'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…