Open Wide For Some Soccer podcast

Thanks to David McKenzie and former Diplomats and Cosmos defender Bob Iarusci for having me on the latest episode of their excellent NASL podcast, Open Wide For Some Soccer. You can hear the episode here. Among the topics discussed were:

* What inspired me to write a book about the NASL

Celeb meets star

* How I came up with the title for the book

* Why the MLS is disrespectful to the history of the NASL * Indications that people are still interested in the league * The US’ involvement in bidding for the 1986 FIFA World Cup * Decisions to market Pelé while perhaps forgetting some other deserving players * Other mistakes made when trying to promote the league * Celebrity appearances and their help (or not) in growing the game in the US * Gimmicks used to promote the NASL and why I was a fan of them * The corruption of FIFA * Why Bob used to have to spray paint his shoes white before every game * Improvements that MLS has made in marketing the sport * Why Geoff Barnett decided not to play for the Cosmos * The merging together of playing styles throughout the world * Where the NASL has had its most influence on American soccer 

* The increased interest of international scouts towards North America 

Johan Cruyff in the NASL: the Anti-Diplomat

When Prince died last month, someone on my Twitter feed posted a snapshot of the page in a book they'd written that told an anecdote involving the singer. Less than a day had passed since the announcement, and already a writer was crying out, "Prince is dead, buy my book!" Well, as I'm always told, publishing's a business just like any other.

Cutting through the bullshit: Cruyff in DC

   

It's taken me a few weeks to write about Johan Cruyff. The day after his death, one of my publishers contacted me to write a piece about the Dutchman and his time in the North American Soccer League. They would try and place it with a newspaper. Good publicity for the book, you understand. It wasn't a good time, and in any case, I didn't want to. There were dozens of Cruyff appreciations being hacked out, as you'd expect. Nothing I said was going to add to the narrative, and I'd have been left with the same sensation I had when I saw the Prince tweet - Cruyff is dead, read all about it! I do read obituaries and I've also been paid to write them, so I'm not trying to come across as morally aloft. But there's a difference between using words to deal with your upset and manufacturing them to push your bloody book (again).

During these past few weeks, though, I did think about Cruyff a lot, just as I had done while writing 'Rock n Roll Soccer'. During that time, I thought how magnificent it would be to talk to him about the NASL. Doubtless, my publisher would have been happy too. But I really did want to know what he'd thought of the league, of the USA, why he went there, and what was his view of soccer there now. I wanted to know what he thought way more than I wanted to know what Pelé or Franz Beckenbauer thought. Cruyff, I imagined, would have torn it up and prompted me to start all over again. He would have said the unexpected, the slanted, the unpopular, the bizarre, the interesting. Not many soccer players manage that.

In many interviews I conducted for the book, I maybe suggested certain things in my questions. Thus prompted, the interviewee might agree, or they said, "You know, I'd never thought of it like that, but I think you're right." How great for the writer's ego! What I loved to hear, however, was the moment when they said, "No, it wasn't like that at all. That's bullshit. This is what it was like." I thought that Cruyff would do that with every question. He would make me feel small and stupid. Like the player and the person he was, he would come at every topic from a completely fresh angle, varying his replies from the ludicrous to the enlightening. It's a certainty that he would have made me write a better book.

Leading from the front: "He was
 the ultimate team player."

The players who encountered him in the NASL loved to talk about him. Who wouldn't want to remind people that they played alongside him? Or against him, like Rochester's Damir Šutevski, who admits in a game where Cruyff scored twice for LA (even though he only played one half, in his first game for six months), "I covered him but I couldn't stop him. He took me to the cleaners." Carmine Marcantonio of the Washington Diplomats recalls trying to compete with Cruyff and LA in a playoff game in 1979, and takes up the tale of chasing the player when he received the ball at the top of his own penalty area. "He got the ball, I caught up with him, I tried to grab his shirt, but I couldn't bring him down and I went down and dislocated my finger trying to hold him back. He went upfield with the ball, faked out two or three defenders and scored the winning goal. There's a picture with four of us on the ground and Johan putting the ball in the empty net."

Cruyff was promptly signed by the Diplomats for the 1980 season, "and that was one of the best years I had, being teammates with Johan", says Marcantonio. "He was the ultimate team player. He took more pleasure in assisting and would pass to a team-mate to score." Cruyff scored 10 goals, but also registered 20 assists in 25 regular season games. However, Bob Iarusci and Don Droege - also both on the Diplomats' team that year - agree that Cruyff disturbed the equilibrium of what had been a fairly successful side, and that he more or less usurped team coach Gordon Bradley when it came to tactics. Droege personally wasn't bothered: "I'm just a lowly American player, and I'm just happy to be out on the field. But the English players like Alan Green, Bobby Stokes, Jim Steele, Matt Dillon - you bring in a player like Cruyff and the whole dynamics are gone." Droege didn't recall any truth to the rumoured story of Cruyff wiping Bradley's chalkboard clean so that he could give his own team-talk, but adds, "I do remember talking with Bradley in the bathroom and him checking under the stalls to make sure Cruyff wasn't in there listening to us."

Cruyff claimed at the time he was in the NASL to help promote and develop the game in the US, but it was also thought that, like Pelé, he came out of retirement because he needed cash after making some poor investments. It's no longer relevant. It's only important that he graced the league with his superior enigmatic touch for a handful of years. "He was a great individual," says Marcantonio, "in that he almost wanted to run the show on the field, but wanted it done in a team concept. Johan was very domineering. Like any great player, he didn't shut up." And for that we can only be thankful.

(The story of NASL soccer in Washington DC, and Cruyff's role in turning around the Diplomats' 1980 season, can be read in Chapter 8 of Rock n Roll Soccer, 'Broken Teams in Dysfunctional DC: Cruyff, the Dips, the Darts and the Whips.' Buy it now for just $£ etc. etc.)

"Jimmy bloody Hill, Jesus wept"

“Washington DC is a city notorious for its inability to function,” is the opening sentence to chapter 8 of Rock n Roll Soccer. I focus on DC in this section not just because I’ve lived there for the past 15 years, but because it’s an extreme reflection of the more unstable end of the North American Soccer League. In the course of the NASL's 17 years, it managed to found and flunk no fewer than four different teams.

At the flag-end of the NASL: Team America meets
President Ronald Reagan in 1983 (pic: The White House)

Jimmy Hill’s involvement in the NASL is a little known oddity among British football fans, lost amid his varied and fascinating career as a player, a campaigner, a manager, a director and, most notoriously of all, as a pundit. Those in the US who came across him as an owner of first the Detroit Express, and then the Washington Diplomats, have few kind words for the man with the tidy-beard chin – he managed to drive both teams into bankruptcy and extinction in the space of three years. 

The quote at the head of this piece comes from an interview with Englishman Clive Toye, the former Daily Express journalist who, together with league commissioner Phil Woosnam, was largely responsible for building the NASL. It was Toye who signed Pele whilst general manager of the New York Cosmos. Later, at Chicago and Toronto, he watched in exasperation as clueless, profligate owners like Hill came in and ran clubs into the ground, followed eventually by the league as an entity.

Hill and his son Duncan weren’t the only ones to fail in the capital city, however.  There was a belief, propagated by Woosnam, that Washington was a city where a team should be succeeding in the same way as the Cosmos in New York. Indeed, for a short while in the late 70s the city's third stab at a team, the Diplomats, were backed with big corporate money from the Madison Square Garden Corp., and actually thrived - including one season with the domineering and disruptive Johann Cruyff. After two years, though, the losses were too high even for a backer like MSG, and they pulled out of the game with the kind of cold decisiveness that was alien to British football at the time. In came the Hills, and within a year the team was extinct. Jimmy and Duncan fled back to England leaving many bills unpaid, and they haven't been seen in the US since...

After the demise of the Washington Whips (1967-68), the Darts (1970-71) and the Diplomats (1974-81), one final attempt was made to keep a team in DC. Team America was made up of US national team players, including some hastily fast-tracked foreigners who found themselves in possession of a US passport. The idea was to have the US team playing in the domestic league to help them prepare for qualification for the 1986 World Cup. Like many ideas in the NASL, it was a brave, bold failure, for reasons outlined in the book. It lasted just a single season (1983) - another wonderful mess. Still, at least they had the dubious honour of meeting the President (see picture).

Here are a couple of scene-setting paragraphs from the early part of this chapter, Broken teams in dysfunctional DC: Cruyff, the Dips, the Darts and the Whips.

Washington DC is a hard city to warm to, and you don’t meet many people who laud it as their beloved home town. There is no city centre, as such, while a revolving cast of diplomats and politicians mean that much of its high-powered population remains fluid, and emotionally unattached to the capital. The statues and monuments that adulate former presidents give it the feeling of an old eastern European capital city that exists to at best commemorate, and at worst deify, bronze- and concrete-sculpted dead men. On the plus side, it boasts a jaw-dropping mile of mesmerizing museums and art galleries on the National Mall that almost make up for the fact that, in daily real life, the archetypical DC operator will be a lawyer or a lobbyist too busy to talk to you for more than 60 seconds at most. The political inertia is in stark contrast to the speed with which thrusting personal ambition can push smart and highly motivated individuals into positions of influence. It’s hard to say what they end up influencing beyond their own personal wealth and reputation, but complain about this and you’ll be met with a world-weary shrug. It’s DC, what do you expect? Don’t take it personally, it’s just politics.

Bearing all this in mind, it’s no surprise that during the seventeen-year span of the North American Soccer League, the city managed to consume and then spit back out no fewer than four soccer teams. Washington DC was the market that everyone believed was made to succeed. When one team failed, someone else came along and gave it another try, as though importing a fresh new ideology that would kick-start the political paralysis, or simply trying to pass some straightforward piece of legislation through Congress. No matter how obvious and logical that law might have seemed to a normal person standing on the outside, once it reached DC it was subject to wrangling, disputes, compromises, distortions, setbacks, and ultimate failure. That’s just DC. Want to put money into a soccer team there? Sure, it’s a potentially large and wealthy market. Best of luck! See you in a year on the bottom steps of the Lincoln Memorial dripping tears into your begging bowl.

‘Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League’ will be published September 4. Pre-order here (UK) or here (US)