In September, the newly crowned NASL champions left for a two-week tour of the Far East, with the club set to become the first professional soccer team to play in the People’s Republic of China. Arranged by Rafael de la Sierra and Clive Toye (prior to his departure), it was conceived as a farewell tour for Pelé but had quickly turned into a full-scale Warner vacation, with virtually the entire board of the corporation (and their wives) clamoring to get a seat on the plane.
The press also found it difficult. Lawrie Mifflin of the New York Daily News even pretended to be the sister of her namesake Ramón Mifflin (no relation) to get a place on the trip but she only got as far as Tokyo. Indeed, with spaces at a premium—de la Sierra had only twenty-three visas—the only way that Steve Ross, Jay Emmett and their partners could make the trip was if they traveled as the team’s official photographers. So, loaded down with the hastily purchased camera equipment, Ross and Emmett joined the team on their excursion to the Orient.
After two sell-out games in Tokyo (a 4–2 win over Furakawa followed by a 3–1 victory over the Japanese All-Star team), the Cosmos finally extricated themselves from the world’s most persistent autograph hunters and headed to China, not really knowing what to expect.
On their arrival in Peking, the Cosmos party was met first by 30,000 people and then by a full diplomatic reception. This time it was de la Sierra and the Ertegun brothers that did the meeting and greeting, Ross and Emmett having thrown themselves into their new roles as photographers, shooting everything that moved.
Despite the cultural and commercial constraints of the Communist regime, it seemed as though everybody was fully aware of who Pelé was. ‘You wouldn’t think they [the Chinese] read a newspaper, or saw a television set,’ recalls Jay Emmett, ‘but they knew Pelé, they might have not known anything else but they knew Pelé.’
Although largely unknown, the Chinese team were strong, organized and eager to prove themselves against the assembled stars of the Cosmos. In the first game in Peking on September 17, they defended resolutely and held Pelé et al. to a 1–1 draw. Three days later (and the day after Steve Ross’s fiftieth birthday bash), the Chinese humbled the Western millionaires, beating them 2–1 in Shanghai in front of 50,000 impeccably behaved and strangely silent fans who were told over the public address system when they could applaud.
Results aside, it had been a successful trip. Shep Messing called it ‘an incredible education’. From a public relations perspective, the name of the Cosmos had been taken to places that Warner could never really have envisaged when they bought the club, and from the Great Wall of China to the grave of Mao Tse-tung it had given the players a rare insight into an alternative way of life. ‘It was one of the most unique places that I had ever been in terms of its culture, in terms of its architecture, in terms of its geography,’ says Werner Roth. ‘Just learning about their political system and seeing communism working from a close standpoint was pretty unique and pretty interesting.’
But while most of the players took the opportunity to experience what China had to offer, others, namely Giorgio Chinaglia, were less taken with the country—especially the cuisine. ‘[Giorgio] was very reluctant about the food,’ laughs Rafael de la Sierra, who remembers eating sea slug soup and jellyfish on the trip. ‘He even brought cans of cannelloni and ravioli with him.’
As the Cosmos passed on dessert, a new soccer league was being born back in the States. The Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL) was the brainchild of a Philadelphia lawyer, Earl Foreman, and was a six-a-side version of the game featuring six franchises: the Cincinnati Kids, the Cleveland Force, the Houston Summit, the New York Arrows, the Philadelphia Fever and the Pittsburgh Spirit.
It was an instant hit with those soccer fans who wanted breakneck action and more goals than the NASL. Soon, the MISL’s most successful franchise, the Philadelphia Fever, would be posting attendances well over 8,000, significantly more than a number of NASL clubs could muster. ‘This is the game Americans want,’ insisted Foreman.
On October 1, 1977, Pelé’s part-missionary, part-mercenary role in the NASL came to an end. His last match, an exhibition game between the Cosmos and his former club, Santos, had been sold out six weeks beforehand and would be covered by 650 journalists and broadcast in some thirty-eight nations. As the hottest ticket in town, the Cosmos had unintentionally oversold the game and actually took bookings for close to 100,000 tickets, despite Giants Stadium’s capacity of just 77,000. With disappointed fans threatening everything from litigation to murder, the Cosmos narrowly averted an investigation by the New York Attorney General by issuing full refunds and complimentary tickets for future games to those supporters who had bought their tickets in good faith.
In the locker room prior to kickoff, Werner Roth gathered his team together and presented the Brazilian with a plaque, with all the squad’s names on it and the inscription: ‘To Pelé, the soccer player, and Edson do Nascimento, the man. Thank you’. In return, Pelé walked around the room, giving each player a small silver medal engraved with their name and Pelé’s likeness, prompting Shep Messing, never the most reserved member of the Cosmos team, to start blubbering like a baby.
Then came a visit from the only other sportsman on the planet to rival Pelé’s renown—Muhammad Ali. Two days earlier, the world heavyweight champion had retained his title by beating Earnie Shavers at Madison Square Garden. Now he wanted to pay his respects to another sports legend. As the pair embraced in the locker room, a reporter asked Ali what he thought of Pelé. ‘I don’t know if he’s a good player,’ shrugged the boxer, ‘but I’m definitely prettier than him.’
Later, however, Ali would concede Pelé his place alongside him in sporting history. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there are two of the greatest.’
Bobby Smith recalls the encounter. ‘It was an awesome moment because . . . they’d never met each other, [but] they both wanted to meet each other,’ he recalls. ‘It was beautiful, you know.’
Muhammad Ali wasn’t the only world figure heaping praise on the Brazilian. Even the president, Jimmy Carter, chipped in. ‘Pelé,’ he said, ‘has elevated the game of soccer to heights never before attained in America and only Pelé, with his status, incomparable talent and beloved compassion, could have accomplished such a mission.’
As Pelé ran out on to the pitch, Giants Stadium reverberated to the familiar chant of ‘PELÉ, PELÉ, PELÉ’ and as the main attraction circled the field, waving and, as ever, smiling, the New Jersey night was set ablaze with the glare of thousands of flashbulbs.
Finally, he addressed his crowd. ‘I want to thank you all, every single one of you. I want to take this opportunity to ask you to pay attention to the young of the world, the children, the kids. We need them too much,’ he urged. ‘Love is more important than what we can take in life . . . Please say with me, three times. LOVE . . . LOVE . . . LOVE.’
Such was Pelé’s hold over the fans at Giants Stadium that they gave their hero the send-off he wanted (and deserved) and joined in with gusto. ‘I knew that if soccer gave me nothing else,’ says Shep Messing, ‘I had been a part of this moment, and maybe that would be enough.’
Pelé’s final game at Giants Stadium would actually be half a game. Having played the first period for the Cosmos (and scored a thirty-yard thunderbolt), he switched sides at the interval to pull on the white shirt of the only other club he had ever played for. As the game progressed, the heavens opened over New Jersey, drenching each and every one of the 75,000-strong congregation. The following day a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: ‘Even the Sky Was Crying.’
By the end of October, Gordon Bradley would also be gone. After all his efforts in guiding the club from the gutter to somewhere approaching the stars, he had found his new position in player development a world away from the day-to-day involvement of pulling on a tracksuit and coaching the team. When the Washington Diplomats offered the Englishman a three-year contract worth $175,000 a year to coach their side—more than he ever received at the Cosmos—Bradley handed in his resignation and headed to the capital.
As one face left New York, a new one arrived. Bronx-born Ed Koch was elected as the new Mayor, charged with restoring financial propriety to a town permanently in the red. ‘We hadn’t had a balanced budget for fifteen years,’ he explains. The banks were no longer going to lend us money, city services had deteriorated and businesses and residents were moving out.’
In just three years, however, Koch would manage to turn things round for New York. By slashing budgets still further, boosting revenues wherever he could and making sure every dollar was accounted for, the Big Apple with Ed Koch at the helm pulled itself together. ‘I did it because we had no option,’ he says today. ‘If you have no option, you’ll do it.’
Despite the absence of Pelé, confidence in the NASL as a viable proposition was high. After the record attendances of the last season, the league roster for the 1978 season expanded again, taking the total number of teams to Phil Woosnam’s desired target of twenty-four. That said, there was still concern for the financial viability of many clubs. While the Cosmos could relax, safe in the deep pockets of Warner Communications, four other franchises had fallen by the wayside, most notably the St. Louis Stars, one of the NASL’s founding members. Moreover, only one of the eighteen clubs that started the 1977 season—the Minnesota Kicks—actually made any money. And while the game in general was becoming increasingly popular in the suburbs (especially in California, where there were now five franchises) and among women and girls, there was still no network television deal in place, and what coverage there was came via smaller independent TV companies.
Not that anybody at the Cosmos really cared. With Steve Ross’s money to burn, Eddie Firmani had set about finding some additional replacements for their dear, departed Pelé. In came Vladislav ‘Bogie’ Bogicevic, a talented midfielder from Yugoslavian champions Red Star Belgrade, and Lazio’s improbably named defender Giuseppe Wilson, who joined his old friend Giorgio Chinaglia.
Another Brit also arrived in the shape of Manchester City’s English international Dennis Tueart, who rejected moves to Manchester United, Nottingham Forest and the Belgian side Anderlecht in favor of a reported £1,000-per-week deal at the Cosmos. Tueart was the type of player that New Yorkers appreciated. Once, when the tennis player Jimmy Connors was asked about the differences between the four Grand Slam tournaments, he said: The New York crowd loves to see you spill your guts. In Paris, they love good tennis. But really, they get behind you and want you to spill your guts like here. In Wimbledon, if you spill your guts all over the court, you get to clean it up yourself.’
In Tueart the Cosmos had bought a player with vast reservoirs of what the American military are wont to call ‘intestinal fortitude’. Swift and agile, he was the kind of tireless runner that Giorgio Chinaglia could or would never be, and would chase every lost cause as if his life, and not just his generous salary and luxury apartment, depended on it. ‘I didn’t realize at the time, but when I finally turned up to sign in the January of 1978 I realized that for the new season I would be replacing Pelé,’ he recalls. ‘When you follow the all-time world leader, an icon as far as soccer is concerned, it can be a bit daunting but I was just looking upon it as a fantastic opportunity to experience a new aspect of my football career.’
Worryingly for Shep Messing, Firmani had also been window-shopping for a new goalkeeper, despite the arrival of Erol Yasin the previous season. Press reports had linked several other keepers to the club, including the experienced Polish international Jan ‘The Clown’ Tomaszewski.
Messing’s worst fears were confirmed when, on Wednesday, February 22, he awoke to a scream from his wife, Arden. Flicking through that morning’s New York Times, she had been shocked to find a story that the Cosmos had signed a new goalkeeper, the Canadian international Jack Brand. It was time for Messing to move on again.
Five days later, Messing signed a contract with the Oakland Stompers, a new franchise playing at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium in Oakland, California. In his autobiography, The Education of an American Soccer Player, Messing revealed that the night before he put pen to paper on his new deal with Oakland, he composed a statement to read to the media and the Cosmos fans. Sadly, he never got to read it:
I love being an American, and I love playing soccer. Until recently, the two didn’t fit together very well. But things have changed. Playing with the Cosmos, I had the privilege to see new standards set in the NASL. Playing with the Cosmos, I had the privilege to know Pelé and Beckenbauer and Chinaglia and Alberto. All of it has been a great education and a great experience. Something new, special and still fragile is being born, and though some people may inadvertently stunt its growth, I’m confident American soccer will grow and flourish.
The new-look Cosmos began the new season as it finished the previous one, humiliating Fort Lauderdale yet again. This time, thanks to hat tricks from Giorgio Chinaglia and Steve Hunt, it scored seven without reply. You had to feel for Gordon Banks. In the last three meetings between the teams, he had allowed eighteen goals.
While its form was dazzling, what was noticeable about the Pelé-less Cosmos was that it was now playing with the kind of freedom that had only really surfaced in the last few months of the Brazilian’s time with the team. It was as if the weight of responsibility that came with pleasing Pelé had gone. Now, the members of the team could play their natural games, even if that just meant funneling the ball to Chinaglia and watching him stick it in the back of the net. ‘I was very demanding,’ says Chinaglia. ‘You had to give me the ball. . . I would be really pissed off if you didn’t give me the ball. If there was a game [and] I didn’t score a goal I would really be upset.’
Some things, however, never changed and even without his partner in crime, Shep Messing, to goad him, Bobby Smith was still getting into trouble. During the Cosmos’s 1–0 win at Los Angeles, Smith responded to taunts from the home fans by issuing what the Washington Post later described as an ‘obscene gesture’. Ordinarily, his misdemeanor would have gone unnoticed, but on this occasion the game was shown on cable TV in New York and his offending finger had not been edited out of the program. It was seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers, one of whom just happened to be NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam.
Guilty as charged, Smith was first fined by the Cosmos and then suspended by the league for ten days for ‘conduct unbecoming an NASL player’. Eddie Firmani wasn’t happy, blaming the television company for Smith’s ban. ‘This could have been avoided if the television people did their job,’ he suggested. ‘After all, who do they work for? They should be loyal to the Cosmos.’
By the end of April, the Cosmos had won all of its five games, scoring seventeen goals and conceding just three. It had been an extraordinary signal of intent and if anyone had thought the absence of Pelé from the Cosmos line up would open the door for the other teams in the NASL, they were off the mark. If anything, the Cosmos was now a much tougher proposition.
After a 5–2 trouncing on its own field, the new Tampa coach Gordon Jago put the transformation down to the talents of Bogicevic, suggesting that the Yugoslav’s left foot could ‘unbutton your shirt’. As the season went on and his influence really began to tell, however, it became clear that not only could Bogie’s left foot remove your shirt, but it could probably put your pajamas on and tuck you into bed as well.
Bogicevic was, indeed, a revelation. He was imaginative, inventive and spontaneous, and capable of transforming a game in a single moment of brilliance. Ahmet Ertegun had been alerted to Bogicevic’s availability, not merely because his time at Red Star Belgrade was coming to an end, but because ‘he was not asking for too much money’. In his time at the club, Clive Toye maintains that after Pelé and Beckenbauer not a single player was earning more than $60,000 and the Cosmos’s annual payroll was just $800,000. ‘From 1978, it was a different story, of course,’ he says.
That said, there was still a decent living to be had from playing pro-soccer. For players like the Canadian defender Bob Iarusci, signed by the club after winning the Soccer Bowl with Toronto in 1976, the opportunity to play for the NASL’s flagship was too good to pass up. ‘They offered me $35,000 a year, an apartment and a car,’ he recalls. ‘And, of course, I couldn’t say no to the opportunity to play with Pelé, Beckenbauer and Chinaglia.’
Ever-present in his debut season, Iarusci had been a candidate for the Rookie of the Year but Toronto was in debt to the Cosmos and something had to give. ‘Because Pelé would go to each city and the games would sell out, the Cosmos had an agreement with the league that it would get a percentage of the gate,’ he explains. The Toronto team owed the Cosmos something like $110,000 so the Cosmos said we’ll forfeit that and take Iarusci.’
But while Iarusci was more than satisfied with his deal, Bogicevic was less than happy with his benefits package. ‘He didn’t like the automobile which we provided him with, he wasn’t happy with the apartment, he wasn’t happy with the television set,’ laughs Ertegun.
Sensing a problem player in the making, Ertegun discussed the matter with Steve Ross. ‘I said, “You know, Bogicevic is a fabulous player and he’s doing the team a tremendous service just by being there, but he’s going to be a lot of trouble because he’s not happy with anything and anything we do is not enough.’”
With a reassuring arm around his colleague, Ross instructed Ertegun that he would deal with the situation personally. That evening, after a 70,000-plus crowd had turned up at Giants Stadium for ‘Franz Beckenbauer Day’ (in commemoration of the German’s first year at the club) and the game against Seattle, Ross made his way down to the locker room in search of Bogicevic, who had not only scored but almost single-handedly engineered a 5–1 victory. Ahmet Ertegun takes up the story. ‘Steve Ross goes in and says, “Bogie, what can I tell you. You were just sensational today. It was like poetry in motion. You are such a great player and it’s so wonderful to have you on the team and, you know, you are such a terrific sportsman”, and whatever. So Bogicevic is listening to what he was saying, without saying a word. And then he turns to me and he says, “Look, I played six years for Red Star and I scored more goals than anybody, even though I play midfield. I played five times in the European Cup and scored more goals than any Yugoslav player. I beat Liverpool by myself. I beat the Liverpool team alone, by myself. I beat Inter Milan by myself. I beat Benfica by myself. And now I come to New York and because Mr. Chairman, he like the way I play, I suddenly become a good player.’”
With Bogie’s outburst at an end, Ross turned to Ertegun. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said.
It would be mid-May before the Cosmos suffered its first loss of the season, a 2–1 shoot-out defeat at the Portland Timbers. Yet the club was in good health and Steve Ross’s predictions that it would soon be making money no longer seemed so fanciful. With an average crowd at Giants Stadium of over 45,000—they drew 71,219 for the game against Seattle—it seemed as though the public, in New York City at least, had been won over.
Certainly, the atmosphere at the matches was as good, if not better, than ever, thanks not to some little-known actor dressed as a giant rabbit, but to some undeniably attractive soccer and the all-singing, all-dancing Cosmos Girls. Debra Benitez and Holly Kelley were two of the thirty-six-strong troupe charged with entertaining the crowd. ‘We were Cosmos Girls,’ insists Benitez. ‘We weren’t Cosmos cheerleaders.’
Like the players on the field, the cheerleading team had also undergone a transformation. As the name and fame of the Cosmos spread, they had been inundated with requests from wannabe Cosmos Girls. A rigorous audition program was implemented, rehearsals took place three or four times a week and the girls now had to perform their kick-line choreography before, during and after the game, instead of just rustling their pom-poms for ten minutes prior to kickoff.
Stealing their kaleidoscope style from the famous Rockettes, and backed by music prepared by Debra’s brother, the music producer John ‘Jelly Bean’ Benitez, the group took to the field in their pristine white uniforms to entertain the crowd at Giants Stadium:
‘C.O.S.M.O.S.—COSMOS ARE THE VERY BEST’ (cue enthusiastic pom-pom rustling)
In time, the sterling work of the Cosmos Girls would gain wider recognition, and they would be selected for duty against international teams too. It would be their first experience of foreign soccer fans. The intensity was so great, the crowds were so loud, [and] there was always fights breaking out,’ explains Holly Kelley, who now runs her own hairdressing salon. ‘It was very, very intense . . . we would just sit there and we’d always be looking and [saying] “What’s going on now?” because they were so passionate about their soccer [they would always say] “Move your pom-poms out of the way, we can’t see the players!’”
Two players who were worth the entrance fee alone were Giorgio Chinaglia and Vladislav Bogicevic. Over the course of the season, the two had forged a prolific understanding and while the Italian took the plaudits for finding the net, it was Bogie that topped the assists statistics, unlocking defenses with vision and an instinctive ability to deliver the killer pass, usually to the feet of Chinaglia. ‘They had this almost mental telepathy,’ explains Bob Iarusci. ‘Giorgio would time his diagonal runs and time and time again Bogie would just slot the ball right into his path.’
Predictably, Bogicevic had his own take on their relationship. ‘If Giorgio is happy, I am happy,’ he said. ‘If Giorgio is unhappy, I am unhappy. If Giorgio is very unhappy, I am gone.’
While the comment was meant by way of an explanation of their budding playing rapport, it also spoke volumes of the esteem, or even fear, in which Chinaglia was held at the club. When Pelé was around, there had always existed some checks on just how much Chinaglia could get away with but with Pelé gone Chinaglia, now an American citizen, had assumed the reins. Indeed, the Italian would often speak of the ‘vision’ he had for the Cosmos, a vision that did not include Pelé. In the Italian’s mind he was the only person capable of making that dream a reality and if that meant offending a few people in the process then so be it. ‘The great thing about Giorgio is he had no filters so he said whatever was on his mind no matter how politically incorrect,’ says David Hirshey. ‘I remember when he first came here and I interviewed him he said that Pelé was unfit and that he would have to carry him until he got in shape. So the Latin fans hated him for that. Then he said, later, that the Cosmos should buy more American players rather than Franz Beckenbauer, and the German fans hated him for that.’
Since leaving Italy, Chinaglia had immersed himself in his pursuit of the American dream. A wheeler-dealer without compare, he had quickly assembled his own business empire away from the internecine maneuvering at the Cosmos. With Peppe Pinton doing his bidding, he had made a name for himself in the property development business and owned ten apartments across Manhattan. He had established his own Soccer Academy summer camp for local kids and, like other high-profile players, he enjoyed a clutch of money-spinning endorsements, from companies including Pony, Spalding and Chevrolet. He also had a Ferrari and a 1969 Corvette but chose to drive his sponsored Toyota.
Without doubt, Chinaglia had found a spiritual home in the land of opportunity. ‘This is, I think, the only country in the world that permits you to choose what you want to do with your life,’ he says. ‘And it’s the only country in the world where you can go broke three or four times and you can still make it again. The only country in the world where you decide your future—you want to work, you work; you don’t want to work, you don’t work, you starve.’
Peppe Pinton wasn’t the only one trying to please Giorgio Chinaglia. The team’s car supplier, Joe Manfredi, was also charged with helping the Italian. During a game against Toronto, Chinaglia, disappointed that his touch in front of goal had briefly deserted him, sprinted over to Manfredi, pointing to the necklace he was wearing. ‘I said, “What do you need Giorgio?” He said, “You see that thing you have on your neck?”
Around Manfredi’s neck was a good-luck charm in the shape of a small horn and Chinaglia wanted it. Ever compliant, Manfredi took it off and wiped it on Chinaglia’s right boot. Seconds later, the ball found Chinaglia in the penalty area and, sure enough, he slotted one home with his right foot. ‘All of a sudden he’s shouting, going like this to me, “Hey Joe!”’
Having been in the coach’s seat for a little under a year, Eddie Firmani had taken the Cosmos to an entirely new level. Despite the loss of Pelé, his team had flourished and by the time they arrived in Memphis for the game against the Rogues the champions were in such imperious form that the only question remaining was which team would be lining up against them in the Soccer Bowl come August 27.
The game at the Liberty Bowl, however, would be a turning point, not for the fortunes of the team, but for the future of their coach. With twenty minutes to go and, unusually, a goal down, Eddie Firmani decided to make a change. Concerned that his team had resorted to lifting high balls into the opposition’s penalty area rather than playing to Giorgio Chinaglia’s strengths, the coach instructed his American international striker Fred Grgurev, a player much more suited to the aerial game, to warm up. Then, just as Gordon Bradley sealed his fate by dropping Chinaglia for the LA Aztecs game in 1977, Firmani called in his number nine. As Chinaglia trudged off the field, his face a picture of rage, he stared intently at Firmani. As he made his way to the tunnel, he pointed at his coach and muttered, ‘You’ve had it!’ He then headed straight to the locker room to call Steve Ross.
In Mario Risoli’s biography of Chinaglia, Arrivederci Swansea, Eddie Firmani reveals that the Italian’s reaction to his decision that day soured an otherwise excellent relationship. ‘What Giorgio did surprised me. It put a strain between both of us and I didn’t bother with him after that… he should have asked me why I made the change. I would have talked with him and told him the reason why. But that’s not the way he worked. Instead of being a man and coming to talk it over with me he behaved like a kid. Maybe I should have sat down with him and ironed it out but he wasn’t that type. He was hard-headed.’
Eddie Firmani would use another substitute that day against Memphis. His name was Rick Davis and at just nineteen years old, he had already established himself in the U.S. national team, scoring after just six minutes of his debut against El Salvador. Having been plucked from his junior year at Santa Clara University, Davis had signed for the Cosmos at the tail end of the 1977 season and now the Denver-born midfielder, along with Gary Etherington, was benefiting from the NASL rule of each team having to play at least two North Americans (a definition that also included Canadians, naturalized citizens and resident alien green-card holders).
Although his appearances would be limited to a handful of run outs as sub, he was already being billed as one of the brightest hopes for American soccer. ‘The first time I walked into the locker room,’ he remembers, ‘there were nameplates on top of all the lockers. When I saw “Davis” next to so many other well-known names like Beckenbauer and Chinaglia, it was an incredible feeling.’
The long-awaited arrival of a good-looking, all-American golden boy in the locker room was also a novelty for the Cosmos Girls. ‘It was like “Oh wow! You speak English!’” says Debra Benitez.
By the second week in July, the Cosmos had become an unstoppable force in the NASL, crushing anything that crossed its path with verve, flair and no small measure of arrogance. After twenty-two games, it had won eighteen, scoring an astonishing sixty-seven goals in the process. Up front, Giorgio Chinaglia still seemed capable of scoring whenever the urge took him while all of the new recruits, especially Bogicevic and Tueart, proved to be inspired signings.
But this was no time for resting on laurels and, like an art dealer trying to complete his collection, Steve Ross signed off on a plan to try and land the last remaining legend in the modern game—Johan Cruyff. ‘I said to Steve Ross that he had to hire Johan [because] he’s the best player you can ever see,’ recalls Franz Beckenbauer.
As the star of the Ajax team that had given the world the concept of ‘total football’, Cruyff had become the greatest player the Netherlands had ever produced. Three times he had been voted the European Player of the Year (1971, 1973 and 1974) and he had won the European Cup three times with Ajax. He had also led the Netherlands to second place in the 1974 World Cup, losing out to Franz Beckenbauer’s West Germany in the final. Undoubtedly, his total of forty-eight games for the Netherlands (thirty-three goals) would have been more, but for disputes with the Dutch Football Association and his refusal to play in the 1978 World Cup, which he attributed to the unstable political situation in the host country, Argentina.
There had been talk of the Dutchman joining the Cosmos even when Pelé was still playing for the team, but now, as Cruyff contemplated his future after a successful spell with Barcelona, he agreed to visit New York to discuss the idea of a move. This time, however, the American press was calling it ‘a negotiating breakthrough’.
That Cruyff was prepared to negotiate at all was largely down to Rafael de la Sierra’s persistence. The Warner vice president had flown to Spain to meet with Cruyff and moot the idea of a move Stateside. With Pelé’s legacy and the presence of one of his old adversaries, Franz Beckenbauer, on the team, de la Sierra was now in a position where no real sales pitch was needed. But like Pelé before him, de la Sierra found a player immersed in all manner of commercial ventures. ‘He owned like five different businesses in Barcelona. He had an art gallery, he had a transport business, an export-import business,’ recalls de la Sierra. ‘He had 5,000 pigs in a farm and part of the deal that we had was to buy that for him to be able to go with us so I had to go to the pig farm with an accountant to count the 5,000 pigs they had there. He also had a rabbit farm and we had to go to see how those rabbits reproduce.’
With their target apparently convinced of the Cosmos’s intentions, the two parties agreed to meet again at the end of the 1978 NASL season and, as a sign of his willingness to strike a deal, Cruyff agreed to play in a three-game exhibition series at the end of the season.
After his decision to replace Chinaglia earlier in the season, Eddie Firmani was now having trouble keeping certain members of his squad in check. Many players, realizing that the position of Cosmos coach was a transitory one, sided with Chinaglia. On away trips, the eleven o’clock curfew imposed by the management was often disregarded. Instead, those players intent on enjoying a night out would just stay in their rooms until 11:30 p.m. Then, as soon as the coach had switched out the lights, they would change into their best clothes and sneak out, safe in the knowledge that the management was tucked up in bed and they were out with Giorgio Chinaglia.
What’s more, Chinaglia would always promise to pick up the tab for any fines incurred for breaking curfew. ‘You know,’ laughs Bobby Smith, ‘Eddie [Firmani] would try and put a curfew and Bogie was going, “I smoke, I drink, I dance all night long. There is no curfew” . . . and I’d say, “I’m hanging with Chinaglia”, because I knew, if he had that much power I’m hanging with him because if we get busted, he ain’t gonna get benched. So I’m gonna be OK by coming in late with Chinaglia. I’m hanging with Chinaglia, you know.’
Phil Mushnick, Cosmos correspondent for the New York Post, agrees. ‘If you got stuck next to Bobby Smith in a hotel you weren’t going to sleep that night,’ he remembers.
But if the players thought they were pulling the wool over the eyes of their bosses, they were wrong. Everyone, from Firmani to Steve Marshall, knew only too well what the more sociable players of the squad were up to, but as long as they were winning and Steve Ross was happy, they were afforded a little leeway. ‘We did have a few characters who liked cocktails,’ says Steve Marshall. ‘These guys were getting paid big money and they liked their drink.’
The other problem facing those players intent on enjoying some extracurricular action was an ever-increasing traveling press corps trailing in their wake. While the larger media organizations refused the Cosmos’s standing offer of all-expenses-paid trips in the interests of objectivity and independence, there was no shortage of reporters on smaller publications only too willing to surrender their journalistic integrity in return for a party with the players of the nation’s most engaging sports team.
The thinking behind the Cosmos’s generosity to apparently insignificant newspapers made sense. While any coverage the team could get in the established New York dailies was valuable, it was imperative to get the team into the local newspapers in New York and New Jersey. ‘We needed the German daily language paper, we needed El Diario [the daily Spanish language paper in New York] to travel with us just like the big papers,’ adds Marshall.
When the Cosmos finished the regular season, not only was it the runaway winners of the Eastern Division of the National Conference, but it had registered an all-time record points total (two hundred and twelve) and number of goals scored (eighty-eight). After a comfortable win over Seattle in the first play-off game, the Cosmos had to face the Minnesota Kicks in the next phase.
Nobody, however, could have predicted the outcome. Led by their gifted English striker Alan Willey, the Kicks took the game to the Cosmos and, for once, the New Yorkers were powerless to hold them back. At the final whistle, Willey had scored five in an improbable 9–2 win. ‘We’ve been threatening to score a bunch against somebody, but I didn’t think it would be against the Cosmos,’ said Willey in the post-game press conference. ‘It feels good, especially against the Cosmos, because they’re the team to beat.’
Fortunately, the nature of the play-off system favored the Cosmos. Had the tie been decided on goal difference, as virtually every other home and away series in world soccer was, the Cosmos would, barring a miracle, have been out of the running and that supremacy all season long would have amounted to nothing. As it was, all the Cosmos had to do was win the following game at Giants Stadium the next Wednesday to take the game to a minigame decider. Win that and they were back on course. Understandably, the system soon came under fire from all quarters. All quarters that is, apart from the players, fans and officials of the New York Cosmos.
As the Cosmos prepared for the return game, conscious that nothing but a victory would suffice, it received another unscheduled visit from Steve Ross. Gathering the squad together, he explained that he had been in the crowd at Minnesota along with scores of his Warner executives and had felt genuinely embarrassed by the mauling the Cosmos had received. ‘Then he said, “I don’t like to feel embarrassed,’” recalls Dennis Tueart. ‘[He said] “We are the best, we pay the best for the best, we want the best performances, if you don’t want to be part of that see the coach and you can go now …” it was a fantastic, motivational speech.’
Buoyed or frightened by Ross’s intervention (and by the fact that Minnesota’s Alan Willey had publicly stated that ‘there is no way we can get beat’), the Cosmos roared back with a vengeance in the return game. Chinaglia and Tueart ran the Kicks ragged, sharing the goals in a resounding 4–0 win and taking the tie to the minigame decider. When that game ended all-square, the match went down to a shoot-out but, predictably, the Cosmos, with lady luck riding on its coattails, won.
Although the records show that Franz Beckenbauer scored the winning goal in that shoot-out, it was Carlos Alberto’s audacious effort that not only kept the Cosmos in the game but revealed the true talent of the man. Whereas most players in the shoot-out dribble the ball towards the goalkeeper and wait for him to commit himself to a save or a tackle, Alberto simply waited for the referee’s whistle and then scooped the ball up into the air. As it bounced ahead of him, the Minnesota keeper Tino Lettieri advanced off his line, but was clearly confused by Alberto’s intentions. With the keeper stranded outside his area, Alberto then calmly lobbed it up and over Lettieri’s head and into the empty net. ‘It was amazing what he did,’ says Bob Iarusci, one of his teammates that night. ‘He was the first to ever try that and he had to score to keep us in the shoot-out … He was very, very special.’
The shock to the system that the Minnesota tie provided was a stark reminder of the perilous position the Cosmos was in. After a season where they had finally established themselves as the dominant team in the NASL (and gone some way to justifying Warner’s $1 million annual investment) anything less than a repeat of their Soccer Bowl success of 1977 would be deemed a failure. Moreover, the Minnesota game had also served to remind the Cosmos players just how far they had come. Two or three years ago, they would have been elated to squeeze through to the next round of the play-offs, but now the victory met not with jubilation but a tangible sense of relief. They were becoming a proper soccer team.
The remainder of the play-offs would follow the script. Following a comfortable win over Portland in the National Conference final, the Cosmos progressed to the Soccer Bowl and a game against the Tampa Bay Rowdies at its own Giants Stadium. It was the overwhelming favorite, not least because just two hours before the kickoff Tampa’s captain and star striker, Rodney Marsh, pulled out of the season showpiece. The Englishman had gashed his shin in the Rowdies’ American conference win over Fort Lauderdale and it had become infected in the days leading up to the game. It was another lucky break for the Cosmos, particularly because Marsh was one of those players who made a habit of giving the Cosmos defense a hard time.
The match itself would be a nonevent. Without Marsh, the Rowdies relied heavily on their defense in a desperate rearguard action aimed at keeping the Cosmos at bay. By half-time, and with nearly 75,000 fans urging them on, the Cosmos were up by two goals, courtesy of Tueart and Chinaglia, and while the Brazilian Sebastião Mirandinha da Silva would pull a goal back for the Rowdies, it was left to Dennis Tueart to kill the game off with his second goal near the end. The Cosmos, without Pelé, had become the first repeat champions in NASL history.
After the game, the Rowdies coach Gordon Jago paid tribute to the Cosmos. They have so much firepower. You stop Hunt and Chinaglia’s waiting. Stop him, there’s Tueart. I think they’ve shown all season that they are a truly superior team.’
Six years earlier, Werner Roth had helped the Cosmos to its first NASL title when it had beaten St. Louis in front of just 6,102 fans at Hofstra Stadium. That same night, he had celebrated by going out with his teammates and having ‘a couple of beers’. Now, after winning in front of a crowd over ten times the size of that in 1972, he said, ‘I think I might party until morning.’
For Giorgio Chinaglia, it was a vindication of all the changes he had set in place and confirmed that his vision for the Cosmos was the right one. That he had played a huge part in the success was irrefutable. Ever-present on the team, he had benefited most from the ingenuity of Bogicevic and had demolished the league record thirty-four goals in just thirty games. He had also weighed in with eleven assists.
Strangely, Chinaglia would not be named as the season’s Most Valuable Player. Instead, New England’s British striker Mike Flanagan took the award, despite registering four goals and three assists fewer than the Italian. Chinaglia’s reputation, it seemed, had preceded him. ‘Of all the strikers I saw in the NASL,’ says NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam, ‘Chinaglia was head and shoulders above them all. Give him the ball in the penalty area and nine times out often he’d score. What-ever anybody thought of him there was no denying that he was an incredible player.’
Not that Chinaglia was unduly concerned. As he fielded questions in the locker room, he was asked what was left for the Cosmos to achieve. ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged, drawing on his traditional postgame cigarette. Today, we did what we had to, no more. I guess all that’s left now is to be the best in the world. We’re certainly number one in this league.’
Their preeminence asserted, the Cosmos decided to strengthen its squad further. In late August, Johan Cruyff arrived from Spain to take part in a three-game exhibition series at Giants Stadium. While the object of the All-Star series was to raise money for UNICEF and the Spanish Red Cross, the games were seen as an audition of Cruyff at what would be his new home.
After the series ended, it was widely assumed that the thirty-one-year-old would sign full time for the Cosmos, but the deal never happened. Wary of criticism that the Cosmos was not only spending its way to success but in danger of making the NASL a pointless procession, the club backtracked on the move to sign Cruyff and the Dutchman eventually opted to join his former coach, Rinus Michels, at the Los Angeles Aztecs. Rafael de la Sierra, however, remembers it differently. ‘We brought him [Cruyff] to New York and then we gave him to Los Angeles to create more competition in the league,’ he admits.
While the Cosmos had earned the grudging respect of even their most hardened critics in the NASL, a better test of just how able a team it was would only come when it embarked on a month-long postseason tour to Europe, with games scheduled in West Germany, England, Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey. In all there would be nine games in just twenty-eight days, a grueling schedule, especially at the end of a long, albeit successful, season.
It was a tour that Eddie Firmani neither wanted nor needed. Having played over forty games already that season, his weary team had been contemplating a well-earned break and the prospect of playing the cream of European soccer at a time when their bodies and minds would patently rather not didn’t augur well.
Needless to say, the trip had not been devised by the playing or coaching staff. As part of Warner’s relentless drive to publicize the team (and their company), each week without a Cosmos game was a missed opportunity, and the idea that the season started at the beginning of April and finished at the end of August was anathema to Steve Ross.
A month later, the Cosmos returned home with some humiliating results to mull over. While it had beaten Athletico Madrid and tied Chelsea, it had also lost 7–1 to Franz Beckenbauer’s old team Bayern Munich, 6–1 to Stuttgart, and even succumbed to little-known German club Freiburg. Winning the NASL was one thing, but, for the meantime, world domination would have to wait.