Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  In 1983, the Whitecaps had returned to the top of their division with 24 wins, the most in the league, only to lose to Toronto in the first round of the play-offs. David Cross, the bearded former Norwich, Coventry, West Brom and West Ham centre-forward, led the attack with 19 goals, while Peter Beardsley’s 8 took his tally to 28 in his 3-year stay in Canada. Other players added by coach Johnny Giles included ex-Sunderland, Manchester City and England stopper Dave Watson and Dutch midfielder Frans Thijssen, who had helped Ipswich lift the UEFA Cup in 1981 and been named England’s Footballer of the Year.

  Vancouver began the 1984 season with Giles, who had returned for a second stint as West Brom manager, being replaced by former Seattle coach Alan Hinton. Peter Ward made the same short journey from the defunct Sounders to register 16 goals and 10 assists. The Whitecaps won fewer games than Minnesota, but edged ahead because of scoring more goals, ten of them provided by Cross.

  The defending champions, Tulsa Roughnecks, never threatened to repeat their feat of a year earlier after very nearly failing to start the new season. The team’s owners, figuring they had lost $8 million on their venture, decided to fold the franchise without even paying the players their Soccer Bowl bonuses. Samuels, however, had other ideas, claiming it would be ‘a kick in the teeth’ if the league began the 1984 season without its champions. Although Samuels’ own efforts at raising the capital to save the team appeared doomed, a local disc jockey galvanised his listeners into raising $65,000 – just enough to keep the team in business.

  Dutch World Cup player Wim Suurbier replaced Terry Hennessey as head coach and, for the second time in his NASL career, striker Laurie Abrahams was pleased to get away from Tulsa. ‘The club was having a ruck again. Terry left and the management was arguing about money,’ he says. Strike partner Ron Futcher signed off his NASL career with a flourish of 18 goals, but 10 defeats in their first 13 games doomed the Roughnecks to a lowly finish.

  Bringing up the rear in the Western Division were the Golden Bay Earthquakes, who had made the play-offs a year earlier after changing their name from San Jose in an attempt to appeal to a wider fan base. Former Luton striker Godfrey Ingram’s 16 goals had been one of the main reasons for their success in 1983, but he began the following season with Minnesota. After scoring only twice in 12 games for the Strikers, he returned for the last eight games of the Earthquakes’ undistinguished season.

  In the Eastern Division, the Chicago Sting took the honours ahead of Toronto, even though they scored only one more goal than they conceded. The Sting had been unable to maintain their championship-winning form after their 1981 triumph, finishing last in their division in 1982 – despite Gordon Hill’s nine goals after a trade from Montreal – and making an early play-off exit a year later. Toronto’s second place finish owed much to David Byrne, who scored 12 goals and made 13 more.

  Occupying last place in the division were the Tampa Bay Rowdies, which was hardly the result Rodney Marsh had expected when he accepted the offer to coach his former team. Marsh’s return had fulfilled the promise he made to Tampa reporters when he warned them after his farewell testimonial game in 1979, ‘I’ll be back.’

  While Marsh had been enjoying success as coach and chief executive of the semi-professional Carolina Lightnin’, the Rowdies had been a pale imitation of the team he graced in the NASL’s boom years. In 1983, no team had achieved fewer than the Rowdies’ seven victories under American coach Al Miller, who had succeeded Gordon Jago after his 1982 team had won only 12 games. Jago’s final match had been an embarrassing 9–2 defeat at Toronto.

  The Rowdies’ owners, Cornelia and Dick Corbett, felt that a dose of the Marsh personality was the tonic required to revive their ailing team. His English contingent included former Manchester City teammate Tony Towers and ex-Bolton forward Stuart Lee, while Mark Lindsay returned to Tampa Bay to play seven games after taking the job of player-coach. Lindsay admits that his move was inspired by the inevitability of the NASL’s closure. ‘I could have stayed in San Jose, but I was more cynical as my career went on. Everyone knew the league was winding down and my idea was to get back to Tampa, play out my career and settle down in my house.’

  Even Marsh, their talisman, could not revive the Rowdies’ fortunes and their only high spot was when South African-born teenager Roy Wegerle, a future US international, was named Rookie of the Year after totalling nine goals and seven assists. Marsh got straight on the phone to England and helped Wegerle launch his Football League career with a move to Chelsea.

  The final NASL play-offs saw Toronto dispose of San Diego in two games, while Chicago and Vancouver played out a much more exciting series. After former Wolves goalkeeper Paul Bradshaw kept a clean sheet and Carl Valentine earned a single-goal Whitecaps victory in the opening game in Chicago, the Sting hit back by winning 3–1 in Vancouver and taking the decider 4–3 in the Windy City.

  Soccer Bowl had gone the way of so many features of the NASL’s previous, more successful, era, replaced by a best-of-three series that at least ensured home team participation. The Sting became the NASL’s last-ever champions – and the only team apart from the Cosmos to win the title more than once – with a pair of close-fought victories, 2–1 and 3–2 over Bob Houghton’s Blizzard team. Toronto keeper Paul Hammond recalls, ‘Many people didn’t like Bob because they thought he was too defensive. We lost both games and it was disappointing because I thought we were the better team.’

  It was obvious, however, that the real battle was taking place away from the field. The league was fighting for its life. While the 1984 Olympic soccer tournament was attracting crowds of 100,000 to games at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California, attendance had continued to slump in the NASL. Hammond remembers, ‘There were rumours rumbling all around during that year. I was lucky that the teams I was with were financially sound, but we heard stories about players not getting paid or being two weeks behind and it was unnerving.’

  San Diego, Minnesota and Chicago announced plans to move to the MISL. The Whitecaps said they could not continue, selling off everything apart from their Soccer Bowl trophy. And, in March 1985, the previously unthinkable happened when the Cosmos, sold by Warner Communications to none other than Giorgio Chinaglia, joined the defections to the MISL. ‘That was the end,’ says Alan Hinton. ‘When the Cosmos pulled out, the league was finished.’

  The possibility of a new franchise in Seattle would still have left the league with only five teams. The death of Howard Samuels early in 1985 from a heart attack also meant that the NASL was without a figurehead to attempt to keep the league in business.

  In the final week of March, the inevitable announcement was made: the NASL was ceasing operations. The news was greeted by most American sports fans like the passing of a fragile, elderly aunt. Even to those who cared, it was hardly a shock. As for the rest, well, it came as a surprise to learn that the ailing old girl had still been alive at all. After close to 4,000 games, and almost 18 years after Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick showed America the potential of the world game, it really was all over.

  Almost two decades on from the NASL’s final curtain, opinions remain divided about the cause of the league’s downfall. Rapid expansion, apathy of the television networks, inept local management, the dominance of the Cosmos, failure to develop North American players, ill-advised attempts to push through home-grown players too quickly, the strike of 1979, the failed American World Cup bid – all played a part at certain times and all feature when those involved in the NASL look back at the league’s demise.

  Former Vancouver Whitecaps coach Tony Waiters argues, ‘I thought it was crazy to expand in 1978. In 1977 it looked as though the league had a real chance of succeeding. It became unbalanced, with more teams struggling than succeeding. Phil Woosnam always said it was not his decision but he must have been able to influence the owners into standing put if he’d wanted to.’

  Clive Toye, the former sportswriter who signed Pelé for the New York Cosmos, remains convinced of the folly of e
xpansion. ‘Those new teams were Johnny-come-lately carpetbaggers who had no idea of how we had got to where we were. They thought you could sign big players and people would come. Bullshit. We built a constituency in New York before we signed Pelé. Some of the good guys in the league sold up because it was not the league they wanted to be in. It was the one thing Phil and I clashed over in our philosophies. We parted ways and haven’t spoken much since.’

  Jimmy Gabriel, who coached the Seattle Sounders and San Jose Earthquakes, blames the industrial action of 1979. ‘When the union man came in and said they had to get the players organised, the wonderful feeling between fans and players was lost and the game never recovered. The players just wanted a union and the owners didn’t want them to have one. It was stalemate and in the end it ruined the league.’

  Alan Ball, who helped the Whitecaps win Soccer Bowl with a mostly British team, says, ‘I thought the Americans started to take the game back for themselves. It went from two American players to three and then to five, but they were moving too fast. People wanted to see big stars.’

  Former Tea Men coach Noel Cantwell disagrees, saying, ‘One of the things that could have been done differently was having more young American players in the team. With only one or two, the game was not going to make progress as quickly as they wanted. Maybe four Americans in the team earlier on would have improved the standard and encouraged more people to come.’

  Peter McParland, one of the overseas stars of the NASL’s early years, says, ‘I think they made a mistake by going into the big time too quickly. They paid big bucks and I don’t think that was wise. Slow and steady progress would have been better. They should have aimed for a mix of players to build it up and not gone after the big stars. The odd one was fair enough, but they brought in a lot of fellows who were just out to get a few bob.’

  Former Vancouver coach and San Antonio player Bob McNab says, ‘Owners of all the other sports clubs here in America will accept vast losses, but only if the value of their franchise increases. The value of the NASL franchises never increased because the league never got a major long-term TV contract.’

  Geoff Barnett was coach at the Minnesota Kicks, one of the league’s best-attended franchises, when that team folded. ‘Our problem was that we had a very low average ticket price,’ he says. ‘It was about four dollars per ticket so for thirty bucks you could take the whole family for a day out. The club was scared to increase the prices in case people stopped coming so we always had low revenue.’

  Peter Wall, who played for and coached the California Surf franchise, says, ‘People had to recognise that the Cosmos had Warner Brothers behind them so money was no object. They could buy who they wanted, but then other people thought they could do that too. They paid out money to compete and at the end of the day owners looked at the balance sheet and saw how much they had lost. It became a crumbling tower.’

  So the NASL failed to last the distance. But a league that captured the public’s imagination, changed the landscape of American team sport and became a focus for the soccer world, if only for a few years, can hardly be written off as a failure. Certainly none of the vast British contingent in what amounted to a world all-star league would ever call it that.

  Phil Woosnam turned down a transfer to Chelsea to accept what turned out to be an opportunity to run the NASL for almost 15 years, prompting the comment that ‘his greatest asset and his greatest defect was a vision that outreached the league’s tenuous grasp’. It seems appropriate, therefore, to give him the final word.

  ‘The NASL established a foundation for the sport that they will never take away,’ he concludes. ‘Certainly many of the American players today are here as a result of the NASL. Brandi Chastain fell in love with the sport because she fell in love with Giorgio Chinaglia. The fact that Major League Soccer is here now is a consequence of what went on in the NASL, with Pelé and Beckenbauer, British guys like Best and Marsh, and, equally, those like Ron Newman, who went around saying, “Let’s get something organised.”

  ‘A lot of people gave their lives to it. It was a great challenge, some great people were involved, we accomplished a lot and we had some great years. We didn’t get past the finish line, but we came pretty close.’

  Postscript

  It may have come too late for Phil Woosnam and the North American Soccer League, but the World Cup finally arrived in the United States in the summer of 1994. At last, so the theory went, the nation would catch the football fever that had been afflicting the rest of the world for more than a century.

  As it happened, few Americans paid much attention to the opening match between Germany and Bolivia. Instead, tens of millions were glued to the televised police pursuit of a white Ford Bronco belonging to murder suspect and former American football hero O.J. Simpson. But a tournament that began and ended with a missed penalty kick – Diana Ross’s embarrassing effort in the opening ceremony and Roberto Baggio’s failure in Italy’s shoot-out against Brazil – had more than its share of memorable moments. It was, as Woosnam had always predicted, magnificently organised, played in wonderful arenas in front of huge and enthusiastic crowds. The football, until the goalless final at least, was of vintage quality and there was even the opportunity for patriotic flag-waving when the United States upset Colombia, one of the pre-tournament favourites, before running Brazil close in the knock-out stage. As an introduction to soccer for the non-believers, there was not much that could have been bettered. Now it was time for the pay-off.

  The award of the World Cup to the United States, ahead of Brazil and Colombia, had been made by FIFA on the understanding that it would be accompanied by the establishment of the country’s first professional league since the NASL played its final game in 1984. But with the sport’s governing body, and American soccer fans, becoming increasingly impatient for the deal to be fulfilled, it was the spring of 1996 before Major League Soccer finally took to the field.

  The years since professional soccer had been played outdoors in the United States had been frustrating for the remaining fans of the sport. At one point, only the Western Soccer League, with its four teams, was playing a decent standard of the game outside of the nation’s colleges. At grass-roots level, the number of players had never been so high, yet soccer was seen as a cheap and safe participation sport for youngsters of any sex, size or shape, while the ‘real’ athletes moved on to the world of gridiron or baseball.

  Professionally, all that remained was the indoor game. The Major Indoor Soccer League, until its closure in 1992, continued to feature many British players who had decided that their futures lay in America. But while players like Alan Willey, Paul Child and Peter Ward put a roof over their heads by playing with a roof over their heads, the revival of the outdoor game was being planned – in the shape of America’s bid to host the 1994 World Cup. The success, albeit brief, of the NASL and the huge crowds for the 1984 Olympic soccer tournament in Los Angeles helped the United States Soccer Federation convince FIFA of the viability of their scheme. And on the playing side, America’s hosting of the event was conveniently validated by the national team’s qualification for the 1990 finals in Italy. It was a feat achieved mostly with players from college soccer and from the semi-professional American Soccer League, which had re-formed in 1988. Among its founders was the former British sportswriter and New York Cosmos general manager Clive Toye.

  To prepare its players for the 1994 finals without the benefit of a top-level domestic league, the USSF signed many of the country’s best players to central contracts and embarked on a programme of year-round warm-up games aimed at providing continuity and competition. It was only ever intended to be a short-term solution, however, and once the World Cup had been and gone the urgency to launch the new league intensified.

  Major League Soccer had earned FIFA approval as the country’s top-level professional competition and set about demonstrating that it had learned some valuable lessons from the NASL’s demise. Limitations on overseas players to five p
er team, a centrally controlled system for signing players, and salary limits of $1.25 million per team and $175,000 per player were all part of the structure when ten teams took the field for the inaugural MLS season.

  By the time the league was entering its eighth season in 2003, very little had changed since that first year. Average attendance was holding steady at around 15,000 per game, while television coverage was being offered on cable sports station ESPN 2, with the MLS Cup final – the modern version of the Soccer Bowl – broadcast on the ABC network.

  Unlike the NASL, there has been no rush to expand. Numbers did rise to 12 for a couple of seasons, only for the teams in Miami and Tampa Bay to be closed down. Following the same thinking employed by the NASL on many occasions, the Miami Fusion had been located in the belief that the large Hispanic population in southern Florida would turn out to cheer their local team. But although it proved to be a misplaced assumption in the case of Miami, the Los Angeles Galaxy have enjoyed considerable support from the Mexican section of that city’s population. The Galaxy, MLS champions in 2002, were even considered worthy of inclusion in the English magazine Four Four Two’s ‘World Premiership’ in the spring of 2003. The product on the field remains predominantly home-grown. Very few established world stars have been seen in the league, the most notable being German World Cup captain Lothar Matthäus, wild-haired Colombian striker Carlos Valderrama and Bulgarian World Cup forward Hristo Stoitchkov. The limits on overseas signings and the improved lot of the professional player in England and Scotland have combined to keep the British presence to a minimum. Whereas the average First Division player in the ’70s dreamed of having his mortgage paid off by the time he retired, the modern Premiership squad member could pay cash for a new house every year. There is no longer a desire to seek out a summer ‘earner’ and, with its salary cap, American professional soccer is hardly the place to get rich quick.