"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.