"Thank Goodness for Rock n Roll Soccer"

America's longest-running football/soccer publication, Soccer America, has reviewed 'Rock n Roll Soccer'. Here's Mike Woitalla's full appraisal:

One of my favorite soccer memories: I was 13, sitting next to my grandfather who was visiting us from Germany, in Aloha Stadium watching Team Hawaii play the Las Vegas Quicksilvers.

I noticed that Opa, not a man prone to demonstrating excitement, was practically giddy.

“Michael, that’s Eusebio!” he said. “The world’s best player ever besides Pele. … See No. 5? That’s Wolfgang Suhnholz. He played for Bayern Munich!”

This was in 1977. After the North American Soccer League had so much success in many parts of the country, it started franchises in the middle of the Pacific and in the middle of desert -- when Vegas was a third the size it is now, had never had major league sports, and no soccer culture.

“What the hell were they thinking?” writes Ian Plenderleith in 'Rock 'n' Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League.' After one season, The Quicksilvers moved to San Diego and Team Hawaii became the Tulsa Roughnecks."

Reckless expansion was of course a main factor for the demise of the NASL, which folded after the 1984 season.

But, boy, am I thankful that the NASL did some crazy stuff. Not just because of the memory of seeing my grandfather so delighted, or because I got to watch Pele play, or had Team Hawaii players visit my school.

The NASL inspired the generation of players who made the U.S. national team respectable, like New Jersey boys Tony Meola, John Harkes, Tab Ramos and Claudio Reyna, who went to New York Cosmos games. It spread the seeds that led to soccer’s current state -- neck and neck with basketball as the most popular team sport among American children.

“In 1967, 12,000 schoolchildren went through the [Atlanta] Chiefs soccer clinics, while 42 area high schools had begun to play the game,” writes Plenderleith.

But what Plenderleith does most expertly -- and is previously less covered than NASL grassroots’ impact -- is show the NASL’s impact on the global game, and how some of that stuff doesn’t seem so crazy in hindsight.

“Old World” soccer purists may have mocked halftime armadillo races, players entering the field on Harley-Davidsons, or the San Diego Chicken doing a pirouette, flopping and playing dead next to a fouled player. (Minnesota Kicks coach Geoff Barnett: “The referee goes nuts and comes over to me shouting, ‘Get that f****** chicken off the field!”)

But as Plenderleith writes, the NASL was “a league that got too much right to ignore.”

“The NASL introduced the idea that a soccer game could be an event and a spectacle, not just two teams meeting to compete for points. You weren’t herded into the stadium by policemen waving wooden batons. You were a customer …”

Some of the “manufactured atmosphere” -- which could also be considered “marketing techniques aimed at wooing a new generation of fans” -- may have been over the top. But …

“Once the game started you could watch a version of soccer easily recognizable as the real thing, but which promoted scoring, played down defensive duties, and refuted the virtues of a hard-fought 1-1 draw. …

“In the 1970s, Pele, Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, George Best, Gerd Mueller and Franz Beckenbauer all played in the same league. … It was a big money glamour league that aimed to entertain, while generating cash. In that respect, it was the Champions League and the English Premier League rolled into one.”

Plenderleith lays out a solid case for how the NASL was ahead of its time. FIFA may have fought the league’s attempts to tweak the rules, but later made changes that resemble some of those attempts. Publishing a wide range of game statistics, marketing to women, names on the back of jerseys -- that happened first in the NASL.

Clive Toye, the former New York Cosmos general manager, says, “We were constantly being visited by executives from English clubs to see what we were doing, asking why we were doing it.”

From all that the NASL got right to where it went astray, this colorful and important era of American soccer is in good hands with Plenderleith, a skillful writer and thorough journalist.

For those of us who lived through the NASL, 'Rock 'n' Roll Soccer' brings back wonderful memories and enlightens us on aspects of the league we may not have realized. For those too young to remember the NASL, it’s a chance to comprehend how soccer took a foothold in the USA and meet the fascinating characters who made it happen -- with laugh-out-loud moments, to boot.

Rock 'n' Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League by Ian Plenderleith (Thomas Dunne Books 2015) 350 pages.

"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)