"Obviously one of the best football books for years..."

The good folks at Got, Not Got - the pictorial-centric book series for those of us who gorge on football nostalgia rather than moan about and mourn over the absurd hype of the modern game - have written up a stunningly positive review of Rock 'n' Roll Soccer here:

Got, Not Got - they get it.

"As the definitive story of the genius concept/trainwreck of the North American Soccer League, Ian Plenderleith’s Rock ‘n' Roll Soccer is obsessively detailed, hilarious and subtly mindblowing – a revolutionary revision of history based entirely on original research and interviews with a litany of movers, shakers and ex-players.

"This is obviously one of the best football books for years, moving way beyond the standard jokey cliches of the NASL – the fat old pros in cowboy-fringed shirts, the rule-tampering, the cheerleaders – to reveal the nascent American league of the 70s and 80s as nothing less than a blueprint for our own ‘modern’ game.

"That’s right: everything we sniggered about back then is now pushed into our cheery upturned faces week on week, rebranded as the ‘Premier’ League. Ha ha ha ha: three points for a win, names on jerseys, squad numbers, an avalanche of stats, multi subs, no backpasses, female-friendliness and bullshit marketing by the agency-load. The difference is, the NASL was experimental, innovative and creative.

"Don’t worry, this is far more than merely enlightening and entertaining; there are plenty of anorak rock ‘n’ roll parallels and arsey jokes, too."

"Well worth your hard-earned buck"

Pink rocks

Many thanks to the print and digital magazine The Football Pink for its generous appraisal of Rock n Roll Soccer. So many nice quotes to choose from. In addition to the headline above, let's go with:

"Plenderleith’s superbly researched, fact-packed book sets out not only to recap the excesses we know about [the NASL], but also to remind us and celebrate that, with so many of its innovations it was ahead of its time. There was so much more to the NASL than cheerleaders, fireworks and razzmattaz – but in the good old US of A, there’s no reason you can’t throw them in for good measure!

"[....] As you might expect, some of the more well-worn topics are covered in great detail in Rock n Roll Soccer – financial ruin, gimmickry, rule changes, the import of ageing foreigners like Pelé, Beckenbauer, Best, Marsh and Cruyff, the English influence, the girls and the parties…

"But you’ll also find out a lot of stuff from the periphery and the far-flung outposts of the NASL that you may never have known without reading this book. The league wasn’t just about the New York Cosmos, you know!

"Plenderleith also pokes around the murky world of the moneymen and politicians of the NASL and how, eventually, those in charge really didn’t have the first idea how to run a soccer club or a league (the Jimmy Hill chapter was an eye opener for me).

"As well as being an engrossing eulogy to the madness and magic of [the] NASL, there’s a healthy smattering of entertaining facts and stats intertwined between chapters. This book is highly recommended whether or not you’re an aficionado of NASL or MLS. This cautionary tale is part of our game’s weird and wonderful history and one that is too often shrugged off with snobbish disdain by European observers as a mere far-away, inconsequential circus. Once you read this book, you’re likely to have changed your mind. The NASL’s legacy may be more visible than you think."

TLS Review of "raffish" Rock n Roll Soccer

"Raffish? Me? I say!"

Well, I feel all grown up now that the Times Literary Supplement has reviewed Rock n Roll Soccer. As though I haven't just written a book about football, but I have written actual literature. The TLS doesn't have anything as vulgar as a Sports section, but it does, apparently, review books about sport on occasion, and in its edition of September 26, 2014, nicely summarized the contents of my book and, without giving me anything like a 'Read this NOW!' quote for publicity purposes, seemed to like it. In fact the reviewer tweeted that he "loved it", but what goes out on Twitter obviously would not be fit for the carefully honed print pages of the TLS. Here's an extract:

"Written with a raffish exuberance worthy of its subject, Rock n Roll Soccer offers a more generous take [than the common perception] on the ill-fated NASL. Yes, it was foolishly short-sighted to try to establish clubs in places like Las Vegas and Hawaii, but there was plenty to admire about the audacity and enterprise of a project that brought together footballers like Pelé, Eusebio, George Best and Franz Beckenbauer. In forcing Association Football onto the radar of US popular consciousness, it ultimately paved the way for the more sustainable, low-key success of Major League Soccer. If the enthusiasm of the American public during the recent World Cup is anything to go by, it hasn't all been in vain.

"Rock n Roll Soccer challenges the parochial assumptions that have skewed the NASL narrative in England - in particular, the idea of English football as a paragon of sporting authenticity. The English football culture of the 1970s was far from perfect: on the pitch, tactics were increasingly defensive and negative; off the pitch, as Ian Plenderleith correctly observes, the hooligan violence that blighted the decade 'no more reflected a passion for soccer than cheering teams of choreographed dancing girls and cheap hot dog promotions'.

"Plenderleith maintains that the NASL was actually ahead of its time, its showbiz trappings, a harbinger of the brazen commercialism that would come to dominate the English game from the 1990s onwards, with the advent of Sky TV and the English Premier League...."

"An excellent work of sports journalism"

Transgress points the way

One of my favourite reviews of Rock n Roll Soccer so far was published this weekend by Transgress Magazine, and not just because of the above quote. The reviewer really 'got' the book and what it's attempting to say. In his words:

"Plenderleith documents the folly, effrontery and ultimate failure of the NASL—an impressively thorough tome that benefits from solid research and a witty outsider’s perspective (though now living in America, Plenderleith is British and brings a European’s passion and insight to football writing).

"One of Plenderleith’s great accomplishments in this book is his ability to zoom in and out of the action while keeping the reader engaged. This is not an easy task. At times, he’ll be recounting the exaggerated drug- and drink-fueled antics of over-the-hill international stars and young Americans performing in a flamboyant, fly-by-night federation that defied, in equal measure, rules, tradition and, ahem, sound business practice.

"Then Plenderleith will step back and establish the international and cultural context within which the NASL was operating. At first, the international audience mocked the upstart Americans, and FIFA pushed back against the young league that was tinkering with tradition.

"But as the NASL achieved early success, the world took notice. While it didn’t reinvent the sport, the outlaw league reinvigorated it by making it a fan-friendly experience and drove rule changes that increased substitutions and decreased back passes.

"The model, though exciting, was as unsustainable as that alcohol-fueled borderline relationship you had in college. The peaks were unforgettable, but the valleys unbearable. Sure enough, the NASL folded following the 1984 season.

"It was an experiment and experience that was thoroughly American, and though the league didn’t last, it left a lasting impression on the game and paved the way for MLS success.

"Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer is an excellent work of sports journalism and, regardless of whether you follow football or futbol (or both), it is worthy of any fan’s bookshelf." 

Independent on Sunday: 'Book of the Week'

IoS: clearly a paper of
 taste and distinction

Not much more to add to that. The Independent on Sunday sports section on September 21 named Rock n Roll Soccer as its Book of the Week, and praised it as a "compendious but vividly entertaining history of the League". They are so right.

Sunday Mirror review: three errors in 47 words

The Sunday Mirror did me the immense favour of reviewing Rock n Roll Soccer this past weekend. It was an astonishing achievement. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but in the space of just 47 words, the review not only failed to even remotely convey what the book is about, but also managed to make three gross factual errors (or five, if you take into account that one of the errors is tripartite). It also made a grammatical error and a terminology error. That’s an impressive rate of around one mistake every seven words.

Here’s the review in full:

“A nostalgic trip through the early years of the North American Soccer League, the harbinger for what we now know as the lucrative MLS. Its struggle to stay afloat and be accepted by FIFA is fascinatingly explained, with cameos from legends Pele, George Best and Bobby Moore.”  

Mirror, Mirror, on the ball...

Error one: it’s not a trip through “the early years” of the NASL. In fact “the early years” only make up about one tenth of the book. It’s an account of all 17 years of the NASL.

Error two (discounting the following grammatical error - you can only be “a harbinger of” something, not “a harbinger for”; and Major League Soccer is known as “MLS”, not “the MLS”): MLS is not “lucrative”, it is a league that prides itself on its attempts to be financially stable, having learned from the mistakes of the NASL. It has been lucrative for David Beckham, and it may well one day become lucrative for its current owners, but that’s all a long way off – many of its teams have only just started making modest profits, many others still run at a loss.

Error three (and errors four and five): Pele, George Best and Bobby Moore played “cameos” in the NASL? You mean, they showed up, played one game and then left again? Or does the writer (and his sub-editor, and his editor) not actually have a flying clue what a cameo is? Best played for seven seasons in the NASL, Pele for three (bringing it instant world coverage and prompting hundreds more players to follow), and Bobby Moore for two.  

Apart from that, the review’s spot on. Indeed, I am absolutely convinced that the reviewer read the book from cover to cover. Thank you, Sunday Mirror – your review is a journalistic triumph. I have no doubt at all that the rest of the paper is as scrupulously accurate as this towering two-sentence book review. 

Interview at This Is Cosmos Country

Cesar Diaz at This Is Cosmos Country interviewed me this week about the book, and here are the resultant words. I must say that I like the idea of him reading the book while sitting in an actual stadium.

Here are a couple of sample answers:

What was more enjoyable, the research or the interviews?

My book, watching the game (pic: Cesar Diaz)

Both. I loved the research aspect – leafing through countless old soccer magazines and books that had been in my cupboards for years, and finally being able to say to my wife, “See! I told you they’d be useful some day.” I spent a lot of time in the magnificent Library of Congress in Washington DC, and if they’d only had beds there and an all-night bar I would probably have moved in.

The interviews were great fun, too – almost everyone I contacted was happy to talk about a period that we all felt had been neglected by soccer history. Some of the former players would still be talking now if I hadn’t called time on them – just wonderful blokes who were willing to give up their time to a hack they didn’t know from Adam.

What was it like to interact with Rodney Marsh?

Rodney was one of the first people to agree to an interview, because he understood straight away what the book was about, and why it needed to be written. He’s not only funny, but a very astute analyst, so he gave me lots of material, and then later agreed to write the foreword.

Needless to say, he was one of those players that I idolised as a boy growing up in England in the 1970s – full of character and flair, and always smiling. It’s amazing what a difference that makes to kids watching the game, a smile. I really wish we could see more of that in the game – from players, coaches and fans alike.

Daily Express on RnR Soccer: "Hugely entertaining"

"I don't normally..." begins a three-paragraph mention of Rock n Roll Soccer by columnist Fergus Kelly in yesterday's Daily Express. Well, I don't normally read anything in the Daily Express, because just a glance at its daily expression of alarmist xenophobia usually makes me weep copious salty tears at The Human Condition. But I'm prepared to make an exception for Mr. Kelly, who sounds more like he should be writing for When Saturday Comes. Perhaps the Express pays better. Here's what he had to say:

Okay, just this once...

I don't normally plug books here but the one I'm currently reading, called Rock'n'Roll Soccer by Ian Plenderleith, is a hugely entertaining account of the north American Soccer League in its 1970s heyday. Legends such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best, Johan Cruyff and Eusebio played together every week as they tried to introduce the game to the US in a glorious but short-lived spectacular of sky-high salaries, showbiz hype and cheerleaders.

The razzmatazz of clubs such as the new York Cosmos and tampa Bay Rowdies contrasted starkly with the grim grounds and hooligan taint of football here at the time, where a cup of Bovril was a luxury and I spent more than one Saturday afternoon dodging chunks of crumbling terracing lobbed by rival supporters over the wire fence of the partitioned Kop at my local club.

The experiment might have fizzled out quickly and even today we don't treat the game there entirely seriously (a bit rich when you compare the USA's World Cup performances to England's). But you can trace today's Premier League pyrotechnics and the £350,000-perweek salary of Manchester United's latest signing Radamel Falcao back to it. Which, depending on how traditional you are, might or might not be regarded as a good thing.

First review: "Fascinating, Enlightening, and Entertaining"

The superb football web site In Bed With Maradona has supplied the first review of Rock n Roll Soccer, out tomorrow. Here's the gist of what they said:

Rock 'N' Roll Soccer is essential reading for enthusiasts of the American game, a group of which we certainly count ourselves a part. Plenderleith hasn't written a chronology of the NASL but the story of the NASL, making his book a fascinating, enlightening and entertaining volume that eschews needless league business details and boardroom minutiae in order to focus on what really made it tick.

As liked by the obviously excellent
 web site In Bed With Maradona

In that sense, the book shares the characteristics of its subject. Where the English game had become bogged down by negative football and an obsession with results, the NASL emerged as a league that was focused on entertainment, and, if Plenderleith's many interviews are anything to go by, a real joy to play in. Under the guidance of Phil Woosnam it became a league famous for glamour, celebrity and innovations that frequently got up FIFA's nose - some better conceived than others.

The league was also fundamentally and eventually fatally flawed, and proved to be fertile ground for storytellers, those fans and observers with an eye for a gripping yarn. Rock 'N' Roll Soccer is a compelling yomp through the tales that really made the NASL unique, from the 35-yard-line shootout tiebreaker to the Minnesota Kicks' legendary tailgates. There's been nothing like the NASL since, and Plenderleith captures it very well indeed.

'Has football caught on in America yet?' Don't ask

Historical evidence of long-
established game in United States

"It seems that every four years when the World Cup comes around, large numbers of European fans are under the illusion that the United States is only interested in football when their national team is on the global stage. This notion is as wayward as most of the other pre-conceived ideas that some Europeans tend to harbour about Americans – namely, that they’re mainly fat, loud, God-fearing, gun-carrying patriots, and they love American football and baseball way more than they will ever love soccer, a sport they can’t even call by its proper name! (In fact, 'soccer' is just as old and correct a term as 'football'.)"

That's the opening paragraph of my blog post at the Waterstone's web site this weekend, arguing that it's way too late to be asking the question, Has football caught on in America? Around four decades too late, in fact. So I'm really looking forward to the day when people outside of the US no longer feel the need to ask the question at all. It caught on, it looked like it died, but in fact it never really went away at all. And now it's as much a part of daily American life as fracking, gridlock and Dunkin' Donuts. 

"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)

"I didn't know who the hell FIFA was and I didn't care"

The North American Soccer League’s relationship with FIFA was fractious from the go, and it barely progressed to the point of cordiality in the next two decades. NASL Commissioner Phil Woosnam was forever lobbying to innovate at the behest of owners such as the Atlanta Chiefs chief executive Dick Cecil who initially, in his own words, “didn’t know who the hell FIFA was and I didn’t care”. The NASL meddled with the points system, the offside law, shirt numbers, and the number of permitted substitutions, and it became wholly opposed to the idea of ending any game in a draw. The NASL knew that to sell the sport to a new market, it had to understand what it was that the fans – unencumbered by 100 years of history and tradition – wanted from 90 minutes of sporting entertainment.

Sport imitating art: Subbuteo-style, the NASL
 experimented with a 35-yard line to spread
 play and decrease offside calls.

Not all of its ideas worked, or were necessarily beneficial to the game as a spectacle, but at least this was a league prepared to instigate a discussion and then take action at a time when FIFA took (and still takes) years to even contemplate the possibility of change. And it happened in a decade, the 1970s, when football was at its nadir of negativity in terms of tactics and goalscoring. In this excerpt from Chapter 7, The NASL vs FIFA and the world, we look at the changes that the NASL, with FIFA’s eventual (but reluctant) approval, made to the field of play. By adding a 35-yard offside line (think Subbuteo), the league attempted to stretch the play, minimize offside, and avoid the tight and frenzied midfield stalemates so prevalent in Europe at the time:

One of the rumours that did the rounds in the 70s was that ‘the Yanks want to abolish the offside law’. This was another supposed example of how the Americans wanted to mutilate and destroy our game, and although it was mooted by a couple of teams at the League’s inception, it was voted down by those who had a vague clue about soccer and its place in the world. However, anyone who recalls the offside trap of the 1970s and 1980s in European soccer might grant the idea of even discussing a change to the offside law a little sympathy. For the benefit of those who weren’t there, or who have shut out the memory, lines of defenders would step forward at the apposite moment with their arms simultaneously raised in appeal, usually catching an opponent clear through on goal, but yards offside. This could happen time and time again, and would prompt much agonizing among television pundits about what to do. The answer, as always from the European game, was nothing. On the other hand, it was of course a wonderful sight when one or more of the defenders got his timing wrong, the linesman kept his flag down, and all of a sudden the forward was through on goal with only the keeper to beat. If the forward scored, the defenders would jaw at the linesman as if he had personally advised them to step up like line dancers and ignore the ball in favour of a negative, under- handed tactic which had never been envisioned when a more Corinthian generation had devised the law as a way of avoiding goal-hangers.

For the unique case of the NASL, though, a modification was in order. In the middle of the 1972 season FIFA allowed the NASL to experiment with an offside line in line with the penalty area, but it was a fiasco – defenders played so deep that play became entrenched in the penalty area and goals per game actually decreased. It was brought upfield to become a 35-yard line for the 1973 season. Long-serving NASL coach Ron Newman explains that one of the reasons the offside line was introduced ‘was mainly down to the fact that we kept playing in high school arenas and they were so long and narrow. You were fitting a soccer field inside a running track, and it was hard in this country, because the running track was a different shape here – more narrow, and you’d get things like a long jump pit down the edge of the field and you had to cover it up.’ With the game already constricted by narrow pitches, having the offside line on halfway squeezed play still further. Despite its introduction being designed to fit the unique case of US soccer, Newman believes ‘without question’ that a 35-yard offside line would have worked for the rest of the world.

Phil Woosnam explained the rationale when FIFA, after a year of deliberation, finally gave the League the go-ahead to try the experiment. ‘By opening up the play with this change in the offside law, we feel that spectators will be treated to a more exciting and enjoyable brand of soccer,’ he said. ‘The entire world of soccer recognizes that changes in the laws that produce greater goal-scoring opportunities must be considered. It is our belief, shared by many European officials, that the ultimate answer is to make a change in the offside rule and the size of the goal.’ Some years later, he explained to Observer journalist Hugh McIlvanney another reason for the offside line: ‘An increasing influence of coaches and players from England in North America was resulting in an increase in the use of offside tactics, congestion of players in midfield and tight marking of skilful players by extremely physical defenders.’

The Wondrous Stupidity of Teams in Hawaii and Vegas

At the height of the Ronald Reagan era in the mid 1980s, Elvis Costello released the album ‘King of America’, including a song that sneered at the United States for being “a brilliant mistake”. I steal this phrase for the title of chapter six of Rock n Roll Soccer: ‘Brilliant Mistakes: Quicksilver teams in Vegas and Hawaii’, which examines the joyous folly of NASL franchises in improbable soccer cities. Two classic examples were Team Hawaii and the Las Vegas Quicksilvers, both of whom only lasted one season, in 1977. They came and went quicker than the Sex Pistols, though given the size of their stadiums, at least they were in no danger of selling out like a major label punk band.

Quicksilvers - easy come, easy go,
like chips at a Vegas casino

The players I talked to all fondly remembered their trips to Hawaii and Vegas, where they’d be warmly welcomed and would often stay for several days. Details of the actual games, though, are sketchy. It’s possible that a lot of players stepped out the worse for wear after a day on the beach or a night in the casinos. The only thing absolutely certain besides the small crowds and sore heads was the debilitating heat. Alan Merrick recalls his boots melting and falling apart. Las Vegas player Alan Mayer remembers that even as a goalkeeper the climate was intolerable. ‘You’d come in to the locker room and dunk your feet, with your shoes still on, straight into a bucket of cold water,’ he says. ‘At that time they didn’t have all the protective wear that keepers have today. So if you slid on Astroturf you got burnt, and you got burnt pretty well. The burns you got, I can still feel them today, they were atrocious.’

Here’s another short extract, likening the NASL’s life to a once happily married man who falls victim to the lures of that anomalous settlement in the Mojave desert.

From a writer’s point of view, naming the NASL’s team in Las Vegas the Quicksilvers seems almost too good to be true. The unpredictable, mercurial league that had tried its hand at steady growth now found itself eager to grab every opportunity to expand while the going was hot. In the early 1970s, the NASL was like a steady married man who’d settled down with a frumpy but reliable girl following a turbulent youth  filled with heady heartbreak [the late 60s]. Then, all of a sudden, the steady married man went on a trip to, let’s say, Vegas, and was reminded of how exciting things used to be. The married man forgot about all the accumulated stability he had worked so hard to build back in his home town, and found himself gambling inadvisable sums in a casino, while drinking reckless amounts of alcohol. There were strippers sitting on his lap, and all kinds of temptations and distractions that came with the strippers. Sure, it was just a brief fling, and all details would stay within Vegas, but once Mr Steady had renewed his taste for the high life, would the lapse into decadence become a pattern that would usher in eventual divorce and ruination?

Of Pitch & Page: 'Watch out for Rock n Roll Soccer'

Esteemed site rates acclaimed writer

The esteemed football literature web site Of Pitch & Page has nominated Rock n Roll Soccer at number two on its list of eight books to watch out for this autumn, calling it "a must for fans of cult sports stories" (I hope that "fans of cult sports stories" represent a significantly large sector of the reading public, but I suspect not). It's ranked ahead of Matt Dickinson's book on Bobby Moore, Rio Ferdinand's autobiography, and a book intriguingly co-authored by Roddy Doyle and Roy Keane. Number one on the list is Gerry Ferrara's A Season With the Honest Men, a behind-the-scenes romp with Ayr United, so no complaints about being pipped to the top spot by the sort of book that all right-thinking folk would want to read.

When I call Of Pitch & Page "esteemed", by the way, I mean that in the same way that my publisher calls me an "acclaimed football writer". That is, I've been acclaimed by my publisher (and my mum), and now that Of Pitch & Page has said something nice about my book, I most definitely esteem it too. 

Gimmicks, Girls and teenage Kicks

Before Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority decided to over-regulate the lives of American youth, there was the 1970s - the short (but long-haired) post-hippie era when openly drinking, smoking dope and care-free indulgence in sexual exploration were pretty much obligatory and accepted staples of US teenage life. It was also the decade when epic stadium rock concerts provided the opportunity for massed bad behaviour, a norm that made summer soccer games played in large venues the obvious place to extend the party. This was particularly true in the state of Minnesota, where the aptly named Kicks used cheap tickets and multiple promotions to attract a younger fan base, resulting in boisterous crowds that regularly reached above 30- and 40,000. 

Here are the first paragraphs of Chapter 5 of Rock n Roll Soccer – ‘Gimmicks, girls and teenage Kicks – selling soccer to the US public’, which examines the endlessly inventive ways that teams tried to hawk an unfamiliar sport to an inherently sceptical public nonetheless willing to give anything new a try if the price was cheap and the freebies abundant. As the San Jose Earthquakes’ PR manager Dick Berg said at the time, ‘We want the people to come out and try soccer, and to have fun while they’re doing it. There is no reason why they can’t enjoy a good game and have a couple of laughs at the same time.’ This was in stark contrast to Europe, where the match day experience tended to be a combination of violence, discomfort, disappointment and - with every bite of your burger - the prospect of botulism.

Minnesota fans getting their Kicks
 (Alan Merrick private archive) 

For young people in the Upper Midwest twin cities area of Minneapolis and St Paul in the late 1970s, the soccer game was the place to go if you wanted to get high, get drunk and get off with someone. It wasn’t really planned that way, even though when the team arrived in the city in 1976 after failing in Colorado they hired an advertising agency that decided to target the young demographic. A peculiar set of circumstances turned the parking lots outside the 49,000-capacity Metropolitan Stadium (‘the Met’) in Bloomington, a town fifteen minutes south of the Minneapolis city border, into a bacchanalian celebration of all the things that youths the world over will do if given the time, the space and the tacit permission. 

One local writer, Jon Bream, said the parties had the feel of Woodstock, but that, by comparison, ‘rock has lost much of its counter-cultural spirit. There was a certain tribal spirit that brought the people together. It was a force greater than the music or adulation for a particular performer or band.’ Only at the Grateful Dead did you still see that spirit, but at the Kicks, ‘the Woodstock generation and their younger bothers and sisters stand around in the Met Stadium parking lot sharing bread, a bottle of wine and a joint just like those hippies did at the Woodstock festival. Some people urinate in public because the lines at the portable toilets are too long – just as they did at Woodstock. They toss frisbees and frolic in the sun.’

The usual American word for such activities is ‘tailgating’, which just means picnicking quite elaborately in the car park outside a sports stadium before a game. The Kicks’ fans were into much more than tame tailgating, though. Tailgating was what the older fans of the Minnesota Vikings football team did in winter, at the same stadium. This was a summer celebration, with fewer clothes and inhibitions, and a lot more recreational drug taking, and was always going to be more lively than the mere setting up of a portable grill to make burg- ers and hot dogs with a couple of cold beers to wash them down. Essentially, these were unregulated raves, but without the dance music and the mass dancing. There had been nothing like it before in American sport, and nothing since. It was why, as the Kicks’ former goalkeeper and coach Geoff Barnett puts it, there developed ‘an absolute love affair’ between the team and its fans…

"Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it"

Tampa Bay Rowdies coach Gordon Jago said of players like Rodney Marsh that “you have to accept them the way they are. Only a fool would try to submerge those assets.” Yet the 1970s were full of fancy-footed, flair players who were adored by fans but submerged by managers and clubs who couldn’t afford to let a single unruly player look bigger than the club, no matter how special his talents. Spurned by the tactically dull English game and the post-Victorian disciplinary norms of its custodians, many of the more individualistic British players found the North American Soccer League to be a far more receptive platform for their charisma-driven style, both as a footballer and a personality.

Chapter 4 of Rock n Roll Soccer examines at length the largely successful NASL careers of Marsh and George Best, looking to resurrect their reputations after having fallen out with Manchesters City and United respectively. While both had their issues with team bosses and coaches in the USA just as they had done in Britain, the two players were also uniquely suited to bringing the NASL the kind of panache and publicity that it was craving during its heady expansion years in the mid 1970s. Here are the opening paragraphs to ‘Marsh and Best: Entertaining the USA’:

Marsh and Best: hair and flair

Rodney Marsh stopped the game, although referee Peter Johnson hadn’t blown his whistle. The Tampa Bay Rowdies midfielder fell to his knees, stretched out his arms and gestured at the ball in his possession. Come and get it, he was saying to the New York Cosmos, a team that was losing 4–0, and whose pivotal player, Pelé, was not having his greatest day. Come on, come and get it – I know you can’t, but try anyway.

It was the 1976 season, and the first visit by the Cosmos to the upstart Tampa Bay Rowdies since Pelé’s signing the previous year. The New York team, fresh off the plane from an exhibition game in the Dominican Republic, looked distinctly out of sorts, playing in front of a national TV audience and a regular-season League record crowd of over 42,000. They finished exhausted, outplayed, and soundly beaten by five goals to one. The talking point of the game was not, however, the exemplary hat-trick that Derek Smethurst put past New York’s hapless second-choice goalkeeper Kurt Kuykendall. It was Marsh, down on his knees, taunting a team that featured the greatest player of all time. 

The Englishman, playing his first NASL season, opened up and flaunted a full bag of tricks that day. There were cheeky back-heel passes, nonchalant dummies, and a flawless back-heeled lob over his own head down the left wing that saw him breeze past a floundering opponent. On another occasion he effortlessly robbed an oncoming Cosmos player of the ball, then passed it forward down the line to a teammate, all the while holding his left boot, lost in action moments before. Marsh fully exploited the vast space in midfield that the Cosmos and the 35-yard offside line (see chapter 7 for more on this NASL innovation) permitted him, prompting CBS’s co-commentator Paul Gardner to say at the end of the afternoon, ‘Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it.’ When he left the field shortly before the end of the game, he received a standing ovation… 

"In England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you"

European players flocked to the North American Soccer League in the mid-70s for one main reason – the opportunity to make money. Once here, however, many found good reasons to stay longer than they’d intended. The change in climate, lifestyle and culture surprised many who’d grown up in a country like grey, repressive Britain. When they coached and communicated at the educational clinics that they were contractually obliged to conduct, players stumbled upon the chance to develop both their careers and their personalities. The open-mindedness, the vastness and the possibilities of America were still relatively unfamiliar concepts in the 1970s to young lads who’d spent their lives focused on nothing but themselves and their football within the very narrow environment of the British game.

Gordon Banks can't quite shake
off his roots in Fort Lauderdale.

In Chapter 3 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Leaving old Europe behind’, several players cite the enthusiasm of the home crowd as a reason why they loved playing in the NASL, as opposed to the open hostility they would encounter from even their own supporters. As former St. Mirren defender Charlie Mitchell says, in Scotland ‘if you made one mistake then the crowd would boo you and be right on your back.’ You also had to ‘fight like a bastard’ to get into the team. At his new club the Rochester Lancers, though, the crowd didn’t understand the game well enough to know when he’d even made a mistake, and if they did, then they didn’t care. 

Here’s a short extract reflecting how some of the NASL’s more famous names enjoyed finding themselves in a world where they could function as normal people:

‘One of the reasons I came to America was that I didn’t think I could live up to the standards I had set back home,’ said Gordon Banks, shortly after joining the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the late 1970s. ‘If I can’t live up to it, people here won’t be saying, I remember him when. This takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. I won’t miss the finger-pointing kind of thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who liked it any­way.’ Franz Beckenbauer was more explicit. ‘Everybody likes to be famous,’ he conceded. ‘But it is an enjoyable difference here [in New York]. In Munich when I went out at night I could read in the paper the next day every place I had been, who I went with, what I ate. Photographers and journalists followed me everywhere. I had a big house surrounded by a big wall. After a game I went home, locked the gate and shut out the world. In the US I can go unrecognized. I have a private life. I had none in Germany.’ The German press, he said, only aimed to ‘tear you down’.

Former Manchester United goalkeeper Alex Stepney came to Dallas in 1979 and enjoyed the simple pleasure of a trip to the amusement park with his family. Back home, he said, you ‘couldn’t go out for a quiet drink or dinner. There was always someone who knew who you were, and it became a bit of a bind. People were quite ruthless. When my wife and kids were here, we went to Six Flags, and it was absolutely fabulous. No one knew us. We wouldn’t do things like that in England.’

A trip to Six Flags amusement park was absolutely fabulous. The kind of activity most average parents dread for weeks and then endure for a long and expensive day was, for Stepney, a wonderfully mundane trip free of some knucklehead fol­lowing him around and shouting out ‘Fuck Man United!’ Peter Osgood, upon arriving in Philadelphia in 1978, was also enjoying the lack of on-street recognition. ‘It’s nice and easy at the moment,’ he said. ‘Nice and quiet. You don’t get too many people bugging me. I’m enjoying the obscurity. It’s a much more quiet, much more relaxed life.’ Ex-Coventry forward Alan Green was happy to return full-time to the Washington Diplomats after a loan spell, despite a very English penchant for watching Benny Hill over a cup of afternoon tea. ‘One of the big reasons,’ he said, ‘was that when I came here I had a lot more confidence in my ability. I’m the type of player who needs a pat on the back, but in England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you.’

Bermudan striker Clyde Best – one of Britain’s first black soccer players in the late 1960s and early 1970s – left West Ham United for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1975 because of the naked racism in England at the time, both on and off the field. Even though he made almost 200 league appearances for the Hammers, and was eventually accepted by the home support, ‘I began to think, why should I go out there and per­form when I have to put up with that sort of stuff? There were problems with the amount of abuse I was taking and I decided I didn’t have to put up with it.’ Rather than point fingers at the English, and without explicitly mentioning that the abuse was racial, Best generously called it ‘a situation that is all over the world. No matter where you go, you can’t find a place where that sort of thing doesn’t exist.’ In the US, though, such abuse was presumably less prevalent, given that he spent the entire final decade of his career there.

Pre-order Rock n Roll Soccer here (UK) or here (US).

Eusebio "was like a little kid. He wanted to be in every attack"

A second extract from Chapter 2 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Pelé vs Eusebio: Hot Property Getting Mobbed’, looks at the 1976 North American Soccer League season, when Pelé was expected to lead the New York Cosmos to the title. Yet it was the awkwardly named Toronto Metros-Croatia – who had taken Eusebio from the financially troubled Boston Minutemen - that quietly and unexpectedly progressed to the championship game. The turning point in their season was the consequence of a running row between Eusebio and Toronto’s Yugoslav coach Ivan Marković:

Eusebio at Toronto (left): Knackered knees on a plastic pitch

As at Boston, Eusebio was at the centre of the team’s tactics. ‘It was a team effort but he was our fulcrum,’ says [Bob] Iarusci. ‘He played behind our two strikers, and when he collected the ball things happened. He was so brilliant in terms of decision-making and understanding the space he was given. Both of his knees were in terrible shape. It was funny, when he walked he really hobbled, but when he was on the field he picked up speed and it was almost as if the knees realized that they could hurt later, but not at that moment. He did some wonderful things even at the ripe age of 35, and without him we wouldn’t have won.’ [Damir] Šutevski also recalls Eusebio’s ability despite a ‘shattered knee, it was really in bad shape. Before each game he’d have to submerge his knee in a bucket of ice in order to play, and he barely trained between games. I guess compared to Europe it must still have been a secondary kind of play to him. A lot of the goals were from free kicks; he had an incred¬ible shot. He was like a little kid: he wanted to be participating in every attack we had, and he would ask for the ball in every attack.’25 

Toronto started the 76 season well, winning eight of their first ten matches, and Eusebio, who missed the first two games, scored six in six appearances. There followed a mid-season, seven-game slump when the team won only on penalty kicks (three times – through this season, drawn games were decided on penalties if no one scored during sudden-death extra time), and failed to score in open play for all seven games – a highly unusual sequence for the high-scoring NASL. After that sev-enth game, the Yugoslav coach Ivan Markovic´ was sacked, but it wasn’t just because his team had lost its scoring touch. It was because of Eusebio. 

The two men had already fallen out at training, with Eusebio resenting that Marković would come in to the dressing room and tell him what boots to wear. ‘Marković was a genius, but geniuses are sometimes like fools,’ says [Carmine] Marcantonio. ‘He lived for the game, and he was a Croatian guy who grew up coaching Hajduk Split, then Marseille and the Yugoslav youth national teams. He was a genius and he could teach us young guys even how to tie our shoes. He had his own bag of cleats and would say, “Today it’s a bit dry, you need this type of cleats.” He’d bring that bag to the game and tell us what we should be wearing. But imagine you’re Eusebio and you have this guy telling you what kind of cleats you should be wear¬ing – they almost came to blows about it…” 

To find out the rest of the story, pre-order Rock n Roll Soccer here (UK) or here (US).

Karl-Heinz Granitza and the German will to win

While watching Sebastian Schweinsteiger chew out Mezit Özil for failing to put Germany 8-0 up against Brazil in the last minute of the World Cup semi-final (Brazil immediately counter-attacked and scored), I was reminded of Karl-Heinz Granitza, the Chicago Sting's prolific, left-footed German striker from 1978-84. Granitza not only scored 128 goals in 199 games for the Sting, making him the North American Soccer League’s third all-time leading scorer behind Giorgio Chinaglia (193) and Alan Willey (129). He was also notorious for yelling at his team-mates whenever they made an error.

"I thought he had a great left foot," says former team-mate Don Droege, "but he was an asshole. He was one of those guys who I thought treated the American players like a piece of shit." Ex-Hibernian defender Derek Spalding says, "Granitza was the type of guy who could demoralise younger players. With him, you had to know how to handle him. I knew how to handle the guy. He watched who he gave it to. If he went after you and you turned round and snapped back at him, he didn't like that."

Granitza (12): "I see someone make a
mistake, I go crazy."

American defender Tim Twellman, though, had no problems playing with someone as pushy as Granitza, and doesn’t think the German especially picked on Americans – he faulted everyone. "He didn’t have a lot of respect for any player, no matter what nationality they were," says Twellman. "He demanded perfection, which helped you play better. The first game I ever played with him, and they put me in at half-time, I hit a ball in to Granitza and he just let it go. He said, I wanted the ball to my left foot, and I was like, Really? He was pretty much laying out the groundwork for who was boss. It [Chicago] was not an easy place to play, but it helped you get better because it pushed you so hard. I don’t think that was a bad thing at all. We were all playing for our livelihoods."

Back in 1981, Granitza defended himself in similar terms. "I see just one way for the team, winning, and when I am on the field and see someone make a mistake, then I go crazy," he said in Soccer Digest magazine. "I'm a crazy soccer guy maybe because always I push. If we're winning 9-1, I'm pushing everyone because I want more. In the indoor [league], I would go crazy sometimes when we would miss so many opportunities. I know people would wonder why, but it is no good to miss opportunities. This becomes so important later. In every situation, you must try to the last second."

It's this quote especially that makes me think of Schweinsteiger and Özil. Schweinsteiger wasn’t bothered about notching up an eighth goal. Instead he was saying to Özil: Do that in the final and it could cost us the World Cup. You fluff an easy chance, then the other team runs down the other end and scores on a counter-attack. In my view, Özil had his best game of the tournament in the final, and that could well have been down to Schweinsteiger's relentless professionalism.

"People must understand that sometimes my crazy style on the field is a winning style," Granitza went on. "I am fair during the games. It is only because I want us to win so bad and for everyone to play good that I sometimes get mad. Many times we fight among ourselves in the game and in practices, but it is only between ourselves and we always talk things over afterward. Everyone knows I always give credit to the players who make the good plays."

We've all played with men like Granitza – it's not just in the professional game that you come across this sort of player. You answer a late call to fill in for a short-handed team playing what you thought was a casual friendly, and five minutes in you find yourself being yelled at by some red-faced psycho for failing to spot his run 40 yards ahead of you. There are two ways to react. Either you tell him to fuck off and ignore him for the rest of the 90 minutes, or raise your game to prove that you're worthy of playing in the same team (depending on my mood, I’ve done both, but usually try and opt for the latter).

Granitza was the kind of player who proves that many Europeans did not just come to the NASL to relax, take the family to Disneyland, and then fly home after a year or two with a wad of dollars. His unstinting will to win was nurtured  at Chicago under German-American coach Willy Roy, who also signed Granitza's compatriots Arno Steffenhagen, Peter Ingo and Horst Blankenburg. The Sting were NASL champions in 1981 and 1984 in an era when the West German national team won, or came close to winning, numerous titles. That spirit has been revived by the current German team, exemplified by the tireless Schweinsteiger, who was most people's choice for Man of the Match against Argentina in the World Cup final last weekend.

Had Özil forgotten about Schweinsteiger's verbal mauling by the time they lifted the World Cup on Sunday evening? If he hadn't, he probably no longer cared, or was even grateful for the little pep talk (while mentally making a note to sit next to someone else on the flight home). You can also be sure that when the Chicago Sting players were celebrating their Soccer Bowl victories in the early 1980s, they still did not exactly love Karl-Heinz Granitza. They would have known, though, that he provided a vital ingredient to achieving success at the highest level – being an asshole.

[Sources: author interviews; Soccer Digest, September 1981]