye claimed, ‘but in 1977 they went out to see soccer.’ The optimism reached its peak in the winter of 1977-78. Woosnam and the owners brought in six new franchises, insisting that expansion to 24 clubs – from just nine five years earlier – was both measured and justified. Indeed, prospective owners were queuing up for a stake in the NASL even if it meant, by Woosnam’s own estimate, losing the odd million over the first few seasons. Two years earlier the commissioner had insisted that ‘everyone in the league understands we are ultimately going to 32 or 40 teams’, and it was now clear why: the steady stream of franchise shifts and new arrivals had earned the league plenty of money. With 27 fulltime employees and a spacious office in midtown Manhattan, the NASL looked convincingly established.

The entry fee, now an even $1 million, did little to dissuade a host of new owners from chasing riches. Rick Wakeman, Paul Simon and Peter Frampton backed a new team in Philadelphia – not the Atoms, but the Fury. Pro soccer also returned to Detroit, where Jimmy Hill, the British TV football pundit and Coventry City chairman, sought to reinvest the tidy sum he had made from ventures in Saudi Arabia. Hill joined forces with a local consortium to bring a team into the 80,500-seat Pontiac Silverdome, the league’s largest venue.

The NASL reappeared in the Boston area, as well as Denver, Houston and Oakland; it spread to Memphis, Tennessee, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, two cities with no competition from major league baseball. There was a new assortment of gauche nicknames and logos, the most lamentable in San Diego, the city which found itself with the remains of Team Hawaii. It called its franchise the Sockers, choosing as its logo a bruised boy named Socko with a ball tucked under his arm.

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