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Rock 'N' Roll Soccer
The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League
By Ian Plenderleith St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Ian Plenderleith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8400-7
CHAPTER 1
Atlanta, "Champions of England"
"America? They can't play the bloody game over there!"
— Ron Newman, future NASL coach, in 1967.
The front-page, capitalized headline on the Birmingham Evening Mail was unequivocal: US CLUB WANTS TO BUY VILLA. This was almost 40 years before Randy Lerner took over the Birmingham club in 2006, when the interest of American millionaires in English top-flight clubs was no longer quite so shocking. In November 1968, however, it was beyond radical. England were world champions, and the only foreign players in English soccer were from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The Americans did not even play the game, did they?
In Atlanta, they did. By the time of the Mail's headline, the Atlanta Chiefs had been playing it for two whole years. Only that summer they had taken on the English league champions, Manchester City. They had the backing of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, making them, in the words of Mail reporter Dennis Shaw, "the wealthy American soccer club." And it quoted the team's chief executive Dick Cecil as saying, "We would only be interested in taking full control," stressing that the organization had "vast financial resources." Villa, struggling for cash, were certainly interested enough to open talks.
Mr. Cecil was asked by the newspaper, somewhat understatedly, if he didn't think that US control of an English soccer team "would raise eyebrows," to which Cecil responded puckishly, "Rather like our taking over the Queen Mary." However, he stressed that the team would still be English-run. "We would not expect to come over with a boatload of Americans and think we had all the answers to English football. We think we would have something to offer by American methods in some spheres. Remember we are businessmen. We would not want to be regarded as a lot of American millionaires coming in to throw money around unwisely."
The takeover never happened, possibly because it was 30 years too early, and because Villa eventually found other sources of money more comfortingly close to home. In the late 1960s, the English league was not ready for American businessmen with fancy new ideas about making money out of soccer. In England, there were still some vestiges of the Corinthian ideal, although any rejection of American business values probably stemmed more from a parochial distaste for the upfront approach of the brazen Yanks. We'll take old money, but not new. Meanwhile, the game was there to be played, not exploited, and it was backed by almost a century of tradition. If a team was having money troubles, it would get through somehow. Glorious old teams like Aston Villa would not be allowed to die overnight.
Dick Cecil will only give a knowing smile when asked today if the Chiefs were making a realistic bid for Villa. At a time when the fledgling US game was looking for every chance to make itself public in a bid to sell soccer, the headline alone could be counted as a great result (he later told the Daily Mail, "A link with Aston Villa would have given soccer in America tremendous impetus."). In 1968, with the backing of baseball cash and the optimism of Phil Woosnam, Villa's under-rated Welsh forward who was nearing the end of his career, Atlanta was the pioneer in an ambitious drive to permanently alter the American sporting landscape. In England, foreign ownership was too much, too soon. In the United States, change was a constant, and its limits were unknown.
English champions, bad losers
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 the 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."
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 cooperated 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 honor, and generally doing their part to talk up the coming game and soccer in general. In spite of the rigors 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 game itself, though, was a proper contest, and in spite of the purportedly offside third goal, City keeper Ken Mulhearn conceded that his team's penalty goal through Francis Lee should probably not have been given either. "I was surprised," he said. "I really didn't think they would be that fast. I knew they had the soccer skills, but the speed surprised me." He compared Atlanta with the better teams from the English Second Division.
What also surprised the local media was the passion of the crowd as they reacted to the home side's comeback from an early goal scored by City's Tony Coleman. "The play on both sides was brilliant, fierce and fiery," wrote the Atlanta Constitution. "The Chiefs opened with every intent on winning and hammered at the British goal on numerous occasions." They equalized through Englishman Graham Newton — a former bit-part player with Walsall, Coventry and Bournemouth — then hit late goals through Kaizer Motaung (who later returned to his native South Africa with the team's name to found the Kaizer Chiefs), and the Zambian Freddy Mwila — Allison's "offside" goal. Lee's penalty in the 88th minute was too little, too late to prevent defeat.
Mercer's analysis was much more generous than Allison's. "We were beaten fair and square on the night," he said. "We're going to Chicago next and somebody has got to catch out for it [the loss]." The Chiefs' player-coach Phil Woosnam exulted: "The boys did it. They really played well together and it was a real team effort. They worked the ball well and really went after them." He wasn't about to say anything too rash, though, being aware of the need to temper local expectations and the American penchant for hyperbole. "We're not First Division now just because we won one game. That does not make us the world champs." Striker Ray Bloomfield, a former England Youth international who had been persuaded by Woosnam to move to Atlanta from Aston Villa, was moved to say, no matter what happened to soccer in the US now, "I shall never forget tonight."
The local press, however, which thanks to Woosnam's tireless lobbying was giving the new team generous coverage in its sports pages, could see that this was a friendly game with some significance. Columnist Jesse Outlar wrote that the Chiefs "attacked the Marvels* as though the World Cup were at stake, instead of a mere exhibition score. When it was over, excited boosters [fans] mobbed the Chiefs, proving that soccer is not only a highly emotional game in Latin America and London. Those 23,141 customers could not have cheered louder Monday night if the Braves had won the seventh game of the World Series." For an American sportswriter, that really was the ultimate accolade.
The paper's most forthright columnist, Furman Bisher — a sporting version of H.L. Mencken whose views were rarely less than entertaining — wrote with some retrospective irony that the game "was another fight for independence. Once again Our Side was the frontier and Manchester was the aggressor. We were the bush-league, Manchester the classic bully. We were the pitiful minority, Manchester the tyrant." The win meant that "our colonials still have a streak going, beginning with the Revolutionary War and carrying on down through the Ryder Cup, the Walker Cup, the Wightman Cup and the cup that runneth over." Meanwhile, Eric Woodward wrote for a UK audience in Football Monthly, "The score, 3–2, could not reflect the enthusiasm the game detonated among a crowd of 23,141 — at least two-thirds of whom were seeing professional soccer for the first time." No one could now dispute that soccer would "sweep the States" when a crowd of this size, way above the League norm, "literally abandoned their seats in this no-standing Atlanta Stadium to stand and yell themselves hoarse for 90 minutes ... The noise at times made Liverpool's Kop sound like a cathedral choir in comparison." It should be noted, however, that the fulsome Woodward worked for the Chiefs as an administrator.
While Atlanta's burgeoning soccer community glowed, City left town to continue their long tour. They lost to Borussia Dortmund in Chicago, twice drew with Dunfermline again, in Vancouver and LA (both games ended 0–0, so they weren't making soccer converts at every stop), then went down 3–0 to the Oakland Clippers. Next it was on to Mexico, to play Atlante in the Aztec Stadium, but the game was canceled because Atlante claimed that City had broken the terms of their contract, which stated that they were supposed to field their championship-winning team. Mercer told them this was physically impossible due to injuries and absences — the situation had become so bad that Allison had played in the second half in one of the Dunfermline friendlies, affording the entire bench the opportunity to hurl abuse at him in "the true Allison style" — and so the game never happened. A second game scheduled against another Mexican first division team, America, was also canceled.
You'd think after a grueling domestic season and eight games across North America, that would have been the cue to take a flight back to Manchester. The squad was threadbare, players were enduring games in pain, and they were missing two key men, Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee, both off on international duty with the England team. Yet clearly something still rankled about that defeat in Atlanta. When the games in Mexico were canceled, City called the Chiefs. Do you fancy a rematch? With the chance of another gate four times above their home average, Atlanta were more than happy to oblige and host the English champions a second time. The rematch was set for 15 June. They had nothing to lose, and plenty of publicity to gain.
Unwanted twins — the NASL's painful birth
"It was the late 60s, the Vietnam war was winding down, there was a lot of rebellion, a lot of 'we want to do things differently,' the long hair — well, soccer fit that trend."
— Dick Cecil, former Chief Executive, Atlanta Chiefs
It's not enough to state that the Atlanta Chiefs were a North American professional soccer team in their second year of existence, because that very existence was both extraordinary and precarious. Although the Chiefs were backed by the wealth of the Atlanta Braves and their owners, professional soccer's new start in the US had already almost choked to an embarrassing, early death. A few months after the Manchester City games, it would almost do so again. Its survival on both occasions owed much to Atlanta, a city in Georgia, a state that is twice the size of Scotland, but where in the mid-1960s a total of six private schools played soccer prior to the founding of the Chiefs.
Professional soccer's presence in the USA was to some extent fortuitous. The live transmission of the 1966 World Cup final had accelerated the imaginations of several wealthy men who had made money out of sport, and who for some time had been considering the formation of a professional, nationwide soccer league. This was in part thanks to the economically favorable climate of the 1960s, and also because several European teams touring the US in the previous decade had pulled in large crowds for one-off friendlies that gave a deceptive picture of the country's level of soccer interest. The United States Soccer Football Association (USSFA — and from 1974 shortened to the United States Soccer Federation/USSF) was also interested in the idea of a coast-to-coast pro league, and let it be known that it was ready to listen to proposals. The presumptive owners were not sentimental about American sporting tradition, and did not care about creating a new rival to baseball or American football — if there was space for a viable new sport, they would be happy to exploit it. The baseball owners like those of the Braves, for example, had new, multi-purpose stadiums that needed more teams and events, and if soccer was going to fill an empty date on the calendar and bring in cash, there was no American businessman or woman alive who was going to get wet- cheeked about stagnating baseball gates and the thought of fewer dads taking their sons to the ball game for peanuts and crackerjack.
Basketball and ice hockey were, in the mid-1960s, not yet firmly established in the US, while even baseball, the generally accepted "national pastime," was sensitive to the "threat" in advance of professional soccer's nationwide return to the US (the first attempt, in the 1930s, had foundered due to administrative factionalism, geographical distances, and the advent of the Great Depression). Perhaps baseball commissioner William Eckert was so defensive because many young fans at this time were eschewing his sport on the fairly reasonable grounds that it was boring compared with American football. When anything happened to affect baseball's position, he stated, "I am naturally concerned and will look into it." Eckert opposed soccer due to potential damage to the field; "conflict of interest and possible anti-trust implications"; the dilution of baseball promotion "by efforts to sell a new sport during the baseball season"; and finally, as a sort of catch-all whine that got to the real point, "financial damage to baseball as a whole." This combination of pseudo-threatening waffle and statutory objections ignored the guiding business principles of all those who invested in North American sports teams, which were — as outlined by Eric Midwinter in his 1986 analysis of sport's over-commercialization, Fair Game — that teams are located in cities "with the same calculating eye to profit as might attend the decision to site a supermarket in an acceptable catchment area." When it doesn't work, the supermarket is shut down or relocated.
Dick Cecil, the man behind the Villa takeover talks, remembers the day he saw England versus West Germany, two months after interested owners of the possible National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) had met for the first time at the New York Athletic Club. While for many Englishmen the match would have been the culmination of a lifetime's devotion to soccer, it was Cecil's first ever glimpse of the game. "We had a baseball game," he recalls. "We turned on the TV and the players started watching the game. It probably had more word-of-mouth reaction than any game I'd ever seen to that point. People were calling people and saying, 'Are you watching this game? It's a hell of a game.'" There were lots of goals, and 100,000 people in a stadium, and the game was being broadcast around the world. It's easy to see how that might have been seductive to businessmen used to making money out of sport.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rock 'N' Roll Soccer by Ian Plenderleith. Copyright © 2014 Ian Plenderleith. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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