Open Wide For Some Soccer podcast

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

* What inspired me to write a book about the NASL

Celeb meets star

* How I came up with the title for the book

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

* The increased interest of international scouts towards North America 

Pelé salutes the readers of Rock n Roll Soccer!

Edison Arantes do Nascimento holds up his hand for
a cheap(er) copy of Rock n Roll Soccer. 

The trade paperback version of Rock n Roll Soccer is published today in the UK. Don't ask me what "trade paperback" means. The first edition was just a plain old paperback for £14.99, the trade paperback is a wee bit smaller and costs six pounds less at £8.99. But calling it the "cheap paperback" probably wouldn't do much for sales. Everyone likes a bargain, but no one wants to be told they're buying low grade goods.

Pelé, as you can see, is on the cover this time. For the plain old expensive paperback we went with Rodney Marsh and George Best and The Bloke Between Them, who turned out to be their agent, but was managing to look like a member of The Eagles - so the photo fit the title. While writing the book, I caught up with the agent by phone from California, where he's now in property. He couldn't remember much about the North American Soccer League, but vehemently denied the allegations in former Washington Diplomats' striker Paul Cannell's book that following a sponsorship deal, he once paid the Geordie striker in lieu of cash with a fat pouch of cocaine.

Three-times world champion Edison Arantes do Nascimento, though, sells more books than some dodgy no-name former wide-boy, so the agent's been despatched to the archives and the cover shows what I'm claiming in the book the NASL was not all about - Pelé, the Cosmos, razzmatazz blah blah blah. But I realise that's not what grabs a reader's attention. Every time I hand someone a copy of the book, or see them pick it up, the first thing they do is flick to the pictures in the centre. Every single person. Pictures, fellow hacks - if you're writing a non-fiction book, don't forget the pictures. Preferably of easily recognizable people.

Pelé is delighted to be on the front cover - you can tell from his face. You may quibble that he didn't know when he was running out on to the field that he was going to be on the front cover of Rock n Roll Soccer some four decades later. But you can't prove that he didn't. And that he's waving, "Buy! Buy!" It's what the game's been all about since the day he signed for the Cosmos.

Major League Soccer’s Existential Dilemma

Personality x 3: Chinaglia, Pelé, Beckenbauer

Wendy Parker's review of Rock n Roll Soccer at Sports Biblio last week highlighted the book's conclusion, where I write about the lack of personality in Major League Soccer compared with its fore-runner, the North American Soccer League. That's an aspect of the book that's been further thrown into focus this week as MLS concluded another season with yet another new champion, the Portland Timbers. All for the good, of course. Who doesn't like to see titles shared around? Who wants to be like Europe, where Barcelona or Bayern Munich win year after year?

On the other hand, there's a major existential problem here for MLS. Commissioner Don Garber is never slow to talk about where his league stands in comparison with its European counterparts. He likes to set vague future goals about when MLS will be big, bigger and biggest. Last week he was talking up the rotating championship title as a reflection of "one of the most competitive leagues in the world". Yet when we think about MLS, what are the equivalent keywords to the NASL's feverishly listed Cosmos, Pelé, Beckenbauer, Best, Cruyff, Chinaglia? You can't answer back with 'parity' and expect to hold anyone's interest. 

But didn't MLS sign David Beckham? Wasn't that the league's Pelé moment? Beckham may be a polite and wealthy young man, but his on-field and off-field personality fell way short of making an impact the size of Pelé's. His former team, the LA Galaxy, may be five-times record champion, but they don't yet have the stature or the style - in any respect - to be seen as the North American domestic giants. They just happen to be the team that has won MLS Cup more than anyone else, without offering many thrills on the way. They also boasted the league's and the United States' best ever player, Landon Donovan, but he needed to be one of many. Instead, he was just one of one. Now he's retired, leaving Toronto's Italian striker Sebastian Giovinco as the league's sole outstanding player in 2015.

In late October, I managed to get a ticket for Eintracht Frankfurt's home game with Bayern Munich. It's the only guaranteed sold out home game for Eintracht, and it's been that way for decades. Every right-thinking German soccer fan hates Bayern, and wants to see them defeated. Though in fact you could leave the word 'defeated' out of the previous sentence. Even as we despise them, we are fascinated at the way they can tear opponents apart with audacious attacking soccer. On the night, Frankfurt defended their asses off and grabbed a point in a 0-0 draw - the first points that Bayern had dropped all season. It's been a point of some pride in a mainly dire season for Frankfurt.

Bayern Munich - hated, but talked about. Rich, hugely successful, and inversely popular. They are a globally massive team. Am I really saying that MLS needs a team like Bayern to win MLS Cup year after year? Not at all. MLS could, however, urgently use four or five teams with some measure of Munich's magnetism. At the moment, parity means 20 clubs that vary from anaemic to presentable. There are still too many MLS games when the teams seem to think that the idea of soccer is to keep the ball as far away from both goals as possible. Importing veteran star names like Andrea Pirlo, Kaka, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard is a sign of stagnant imaginations in the league's front offices. These players won't make the league any worse, but neither they will they do much for its future. Eventually expanding the number of teams to 28, as MLS announced just this week, is making me feel tired as I type, and it's only nine in the morning. 

Fatal expansion: Former NASL commissioner
 Phil Woosnam presents quantity over quality. 

Garber pointed out last week that "we’re spending almost $120 million on DPs [Designated Players]. That’s six times what we spent five years ago. So if we’re able to grow our business, our owners are going to spend more money. And it’s not just going to be on our core roster. It’s going to be on areas where we can spend more on players that will improve quality." To paraphrase the commissioner - spending money on big name players means the league will attract even more money, and then we can invest that in long term youth development. That's a leap of faith that's hard to quantify, even with the aid of corporate flow charts. As a Plan for the Future, it's lacking exactly what you would hope for in a plan for the future - a clear-sighted vision, and a cogent means of getting there.

In the book's conclusion I generally show understanding for the MLS approach to building a league during those nascent years. Its caution, its prudence, and its need to develop in a way that will not frighten off new investors with concepts like relegation and bankruptcy. Yet, as that $120m figure above shows, parity and the salary cap have become fluid concepts according to the league's evolving needs. 

That salary cap isn't fooling anybody, and is increasingly meaningless when the league, with a ludicrous and shameless lack of transparency, will not even reveal its teams' profits and losses, transfer figures, or salaries (we have to rely on leaks, Forbes and the players' union for any of this information). What remains of parity's sham are the shackles preventing the emergence of teams with the kind of power and personality that - compared with the old NASL - is conspicuously missing. Still in place is a league more focused on its balance sheet than its league table and the quality of its play.

A possible solution? MLS should stop trying so hard to control its own history. Quit setting grandiose goals, drop the business-speak, and cease caring about how it shapes up compared with Spain, England and Germany. Retire Garber - he's steered the league to security, but his job is done. Bring in someone (former deputy Ivan Gazidis?) who has a genuine feel for the game. Remove parity and let the clubs chart the league's history, mistakes and all. Allow supporters to develop a team's culture, not the marketing department.

It wouldn't mean having to see the same team celebrate lifting the championship trophy year after year. The playoffs will prevent the dominant teams from serially winning titles and always give outsiders a chance. Even the mighty Cosmos only won four of the ten NASL titles between 1975 and 1984. They had charisma, but it was infectious. And as that league discovered too late - better a smaller, vibrant league than ill-conceived expansion for expansion's sake.

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. 

"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.’

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.