On December 20, 1991, Steve Ross died. He was sixty-five. Beset by prostate cancer, he had checked himself into a Los Angeles hospital as ‘George Bailey’, the name of Jimmy Stewart’s character in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life. It was his idea of a joke, a last-ditch appeal to be given another chance on earth. For once, though, Ross didn’t get his way.
After the demise of the Cosmos, Ross’s Warner empire had grown prodigiously, culminating in a $14 billion merger with Time Inc. in 1989. The deal had created the world’s largest media and entertainment company, encompassing Sports Illustrated, People and Time magazines; the Warner Bros. movie studio; the Warner, Atlantic, Asylum and Elektra record labels; Warner Books; DC Comics, and Home Box Office and a host of America’s biggest cable television channels. By the time of his death, Ross was drawing a salary and bonuses of $78.2 million. ‘If you’re not a risk-taker,’ he once said, ‘you should get the hell out of business.’
The truth was, when it came to the New York Cosmos there really wasn’t much of a risk to speak of, especially once Ross had green-lit the decision to pay for Pelé. Even at the outset, Ross and his investors had eradicated any personal risk by transferring the club’s ownership to Warner Communications, which could afford to bankroll the club.
As with McDonald’s opening a restaurant in Moscow, the Cosmos concept was driven not by profit but by perception. It was, as Mark Ross reveals, a means to an end. ‘Over time, he [Steve Ross] considered it a very good business idea in that the Cosmos could take the Warner Communications name into parts of the world that it hadn’t gotten to before.’
The Cosmos was perhaps the ultimate act of commercial arrogance, a moment in time when sport and money, Steve Ross’s favorite things, collided head on. Here, after all, was a nation that had, for the most part, never given soccer a second thought, even though the rest of the world clutched it to its heart. That was Steve Ross’s idea: “Let’s buy it. Let’s bring it here. And if we show it to people they will like it and they will come back, and then it will grow and we’ll really be on to something’”, explains Lawrie Mifflin, Cosmos correspondent at the New York Daily News.
While it was a fine idea in principle, the mistake in Ross’s plan to take soccer to Apple Pie America was that it made no concession to developing the game at any level other than that of the choppers and cheerleaders at Giants Stadium. It was like building a house and starting with the light fittings.
Clearly, the responsibility for putting in place a structure that guaranteed a steady flow of young, talented American players rested not solely with the Cosmos but with the NASL as a whole. While importing a mass of supremely talented players from other countries was commendable, the failure to divert the necessary resources to first improve the collegiate soccer system and then develop the American players who emerged from it would prove costly. Who knows what may have developed if the NASL had happened upon their own Joe Namath or Reggie Jackson.
Thirty years after Pelé ran out onto a painted field at Downing Stadium, it is hard to escape the feeling that, for all its success, the Cosmos phenomenon was never really anything other than a victory of marketing muscle and conspicuous expenditure over any understanding or love of the game.
When the team and the NASL peaked in 1977 and 1978, it had seemed as if America had finally capitulated to soccer. For a couple of seasons, the Cosmos really was the news and its exploits managed to dislodge the Mets and Yankees, the Knicks and the Giants, from the back pages. No longer was soccer the game that papers sent the junior hacks to cover. No longer was it that foreign game for commies and fairies. Even when the Yankees, carried by the bat of Reggie Jackson, beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series in 1977, they still had to share the spotlight with the Cosmos.
For all its achievements on the field, though, the Cosmos never made a profit. For fourteen seasons it was the most successful and, by some distance, the most visible franchise in the North American Soccer League. No other club, regardless of the profile or salaries of their imported players or the designs they may have harbored on emulating their New York counterparts, came close to capturing the imagination of the American public in quite the same way as the Cosmos. But then no other team could afford Pelé.
With a company like Warner behind them and a chairman as wholehearted as Steve Ross, the Cosmos was always going to be in a figurative league of its own. But just as the financial clout of English Premiership club Chelsea under the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has fundamentally changed the landscape of contemporary English football, so it was that the Cosmos under Steve Ross could buy whichever player it wanted, whenever it wanted, to the detriment of the rest of the competition.
While it was a position that any other franchise would have gladly accepted, it nevertheless caused resentment among the other NASL teams, even though a visit from the Cosmos would always put thousands on the gate. On one hand, they were feted for raising the profile of soccer to unprecedented heights in the States. On the other, they were accused of being the team that killed the NASL. Terry Hanson, the vice president of the Atlanta Chiefs, perhaps summed it up best when he concluded that the Cosmos ‘were the best and the worst thing that happened to this league’.
That, though, is just a natural consequence of professional sport, where there will always be a hierarchy, in which some teams dominate and others merely aspire. When the NASL’s preeminent members, the Cosmos, transformed a dormant league with the signing of just one player, every other franchise in the fragile NASL felt obliged to deliver the same standard of players to their supporters, irrespective of ability to cover the costs. Other clubs, keen to keep pace, traded poorly, enlisting foreign players who ill deserved their salaries and, sometimes, their reputations.
When Giorgio Chinaglia purchased his controlling stake, he did so amid high hopes that his reputation and his tireless promotional effort would breathe much-needed life into the club. It didn’t work. Without the expertise or the capital to back up his rhetoric, Chinaglia, who had returned to the Cosmos as a savior, was left to administer the last rites. Certainly, those at the heart of the NASL, notably Clive Toye, believe that Chinaglia’s role in the demise of the club was crucial. ‘Giorgio had a malign influence on the Comsos,’ he contends. ‘I would say he was almost single-handedly responsible for the death of the Cosmos.’
For all intents and purposes, the Cosmos was the North American Soccer League. It was the flagship franchise and the cornerstone, the showcase and the cabaret. With Pelé on board, the Cosmos brought instant credibility to a league widely derided as substandard and irrelevant. It succeeded in introducing the game of soccer to a new generation of New Yorkers, who had been spoiled on the success of the Knicks, the Mets and the Jets. As Shep Messing maintains, ‘they laid the foundation for every single kid that plays soccer in this country now.’
But it was more than that. Despite their failure, the Cosmos managed to foist soccer onto a nation that had long resisted. Today, you can travel from coast to coast and find soccer games and soccer fans. Walk into many bars in New York on a Saturday morning and there’ll be the English Premiership on the television. Look a bit harder and you’ll find live soccer from Mexico and Argentina, Italy and Spain. Even the commercials have kids kicking soccer balls around. There really is no avoiding it. ‘People like me,’ says Gordon Bradley, ‘don’t have to explain what it is anymore.’
Clearly, the truth is that Americans do get soccer; it has simply taken them longer to first embrace the game and then discover their own indigenous form of it. Today, there are over twenty million registered players in the country; America has a national team ranked in the top ten in the world; it has successfully hosted the World Cup finals; and it can boast a women’s team that has won their World Cup; and a professional league, the Major League Soccer (MLS), that seems to have learned from some of the mistakes of the many previous efforts and, despite a question mark over the standard, is developing a competition based largely around homegrown players. To call soccer ‘un-American’, especially in the twenty-first century, makes no sense at all. ‘I think more utter rubbish has been written and talked about American soccer both inside America and, particularly, in the UK than any other single subject ever devised by man,’ argues Clive Toye.
Today, two decades after their demise, there are Cosmos Web sites and chat rooms, supporters clubs and forums, yet there is no Cosmos as such. There are campaigns to relaunch the team and get them back in the MLS but there are also lingering disputes over who actually owns the name. The commonly held belief is that the rights are owned by Giorgio Chinaglia’s erstwhile manager, Peppe Pinton, who says he acquired the rights as a ‘mark of respect for Steve Ross’.
Not so, laughs Jay Emmett. I’ll sue him in every court in the land … he may have been a big player in the pizza parlor but he was never a big player in the Cosmos.’
David Hirshey, meanwhile, regards the current situation as ‘surreal’, adding that Pinton owning the Cosmos ‘would be like Gazza’s great friend Jimmy Five Bellies running the Spurs’.
On Sunday, July 21,1991, there was a reunion match at Giants Stadium to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the birth of the New York Cosmos. With the exception of Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia, virtually all of the legendary Cosmos players made an appearance. Hubert Birkenmeier, Werner Roth, Shep Messing, Steve Hunt, Johan Neeskens, Rick Davis, Jeff Durgan—all pulled the shirt on one more time. The two teams were even coached by Julio Mazzei and Gordon Bradley. Pelé was there too, but, for once, he didn’t play. Instead the fifty-year-old took a halftime salute to the strains of the Barbra Streisand song The Way We Were.
It would be an emotional night, as another of the Cosmos alumni, Vladislav ‘Bogie’ Bogicevic, explained. ‘This was being home again, born again. So many memories, so many great memories. You just try to think about what happened, sometimes, and I feel I think I should almost cry. People cheering, the national anthem, players, fans. Who knows, maybe one day it will come again—maybe.’
Harold the Chimp was unavailable for comment.