As June melted into July, it was game over for Atari. Having cut staff levels to 1,100 employees in June 1984—down from more than 7,000 a year earlier—Steve Ross all but gave the company away a month later in a deal brokered by the Cosmos board member Alberto Cribiore. The recipient was Jack Tramiel, the former chief executive of rival computer firm Commodore International Ltd., which gave Warner $240 million in long-term notes and warrants for a 32 percent stake in his new computer venture.
Atari would not be the only Warner company off-loaded by Ross. Soon after, Franklin Mint, Warner Cosmetics and Panavision were all sold. By 1985, a total often of Warner’s ventures would be sold or closed. Inevitably, the Cosmos would be one of them.
The years of celebrities, superstars and sellouts at Giants Stadium now seemed like a distant memory. Even Bugs Bunny had split, hanging up his carrots to shack up with a Cosmos Girl.
For players like Rick Davis, whose first season on the team was alongside Pelé, it was now an entirely different club. ‘It was like everyone was hanging out in the middle of a ghost town,’ he recalls.
On July 27, WCI announced that it had concluded a deal to sell a controling interest in the Cosmos to none other than its former center-forward, Giorgio Chinaglia. Although the details of the sale were not disclosed, it transpired that like Atari, Warner would receive no cash payment for the sale. Instead, Chinaglia and his team of investors would acquire their 60 percent share in return for providing a reported $1.5 million of working capital.
Under the deal, the Cosmos would become a partnership with Chinaglia as manager and general partner and Warner as a limited partner. It was another perceptive, essentially risk-free, piece of dealing by Steve Ross. Not only had he appeared to free Warner of another bothersome debt, but he had maintained some interest in the club in the unlikely event of the new owners turning the sorry situation around.
In a statement announcing the sale, Steve Ross said Giorgio Chinaglia’s return to the Cosmos was ‘an exciting moment for the team and for soccer in America’, adding that ‘Giorgio has proven himself as a leader both on and off the field, as his great success running the Lazio club in Italy attests and I look forward to a mutually rewarding partnership in the years to come.’
For his part, Chinaglia seemed intent on saving his former club, even though his experience of running a professional soccer team to date consisted of sitting in an office at one of Europe’s most famous stadiums, at a club where the average gate was over 66,000 and where support was ingrained in local history.
Now, as president of the Cosmos, his concerns were on an entirely different level. Instead of wondering if there were enough seats to accommodate the legions of die-hard fans who would turn up if there was a game every day of the week, he would be preoccupied with ways and means of attracting more than 8,000 to games at a ghostly Giants Stadium. Still, it wasn’t a task he was going to shirk. ‘It is with enthusiasm and an appreciation of the challenges that lie ahead that I return,’ he told the press. ‘I have great confidence in our ability to rejuvenate soccer on a professional basis in America, and I can think of no better opportunity to accomplish this than with the Cosmos.’
Today, however, Giorgio Chinaglia recognizes that taking on a venture as fragile as the Cosmos, especially in 1984 when the NASL was fading fast, was not merely imprudent but verging on the senseless. It was a costly decision, later compounded by his outright purchase of Lazio, which then fell from the heights of Serie A to the sorry depths of Serie B, taking Chinaglia’s millions with them. ‘I made a big mistake because of my ego,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I went and bought my own team back. And needless to say I lost a lot of money.’
Not everyone agrees with Chinaglia’s version of events. Teppe Pinton . . . confirmed to me that Giorgio never owned a thing,’ insists Clive Toye. ‘It was passed to him to manage but Warner Communications owned the franchise throughout.’
Come the summer and the eyes of the world were on Los Angeles for the Olympic Games. Across the planet, viewers stayed up to watch the most spectacular (and perhaps the most surreal) opening ceremony in the games’ history. There was a flood of cheerleaders, scores of marching bands, a spaceman with a jet-powered backpack, a bank of eighty-four pianists all playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and, at the end of it all, Ronald Reagan declaring the games open.
Despite the revenge boycott of the Russian team, the event was a huge cultural and commerical success. First, there were the record-breaking feats of the twenty-three-year-old American athlete Carl Lewis, who having taken gold medals in the 100m, 200m, the long jump and the 4 × 100m relay, emulated the achievements of Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936. Moreover, with a return of $223 million, the Los Angeles games became the first in over fifty years to turn a profit.
What made the success of the Olympics all the more galling for Gene Edwards and the USSF, was that having missed out on hosting the 1986 World Cup Finals, they now had to sit idly by and watch as a record 101,970 fans packed the Pasadena Rose Bowl to watch the final of the Olympic soccer tournament. In fact, when the games ended, soccer would prove to have been the most popular event of all, with 1,422,000 fans turning up for the matches, over 300,000 more than for the traditional favorite, the track and field events.
It also put the declining crowds of the NASL in some kind of perspective. For the majority of the franchises still trying to make a go of things, a five-figure turnout was now a cause for celebration. Remarkably, though, the biggest crowd of the season was at Minnesota’s Metrodome, where a crowd of 52,621 turned up for the game against Tampa Bay. Ordinarily, the Strikers struggled to get a crowd of more than 10,000. That the Beach Boys were playing live immediately after the final whistle may have been a factor in the high attendance.
When the Olympic flame was extinguished in August, it was clear that the crowds for the games’ soccer tournament would not translate into an upturn in the attendances for the NASL. The fact that the Cosmos, for so long the league’s best supported and most recognizable team, would miss out on the play-offs for the first time since 1975 would also make the NASL even less attractive. ‘There were fewer teams in the league and we were back to playing the same sides maybe four times a season,’ explains Angelo DiBernardo. That’s not what the fans want to see. They want to see big name players and not the same opposition every couple of weeks.’
On October 26, the league president suffered a fatal heart attack in his Manhattan apartment, aged sixty-four. The league’s general counsel, Mark Bienstock, said that J. Howard Samuels had been a man with ‘an extraordinary array of traits . . . His forthrightness with the media, his perseverance in addressing problems of individual clubs and his devotion to the sport were indisputable.’
Significantly, no immediate move was made by the NASL to replace Samuels, suggesting that everyone knew that the game was all but up. ‘Right now,’ said Clive Toye, the Toronto Blizzard president, ‘there is no need whatsoever to employ anyone to take Howard’s position on a full-time basis.’
Certainly, the players knew that the end was in sight. ‘When you are used to playing in front of an average of 47,000, it’s difficult to get as excited when only 10,000 are turning up,’ says DiBernardo. ‘The problem is that the fans pick up on that and if they’re not happy, they won’t come again.’
Lifeless and leaderless, the NASL soldiered on without any clear idea of where it was going. At least, it was business as usual at the Cosmos, who decided to sack Eddie Firmani once more. Six or seven years earlier, his departure would have provided lead stories for the sports pages of New York’s dailies. Now, though, the event, like the NASL, went largely unnoticed.
Firmani had just watched his Cosmos indoor team slide to a 7–4 defeat to the Cleveland Force at Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford when he was summoned to the trainer’s room to meet with the president, Chinaglia, and the new executive vice president, Peppe Pinton. There, Pinton informed the coach that his services were no longer required and that his assistant, Hubert Birkenmeier, would take over on an ‘interim basis’.
Eddie Firmani’s reaction to his latest sacking suggested not only that he knew it was inevitable, but that his heart was no longer in the club or even the game itself. ‘I have no animosity whatsoever against the Cosmos,’ said Firmani, who confirmed that he would be seeking compensation for the year remaining on his contract. ‘They made the decision and it’s fine by me. The club is Mr. Chinaglia’s and he does what he wants.’
Peppe Pinton, however, was feeling less than generous. ‘He owes us a play-off, maybe a championship, that he didn’t make,’ he replied. ‘He should give us back his pay.’
Hubert Birkenmeier’s appointment as Cosmos coach wasn’t the only interim position filled in the dying days of 1984. Soon after, Giorgio Chinaglia’s old adversary, Clive Toye, would step into the role made vacant by Howard Samuels’s passing, although it was unclear what he could do to salvage the situation.
The Cosmos now had to decide which version of the game it was going to play. Having prevaricated for months about joining the indoor setup, the Cosmos had eventually entered the fray but soon found that the MISL’s version of the indoor game, played in ice hockey arenas (minus the ice), differed markedly from the indoor game that the NASL had tried to implement. Once described by the MISL founder, Earl Foreman, as ‘human pinball’, it featured American football-style time-outs and was a faster, more frenetic alternative to the indoor game the Cosmos had played. It was also broken into four periods, partly for television and partly because it was so physically demanding,
That lack of familiarity would be evident from the outset. Having lost twenty-two of their thirty-three games in the MISL, gates once more began to dwindle. Those low attendances, coupled with a minuscule marketing budget, meant further trouble for the Cosmos. Without the means to attract new players, yet alone supporters, Giorgio Chinaglia was beginning to rely increasingly on college players like Darryl Gee and Mike Fox, not because he had realized the value of having young Americans in the team, but because they were cheap.
He could not win. As inexperienced players found themselves in the starting lineup, the standard of play at the Cosmos dropped precipitously. The more the standard fell, the fewer fans turned up.
Each time the Cosmos opened up the 19,000-seat Brendan Byrne Arena for a home game it cost $25,000. That meant drawing a crowd of at least 8,000 just to break even. Its average crowd, however, was half that figure. Add an inflated payroll (perhaps the only constant in the history of the Cosmos) and the withdrawal of commercial sponsors such as Minolta and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the debts soared, reaching a reported $1.5 million. Even the sight of Giorgio Chinaglia once more pulling on his boots for the Cosmos had failed to make a difference. Something had to give.
On February 22, 1985, Peppe Pinton announced that the Cosmos would withdraw from the Major Indoor Soccer League. In retrospect, the Cosmos should have known better as two other New York indoor franchises, the Rockets and the Arrows, had already folded. ‘We have no obligation if the fans don’t support us,’ said Pinton. ‘If you sell ice cream and nobody buys ice cream, there is no sense in going to the corner and ringing your bell all day.’
Though logical, the departure of the Cosmos provoked an angry response from some MISL franchise owners who felt they had done what they could to accommodate the New York club, only for the Cosmos to walk away when the losses started to bite. One such owner was the Chicago Sting’s Lee Stern. ‘Giorgio Chinaglia told me personally many months ago that they [the Cosmos] could not survive without indoor soccer. We worked to get them in,’ he said. ‘Now, there is no Cosmos as far as we’re concerned. All it means is a word in the dictionary referring to astronomy.’
Three weeks later, it was the NASL’s turn to consider its options. Having watched the Cosmos call time on its indoor operation with the MISL, league president Clive Toye called Cosmos president Giorgio Chinaglia to the NASL’s office on Broadway to see if he had any intention of posting the $150,000 letter of credit required for his team to take their place in the NASL 1985 campaign. He didn’t. ‘In accordance with the NASL constitution, a hearing was held,’ recalls Toye. ‘Charges were made against the Cosmos and Chinaglia threatened to throw the league’s lawyer out of the window. Charming man, as always.’
Without the necessary funds and, perhaps, the will to find them, Chinaglia had forced the hand of Toye and the NASL. A vote was taken and the Cosmos, so long the life and soul of the NASL party, was expelled from the league on March 13, 1985. It left just two outdoor franchises in the NASL—Minnesota and Toronto—and that, even in the warped world of American soccer, could never be construed as a ‘league’. Without the Cosmos, the game of soccer, said the Chicago Tribune, was no longer the sport of the 1980s but ‘the sport of the 2080s’. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, reported that ‘the Cosmos are a team without a league and, perhaps, without a future’. Even the Financial Times in London chipped in, reporting ‘how a U.S. soccer strategy came unstuck’.
For Giorgio Chinaglia and Peppe Pinton, that future meant exploiting what little credibility the club still had in the world game and arranging some exhibition games against international opposition. In years gone by, such matches had always proved to be crowd-pullers at Giants Stadium, providing a genuine test for the team as well as a much-needed injection of revenue.
There would also be discussions on taking what was left of the Cosmos into one of the smaller, semiprofessional leagues, like the Italian-American league in New Jersey, an organization that now boasted the Brooklyn car dealer Joe Manfredi as its president. It would come to nothing.
Without the Cosmos, there were just a few soccer teams, none of which had the necessary backing or the star quality to shoulder the burden of taking soccer to the States. A fortnight after the Cosmos’s expulsion, on March 28, 1985, the North American Soccer League suspended operations.
Predictably, the passing of the NASL met with the kind of general indifference that had typified the last years of its life. For those who did care, the postmortem was long and often brutal. Some felt the problems stemmed from the league’s rapid expansion in 1978 from eighteen to twenty-four teams; others laid the blame on the over-reliance on scores of only average foreign players who came to the States to wring a few more dollars out of their dwindling careers at the expense of developing young American players.
They cost people bloody fortunes,’ says Clive Toye. ‘The owners didn’t understand that if Pelé was worth $2.8 million, that Gerd Müller [Fort Lauderdale] wasn’t worth $1.5 million or even $100,000. In the later days, rosters were full of overpaid, overweight nonsuperstars.’
For many observers, though, the principal reason for the demise of the game in the States lay in the lap of the Cosmos, suggesting that the beginning of the end didn’t start with the loss of the ABC television deal or the failure to land the 1986 World Cup finals, but the day when a beaming Brazilian ran out onto a painted pitch at Randall’s Island and changed American soccer for ever. In short, it was all the fault of the Cosmos.
When the boom in U.S. soccer began in 1975, driven by Warner’s bankroll, it prompted the kind of spending that most franchises could ill afford. As mammoth crowds arrived at Giants Stadium and the latest A-list soccer star put pen to paper for the Cosmos, other owners felt duty-bound to supply the same star quality for their supporters, signing up players who didn’t warrant salaries anywhere near those commanded by Pelé or Beckenbauer.
The truth was that what occurred at the Cosmos bore little relation to what was happening at franchises around the country. After all, if soccer was going to work anywhere in America it was going to be in New York, a huge, vibrant city with an ethnically diverse population, many of whom came from backgrounds with a long-standing interest in the game itself. The likelihood of a franchise in, say, Minnesota or Edmonton ever being able to boast the same pulling power was slender. With the death of the NASL, the Cosmos was left to rely on a series of exhibition games arranged earlier in the year to save them from heading the same way as countless other forgotten franchises. Even that was far from simple. Without an affiliation to a recognized league, the games would not receive official FIFA sanction and the number of teams willing to flout FIFA regulations to play the Cosmos soon dried up.
When fewer than than 9,000 showed for the Father’s Day defeat against Chinaglia’s other team, Lazio, it seemed as though the writing was on the wall. In Europe they called exhibition games ‘friendlies’ but, invariably, the Cosmos friendlies were anything but friendly. The Lazio game was no different. Under pounding rain, the game descended into an ugly, violent tussle—Chinaglia likened it to ‘a bullfight’—and it would end with a mass brawl, six yellow cards and two red ones.
After the game, Chinaglia reflected on the meager attendance and concluded that the club was ‘fighting a losing proposition’. It was an understatement. Without the munificence of Warner and the support of the public, the Cosmos budget had shrunk from supersized to shoestring. Coach Ray Klivecka and Peppe Pinton had not been paid for nine months, the players’ paychecks had bounced, the club was struggling to meet its rent and Joe Manfredi had long since taken back the keys to his Toyotas. Crucially, too, the collective will to continue had all but disappeared. ‘Money,’ said Pinton ‘is the bottom line, and we don’t have it.’
The day after the Lazio game, Peppe Pinton tendered his resignation, just as Giorgio Chinaglia was flying across the Atlantic to keep an eye on the money pit that was Lazio. Speaking to the press, he said that the fate of the Cosmos was no longer in his hands. From now on, he said, the team’s future was ‘strictly an ownership decision’.
The ownership wasted no time in deciding. Four days after the Lazio game, they disconnected the phone in the Cosmos office.