"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] 

"I'm thinking about getting him caught in a Playboy club"

Chapter 2 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Hot Property Getting Mobbed’, looks at an extraordinary game featuring Pelé and Eusebio in June 1975, just one month after both had signed for their new North American Soccer League teams. At a later nullified game in a 12,500-seater college stadium (Nickerson Field) in Massachusetts between Pelé’s New York Cosmos and Eusebio’s Boston Minutemen, the two players faced off in a competitive match for the first time since the 1966 World Cup. Neither Boston nor the NASL were prepared for the far-beyond-capacity crowd that turned up that night, nor the riot that resulted from a disallowed Pelé goal…

Promotional tool for later
Pelé-Eusbeio clash in the NASL

Like Pelé, Eusebio had come to the NASL just the month before [May 1975], but without any of the fanfare of Pelé’s multi-million dollar contract, and certainly on a comparatively smaller sal­ary – the Toronto Star reported that Eusebio would be paid $1,000 per game. Still, that wage was enough to cause unease in the Boston dressing room, where most players were still on peanuts and holding down part-time jobs to supplement their soccer money. In New York, under the auspices of Cosmos’ owners Warner Communications, Pelé could be paraded as a superstar and used for all kinds of marketing misdemeanours. The Minutemen, however, seemed to have no idea what to do with Eusebio, especially as he was by now pretty much hobbled thanks to several knee operations. The team’s PR director, Fred Clashman, said that Eusebio’s signing had not triggered a surge in season ticket sales, but added, ‘I’m getting crap from up top because I’m supposedly not pushing Eusebio. He’s been profiled in the paper, but I’m thinking about get­ting him caught in a Playboy club or something. People want a human personality. He hasn’t really caught on.’
    Prior to the game at Nickerson Field, the out-of-training Pelé had played one hastily arranged, and televised, exhibition game on Randalls Island against Dallas (he duly scored in a 2–2 draw), and one home game against Toronto (a 2–0 win in front of 22,000). Eusebio had played one away game for Boston, a 4–1 defeat at Rochester, in front of what had been Rochester’s lowest gate of the season (just above 4,000). It’s impossible to say whether it was Pelé alone that brought so many to the game that night, or the belated realization among the local Portuguese community that one of their national heroes was in town for the medium term at least. But come they did, prompting the Boston Globe to write the next day: ‘For a league that prides itself on being professional, it was a hopelessly amateur display of planning and crowd control.’

"They couldn't play in the fourth division in England"

Chapter one of Rock n Roll Soccer (‘Atlanta, Champions of England’), not only covers the difficult inception of the North American Soccer League in 1968 - the result of a merger between two rival professional leagues that had started up in 1967 - but also the extraordinarily gruelling tour of newly crowned English champions Manchester City to Canada, Mexico and the United States. In May 1968, City played one of the NASL’s more promising new teams, the Atlanta Chiefs, in a friendly game that caught the imagination of local fans. City lost 3-2, but when two subsequent games in Mexico were cancelled, they opted against an early return home in favour of returning to Atlanta to try and beat the Chiefs at the second attempt.

Extract:

Manchester City’s assistant manager Malcolm Allison didn’t take his team’s defeat to Atlanta well. Prior to the game on 27 May 1968, he had been sanguine, while the local media touted City as champions of England and thus possibly the best team in the world – a deductive leap that, in the name of publicity, few in either camp would have bothered to dispute. ‘The stadium is a beautiful facility and the pitch is fine with us,’ Allison said. ‘It won’t make a bit of difference to us play­ing on part of a baseball infield. It’ll be just like playing on a frozen field in England. And we’ve played in all kinds of condi­tions.’ He even pre-empted excuses about City struggling after a long, hard season, because it just meant ‘we really don’t need that much practice’.

The Atlanta Chiefs promote themselves in a city
parade to an unsuspecting public in 1967
(Ron Newman private collection)

His players were more cautious. Tony Book, looking back at an already demanding tour (City had so far played and drawn with Dunfermline Athletic, twice, in Toronto and New Britain, and then beaten the Rochester Lancers 4–0) conceded that ‘the team is a little tired, since we’ve had to really play in these games. It seems everyone wants to beat us.’ With City missing some key players on international duty, the game could be a close one. Should that happen, he added, ‘it could be a great thing for soccer. It would be great for the game, because everyone back home and over the world is watching soccer in America. And we all want it to succeed here.’

Book’s comments reflect that City, to their huge credit, willingly co-operated in selling the exhibition game to the Atlanta public, arriving in the city a few days in advance, show­ing up at various banquets and receptions in their honour, and generally doing their part to talk up the coming game and soccer in general. In spite of the rigours of a demanding tour at the end of a long and extremely successful English season, manager Joe Mercer at least gave the impression that his side was taking it all seriously enough. ‘Although we don’t quite know what to expect, you can bet we won’t be complacent,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen the Chiefs play, but I do know some of their players and what their capabilities are.’ Francis Lee also cautioned that ‘they just might give us a pleasant, or unpleas­ant, surprise.’

Pleasantly, or unpleasantly, City lost 3–2 in front of 23,000 raucous fans, and Allison’s reaction was far from gracious. ‘They couldn’t play in the Fourth Division in England,’ he said. ‘The boy that kicked the last goal was offside too. They played well. We played poorly. It’s as simple as that. It hap­pens sometimes in England. The Third and Fourth Division sides come up and beat the First and Second Division teams. They just want the game more. The Chiefs had more to gain tonight than we did. We played like we didn’t really want to win the match.’

The Opening Paragraph

Here are the opening two paragraphs of ‘Rock n Roll Soccer’. When I'm in a  shop, here's how I decide whether or not to buy a book: I read the blurb on the back. If I make it through the blurb on the back, I read the opening paragraph. If I really like the opening paragraph, I buy the book. If I really, really like the opening paragraph, I stand there and keep reading until my legs start to ache, and then I go and buy the book.

It’s therefore an understatement to say that I spent quite a bit of time making sure I was happy with the book’s opening paragraph. The introduction is headed by a quote from the North American Soccer League’s irrepressible commissioner, the wonderful Phil Woosnam, who did more than any single figure (including Pelé) to push the league briefly into the US sporting stratosphere.

NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam

‘This sport will take off. There is absolutely no way that it will not bypass everything else. This country will be the centre of world soccer. In the 80s there will be a mania for the game here. There will be three to five million kids playing it. The North American Soccer League will be the world’s No. 1 soccer league. And it will be the biggest sports league in the USA.’

—North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam, 1977.

No one ever accused the North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam of lacking in optimism. It was, after all, the former Aston Villa forward’s drive and diligence that had rescued the nascent professional soccer league from the brink of extinction after just one year of play in 1968. Less than ten years later under his stewardship, the League was not only succeeding and expanding beyond the wildest of expectations, but was turning into a roller-coaster phenomenon that really might fulfil Woosnam’s brash and bullish forecast: number one sport in America, number one soccer league in the world. Yet again, the Yanks were coming with their arrogance, their money, their revolutionary vision and their self-belief, sweeping aside a century of tradition as they stormed forward into a shiny future that was splashed with character, colour and cool.

    A few months after Woosnam’s bold forecast, the New York Cosmos beat the Fort Lauderdale Strikers 8–3 in a sold-out NASL playoff game at Giants Stadium, New Jersey. The attendance was 77,691, and the Cosmos starting line-up featured Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia. The NASL was at its zenith, and this single game sums up everything the league stood for – a huge crowd, tons of goals and some of the biggest names in world soccer. There were celebrities in the stands and leggy cheerleaders on the touchline. What could possibly go wrong? It’s easy to ask that question now with a knowing smile. Arguably of more interest are the things that went right...

Rock n Roll Soccer: chapter titles

The Author's Note of Rock n Roll Soccer is keen to state that "this is an analysis, not a complete history of the North American Soccer League". The cover blurb, by contrast, is necessarily a superficial summation of both the NASL and the book's 400 pages. Until the book hits the stores, perhaps a list of the chapter headings can better convey the Contents:

Foreword by Rodney Marsh

Introduction

1. Atlanta, ‘Champions of England’

2. Pelé vs Eusebio: ‘Hot property getting mobbed’

3. Leaving old Europe behind

4. Marsh and Best: Entertaining the USA

5. Gimmicks, girls and teenage kicks: Selling soccer to the US public

The 1968 NASL champions, the Atlanta Chiefs, who
were challenged to a re-match by an aggrieved
Manchester City side on tour
(Dick Cecil private archive). 

Half-time (some miscellaneous and subjective NASL lists)

6. Brilliant mistakes: Quicksilver teams in Vegas and Honolulu

7. The NASL vs FIFA and the world

8. Broken teams in dysfunctional DC: Cruyff, the Dips, the Darts and the Whips

9. Myths and memories: The Cosmos, the Fury and the rock n roll lifestyle

10. Crash

Conclusion

Why I Wrote Rock n Roll Soccer

My forthcoming book Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League (Icon Books, September 2014) will for the first time examine and analyse a daring, garish football league that was out of place and out of time. The NASL was an attempt to make football work as a business in one of its largest unconquered markets – the United States and Canada – in the 1970s, when the rest of the world had barely thought about the game’s commercial potential.

After a reckless, nigh-on suicidal start in the late 1960s, the NASL stabilised on a low budget with mainly no-name foreign players. Yet when the New York Cosmos signed Pelé in 1975, it suddenly bloomed and boomed, and the world’s biggest names (Eusebio, Cruyff, Best and Beckenbauer) came to ply their trade and earn some cash. Meanwhile, wealthy North American sports entrepreneurs sought to teach the world how the game should be run – for the sake of pure entertainment, with an eye to making a profit, and preferably without the interference of FIFA.

As a journalist covering Major League Soccer and the US national team in the early years of this century, it often struck me how many untold stories there were from the NASL days, and how many players were still in the game to tell them. A colleague who’d proposed writing such a book ten years earlier told me that no US publisher had been interested. But now in London, England, one small independent publisher has had the conviction to take Rock n Roll Soccer on board and allow the remarkable story of the NASL to be told in full.

During the relative euphoria of the US national team’s exciting campaign at the 2014 World Cup, several hacks posited the idea that football had now truly arrived in the US. In fact it truly arrived decades ago, mainly in the form of European and South American players who not only came to play in the NASL, but to coach the game by tirelessly conducting clinics in thousands of schools across the country. Once the NASL went bust, many of them stayed on to make a living in a continent they’d come to love, and many are still here today. It wasn’t Jürgen Klinsmann who built US soccer, it was men like Rodney Marsh, Alan Merrick and Jimmy Gabriel.

Rock n Roll Soccer is a fluid narrative of excess, bravery, adventurousness, folly and football at its finest, played by international heroes among third division journeymen and young native hopefuls. Some of the things that the NASL attempted are retrospectively ridiculous, but many of its ideas and innovations have since became staples of the modern game. No one ever gave the NASL credit, though, which is one of the main reasons that this book now exists.