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

by David Wangerin

  Harkes's father was born in Scotland, which helped him secure a British passport and thereby alleviate the work permit restrictions that had thwarted other hopefuls. His ancestry had also instilled in him an unusual reverence for Wembley, and lent a special poignancy to Wednesday's presence in the League Cup final that season. Earlier in the competition, he had scored his first goal for the club, a sensational long-range strike against Derby County which, as the US press unfailingly pointed out, came at the expense of England's Peter Shilton. Against Manchester United on April 21, 1991, Harkes became the first American to appear in a Wembley final (Wednesday won 1-0), fulfilling an ambition few other New Jersey youngsters had harboured.

  About 30 other young hopefuls had ended up in Europe, most in the middle echelons of the German pyramid, as progress on the domestic front stagnated. The 1992 target FI FA had set for a US professional league came and went, with the task of replacing the NASL frustrating even the new high-flyers at the federation. The principal issue, Alan Rothenberg insisted, was finding places to play. 'If we had 25,000-seat stadiums,' he declared, 'I'd launch a soccer league yesterday and prophesy 1000 per cent success.'

  There were other hurdles, of course, but the prospect of big-league soccer playing to section after section of empty seats in some yawning gridiron cathedral hardly flooded potential investors with confidence. Even the satisfaction that dozens of cities wanted to stage World Cup matches was tempered by the knowledge that a number of showpiece stadiums did not comply with FIFA's demands - in particular, its insistence on grass pitches and a playing width of at least 68 metres. Many of the proposed stadiums, such as the 101,701-seat facility on the campus of the University of Michigan, literally failed to measure up.

  Most ominous was the absence of any bid from New York, whose only two major-league facilities were consigned to baseball over the summer and not really conducive to soccer anyway. Giants Stadium - in New Jersey, lest anyone forget - had been left off the shortlist because its pitch was a few metres too narrow and its proprietors did not wish to compromise its 'structural integrity'. The area's hopes seemed to rest on the Yale Bowl, 80 miles north-east of the city. FIFA put its foot down, insisting the organisers could do better than hold New York's matches in Connecticut. The response was almost laughable: enlarging 23,000-seat Rutgers Stadium in New Jersey or remodelling the Aqueduct race track in Queens. Giants Stadium, which in spite of the Cosmos' tenancy had not been built with soccer in mind, seemed the most sensible choice. But accommodating a wider pitch and covering it with real grass would not only cost millions of dollars but also inconvenience its most powerful tenants, the NFL's Giants, and the jets, who had abandoned Shea Stadium in 1983.

  When the organising committee came up with its definitive list of venues in April 1992, Giants Stadium magically appeared on it. Only eight other sites were to be used. FIFA claimed such a small number, the lowest since 1974, when the tournament involved only 16 teams, would provide 'better exposure to football', but less charitable sources pointed towards the cost savings. In truth, the decision had less to do with 'exposure' than an underwhelming level of support from corporate America. Werner Fricker claimed the original intention had been to stage the World Cup in the 12 cities most likely to be involved in a professional league. If that was true, it was difficult to justify the selection of Orlando, Florida, with a population of less than 200,000, or the exclusion of Philadelphia, the fifth-largest city in the country.

  Chicago, Detroit, Boston (or at least Foxboro), Los Angeles (Pasadena), San Francisco (Palo Alto) and Washington DC joined Orlando and New Jersey in clearing the final hurdle. Completing the field was Dallas, home of American Airlines, a key USSF patron. Not all were tendering the country's finest stadiums. Crumbling venues such as Texas's Cotton Bowl would require something more than a new coat of paint, while the proprietors of Giants Stadium still balked at demands to expand the playing surface. FIFA threw the problem back at the organisers: If in the United States, the land of all possibilities, this is not overcome,' sniffed secretary Sepp Blatter, 'FIFA shall not bring the World Cup to New York.' The land of all possibilities duly produced its solution: a platform which would raise the pitch ten feet above the artificial surface and its constrictive retaining wall. Told the arrangement would set them back about $5 million, FIFA suddenly turned conciliatory and declared the conundrum to be `haggling over a few centimetres' - though in fact there were more than three million square ones at stake. The undersized pitch was passed fit.

  Attention also turned to the curious choice of the indoor facility in suburban Detroit - evidence, said Blatter, that at 'so-called conservative FIFA there are open-minded spirits' - whose problems with a similarly narrow pitch paled alongside the unprecedented challenge of staging matches indoors on a natural surface. A few years earlier its proprietors had experimented with growing grass indoors, but with little success ('It grew, but it was kind of a sickly green,' recalled one observer). A group of university scientists was engaged to round up all the horticultural expertise it could find.

  The national team's progress, meanwhile, consisted largely of offering those players under contract as much international exposure as possible, a development which soon led to some fairly young heads accumulating staggering numbers of caps. It took Peter Shilton 15 years to make 70 international appearances, but Bruce Murray reached that mark in less than half the time, while he was only 25. The 72 caps Murray had collected by 1993 were more than twice the number with which Arnie Mausser had set a national record as recently as 1985. Half a dozen of Murray's Italia 90 team-mates, all under 30, closed in on 50-cap careers, paying for them in wearying denominations of air miles. In 1992 alone the US staged matches in North Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Washington DC, and visited Ireland, Morocco, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Saudi Arabia. The 1993 schedule included 34 internationals from Texas to Tokyo, the most important of them squeezed into a two-month period when the US found itself entered in three competitions. To the outside world, the most significant of these were the South American championships in Ecuador, the Copa America, to which Concacaf teams had been invited. For the federation, it was more important to perform well at home in the US Cup, a competition the World Cup organising committee had first staged in 1992 as much to prepare itself for 1994 as the national team.

  The 1992 event pitted the US against three European sides - Italy, Ireland and Portugal - who had failed to qualify for the European Championships that summer. Surprisingly, the Americans emerged with two victories and a draw to claim the trophy. Yet they returned to the competition the following year having won just one of their previous 14 internationals. Milutinovic expressed indifference to the results, insisting he was far more concerned with individual performances and longer-term aims. But for the men in the suits, a losing team was bad for business. 'Even with some players in Europe, we've got to do better than a tie at home against Iceland,' sighed one official.

  The 1993 US Cup succeeded in landing crowd-pleasers Brazil as well as Germany and England, perhaps selected as much for the testing behaviour of their supporters as the appeal of their teams. The competition drew a total of 286,000 fans to a sort of dress rehearsal for the following summer. In Foxboro, an hour's ride from the site of the Boston Tea Party, England helpfully broke an American streak of five matches without a win by losing 2-0 in front of 37,000 startled fans. While the English press dismissed the result as yet another example of the failings of beleaguered manager Graham Taylor, to the home team it was a considerable accomplishment, a clean sheet against the motherland and the first victory over the English since Belo Horizonte.

  'If this isn't on the front page of every paper tomorrow, I don't know what we have to do,' exclaimed Harkes - in vain, since the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup later that day and laid claim to the sport section. One USSF official, apparently unaware that the opposition were hardly the footballing giants of half a century earlier, gushed that the victory
represented 'the highest point in American soccer since we beat England in the 1950 World Cup'. Though the Americans lost to Brazil and Germany, US Cup 93 - as seen on national TV - provided plenty of excitement, including a dramatic match that saw Germany retrieve a 3-0 half-time deficit against Brazil to draw 3-3 on a sweltering Washington afternoon.

  But perhaps the most important occasion was the Germans' 2-1 win over England in front of more than 62,000. The debut of indoor grass at the Silverdome proved a success: 1,850 hexagonal trays, each weighing 1.5 tonnes thanks to a 15-centimetre base of loam, were wheeled inside and assembled for the contest, and the end result proved as playable as anything under the sky. The port-a-pitch was promptly taken apart, and would spend the next 12 months in an adjacent car park.

  For Milutinovic, there was scarcely time to draw breath. Days later, an American team flew to Ecuador to play in the Copa America. The United States and Mexico, whose ambition had largely prompted the invitation, participated as guests, the first in the competition's history. But Milutinovic rested his Europe-based players, and the US capitulated, losing to the hosts and Uruguay and somehow contriving to throw away a 3-0 lead against feeble Venezuela. The third trophy to play for that summer was the Gold Cup the team had won two years earlier. Back came Harkes, now a minor celebrity in England, and Eric Wynalda, who had reached the German first division with Saarbrticken, though they were relegated that spring. Three other European players, none USborn, also returned. Earnie Stewart, the Dutch-born son of an American serviceman, had become a respectable goal-scorer in the Eredivisie with Willem II; he had lived in California between the ages of two and seven before moving to Holland with his mother. Roy Wegerle, a South African with a Scottish mother, German father and American wife (and a brother, Steve, who had spent eight seasons in the NASL), had the highest profile of the three, not only because of his seven seasons of English league experience but because of the variety of countries he was eligible to represent.

  Perhaps the most curious arrival was Thomas Dooley, whose name alone had attracted the interest of USSF officials familiar with the progress of Kaiserslautern in the Bundesliga. Dooley had signed for the club in 1988 and helped them to a league championship in 1991, establishing himself as a first-rate midfielder. His father was an American serviceman, but he had abandoned the family shortly after his son's birth. In spite ofhis name, Dooley spoke no English and had never visited the US, yet he drove a Corvette, claimed to watch the Super Bowl and 'always considered the Americans among my friends'. Understandably, his ambition had always been to play for Germany, but after a series of injuries helped to deny him that opportunity, at 31 he pledged his international future to the US, rapidly developing a keen fascination for his adopted country. As Caligiuri later remarked: 'Everything with him's like a 33-year-old boy seeing Disneyland for the first time.'

  Dooley and Wegerle turned in a number of impressive performances, and were ever-presents at the 1993 Gold Cup. Dooley scored the winner against Panama - a brutal match which produced fines for both sides - but his team played well only in spurts, while the meagre attendance in Dallas mocked the city's World Cup pretensions. Though the US finished top of its group, a total of only 43,500 had appeared at the three doubleheaders, a figure nearly eclipsed by the first match in the Mexico City group. The Americans' semi-final against Costa Rica, settled by Californian Cle Kooiman's extra-time goal, drew fewer than 15,000 to the Cotton Bowl. Kooiman played his club football with Cruz Azul, whose own Aztec Stadium staged the final.

  Laden with World Cup qualifiers, the Mexicans had needed some persuasion to take the competition seriously, having made a better fist of the Copa America than their northern neighbours (to the extent of reaching the final, where they lost narrowly to Argentina). That success now steeled them with confidence for the Gold Cup final where, in front of 120,000 in the smoggy, thin air of the Estadio Azteca, the Mexicans turned in their customary forceful performance against the US, a 4-0 whitewash that left the Americans gasping for breath and desperate for a rest. 'We went to Bora's after the game, and when we thought about it, it was hard to take,' Kooiman said. But the tacos were great, the music was great, and the guys were thinking about vacations.'

  But with the World Cup less than 12 months away, there was little respite for those hoping to make the final 22. The USSF arranged a battery of test matches: Iceland in Reykjavik; Ukraine in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Denmark in Hong Kong; Bolivia in Miami; Chile in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and dozens of others. Players walked a peculiar tightrope, needing to put in the effort that would earn them a place in the squad, yet desperate to avoid the sort of serious injury that had kept Marcelo Balboa out for most of 1993.

  Milutinovic's axe surprisingly fell on several Italia 90 veterans: John Doyle, Desmond Armstrong, Peter Vermes and even Bruce Murray. He also shunned arguably his most experienced goalkeeper, Kasey Keller, whose performances for Millwall had attracted considerable acclaim. Keller's insistence that his time in the English First Division had provided him with more competition than the sum of his national team experience went unheeded. Meola, whose brief European sojourn had been damned with faint praise, seemed the certain first choice.

  The inscrutable Serb offered little in the way of explanation for his decisions, relatively free from the sort of scrutiny they would have attracted in other countries. 'My job isn't hard,' he joked with reporters. 'You're the ones with the difficult job - trying to get me to tell you something.' Not that there weren't cogent criticisms to be made. The World Cup run-in was far from inspiring, with draws at home to Moldova and Saudi Arabia, a defeat by Iceland in San Diego and a narrow win over Armenia in Fullerton, California. Milutinovic persisted in shuffling his line-up and instigating a parade of substitutions which hinted more at panic than experimentation; for a while the team's top scorer was defender Frank Klopas. When he cared to, the manager defended his seemingly haphazard selections with references to his time with Costa Rica. The same approach, he claimed, had led to that team's success in Italy. In the end, he chose only eight who had gone to the 1990 World Cup, as well as five who had played for his college-based assistant, Sigi Schmid, at UCLA. Above all he wanted those with European experience: Harkes, Stewart, Dooley (now with Bayer Leverkusen), Wynalda (transferred to VfL Bochum), Tab Ramos (Real Betis) and Caligiuri (back in California).

  In a confusing and largely predetermined draw, FIFA were exceedingly kind in naming the US as one of the six top seeds, if less kind in pulling much-fancied Colombia's name out of the hat to join them in Group A, along with Switzerland and a Romanian side at its peak, led by Gheorghe Hagi. There was little evidence that the Americans had been given the easy ride some had forecast. Not content with overtly orchestrating the draw for the greatest commercial potential (Ireland would get to play closest to Boston, Italy to New York, Germany in Chicago) FIFA banished from the glitzy Las Vegas ceremony the one person the country most readily associated with the game.

  A feud with FIFA president Joao Havelange - over an affair that had nothing to do with the tournament - cost Pele his place at the table, and even beseechings from Alan Rothenberg that 'the notion of having a draw in this country without Pele is unthinkable' proved futile. Not for the last time, the unthinkable had happened. Havelange bristled: 'FIFA has the right to decide who will participate. The presence of one person is not that important.'

  FIFA proved to be more open-minded when it came to the game itself. It decided to award three points instead of two for victories in group matches, and ordered referees to clamp down on rough tactics, especially the tackle from behind. Miscreants were to be severely discplined, and the offside law interpreted more generously for attackers. Blatter referred to the changes as 'an unequivocal sign that attacking spirit will be rewarded', and they did prove largely positive, but many questioned the wisdom of introducing them on the eve of the event. Some even claimed FIFA were responding not so much to the cynicism of the previous tournament as to the demands of a less accepting host audi
ence.

  But in the weeks leading up to kick-off, quizzical looks and contemptuous frowns largely gave way to broad smiles. Pointing to the astonishing fact that almost all tickets had been sold, the organisers proclaimed that USA 94 would be 'the best World Cup ever'. Whether it had captured the imagination of the local population was another matter, and an issue which seldom escaped the notice of the international media. Foreign journalists took endless delight in corralling the American-in-the-street and waiting for the inevitable response to their question: the World what? One pre-tournament poll claimed 71 per cent of Americans did not know the event was about to take place. The organisers were under no illusions. 'To 178 countries, it's the most important thing in the world,' one official acknowledged. 'We happen to be the 179th.'

  That a World Cup could be considered the `best ever' in spite of such widespread apathy seemed incongruous, but of course the definition of `best' had never been made entirely clear. In Soccer America, Paul Gardner hinted at the most likely criterion:

  I've been an accredited journalist for the past four World Cups. Never, in the lead-up to any of those tournaments, did I receive a single piece of sales material. But this time, it's a rare day when I don't get in the mail some catalogue or expensivelyprinted brochure offering to sell me some official World Cup merchandise, or hotel rooms, or not-to-be-missed ticket deals. All, need I add, at alarmingly high 'special' prices. A lot of this uninvited, unwanted stuff comes direct from the World Cup people. Money has evidently become an obsession with them.

  It was not difficult to find similar views from other journalists, whose employers were forced to hand over $500 to obtain a press pass or were relieved of $100 just to use their own telephones in the press box. George Kimball of the Boston Herald discovered that at the press car park at Giants Stadium: 'I could pay $10 at the gate, show my media badge and park alongside the poor sap who had paid FIFA $40 to put his car there.' Fans, naturally, were confronted with similar avarice. After discovering he could not buy tickets for one World Cup match at a time, a disillusioned fan wrote to the New York Times that organisers in California had told him the block purchase scheme guaranteed full stadiums, which was 'important for television' - and that touts represented the best chance for anyone unable to part with $200 or more for the standard three-match 'package'.