The brief, tumultuous marriage that seeded a love of soccer in New York City <\/p>\n
On July 19, the FIFA World Cup Final will take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A little over 50 years ago, on the same site, there was a different stadium and a different team playing there, But something just as momentous happened: the birth of a sporting phenomenon that helped America fall in love with soccer.<\/p>\n
And it was all thanks to one man \u2014 Pel\u00e9.<\/p>\n
A three-time World Cup winner with Brazil, the man born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was known across the world as being the greatest player that had ever graced a soccer pitch and now he was here in America, a country whose indifference to the sport couldn\u2019t have been more pronounced.<\/p>\n
When Pel\u00e9 first stepped onto the field for the barely-known New York Cosmos in 1975, American soccer changed overnight<\/a>. The Brazilian icon arrived in a country where his sport existed largely on the margins, competing for attention against more established, mainstream sports.\u00a0<\/p>\n Within months, crowds that had rarely paid attention to soccer were flocking to see the three-time World Cup winner in action and the Cosmos, a club going nowhere fast, soon became a cultural event. Celebrities filled the stands, television cameras followed their every move and soccer suddenly occupied a place in the national conversation in a manner not dissimilar to Lionel Messi\u2019s arrival at Inter Miami in 2023.<\/p>\n Until Pel\u00e9 arrived in 1975, the game the rest of the world called \u201cfootball\u201d had been dying a slow and largely unnoticed death in America. Indeed, in the five years that the North American Soccer League had existed, it had singularly failed to ignite any public interest in a sport that most every other country on the planet clutched to their hearts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even before the NASL began, the odds were stacked against pro soccer succeeding, especially when faced with the hegemony of baseball and the other kind of football. Certainly, the massed ranks of the nation\u2019s press seemed dead set against giving it any kind of opportunity to flourish. In 1968, for example, the San Francisco Examiner wrote despairingly of soccer\u2019s influence around the world: \u201cIn Europe, as in South America, they go raving mad over the game. Pray that it doesn\u2019t happen here.\u201d<\/p>\n Even in New York City, perhaps the most ethnically diverse metropolis on earth, there appeared to be little appetite for the game, with the city\u2019s soccer franchise, the New York Cosmos, \u201cdrawing less than the skin flicks on Eighth Avenue,\u201d according to one of the Cosmos players, Shep Messing.<\/p>\n But the turning point came when global entertainment giant Warner Communications acquired the Cosmos and put its visionary chairman, Steve Ross, in charge. Ross didn\u2019t know a goalkeeper from a zookeeper, but he was determined to break the Cosmos \u2014 and soccer itself \u2014 in the United States. Prior to the change, the team had been little more than a ragtag assembly of part-timers, students and foreigners who played their games at Downing Stadium, a crumbling wreck of a site under the Triborough Bridge at Randall\u2019s Island.<\/p>\n Now, with the financial might of Warner Communications behind them, the Cosmos were transformed from a team on the brink of collapse to one with lofty ambitions, one of which, ridiculously, was signing 34-year-old Pel\u00e9, the greatest soccer player that the world had ever seen and who had recently retired from playing.\u00a0<\/p>\n In basketball terms, it was like a 40-year-old Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for a Turkish basketball team nobody had ever heard of.<\/p>\n The idea came from the Cosmos\u2019 general manager, Englishman Clive Toye. \u201cThere was only player in the world who could break through this crust of indifference \u2014 and that was Pel\u00e9,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The idea appealed to Steve Ross, a man drawn inexorably to star names and supersized personalities.<\/p>\n So began a four-year, 300,000-mile odyssey for Toye, where he pursued the Brazilian around the world as though he were a fugitive, eager to lure him out of retirement and back on the football pitch.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were meetings in London, Frankfurt and Toronto, in Santos and Sao Paolo, none of which yielded the result Toye wanted. It was only when Pel\u00e9\u2019s financial woes caught up with him in late 1974 that Toye\u2019s hand was suddenly strengthened. Waylaid by a succession of bad business deals and poor legal advice, the player was in dire need of money and the Cosmos, thanks to the deep pockets of Warner, had bags of it.<\/p>\n The deal Toye finally struck with Pel\u00e9 guaranteed the player more money in three years than he had earned in his entire playing career with Santos \u2013 nearly $3 million (around $18 million today). Not only was it a world record package but it was over twice that what the rest of the Cosmos squad earned combined. Add in two homes, one in Manhattan and one in Connecticut, a lavish office at Rockefeller Plaza and guaranteed spots for his children at the city\u2019s top schools, and Pel\u00e9\u2019s compensation package was staggering by the standards of any era.<\/p>\n The Cosmos management also went out of their way to ensure Pel\u00e9 paid as little tax as possible, preparing a succession of contracts for him, with just one having any mention of soccer in it. Aside from the three-year playing deal, there was a 10-year deal for the global marketing rights to the Pel\u00e9 name and likeness and a 14-year PR contract for Warner Communications. One agreement even had his position within the corporation as that of a \u201cRecording Artist\u201d.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t just money that tempted Pel\u00e9.\u00a0<\/p>\n When Clive Toye made his sales pitch to Pel\u00e9, he convinced him not to join one of the big European clubs, like Juventus in Italy or Spain\u2019s Real Madrid, that had been keen to secure his services. \u201cI said if you go there, all you can do is win another championship. If you come here, you can win a country.<\/p>\n \u201cHe and he alone could do something no one had ever done and bring soccer to the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n Those dreams would go through the nation\u2019s largest city during one of its most difficult periods. In the fall of 1975, New York was a city on the brink.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Mayor Abe Beame\u2019s administration had overseen the city\u2019s worst-ever fiscal crisis, with thousands of city workers and public-sector workers laid off, wages frozen and essential capital improvement projects shelved indefinitely. With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, Beame had been left with no option but to seek financial assistance from President Gerald Ford.\u00a0<\/p>\n Just a couple of weeks after Pel\u00e9\u2019s unveiling as a Cosmos player at the 21 Club on June 10, 1975<\/a>, Beame and New York got their response from the White House, a rejection that gave rise to the famous Daily News headline: \u201cFord To City: Drop Dead.\u201d (The actual history<\/a> is a bit more complicated<\/a>, but that\u2019s a story for another essay.)<\/p>\n Even as the city spiraled, the Cosmos, now with the world\u2019s greatest ever player on their roster, went stratospheric. They moved into the revamped Yankee Stadium and then, in 1977, moved into Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, where, against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers on August 14, 1977, they pulled in a new NASL record attendance of 77,691<\/a>.<\/p>\n Uniquely, the Cosmos blended sport and celebrity culture \u2014 Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Robert Redford and Muhammad Ali were all regular attendees. In disco-era New York, they had managed to take soccer beyond the confines of the stadium. For the players, that invariably meant jumping in limos and heading straight to legendary super club Studio 54 after the final whistle, where they could skip the queues and get the party started.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were drugs on the dance floor, sex in the toilets and the Cosmos in the VIP section. As team captain Werner Ritter said: \u201cThat club was one of the home bases for the players. It was pretty standard Cosmos treatment. The mob would part, the velvety ropes come open and you\u2019d be taken into a VIP room there. We got superstar treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n Pel\u00e9\u2019s part-missionary, part-mercenary Cosmos career finally came to an end on October 1, 1977.<\/a> In a farewell game at Giants Stadium against Santos, he played one half of the match for the Cosmos and the other for the only other club he had ever played for. As the game drew to an emotional end, the heavens opened over the stadium, drenching the 75,000 in attendance.The following day, a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: \u2018Even The Sky Was Crying\u2019.<\/p>\n