Another season, another brain wave. With Phil Woosnam keen to create the impression that the NASL was every bit as vital as rival sports in the United States, the commissioner decided to rename the season’s showpiece finale the ‘Soccer Bowl’. Said swiftly, it almost sounded like the Super Bowl.
Five new franchises would also enter the fray in 1975, with soccer returning to Chicago for the first time since 1968. There would also be a glut of familiar faces joining the league, including the legendary Portuguese striker Eusebio, the Chelsea and England goalkeeper Peter Bonetti and the Manchester United winger Gordon Hill.
While the arrival of such talented players was welcome, they were still some distance from being the kind of name signings that would make the rest of the soccer world sit up and take notice of the much-maligned NASL. Despite the expansion, what the league needed more than ever was a player of genuine star quality, the kind of player who could provide an instant fillip for the league and persuade the most sceptical of sports fans to hand over their money at the weekend.
It wasn’t for want of trying. Clive Toye, of course, had tried his luck with Pelé but to no avail, and with his four-year pipe dream of signing the Brazilian legend looking less likely with each passing season, the Cosmos’s general manager lined up another star performer as the man to take the Cosmos and American soccer on to new heights—George Best.
With his background in sports reporting, Toye (and most of the soccer world, for that matter) had followed the career of Best with interest and knew that he was one of the few genuine superstars left in soccer. With swarthy good looks and a talent rarely seen in the modern game, Best’s skill was sublime, his appeal universal. He possessed an almost balletic grace and an ability to beat defenders with the ball seemingly glued to his feet. But trouble followed Best around like a puppy and while he had won most of the honors in club football and been voted the European Player of the Year in 1968, his career had been blighted by a seemingly insatiable appetite for the highlife. ‘I was born with a great gift,’ he once said, ‘and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak. Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.’
Increasingly, Best’s name had moved from the back-page headlines to the front. There were scores of sordid tales of all-night drinking and gambling and he seemed to collect beauty queens as some men collected stamps. One tabloid even called him the ‘Fifth Beatle’.
Inevitably, Best’s availability had seen a number of English clubs battling to sign him, most notably Malcolm Allison’s Manchester City and Brian Clough’s Derby County. By far the most exciting offer to reach Best, however, came from Toye and the New York Cosmos. Certainly, it was a move that appealed to Best. Hounded by the British press and unable to walk down the streets in the UK without being mobbed or attacked, the Northern Ireland international viewed a move to New York, perhaps naively, as a fresh start and a way to enjoy a degree of anonymity while still maximizing what was left of his earning potential.
Best duly arrived in New York on January 13,1975, checking into the Essex House Hotel opposite Central Park. Over the course of a week, negotiations with Toye progressed so well that within days, the pair, flanked by NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam, appeared at a press conference together to launch the new official NASL game ball. ‘We are very close,’ said Best of the ongoing dialogue. ‘As far as I am concerned there will be no problem.’
Toye was equally optimistic, explaining ‘there is little to do now, except put all the details in writing.’ Superficially at least, everything seemed to be going to plan; Manchester United and their manager Tommy Docherty were happy to let Best go (especially as he wasn’t going to a rival club in England), Toye was happy with the player and his commitment and Best himself wasn’t anticipating any problems. Indeed, by January 26, Toye had reached an agreement with Manchester United to buy Best for a down payment of £10,000 followed by an additional £10,000 for each appearance he made. All that was required now was for the player himself to agree to personal terms, and the contracts could be signed and George Best unveiled as the biggest star to pull on the Cosmos jersey.
Best, however, would never put pen to paper, going what Toye calls ‘walkabout’ when the deal had been finalized and failing to turn up to sign the contracts.
Former ABC soccer commentator Paul Gardner was at that press conference. ‘George Best [was] being charming, just enchanting everybody,’ he recalls. ‘“I love it. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that and we’ll have another conference on Thursday and we’ll see you all then” and off he went and they never heard from him again. They couldn’t find him, apparently he was in Spain on the beach somewhere.’
Twenty-six years later, in his autobiography, Blessed, Best would reveal why he turned his back on a move to the Cosmos. They wanted me to do a lot of promotional stuff, and, not unnaturally, to live in New York full time,’ he wrote. ‘I didn’t fancy that. I think New York is a great city and I love the madness of it for a few days. I just didn’t relish the prospect of living there full time.’
Best’s failure to commit to the Cosmos rankled with Toye, who had seen his chance of landing the genuinely high-profile recruit he craved defeated at the eleventh hour. Years later, Toye would corner Best during a preseason game between Best’s new team, the LA Aztecs, and the Cosmos. ‘[The] teams were lining up for the anthem,’ recalls Toye, ‘so I walked up behind George, put him in a headlock and said, “So that’s where you got to you little bugger” and he just smiled and said: “Hello, Clive” and that was that.’
Unperturbed, Toye’s attentions returned to the player who had remained his number one choice, even throughout the negotiations with Best. For years, Toye had badgered Pelé, pursuing him around the globe as though he were a fugitive and taking every opportunity to remind him not what the Cosmos could do for him, but rather what he could do for the Cosmos and, more importantly, what he could do for soccer in the States. There had been meetings in Sao Paolo, Santos, Frankfurt, London and Toronto, all without the outcome Toye wanted. Crucially, though, Toye’s hand had now been strengthened, not least by Pelé’s retirement from the game at the age of thirty-three in the October of 1974.
Moreover, the player himself was now in need of money as a succession of bad business deals and poor legal advice had left him with substantial debts back in Brazil. His chief concern was the position of Fiolax, a company that manufactured rubber components for the motor industry. Although he owned only 6 percent of shares in the company, Pelé had signed a guarantee for a bank loan on Fiolax’s behalf. Needless to say, when the company defaulted, the banks came looking for Pelé. It would also transpire that Fiolax had contravened corporate regulations governing the importation of raw materials, and the outstanding loan repayments coupled with a hefty fine had left Pelé with a bill of over $1 million.
When Pelé flew to Brussels to play in the testimonial game (essentially a benefit game granted to long-serving players of any given club) of the Belgian captain Paul Van Himst in March, he was followed, as ever, by Clive Toye. ‘I had pretty well decided I was either going to get a really positive response from him then or I was going to go away and commit suicide,’ he says.
The following few days would make or break any deal. Toye’s problem, however, was finding the time to sit down with the player to discuss any possible move. Pelé was a man in demand. There were cocktail parties and banquets, photo shoots and signing sessions, meetings with ministers and multimillionaires. Then there was the game itself. Everything, it seemed, except time for a meeting with Clive Toye. Eventually, after a stolen ten-minute conversation in the back of a Brussels taxi, the pair agreed to meet at Pelé’s motel the morning after the match.
Toye arrived at the GB Motor Inn determined to secure Pelé’s signature. Time was of the essence. Pelé was due to fly out to Casablanca that afternoon for an audience with the King of Morocco and Toye was anxious to get down to business, even though his task had been complicated by emerging press reports linking some of Europe’s biggest clubs to Pelé. ‘Juventus and Real Madrid were nibbling at him and I said if you go there, all you can do is win another championship, if you come here, you can win a country. He and he alone could do something no one had ever done and bring it to the mainstream.’
But Toye’s pioneer sales pitch—or ‘pestering’ as he puts it—seemed to be working. Pelé, after all, had never played his club soccer outside Brazil, and though extremely fit for a man in his mid-thirties, there was every chance he would be found wanting if he moved to the more demanding leagues of Italy or Spain. But as Toye began to sense that he was finally making headway, proceedings were brought to an abrupt end. ‘[There was a] knock on the door and then one by one, all these great players who had played this testimonial game all came in to give [Pelé] a hug and a kiss and say good-bye,’ recalls Toye. ‘Eusebio came in and Alan Simonsen and Van Himst, of course. Then Altafini came in.’
Jose Altafini was an abrasive center-forward who held dual nationality for Brazil and Italy. Born in Brazil, he had played with Pelé for the national team in the 1958 World Cup finals under the name Mazola. Later, having moved to Italy and made a name for himself as the star striker in the AC Milan team of the early 1960s, he had opted to play for the Azzurri instead. When Altafini saw Toye talking to Pelé he knew immediately that he was trying to sign him, and decided to offer his services to the Cosmos as well. ‘Under normal circumstances I would have snatched his hand off,’ explains Toye, ‘but I wanted him out of the bloody room because I had another hour with Pelé.
But Altafini wouldn’t budge, badgering Toye to make him an offer of a contract. ‘He wouldn’t go,’ adds Toye. ‘I kept on saying “Later, Jose,” he was [saying] “no no, how much you pay me?” So in the end I made him some insulting offer like $15,000 a year and he left in a huff.’
With Altafini finally gone, Toye persevered with Pelé as the player changed clothes, slipping into a pair of painfully tight white trousers. As the Englishman outlined his plans for the club and the NASL, Pelé bent over to pack his suitcase. Then, disaster. Pelé’s trousers ripped and, as his other trousers were buried deep in his suitcase and he had neither the time nor the inclination to unpack again, he needed some emergency repairs. Off came the trousers, on went a towel and an increasingly exasperated Toye sent for a chambermaid. ‘So in came this very respectable-looking middle-aged lady, took one look at Pelé, burst into tears and explained that her husband had been a huge fan, had never seen him play, had tickets to the game last night but had died two weeks before of a heart attack. Could she please have a photograph taken with Pelé?’ laughs Toye. ‘So now with twenty-five minutes to go of the rest of my life, we have to find a camera. She goes away to mend Pelé’s trousers, comes back with the trousers, we take the photograph, she goes. I stand with my back to the door so no one else can come in and we get down to brass tacks and say OK, what about it then. So finally he agreed to sign to us for two years and I said OK, let’s get it on a piece of paper. I still have that paper at home.’
Finally, Toye had his man, or at least he had an agreement in principle. Before he left for the airport, the pair discussed Pelé’s personal demands—he wanted $3 million over two years—and they agreed to meet again in Rome in a fortnight’s time to further discuss the deal.
Two weeks later, Clive Toye arrived in Italy accompanied by Warner executive Rafael de la Sierra, who in addition to having some control over the Cosmos purse strings was tagging along as Toye’s impromptu interpreter. The fact that he spoke Spanish and not Portuguese didn’t matter. It seemed close enough.
Curiously, de la Sierra was a Cuban architect who had redesigned the new Warner offices in Manhattan as well as working on Villa Eden, the company’s executive retreat near the Las Brisas resort in Mexico. During both projects, he had impressed Steve Ross so much that he brought him into the Warner family and had rapidly gained a reputation as one of the rising stars of Rockefeller Plaza.
A meeting was convened at the Excelsior Hotel on one of Rome’s most famous streets, the Via Veneto. Toye, decidedly more relaxed now that he had at least gained an assurance from Pelé, arrived with de la Sierra, confident they could finally reach a more definite agreement with the player. But before the party had even sat down to dinner, yet alone begun contract negotiations, the hotel’s busboy had sprinted home to get a soccer ball for Pelé to autograph and the chef had emerged from the kitchens begging Pelé to sign his hat.
When they reached their table, one of the musicians from the house band wandered over to the table and, knowing that Pelé was an accomplished guitar player, handed him a guitar and pleaded with him to play for the diners. Ever courteous, Pelé duly obliged, but as he finished and accepted the applause of the restaurant, an official looking man, bedecked with ribbons and medals, appeared at his side. Explaining that he was a guest at a diplomatic function in a neighboring room, he wondered whether Pelé would do him and his fellow guests the honor of sharing a glass of champagne with them. Pelé smiled and, much to Toye’s chagrin, said yes. ‘So we all have to traipse in while they all stand up in their glittering evening gowns and tiaras and toast Pele,’ he sighs.
When every last autograph had been signed and photo taken, the three men sat down to dinner. In their previous meetings, Clive Toye had only ever gained minor concessions from Pelé. He had, for example, offered to play the occasional exhibition game and host a handful of soccer clinics but nothing concrete. While such offers were welcome, they were only piecemeal suggestions, a world away from what Toye (or ‘Clivie’ as Pelé called him) really needed from his man. Now, however, Toye knew he had all but pulled off the biggest transfer coup in soccer history.
Back in the States, the new NASL season began on the same day the Vietnam War ended. Back-to-back defeats at home to Miami Toros and away to Eddie Firmani’s Tampa Bay Rowdies had left player-coach Gordon Bradley and his team fearing another season of underachievement. That said, the NASL was also fearing the worst. Only a handful of teams were capable of drawing five-figure crowds (most notably the San Jose Earthquakes, the Seattle Sounders and the Tampa Bay Rowdies) and attendances of three or four thousand were the depressing norm.
Quite why Pelé should want to join a struggling club in a league with no clear future was anyone’s guess. To his credit, though, Clive Toye had persevered with a rare zeal, and but for the contracts being signed, had managed to get his man. With the deal all but done, Norman Samnick, the general counsel in Warner’s Publishing and Licensing Division, was drafted in to conclude the outstanding issues.
As one of WCI’s top lawyers, Samnick was in the process of drafting Dustin Hoffman’s and Robert Redford’s contracts for the film of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, but had been seconded by Steve Ross to work on the details of the Pelé deal. ‘I got a call [from Ross],’ says Samnick. ‘[He said] “I want you on a plane tonight to Brazil, you’re going with Jim Kerridine [Warner’s tax specialist] and you’ll meet Rafael de la Sierra there.” I had no idea what I was doing, why I was doing it, when we were doing it and with whom we were doing it.’
Samnick and Kerridine took the ten o’clock Pan Am flight that evening to Rio de Janeiro, arriving in Brazil at eight the following morning. A taxi then took the pair of them to a local airport and on to a domestic flight to Sao Paolo, where they would meet de la Sierra. Over lunch, de la Sierra explained to Samnick and Kerridine that they were there to finalize the contracts with Pelé, before meeting the player at his home near Santos.
When the two parties reconvened, the discussions continued but progress proved slow. The chief concern for Pelé and his adviser, Valdemar De Brito, was that the player’s salary should be tax-free and that it should be grossed up to account for his tax burden. With the deal on the verge of collapse, Samnick called Jay Emmett at his home in New York to seek guidance. It was 2 a.m. and Emmett, not surprisingly, was unimpressed. After listening to what Samnick had to say, Emmett hung up, because he ‘knew there would be six or seven other calls’. Later that night, Emmett would meet with Clive Toye to try and salvage the deal.
Eventually, there was a breakthrough. ‘We came up with some ingenious ideas to get more money, less taxes and a lot of licensing income [for Pelé],’ explains Samnick. Pelé and his team were particularly taken with the idea of a 50 percent cut of all endorsements and a new licensing deal, and his mind was as good as made up when, soon after, he received a communication from Henry Kissinger, the then Secretary of State and a goalkeeper in his youth. Previously, Kissinger had sent a letter to the Foreign Secretary of Brazil pleading with him to let their national treasure join the Cosmos, but now he would contact the player himself to persuade him to try his hand in NYC. ‘In my dealings with the Brazilian government and with Pelé there was no huge resistance,’ recalls Kissinger. ‘I tried to convince them that to have Pelé play in the United States was a tremendous asset for them and by that time he was no longer on the Brazilian national team so we were not taking him away from anything that Brazil wanted.’
Quite how much Kissinger’s intervention swayed Pelé is debatable, but certainly it was another PR masterstroke from Warner. If the Secretary of State was getting involved then this really was news, even if it was about soccer. After twenty-four straight hours of drafting the final contracts, Samnick, Kerridine and de la Sierra completed the job. Elated but exhausted, the Cosmos delegation headed back to their hotel to gather their things and get a plane back to Rio, before getting an early-morning flight to New York the following day.
When Norman Samnick arrived back in New York, however, he was contacted by Steve Ross’s office, and instructed to meet Ross, Toye and Jay Emmett at the airport the following morning. There, they would get the early flight to Hamilton, Bermuda to complete the formal signing of contracts at the Hamilton Princess Hotel. Bermuda was chosen for what Emmett describes as ‘[Pelé’s] tax reasons’.
To help ease Pelé through the bothersome issues of visas and work permits (and to ensure that he paid as little tax as possible), Warner prepared a succession of contracts for him, with only one having any mention of soccer in it. Aside from the three-year playing deal, there was a ten-year deal for the worldwide marketing rights to the Pelé name and likeness and a fourteen-year PR contract for Warner Communications. One agreement even had his position within the corporation as that of a ‘Recording Artist’ with Atlantic Records. ‘We owned him lock, stock and barrel,’ smiles Toye.
While it was, undeniably, a lucrative deal for Pelé, there was some confusion over the exact amount the Brazilian would be paid for his services. Initial press reports suggested Pelé would be paid $4.7 million over the course of his three-year contract—more than any other professional athlete in the States at that time—but Norman Samnick, Jay Emmett and Clive Toye maintain that the amount he agreed to was $2.8 million. However the deal was examined, it was clear that for the next three years Pelé would earn more than he did in his entire career with Santos.
The deal also went far beyond merely lining Pelé’s pockets. As well as two houses, an office suite at Rockefeller Plaza (with luxury bathroom, naturally) and guaranteed places in New York’s best schools for his children, Pelé had sought and secured a number of additional assurances from Cosmos, including the establishment of exchange programs between American and Brazilian sports coaches and a sponsorship deal for a soccer school for underprivileged children in Santos. He had also persuaded Clive Toye to take on Julio Mazzei as an assistant coach at the club.
When Clive Toye got back to Warner HQ, his four-year, 300,000-mile odyssey at an end, he called John O’Reilly into his office. When O’Reilly arrived Toye sat with Gordon Bradley. They said: “We want to tell you something that has taken place,’” recalls O’Reilly. ‘I wasn’t sure if they were going to tell me I hadn’t got a job or the club had folded, and they said, “We . . . we’ve signed Pelé.” And I gave them a look of “you’re both crazy”. I used different words. And they said “No, we’ve signed Pelé.’”
As Toye puffed on a celebratory cigar and Bradley sniggered at O’Reilly’s bewilderment, the same words rang out again: ‘We’ve signed Pelé.’ O’Reilly was nonplussed. I said “I’m going home”. It was 3 p.m. and I left for home, hours before the day was over because I truly didn’t believe we had signed Pelé.’
On June 10,1975, at a triumphant press conference at New York’s famous 21 Club, the New York Cosmos announced the signing of the greatest player the game had ever seen. Outside the club was a scene of utter pandemonium, with 51st Street, 52nd Street, Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas all packed with people jostling to see what all the fuss was about.
Inside the club, though, it was much worse. Pelé was two hours late, there was no air-conditioning and according to the sign on the wall the capacity of the 21 Club’s Hunt Room was 143 people. With proceedings threatening to get out of hand, John O’Reilly did a head count, stopping when the number topped 400. ‘We had superstars in the United States, but nothing at the level of Pelé,’ says O’Reilly. ‘Everyone wanted to touch him, shake his hand, get a photo with him.’
Clive Toye agrees. ‘Absolute chaos,’ he adds, ‘more photographers than I have ever seen in my life before.’
Eventually, Pelé made his entrance, flanked by his wife Rosa, Steve Ross, Jay Emmett, Clive Toye, Gordon Bradley and Julio Mazzei. ‘For me it is like a dream,’ he said. ‘The United States is the capital of the world. Everybody has something to do in this life, a mission, a goal, and the only country in the world where soccer is not well known is the United States. I had a dream that one day the U.S.A. will know soccer and that is the main reason I am here now—to show this nation why soccer in the world is so important.’
As flashguns popped and Pelé posed, the sound of glass shattering caught his attention. As the media scrum battled to secure the best picture of the Cosmos’s new recruit, two rival photographers had started fighting, turning over a glass-topped table as they grappled. Understandably, Pelé looked bewildered but, as he would soon discover, the madness had only just begun.