Steve Ross married again in October 1982. Despite the unseemly manner in which he had left Courtney Sale for Amanda Burden, Ross had remained close to his former girlfriend and in a lavish reception at the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel the thirty-five-year-old Sale would become the third Mrs. Ross. Over three hundred guests attended the day, including Cary Grant, Steven Spielberg and Frank Sinatra. The music was arranged by Quincy Jones.
The ceremony over, Ross and his bride headed off to Italy on honeymoon. When he returned to Manhattan three weeks later, the Warner chairman walked headlong into the biggest crisis of his career. Atari, for so long the family member that had cosseted WCI, had hit trouble. ‘E.T.’ the game looked and played as though it had been knocked up in a few weeks (which, of course, it had) and of the four million copies that Atari shipped, some 3.5 million were returned. The problem, as Raymond Kassar later reflected, was that E.T. ‘was a lovely, sweet movie, and kids like to kill things’.
The miserable failure of ‘E.T.’ followed several other setbacks for Atari. Not only had the home version of Tac-Man’ been uninspiring, but their long-awaited new console, the 5200, had all manner of problems, primarily because existing Atari 2600 cartridges were incompatible with the new machine. There was also increased competition from companies like Coleco, whose ColecoVision boasted the most impressive sound and graphics of any home console to date.
For a company grown used to almost printing its own money, the costly errors had now mounted up to such an alarming extent that Atari was forced to revise its projections for the fourth quarter of 1982. First, on November 17, they were cut by $81 million, then, on December 7, by an additional $53 million. The following day WCI issued a statement announcing that its profits for 1982 would be significantly lower than the 50 percent rise they had anticipated, blaming the fall on its consumer electronics division: Atari.
Overnight, the value of Atari and Warner stock plummeted, as nervous shareholders bailed out. It seemed, though, that Steve Ross had foreseen some kind of crash. From late August through to early November, he had sold 479,000 shares in the company for more than $21 million. He was sitting pretty.
If anyone could save Atari, it certainly wasn’t Giorgio Chinaglia. But as the computer firm reeled from crisis to crisis—it would soon be losing more than $1 million a day—the Cosmos’s skipper was dispatched to Europe to promote the computer company. While the idea that a burly Italian with a short fuse could bully people into buying Atari might have seemed like a good idea, Chinaglia lacked the basic salesman skills. ‘It didn’t work,’ he concludes.
During the Italian leg of his trip, Chinaglia paid a visit to his old club, Lazio, and took the opportunity to train with the team, much to the delight of the 10,000 fans who had heard of the prodigal son’s return. While he was there, the club president, Gian Casoni, broached the idea of Chinaglia returning to the Stadio Olimpico as Lazio’s chief executive. He even offered him a six-year contract worth $300,000 a year. Intrigued, Chinaglia returned to the States and promised to think about it.
Back in the U.S.A., storms were ripping their way across the Midwest. Twenty-two people would die and over $600 million worth of damage would be caused by the freak weather conditions. Storm clouds were gathering over the NASL too. Having seen firsthand the gloomy manner in which the previous season had concluded, Howard Samuels was determined to impose himself in his first full season in charge of the NASL. He introduced a glut of new directives for the franchises designed to not only stimulate interest in the league but, more importantly, prevent any more clubs from folding. Consequently, roster sizes would be cut from a maximum of twenty-eight players to just nineteen and a salary cap was agreed to with the NASL Players’ Association. ‘Band-Aids for a hemorrhaging league,’ was soccer commentator Paul Gardner’s assessment of the changes.
Perhaps the most significant change enacted by Samuels, however, was his introduction of a new team in the NASL—Team America. While it sounded like some elite squad of super-heroes, Team America featured only American or naturalized American players and was actually the U.S. national soccer team in another guise. Under a deal worked out with the United States Soccer Federation, a maximum of three American players from each NASL side could join Team-America, provided they came through coach Alkis Panagoulias’s trials. Once the try-outs had taken place, the Cosmos would lose Jeff Durgan (who would be named as captain), Chico Borja and, after Rick Davis had opted to stay at Giants Stadium, Boris Bandov to the Washington-based franchise. The compensation to the Cosmos for taking three of its best players would be just $50,000 per man.
The rationale behind Team America joining the NASL was that by giving the United States national side a chance of playing better-quality opposition on a more regular basis, not only would the team itself fare better in international competition but it would significantly increase the chance of that elusive ail-American soccer superstar finally emerging.
The strength of the U.S. national team was also of primary importance as the USSF had made a last-minute bid to stage the 1986 World Cup Finals. Having initially awarded the tournament to Colombia, FIFA had found itself without a host when the event was expanded from sixteen to twenty-four teams, and the South Americans decided they could no longer accommodate the tournament.
Colombia’s withdrawal (and Brazil’s subsequent refusal to stage the competition on economic grounds) left just three countries in the running for the quadrennial event—Mexico, Canada and the United States. In a 92-page presentation to FIFA, the USSF projected gate receipts of $40 million for the month-long tournament and crowds for the first round of matches between 35,000 and 50,000. It boasted about record numbers of American youngsters playing the game and the fillip that hosting such a prestigious event would give the game in the U.S. Not surprisingly, it failed to mention multimillion dollar losses, folding franchises and falling crowds in the NASL.
If anything could breathe life into the NASL, it was the World Cup finals. With it, there was a chance that America would finally take to its heart what the rest of the planet knew to be the greatest game of all. Certainly, a future without it didn’t bear thinking about. The USSF president, Gene Edwards, was confident they could host the world’s biggest soccer tournament, declaring the States to be a ‘big events country’, and adding, There is no greater sports stage on earth.’
Back at Giants Stadium, Professor Julio Mazzei had finally been offered the full-time coach’s job, a position he readily accepted. It was the least the man described by Nesuhi Ertegun as ‘an actor, a comedian, [and] a philosopher’ deserved. However, with attendances falling and public interest waning, Mazzei was forced to assemble a squad with neither the choice nor the financial backing that previous Cosmos coaches had enjoyed.
Despite the imposition of reduced roster sizes and the loss of three more of his most important players, the crucial advantage that Mazzei held over previous incumbents was that his affable personality and unabashed passion for the game far outweighed any doubts the Cosmos board may have had over his lack of professional qualifications and his ability to work within increasingly stringent boundaries. When Mazzei asked the Cosmos board for the backing to buy three new players, for example, his request was denied. The board,’ he reflected, ‘had other priorities.’
While the club had tried to look for a coach of international renown, Mazzei’s relationship with his players and the esteem in which he was held gave him an edge in his bid to fill the coach’s position. The fact that Mazzei had won the Soccer Bowl seemed to be the clinching factor. ‘The Professor has done a great job,’ said general manager Tom Werblin. ‘He is a Brazilian, but he is a New Yorker as much as you and I.’
Unlike Hennes Weisweiler before him, Mazzei had thrown himself into American life with gusto and, like his friend Pelé, considered it a personal crusade to take the game of soccer not merely to the average American but to the world more generally. ‘I gave a clinic in Guadalajara, Mexico, for 45,000 people, maybe the biggest clinic in history,’ he once said. ‘I love to spread this game.’
As a youngster in Brazil, Mazzei had been a promising soccer player but a cheekbone injury had curtailed his career. With football no longer a possibility, he had instead turned to academia, earning a degree from the University of Sao Paulo before going on to conduct postgraduate work at Michigan State and the University of Paris. In 1962, he had returned to Brazil to teach physical education where he then became affiliated to the Palmeiras club in Sao Paulo. Soon after, he moved to Santos, where he would befriend Pelé and the two would embark on their missionary campaign to convince soccer-less nations about what they were missing.
Mazzei’s ceaseless enthusiasm was one of the principal reasons (after money, obviously) why Carlos Alberto had decided to return to New York and why Giorgio Chinaglia would decline Lazio’s offer of the job of chief executive for one more crack at the NASL.
Indeed, with Mazzei at the helm, it didn’t take much persuasion to lure one other old boy back to the Big Apple. Having signed a five-year promotional contract with Warner, Franz Beckenbauer had ended his stint with SV Hamburg in the German Bundesliga in the summer of 1982, but even at his farewell game the Cosmos goalkeeper Hubert Birkenmeier was there to badger him about a return to the NASL. Eventually, after further gentle coercion and a successful post-season tour to the Far East with the club, The Kaiser, now thirty-seven, gave in and signed on for another season with the Cosmos.
Any sense that the good times were returning to the Cosmos and to the NASL was soon quashed, though, by the news that the USSF had failed in their bid to bring the 1986 World Cup Finals to the United States. Despite some last-gasp intervention by their World Cup Organizing Committee chairman, Henry Kissinger (who had enlisted none other than President Ronald Reagan as the honorary chairman of the American delegation), the USSF’s impressive presentation featuring Pelé and Beckenbauer counted for nothing at FIFA’s meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. Instead, it would be a hastily assembled ten-page document from the Mexican Football Association that helped win them a unanimous decision from FIFA’s twenty-one-member executive committee. Canada, said FIFA, lacked the requisite number of stadiums for the event while the United States government had not provided sufficient logistical guarantees. The fact that the International Olympic Committee was more than happy to host the following year’s Olympic Games in Los Angeles mattered little, it seemed.
Both the USSF and their Canadian counterparts had suspected that their efforts would be in vain when FIFA didn’t even bother to send inspecting delegations to visit as they did in Mexico.
After the decision, Henry Kissinger described his first attempt at soccer diplomacy as ‘dismally unsuccessful’, and later questioned the fairness of FIFA’s decision. ‘The politics of soccer,’ he sighed, ‘make me nostalgic for the politics of the Middle East.’
Nostalgia was also at the heart of Giorgio Chinaglia’s decision to look to Rome for a new diversion. When he was just twenty-three years old and making a name for himself at Lazio, Chinaglia had barged into the president’s office with a cheque in his hand, demanding to invest in the club and be made a vice president. Although he was denied on that occasion, Chinaglia had never given up the idea of one day becoming the owner of a club, and having rejected the offer of a job earlier in the year, the Cosmos captain’s long-distance love affair with Lazio had finally become too much to resist.
In May, he was approached by a consortium of five Italian-American businessmen, based in New Jersey, and asked whether he would front a bid to acquire the Rome club. Mysteriously, neither Chinaglia nor his manager, Peppe Pinton, revealed the identities of the businessmen concerned. All they would say is that they were involved in real estate and travel.
Within three weeks of the story breaking, Giorgio Chinaglia would be installed as the new president and part owner of the only other soccer club in his life. When asked whether he could combine playing for the Cosmos and helping to run Lazio, Chinaglia, the man who would be voted Lazio’s ‘Player of the Century’, merely shrugged and said, ‘Why not? The Cosmos play in the summer and Lazio in the winter.’
Today, both Chinaglia and his erstwhile manager claim credit for closing the deal to purchase Lazio. ‘I negotiated successfully the acquisition of Lazio, on my own with several investors, and I sort of handed that over to Giorgio Chinaglia, to his surprise,’ claims Pinton. ‘He asked me, “How did you do it?” and I said “Just get on the podium and we’ll announce you as the president of Lazio.’”
Not quite, says Chinaglia. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Mr. Pinton must be a multibillionaire.’
Despite widespread concern that his move into ownership would adversely affect his form for the Cosmos, Chinaglia took the long-haul commuting in stride. In June, for example, he played in an exhibition game against SV Hamburg just hours after stepping off a plane from Rome. Typically, he scored twice in a 7–2 rout of the reigning European Champions. He would also play a significant part in the Cosmos regaining its Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup, scoring three times in games against Fiorentina of Italy, Sao Paulo of Brazil and the NASL’s Seattle Sounders.
What would affect his form, however, was the first serious injury of his illustrious career. During a game against the new Team America franchise, Chinaglia pulled his left hamstring so severely that he would be out of action for nearly two months. While not the kind of problem to end a playing career, it would nevertheless be serious enough to end Chinaglia’s incredible run of 222 consecutive games for the Cosmos. Moreover, it was the first real sign that although Chinaglia could still talk the talk better than anyone else in the game, he was becoming increasingly incapable of walking the walk.
The game against Team America, however, would have greater significance than Chinaglia’s injury worries. The previous day, the former Cosmos coach Hennes Weisweiler had suffered a heart attack at his home near Zurich, Switzerland and died. He was sixty-three. Before the match, the players held a minute’s silence for the West German and then wore black armbands throughout the game at Giants Stadium.
Phil Woosnam should have seen it coming. A little over a year since the appointment of Howard Samuels as president and CEO of the NASL, Woosnam’s job as commissioner was abolished. Under the restructuring, the Welshman would retain a position as a ‘special adviser’, but as most of the commissioner’s duties would now be passed on to Samuels himself, it was unclear exactly how much special advising Woosnam would ever be required to carry out. ‘I’m proud of what we did with the NASL,’ says Woosnam today. ‘To come as far we did in such a relatively short time was a real achievement, especially when you’re up against so many obstacles.’
Howard Samuels’s determination to drag the NASL out of its torpor was admirable but ultimately futile. In just three years, the league had halved in size and now, with only twelve franchises, two-thirds of the clubs would be guaranteed a place in the play-offs. It also meant that over the course of a season each team would now play each other up to four times. Consequently, the sense of occasion among supporters that accompanied the big game days of the late seventies had vanished amid a widespread feeling of apathy.
For example, the Cosmos’s opponents in the first round of the play-offs were the Montreal Manic. Despite finishing last in the Eastern Division some seventy points adrift of the Cosmos’s winning total and having lost each of their four meetings, they still sneaked into the play-offs by virtue of their better overall record than Tampa, Seattle, San Diego and the woeful Team America, who lost twenty of their thirty games and scored just thirty-three goals.
With everyone anticipating a mismatch, just 17,202 fans showed up for the first game of a best-of-three series at Giants Stadium. It didn’t happen. The Manic, courtesy of two goals from their Northern Irish midfielder, Brian Quinn, emerged from the game with a 4–2 victory. While surprising, the defeat still wasn’t expected to cost the Cosmos its place in the next round of the play-offs. But it would. In the second game, the Cosmos dominated proceedings in regulation time, but a combination of wasteful finishing by Giorgio Chinaglia and some exceptional goalkeeping by the Manic’s Ed Gettemejer saw the match end goalless.
Seven attempts into the subsequent shoot-out and with only Rick Davis and Julio César Romero finding the net for the Cosmos, Mazzei’s men were facing an embarrassing exit. It was left to the Manic’s Dragan Vujovic to settle the tie, and while the Yugoslav striker would score, the referee, Peter Johnson, initially disallowed the goal as the ball had crossed the line after the time limit of five seconds. As a relieved Cosmos squad gave thanks for their good fortune, though, Johnson consulted with one of his linesmen, who informed him that Vujovic’s goal was good.
The Cosmos had been knocked out in characteristically controversial circumstances. Just as Steve Ross had threatened to take his players off the field seven years earlier against the Tampa Bay Rowdies, now general manager Tom Werblin took it upon himself first to berate the match officials about their decision and then telephone the league president, Howard Samuels, and lodge an official complaint about Vujovic’s winning kick. Both acts of straw-clutching would come to nothing.
Whereas Pelé and Beckenbauer had departed the NASL as Soccer Bowl winners, Giorgio Chinaglia had been denied a final triumph. Instead, he left the NASL after an unsatisfactory defeat, a missed shoot-out attempt and with everyone around him complaining that the Cosmos had been cheated. For once, though, Chinaglia was unusually restrained on the subject, shrugging, ‘We must believe in destiny.’
For all his posturing, there could be no doubt that Giorgio Chinaglia’s goal-scoring record in the NASL was phenomenal. In his 213 regular season games he had plundered 193 goals, while in forty-three play-off games he had scored a further fifty. It remains a record that nobody in the modern professional game can claim. ‘I just wanted to score goals,’ Chinaglia says today nonchalantly. ‘I didn’t care who played beside me really, I never did, that’s why sometimes I wasn’t liked but I don’t care about that.’
His close friend and teammate of five years Bob Iarusci rates Chinaglia among the very best the game has seen. ‘I can honestly say that I can’t recall a time when he went more than two games without scoring a goal,’ he says. ‘And he scored against everybody. It’s one thing to score in league games [in the NASL] but another to go to Montevideo and score three against Nacional or go to Buenos Aires and score against Boca Juniors. I think he and Gerd Müller were the greatest I’ve ever seen … he was a machine.’
Life at Sunnyvale, meanwhile, was anything but sunny. As the summer of 1983 turned to autumn, Atari’s CEO, Raymond Kassar, was fired. Having been the darling of investors in 1981 and 1982, Atari had seen all the gains in their share price wiped out. Moreover, almost 2,000 Atari staff had either lost their jobs or had their positions redeployed overseas.
Concerned that there seemed to be no sign of a reversal in the fortunes of either his electronics division or the stock price of Warner, Steve Ross intervened and took personal charge of a management shake-up at Atari that saw Kassar replaced by James J. Morgan, formerly executive vice president of marketing at the tobacco company Philip Morris.
It was a frantic time for Ross. Not only was he doing his utmost to reignite Atari in an intensely competitive market but WCI was about to record a $418 million posttax loss after twelve straight profitable years. Indeed, Warner’s plight was such that it had now been targeted by the Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who had purchased 6.7 percent of the company with a view to a takeover bid. In time, a battle-scarred Ross would manage to hold Murdoch at bay but only by selling 20 percent of WCI to Chris-Craft Industries, a New York conglomerate headed by the billionaire investor Herb Siegel.
There was also the headache that was the Cosmos. After he had endured the twin trials of Atari and Westchester, Ross’s pet project had lost its lustre and dropped down his list of priorities. Unlike the golden days of 1977, by 1983 there were no celebrities at the Cosmos games. No pop stars or politicians, no actors or artists. As such, there was now very little PR capital to be gained from the matches, and given the perilous financial state of Warner, the Cosmos had become another debt they could patently do without.
As part of his plan to off-load noncore divisions of Warner (and in a bid to make the club a more attractive proposition for potential buyers), Ross once more turned to Rafael de la Sierra to help turn the Cosmos around. As the team’s executive vice president, the Cuban architect had played a fundamental role in the success of the Cosmos during the championship years of 1977 and 1978 but had resigned from the club to coordinate the many international branches of the Warner stable. Now Steve Ross brought him back as the new club chairman with a remit to give the Cosmos a much-needed face-lift.
The restructuring that followed—’back to basics’ was de la Sierra’s description—was as dramatic as it was swift. Out went the Erteguns, who stepped down from the board but retained honorary titles within the organization; a new, smaller board was appointed consisting of de la Sierra, Warner special consultant Robert Morgado, Warner senior vice president Alberto Cribiore, and the president of Atlantic records, Sheldon Vogel. Tom Werblin left his position as general manager to concentrate on marketing (nobody replaced him as general manager), while Giorgio Chinaglia’s agent, Peppe Pinton, who had worked closely with de la Sierra in setting up the successful Soccer Camps of America scheme, was given greater authority in the running of the club.
On the playing side, de la Sierra would also introduce severe salary restrictions for players and, significantly, Julio Mazzei would be jettisoned to make way for the return of the Cosmos’s most successful coach, Eddie Firmani. ‘I work for a company that doesn’t accept excuses,’ reflected Mazzei, who was given a consultancy role within the club.
As Rafael de la Sierra’s new broom swept through Giants Stadium, there was even a rumor that a certain forty-three-year-old Brazilian player was going to be making a return to the Cosmos. ‘He is now Edson Arantes do Nascimento,’ said de la Sierra, calling Pelé by his real name. ‘Let him stay that way.’
As the new season hobbled into life, the NASL resembled a league that was merely passing time until someone put it out of its misery. Howard Samuels was still grappling to save it, although tampering with the NASL was becoming increasingly difficult for the New York millionaire. In truth, because there were now only nine teams in the league, there was actually precious little to tamper with. The Montreal Manic, who had morphed into a de facto Team Canada, folded because the largely French city of Montreal had never really considered itself Canadian and nobody wanted to see them play; the Seattle Sounders soon followed and Team America, Samuels’s ambitious new concept, had fallen flat. Despite a respectable average attendance of around 13,000, the USSF still had reservations about their national team playing in a failing club league and when a potentially lucrative marketing deal for the team was rejected it signaled the end of Team America.
And yet it could have been much worse. Fort Lauderdale, for instance, had moved its operation to Minnesota just to stay afloat and Tulsa was only saved from bankruptcy when a local radio disc jockey launched a fund-raising campaign and raised $65,000 from supporters to keep the team from folding.
Despite only limited progess, Howard Samuels remained positive, convinced that the NASL could survive and prosper. ‘We’ve got the most dynamic sport in the country from a participating standpoint, and we’ve got the greatest economic failure from a financial standpoint,’ he said.
Certainly, there was some evidence to suggest that if those franchises that still existed could just keep their heads above water—the Cosmos included—then there was a chance that the NASL could begin what would be a very long road to recovery. The league’s debts had been cut, down from the $40 million it lost in 1980 to a reported $25 million in 1983, league expenses had been slashed and a new three-year collective bargaining agreement had been reached with the players that would see a gradual reduction in salaries and the creation of a salary cap of $825,000 per team per year.
Predictably, the latter initiative met with widespread condemnation. While the accord had undoubtedly helped to save the league from collapse, it had stopped short of what league management considered to be a key demand: that all those NASL players earning more than $40,000 a year take 15 percent salary cuts. Instead, each team agreed to cut its payroll by 10 percent for each of the three years of the agreement.
Of all the clubs still operating in the NASL, the agreement would hit the Cosmos the hardest. With an annual players’ payroll of $1.7 million—comfortably the highest in the league—there was a clutch of players at the Cosmos who would fall foul of Howard Samuels’s cost-cutting. Four of them—Hubert Birkenmeier, Jeff Durgan, Angelo DiBernardo and Steve Moyers—would be summoned before Rafael de la Sierra and told that if they didn’t accept the wage cut there was every chance they would be released. Although there were other team members who earned more—Johan Neeskens, Vladislav Bogicevic and Roberto Cabanas to name but three—the quartet were selected because they were the top earners whose contracts had not yet been guaranteed by the club, which meant that if the need arose, they could be dispensed with little or no legal redress. What made the players even more incensed, however, was that they, unlike some of the higher earners, actually played football for twelve months a year because of their involvement in the indoor season as well.
It would be the start of a series of fierce contractual disputes between the playing staff and the club’s management. Jeff Durgan, now the club captain, was asked to take a 20 percent reduction. DiBernardo, meanwhile, had the perfect plan B should the Cosmos carry out its threat to trade them. ‘Maybe we can all play for Lazio,’ he shrugged.
As the NASL limped on and players, agents and lawyers got to grips with the new salary legislation, American football continued to boom, claiming the title of the undisputed number one game in the U.S.A. The 1984 Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins, for example, was watched by 71 percent of the country. The Soccer Bowl wasn’t.
Contractual disputes were cast aside, albeit temporarily, when the Cosmos made its latest stab at bringing the good old days back to Giants Stadium. On May 5, the team played an exhibition match against the club’s alumni. All the old guard turned up, expect for Giorgio Chinaglia, who was busy with Lazio in Italy; Werner Roth, Siggy Stritzl, Terry Garbett, Bobby Smith, Shep Messing, Francisco Marinho, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto—even Randy Horton got the call. ‘I played before the so-called glory days, when players made $2,000 a season,’ says the Bermudan striker. ‘But the Cosmos made me feel like I had been a big part of it.’
And, at the end of the introductions, as always, came Pelé, now forty-three, who ran out to a standing ovation from the 32,653-strong crowd (comfortably the biggest attendance of the year at Giants Stadium), blowing kisses to everyone and looking exactly as he had the day he retired.
While the current Cosmos won the game 6–2, the very fact that the loudest cheers of the evening were reserved for the former players suggested nostalgia was the only real future the Cosmos had, especially as most of the aging ex-players still showed flashes of talent far beyond what any of the current crop of players could ever aspire to. Franz Beckenbauer, for example, was looking fitter and fresher approaching thirty-nine than players young enough to call him dad. So much so, in fact, that soon afterwards the Cosmos would make another audacious offer to lure him out of his latest retirement. This time, though, there was no persuading The Kaiser, who confessed that he was now ‘better at skiing than soccer’.