John Best was a player, a coach
and a General Manager in the North American Soccer League. After coming over
from his native England in the early 1960s, he turned out for the Philadelphia Ukrainians
in the American Soccer League (1962-67), the Philadelphia Spartans (1967), the
Cleveland Stokers (1968), and the Dallas Tornado (1969-73). He then coached the
Seattle Sounders for three years before becoming GM at the Vancouver Whitecaps. He then returned to the Sounders, also as GM.
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| John Best, transitioning from player to coach in 1974 |
John very sadly passed away a year ago. With the permission of his wife,
Claudia, here are the highlights of an interview that John gave me in January
2014 while I was researching Rock n Roll Soccer.
RnRS: You started out with the Philadelphia Spartans in the National Professional
Soccer League [which one year later merged with the United Soccer Association
to become the NASL]. Can you tell me about the pay and conditions
as a player in 1967? Were you well looked after?
John
Best: Oh yes, very much so. The pay wasn’t great at
that point in time, but it was as good as a lot of people were getting in the
first and second divisions in England. I’m sure there were many [in the NPSL] who earned
less, but in terms of being taken care of
- it was really unbelievable because of the quality of hotels and
travel. We flew to games, stayed in the best hotels, and I remember after we played
in St. Louis, [team owner] Art Rooney took the whole team out to eat. I don’t
know that every team was treated that way, but certainly we were. And at the clubs
I later managed we tried to maintain the high standards as well. It was a
better experience than most people had in British soccer.
RnRS: Art Rooney was typical of the early NASL
owner - a wealthy entrepreneur. Looking back, is it surprising to you that people
like him wanted to get involved in soccer?
JB: Rooney owned the Pittsburgh Steelers. If you go back and look at
the ownership of the NASL clubs all the way through that early period, you’ll
find that it was extremely strong, and made up mainly of sports entrepreneurs.
They were wealthy people, but very shrewd in terms of marketing professional
sports. The problem was that the sport was unknown – you’re not just starting
up a new sport, but you’re starting up with people with absolutely no concept
or idea of that. It took a tremendous effort to grow the sport in those early
years.
I
was very fortunate to play for the Rooneys. Later on I played in Dallas for Lamar
Hunt, and then went up to Seattle as coach for an expansion team, where the
ownership group were city elders, and [were] just very intelligent, proactive people.
So you had a great opportunity to do a quality job, because you were left alone
to do it, and with enough funding. I’m not suggesting that all ownerships were
like that. There were amazing changes as time went by, and the majority of
teams became corporately owned, and that brings a difference in attitude and
perspective – when you have a meeting of CEOs of major corporations compared
with a group of wealthy sports entrepreneurs.
