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The most spectacular attempt ever made to establish a
professional soccer league in the United States, the NASL
lasted for 17 seasons, from 1968 through 1984, before
folding. During several of those seasons, the top crowds
were in excess of 70,000 and it included dozens of the world's
most famous players.
The NASL rose of a soccer fervor that
overtook the United States, or a part of it, in the
mid-1960s. A significant number of those whom it overtook
were sports promoters who thought they saw a moneymaking
opportunity as a result of the interest generated by the
broadcast in the United States of the England-West Germany World
Cup final in 1966. As a result, the USSFA, and the Canadian
Soccer Association were besieged by bidders seeking to get
their sanction for professional soccer leagues to begin the
following year. The bidder that got the nod, thanks to its
willingness to pay a substantial fee to the USSFA, was called
the United Soccer Association. Another group,
the National Professional Soccer League, forced to go without
sanction, did just that. Rather than sink away, the NPSL
decided to operate as an outlaw league. Without the
sanction of the national associations, players who played in the
NPSL faced being banned from the sport worldwide by FIFA.
The NPSL had two advantages, however. It had a national television
contract, which the USA did not, and it wasn't limited
in its schedule by the offseason window of the European
season. While the sanctioned USA was able to play only
seven weeks, from May to July, the unsanctioned NPSL played
three times as long, from April to September. The merger of
the two leagues, with 17 teams to play in 1968, rather than the 22 that
had played in two leagues in 1967, marked the real birth of the
NASL. Those 17 clubs that composed the NASL in 1968
were the Atlanta Chiefs, Washington Whips, New York Generals,
Baltimore Bays, Boston Beacons, Cleveland Stokers, Chicago
Mustangs, Toronto Falcons, Detroit Cougars, Kansas City Spurs,
Houston Stars, St. Louis Stars, Dallas Tornado, San Diego Toros,
Oakland Clippers, Los Angeles Wolves, and Vancouver Royals. Between
the 1968 and 1969 seasons, 12 of the league's 17 teams folded,
one of the largest mass die-offs in American pro sports history.
Atlanta,
Dallas, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Kansas City were the teams
that survived into the NASL's 1969 season. The teams that were
left turned out to be a solid, nucleus, however, and they
contributed two very important leaders to the league's efforts
to rebuild itself. They were Phil Woosnam, coach of the
Atlanta Chiefs, who became director of the NASL for the 1969
season (a title that later was changed to commissioner) and
Lamar Hunt, owner of the Dallas Tornado, who set an important
example for American soccer investors by the way he stayed
committed to the sport despite monetary losses. The
league grew to six teams in 1970. The Baltimore Bays
folded but the NASL leaders persuaded the Washington Darts and
Rochester Lancers of the American Soccer League to switch to the
newer league. By this
time, the league's health was improved enough that it felt could
begin awarding expansion franchises. And in 1971, it
decided to go back to New York again and awarded a franchise
to the New York Cosmos.
The expansion that brought the Cosmos in the league was a
relatively cautious process. The next awarded franchise
was in 1973 and that was the Philadelphia Atoms. Both
the Cosmos and the Atoms won championships in their expansion
years partly due to how thin the talent level of the
established teams was. The result was a sudden, no-longer cautious
burst of expansion that probably was a significant part of the
reason for the league's eventual trouble. From
nine teams in 1973, the league exploded to 15 in 1974 and 20 in
1975. The continued
rise in attendance in 1975 was far overshadowed by another
event, the arrival of Pele, who had retired from Santos F.C. of Brazil in 1974. A year later, the world's most famous
player of all time came out of retirement, signing a contract
with the New York Cosmos. Pele
brought the NASL previously unimagined publicity in the American
news media. The reaction in the rest of the soccer world
to Pele's American venture may have been lukewarm, but there is
no question that from an American standpoint, Pele contributed
mightily to putting soccer on the map. The
Brazilian star's arrival, and that of Eusebio in the same
season, had given the league a credibility that it had not
existed before. And now, foreign players were arriving by the
planeload. After
the attendance burst of 1977, the expansion from 18 teams in
1977 to 24 for 1978 seemed logical, not the misstep that it
would appear in retrospect to have been.
Cosmos attendance was even more sensational than in 1977, now
soaring to an average of 50, 842 for the 1978 season. What's
more, the league now had a national television contract with
ABC. The revenue was good for the league and so was the
exposure of a weekly NASL game on national television. A
dark cloud appeared on the horizon in 1981, when FIFA finally
ran out of patience with the NASL's insistence on continuing its
biggest alteration of the traditional rules of the game. (In
1973 FIFA had granted permission for the NASL to experiment with
a change in the offside rule, adding a line across the field 35
yards out from the goal, outside which a player couldn't be
called offside. With the USSF threatened with expulsion
from FIFA, which would have made the NASL an outlaw league
and unable to make lucrative contracts with the rest of the
soccer world, the league agreed to discontinue the 35-yard line
rule at the end of the 1981 season. Another
thing that may have contributed to the NASL's trouble was the
impressive growth of professional indoor soccer. The Major
Indoor Soccer League had been established in 1978 and had been
engaging in a bidding war with the NASL for players and perhaps
more importantly, a race with them for fan support. The
indications that the NASL was losing ground became unmistakable
in 1982. Perhaps the worst was the fact that ABC did not
renew its television contract. The loss of the revenue and
the exposure were bad enough, but the network's
no-confidence vote on the league's future was even more
unsettling. And just as bad, symbolically at least, was the
fact that Lamar Hunt's Dallas Tornado, the last remaining
survivor from among the league's original 17 teams in 1968,
folded before the 1982 season. The
NASL did make attempts to salvage the situation. In an
attempt to both attract American spectators and reduce payrolls,
the league changed its rules a bit to require more American
players on the field than it had before. And it created a
league club called Team America, which played in Washington in
the 1983 season and which consisted of entirely of U.S.
national-team players. The idea might have been a good
one, but it didn't work, particularly because several teams,
most notably the Cosmos, wouldn't release their
national- team players. Only
four clubs were interested in playing in 1985, New York,
Toronto, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay. After Tampa Bay dropped
out and the Cosmos were suspended for failing to pay a
performance bond, the remaining two gave up the ghost, and the NASL officially folded on March 28, 1985. The end
of the NASL was an event that, by the time it happened, had so
long been seen coming that its immediate impact was somewhat
muffled. But as the next few years passed, the loss of the NASL
began to be felt more keenly by American soccer fans. The
fact that American soccer fans realized in the years after 1985
what they had when the NASL was alive, and how much they missed
it, certainly was crucial in helping Major League Soccer to get
off to the fast start that it did in 1996.
The Encyclopedia of American Soccer History by Roger Allaway, David Litterer,
and Colin
Jose
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