Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)

by David Wangerin

  The tactics of the day did them no favours. In Europe, cautious, dull football had propelled ultra-defensive teams such as Eintracht Braunschweig and Juventus to league championships in 1967, when both secured their honours by scoring less than a goal and a half per game. Liverpool's 1966 championship had been won with a scoring rate poorer than any English title holder since 1950 and a defence meaner than any since 1948. It was a similar story with Atletico Madrid's Spanish title that year. Modern soccer had come to mean defensive soccer.

  The NPSL attempted to remedy this through a convoluted system which awarded six points for a victory and three for a draw, with additional points for each goal up to a maximum of three. While this ultimately produced an average of 3.4 goals a game (compared with 3.0 in the English First Division and 2.9 in the Bundesliga that year), it did little to address the fundamental problem of away teams holding out for a draw. Some clubs responded to the system with greater enthusiasm than others. The Baltimore Bays, coached by Englishman Doug Millward, ground out three 1-0 home wins and four goalless away draws on their way to one of the league's two division titles.

  It wasn't just a mind-set at fault - with such hastily assembled teams, it was far easier to destroy than create. Few NPSL managers ever seemed content with the teams they put out. Freddie Goodwin changed the Generals' line-up 14 times over the course of the season; as early as the third match he was making new signings just hours before kick-off. The Chicago Spurs fielded 26 different players from 14 nations, four of whom were used only once. Virtually every club in the league found itself discarding players after only one or two games. But in spite of its heterogeneity, or perhaps because of it, the NPSL proved to be a reasonably competitive league, if a rather anonymous one. The deciding match of the two-legged championship series between division winners drew just 9,000 to Oakland, with the Clippers overturning Baltimore's 1-0 first-leg victory with a 4-1 win to claim the league title.

  The USA managed to end its briefseason with a bang: a free-scoring and drawn-out championship match between Los Angeles and Washington, seen by 17,800 in the LA Coliseum. When 30 minutes of extra time succeeded only in turning a 4-4 draw into 5-5, the two exhausted teams lined up for the first 'sudden death' extra time professional soccer had ever staged - a forerunner of FIFA's 'golden goal' experiment. Six minutes later, a Whips defender put through his own net to hand the Wolves the title, 6-5.

  The USA's league had played the better football, even if some of its clubs treated the competition as more of a close-season holiday than a fully fledged competition. Neither venture, though, had emerged with much credibility, and both factions spent the autumn licking their wounds. For many, these ran deep. Average attendances in the NPSL had failed to reach 5,000, saddling nearly every club with troubling debts. St Louis had paid the colourful Bundesliga manager Rudi Gutendorf $50,000 to manage its team and had lost more than ten times that amount. Pittsburgh, who had lured Co Prins from Holland by more than doubling his salary and were everyone's tip for the title, finished as the worst team in the Eastern Division and $745,000 in the red, with Los Angeles ($692,000) and New York ($600,000) nearly as drained. All told, the ten clubs had lost nearly $5 million.

  The USA fared little better. Apart from the initial flurry of interest in the Astrodome, apathy was rampant. None of the other clubs averaged as much as 9,000, and their gates looked all the more embarrassing in the light of the crowds the league had attracted for many of its pre-season friendlies. In addition to the 33,351 who had seen West Ham play Real Madrid in the Astrodome (the first proper soccer match ever played indoors), they had included Benfica v Manchester United in Los Angeles (20,380) and Sparta Prague v Glasgow Rangers in Toronto (21,940). The USA's own regular season ended with just 4,000 scattered across San Francisco's 59,000-seat Kezar Stadium for a match that - almost inevitably - ended 0-0.

  All of this suggested emphatically that pro soccer was a long-term proposition, unsuited for making a quick buck. But this wasn't what the owners wanted to hear, and nor were criticisms of their haste, short-sightedness and the almost total absence of soccer expertise which doomed their projects from the start. Seeking to redress its financial plight and still irritated by its outlaw status, the NPSL filed an $18 million lawsuit against FIFA, the USA, the USSFA and the Canadian Football Association, claiming the four had conspired to drive them out of business. Such was the level of their paranoia that they even alleged the other parties had encouraged rumours that foreign players joining the NPSL would be drafted to serve in Vietnam.

  Eventually the antagonists gave in to common sense and a merger, taking up the discarded North American Soccer League name and declaring an amnesty on the NPSL outlaws. British players wishing to return home, though, found themselves confronted with a one-year ban - a considerably harsher punishment than that which had been handed down a decade earlier to the much more prominent players tempted by unauthorised transfers to Colombia. Four players were told by the FA their applications would not be considered until September 1968, and only Barry Rowan, later of Exeter City, played more than a few games again in the Football League. Brian Eastham is described as having `slipped unnoticed through the official machinery', though only to the extent of 13 further appearances for Rochdale.

  By January 1968 not nearly as many seeds had been planted as club officials had once so enthusiastically pledged. The Chicago Mustangs, who had seen off the threat of the rival Spurs (moved to Kansas City) did not stock their team full of Americans and remained as international a collective as the other 17 survivors. The NASL did hold a mid-season college draft - akin to those used by professional basketball and football teams - but it was a hollow exercise. Most managers weren't in the slightest bit familiar with or interested in the college game, and few considered any of its players to be close to the required standard.

  With the development of the American player abandoned for another year, preparation for the 1970 World Cup - an event capable of transforming the league's fortunes - suffered. Between 1961 and 1965 the only full international the US had played was the 1964 debacle against England. Yet in attempting to qualify for the 1966 tournament, the American team, which was still selected by the USSFA through Byzantine means, had performed reasonably well, especially given the chaos under which it operated. The players were not even sure who was managing the team. Geza Henni, who had kept goal for Hungary and later managed the New York Hungarians to some success in the German-American League, had been appointed as an assistant, but soon clashed with Chicago-born manager George Meyer. Meyer had also been in charge of the 1964 Olympic team, which had managed to lose one of its qualifiers to Surinam.

  On a preparatory tour of Bermuda the players were eventually exposed to what had been a private feud between the two men. Yet they still managed a 2-2 draw against Mexico in hostile Los Angeles, before a record 'home' crowd of 22,500. Defeat in Mexico City five days later rendered the two remaining matches with Honduras meaningless. Both were played away, within a week of each other and in stadiums with no dressing rooms. Because the USSFA had made no provisions for local transport, the team even needed to find its own way to the game. Though qualification for Mexico 70 was due to start after the 1968 NASL season, the USSFA did not appoint a new manager until it was almost over.

  Meanwhile, the surviving USA clubs found themselves in much the same position the NPSL had been in the season before: needing to find players as quickly as possible. Some did so with surprising success. Cleveland - still calling themselves the Stokers even though they were no longer Stoke City - brought in the Argentinian Reuben Navarro from disbanded Philadelphia and Enrique Mateos from Seville. Henni left the national team to take charge of the Houston Stars, who now became largely Yugoslav, augmented by players from the manager's homeland. The Washington Whips were no longer Aberdeen but a curious blend of Danes and Brazilians, coached first by a Hungarian and then a Turk. Ferenc Puskas took over at Vancouver (though Bobby Robson had been lined up for the job before the merger), and
offered playing time to citizens of Cyprus, Hong Kong and Luxembourg as well as one Canadian.

  While each of these teams scrambled to a level of respectability with their hastily formed squads, the same could not be said of the club who had been Dundee United in 1967. The Dallas Tornado hired as their manager a Croatian migrant named Bob Kapoustin who had settled in Canada. Kapoustin - or Kap as he came to be known - claimed to have played professionally in Yugoslavia for ten years before emigrating to Hungary and fleeing during the 1956 uprising. More recently he had been editor of a short-lived soccer magazine in Toronto.

  The Tornado's preparation for the 1968 season bordered on the surreal. Kap flew to Europe to search for a team and emerged with a collection of mostly English, Norwegian and Dutch players, none married, most barely 20 and all utterly anonymous. `There will not be a star system,' he declared. `The only name here is mine.' Then, with the club's blessing, he took them on a 45-match, seven-month pre-season tour, before any of the players had even set foot in Dallas (a blemish the club attempted to remedy by supplying everyone with ten-gallon hats and westernstyle outfits). From August to February, the Tornado played two and sometimes three matches a week on a globe-trotting odyssey that sent them as far afield as Ceylon, Burma and even war-torn Vietnam. They lost 2-1 to the Iranian Air Force, 5-1 to a team from Bombay, 2-1 in Manila, and finished with a 3-0 defeat in Tahiti - 19 different countries in all, losing nearly everywhere they went.

  The thinking was that exposure to modest and varied opposition would help the young bachelors - who were apparently very popular with the ladies - fuse into a cohesive unit. Yet it seemed only to exhaust them. 'We won't finish last,' Kap had promised after being hired, but his team lost its NASL debut 6-0 against Houston and played another 21 times before managing a victory. By then Kap had been replaced by an Englishman, Keith Spurgeon, who had briefly managed Ajax and was now fresh from a stint with the Libyan national team. 'As a Tornado, you couldn't have blown out a candle,' Spurgeon grumbled to his apparently ill-conditioned charges, but he could supply no extra lung-power. Dallas managed only two victories all season, and most of the 35 players it ran through were never heard from again.

  There were other curiosities that season. The Oakland Clippers, who won as many games as any other team in the league, scored the most goals and compiled the best goal difference, didn't even qualify for the play-offs. The NASL had opted to retain the NPSL's bonus point scheme and as a result Oakland finished second to the San Diego Toros. The Toros, though, faltered in the play-off final, losing to the Atlanta Chiefs, a largely British team whose top scorer was a 23-year-old South African named Kaizer'Boy-Boy' Motaung. (After returning to his own country several years later Motaung used his American experience to found the club he named after himself and his former team: the Kaizer Chiefs.) Once again Atlanta had been managed by Phil Woosnam, his star rising brightly amid the gloom. Assuming the role of general manager had given the university-educated Welshman a seat at league meetings and helped to acquaint him with the machinations of American sport. The enthusiasm, optimism and energy of someone who understood soccer stood out at a time when the league's future seemed bleak.

  Woosnam later claimed league owners had not begun to address their financial difficulties until the season had almost finished, but the yawning expanses of empty seats had been obvious from the start. The Chiefs averaged less than 6,000 in Atlanta. The Toros drew home crowds as low as 2,200, and didn't even manage 10,000 for their leg of the playoff final. Even Houston now found themselves playing in front of just 3,200 in the Astrodome.

  In the larger cities, interest was even more pitiful. The Chicago Mustangs succeeded in luring only 336 to an early-season match; the Los Angeles Wolves often played in front of fewer than 2,000, which looked more like 20 in their colossal home. Worst of all, fans in New York had all but given up on the Generals. One late-season match drew 1,554 to Yankee Stadium, rather fewer than the baseball team attracted for pre-game batting practice. New York City still teemed with soccer fans, but they were not interested in paying to watch a polyglot unit - of whom Cesar Luis Menotti, the future World Cup-winning manager of Argentina, was one - even if it was now comfortably off the bottom of its division. Nearly 37,000 attended the Generals' fixture with Detroit, but only because it was part of a doubleheader. Almost all had come to see the match that followed, a friendly between Santos and Benfica on a pitch limited by Yankee Stadium management to a width of just 60 yards. Two months earlier the Generals themselves had played Pele's club - and won - in front of more than 15,000, a figure which dropped to just 3,000 for their next home game.

  That a mid-table NASL team had beaten one of South America's top clubs may seem surprising, but the 1968 version of American pro soccer was considerably better than what the NPSL had managed to throw together the year before. Manchester City, the reigning English champions, lost a friendly to Woosnam's Chiefs that summer, a defeat their manager Malcolm Allison dismissed as a fluke, insisting Atlanta were little more than a fourth division side and would never beat them in a rematch. After one of City's other fixtures was cancelled - and after the club had also lost to the Oakland Clippers - a rematch was arranged and the Chiefs beat Allison's side once again. Elsewhere, the Cleveland Stokers duplicated the Generals' achievement of beating Santos, and the Kansas City Spurs held Europe-bound Dunfermline Athletic - fourth in the Scottish League and holders of the Scottish Cup - to a draw. Not surprisingly, friendlies against such high-profile opposition often outdrew league contests, and reinforced the limited appeal of the NASL. Within weeks of Atlanta's championship victory - the deep south's first in national professional sport - the league began to haemorrhage.

  The Detroit Cougars were the first to go, slipping away less than three weeks after their final home match. Losses, officials claimed, were $1 million, far in excess of their most pessimistic projections. Others followed in ominously rapid succession. Sensing an apocalypse, the league fled from its high-rent offices in New York, and sadly shed much of its documentation. Those willing to try to stem the tide were few. As early as September, Baltimore manager Gordon Jago (later of QPR) warned: 'The NASL is one week away from having a strong league or no league at all. They've got to come up with strong leadership, a commissioner who is almost a dictator.' But it would take months for such a dictator, or even a leader, to emerge.

  CBS, which had given the NASL the benefit of the doubt by renewing its contract for 1968 (and replacing Blanchflower in the commentary box), decided it had seen and shown enough. Removing soccer - or, more precisely, the chance to see it - from the nation's living rooms made an already gloomy prognosis all the more disheartening. Before the year ended, six clubs had disbanded. Dick Walsh and Ken Macker, named as the divisional overlords at the start of the season, threw in the towel, never to dirty their hands with the sport again. Many of the remaining franchises teetered precariously, including Woosnam's own Chiefs.

  The clubs that remained were hardly united in their appraisal of what had gone wrong. Eugene Scott, a former Davis Cup tennis player and a director of the Generals, was appointed temporary chairman of what was left of the NASL. 'Sure we're in trouble,' he admitted, 'but give us time. Remember what a slow start professional football had? Soccer can make it, too.' Down in Georgia, Woosnam was expressing similar views, but the two men had completely different ideas on how to take the game forward. Woosnam wanted the remaining clubs to merge temporarily into one `all-American' unit and take on teams like Santos, the theory being that this would generate sufficient interest to reconstitute the league. Scott and the Generals - whose weary coach Freddie Goodwin had long since resigned, expressing doubts that Americans would ever warm to soccer - favoured an eight-team league, playing a short, weekends-only fixture list at more humble venues.

  To Scott's cost, power in the league had shifted from New York to, of all places, Atlanta, where Woosnam emerged as the new chieftain. 'The whole problem of soccer in this country goes deeper than playing a few profess
ional games,' he pointed out, to those who were still listening. 'You don't start with pro soccer and wind up with eight-year-olds playing soccer in grammar school. You start with the eight-year-olds and end with highly competent professional teams. Americans have got to learn the value of playing soccer before they can enjoy watching the finished product.'

  Woosnam was right, but like so many others who became captivated by the dream of selling soccer in the US, he would soon lose patience waiting for the eight-year-olds to grow up. The adoption of his philosophy, though, meant that clubs now needed to devote as much of their energy to promoting the sport as selling tickets, something generally overlooked in the rush to make millions. In Atlanta, soccer had been as alien a game as cricket, but Woosnam and his colleagues had visited schools and youth groups, often without much support from the club and sometimes because the players' own children had no place to play. Perhaps not coincidentally, few teams matched the attendances of the Chiefs over the two seasons.

  Building for the next generation was a reasonable strategy, but it hardly solved the immediate problems of the league. Some clubs had let their players' contracts expire, some were unsure whether they wanted to continue, and the USSFA was not at all happy with the all-American, single team approach. It wanted the franchises - which were still granted exclusive rights to professional soccer in their city - to remain as separate teams. What eventually materialised was a strange hybrid that drew its inspiration from the United Soccer Association's mini-league of 1967. The 1969 campaign would begin with foreign teams playing in NASL strips, which would then be handed over to the club's own players, who would contest a shortened season. Not everyone was enamoured of the idea, and when Woosnam was appointed league commissioner, Scott and the Generals disappeared.