Z/Web

This is a fascinating documentary about the New York Cosmos soccer team of NASL (North American Soccer League) back in the 1970s. I knew some of the history, but I did not realize how extraordinary it was even at the time. Today we compared soccer in the U.S. to American football here — but back then American football wasn’t nearly as big as it is today (the Superbowl and televised games were just becoming popular), and soccer wasn’t even played by kids in the U.S. (kids playing all started because of the Cosmos). The film shows how Warner Communications’ head Steve Ross got involved with the team which at that time was really only semi-professional (the players all had separate jobs to make a living) and turned it into one of the best teams in the world, regularly drawing crowds of over 70,000 to Giants Stadium (which was then newly built). Ross did this by luring Pele, the world’s greatest footballer (both at the time and all-time), for millions of dollars. I found hilarious the little montage of news reports and various people each throwing out wildly different amounts of how much Pele was supposedly paid, from as low as a million to seven million (the real amount is lost in history, no doubt). This was a multi-year deal, but what shocked me was the comparison to other sports figures at the time: the highest paid baseball player in the world was paid just $200,000 a year — so Pele getting millions really was extraordinary. Another thing I found telling was the comments that Pele came to play and didn’t complain about the conditions (horrible field, etc.) or the fact that the team initially sucked and Pele alone wasn’t enough to create a winning team (contrast that with David Beckham’s stint in L.A., where he seems unhappy to be on a losing team). To create a winning team Ross repeated the Pele formula bringing in numerous world class players so the Cosmos was essentially an all-star team with 14 nations represented. I was also surprised that this didn’t happen all at once — Pele’s Cosmos didn’t win the championship until his final year with the team, and when they won it several more times they did it with others. Since Pele is the main name you hear with the team, I had assumed he was part of all the championship teams, but he was not.

Of course the story has its downside, as the league collapsed. I wish the film had more about that (I’d love to see a documentary on the NASL itself), but of course this film is about the Cosmos. Still, some of the reasoning is explained: the league over-expanded (to a whopping 24 teams) too fast (there wasn’t enough talent for all the teams and play suffered), many of the team owners couldn’t afford losses, the Cosmos’ high spending ways created an imbalance compared to other teams with smaller coffers, TV coverage that failed, and ultimately, when Warner Communications started to struggle and the Cosmos faced cutbacks (and eventual dissolution), that signalled the end of the league. In retrospect, Major League Soccer has fixed most of the problems of NASL (MLS has a shared structure, so all owners share in the entire league’s profit/loss and no one team can outspend all the others). MLS has it’s own issues — mostly the fact that soccer here is still not as popular as other sports — but I do appreciate that MLS’ chief goal is to built a solid foundation for a league that will be around for hundreds of years, not an ill-conceived flash-in-the-pan like the NASL. Still, MLS — and American soccer — would not exist without the Cosmos, who certainly drew world attention and started a soccer foundation here in the United States. Very well done documentary.