Not really. I mean unless you count 3-4,000 fans attending USL games. The Quakes had folded in 1988 and came back as the Blackhawks and Clash. MLS in their infinite wisdom wanted nothing to do with the old NASL names in 1995 and the same goes for Sounders, Whitecaps and Timbers. I recall Garber specifically leaving out the Sounders in the name the team contest and the fans wrote them in and 26 years had passed since the original team folded.
Of course it does. You mention the Cosmos and you think of the greatest players in the world. That was true 30, 20 , 10 years ago as well as today. Even today in Europe the Cosmos name and brand still has a buzz. No the 1994 WC was awarded to the USA on July 4th 1988 because of the efforts of the NASL founders and players who wanted the 1986 tournament and also on the strength of a successful , sold out Olympic tournament of 1984 at Stanford and LA. FIFA wouldn't have ever awarded the USA the 1994 games if it wasn't for the NASL.
The OG NASL folded in 1984.............. Also, I was born in the 70's and have ZERO memories of the OG NASL or the Cosmos. I do remember growing up with barely any soccer at all on TV, or coverage for that matter in any format.
Um, no... Greatest players in the world? C'mon man, you're reaching. No world class player ever played in his prime for the Cosmos. Getting all giggity over Pele, Alberto and Beckenbauer playing for the Cosmos would be like baseball fans getting excited if Derek Jeter, ARod and Barry Bonds decided to play baseball in Italy this summer.
So what. You probably wouldn't have haver played or knew about the game had the NASL not put for the their efforts with the youth HS and college soccer in the 70's. That is when it all began. Again thanks to the efforts of the old league. That is a fact whether you want to believe it or not.
Pele and Alberto were old but Chinaglia was 29 when he came. He still has the most goals ever in the USA. Eskandarian, Neeskens, Tuerart, Bogicevic, Wim Rijsbergen were young and Franz was European player the year before he came. Then you had Romero and Cabanas Many players were in their primes. Granitza, Zungul, Hugo Sanchez, Peter Beardsley and Bruce Grobbelaar to name a few. Not many stars came after their 35th BD like Pirlo , Lampard , Steven Gerrard and Ibra did. As a matter of fact, I recall maybe only 1-2 players who came at that advanced age but as a rule, most were in their late 20's or early 30's.
Nah. That's silly. USA '94 surely was a watershed event and we'd have had to start a D1 league if we had gotten it in '98 or 2002 or whenever. The impact of that tournament was massive, no question. But ignore the impact of the original NASL at your own peril. With no post-Pele boom, the youth participation explosion doesn't happen and who knows where we are today. The original NASL'S impact was profound and those years (and they were years, not a month in the summer of 1994) laid a lot of the groundwork for what we enjoy today. A lot.
Garber didn't do that. Hanauer and company did. Jesus, this insistence that Garber does and controls everything by fiat has to stop. Just stop. The original NASL's heyday was basically over by 1982. If you were born after about 1973, it would make sense that you would have no memory of it. That does not mean the historical record should be ignored.
The point that I am making and agree with is that league created the legacy for the game in this country as we know it. Same goes for the team names and logos. The bottom line is we are here because of that league. Same goes for women's soccer. I don't think it will have happened if it wasn't for the youth soccer boom and/or grass roots efforts of the old NASL.
I'm not disagreeing in the least the impact the Cosmos et al had on the game in this country 40 years ago. I'm just saying intimating the Cosmos brand is some sort of elixir the professional game in this country needs in 2019 is total nonsense.
Of course but again, the same can be said for the other teams that carry the original NASL names as well.
New York is a transient city. 37 per cent of the local population were born overseas well over half were born outside of New York State, so things don't resonate locally in the same way as they do in other cities. Add to that the the Cosmos, unlike the Giants, the Jets and the Dodgers never played in New York, and never had a real connection to the city, other than the name and the fact they shared Giants Stadium. There was no ticker tape parade for Pele and Beckenbauer when the Cosmos won the Soccer Bowl. The British were so dismissive to NASL that they stopped calling the game "soccer".
The Cosmos did play in NY. They played on Randalls Island, Yankee Stadium then moved to New Jersey at Giants stadium in 1977. The English League at one point actually put a ban on loaning players to the NASL. I can’t recall when but I think it was in 1980. Trevor Francis did not come back after 78-79 but I think he was one of the main reasons of the ban as he was a top player.
There is a good deal of truth in this but maybe not entirely the way that people intend it. I had a long talk once with a guy who owned and ran a USISL (that's USL for you kids) pro team in the 90's which folded when MLS put a team in his town. He had also been well connected with NASL; he was close with Phil Woosnam and that crowd. He lost his shirt (and his marriage) but never regretted a bit of it. He used to say - much better than I can replicate it - that the NASL was what seeded soccer in the USA, not so much because everybody pined for glory days of the Boston Whatevers or the Atlanta Whozits, or the love of seeing Der Kaiser and Snow-nose Chinaglia chugging around a pitch. Rather, it was because of the rank and file players, the no-name low end of the roster guys, of which the league was chock-a-block full. When they finally hung it up, or when the team or the league folded, they tended to stay where they were. They liked living in America, many had started side businesses, and/or married American women, started families, etc. There were thousands of them across the fruited plain. A whole bunch of those guys, maybe a majority even, started youth clubs as a side gig or took jobs with youth organizations or got hired as college coaches. His feeling was that the 94 World Cup team was largely a product of those guys work at the youth level, which inspired a lot of what followed.Many of them are still around today, and their youth players largely run American soccer. His feeling was that MLS isn't so much the legacy of the NASL itself, but rather the people it brought over.
I believe it was Francisco Marcos who owned the original Tampa Bay Rowdies that started the SISL or the Southwest Indoor Soccer League which was the precursor to the USL.
Hell, Mo Johnston and his family initially stayed in Kansas City. Even when he started working for Toronto, his family was in KC (and might still be there, I've lost track). The Carolina Hurricanes have been in Raleigh for 20 years, and you can't go around Raleigh or Cary without running into a retired NHL player. A bunch of old Canes, and more than a few players who never played for the local club have settled in the area. Time will tell whether or not a revitalized franchise that makes the playoffs more than once every 10 years will be viable or not, but the youth hockey scene in the Triangle is pretty legit. I have no memory of the NASL Kansas City Spurs, even though I have dim memories of the contemporaneous Chiefs and Royals - though my mom did mention that she and dad did go to a Spurs game at old Memorial Stadium. That said, the NASL definitely was an influence. I remember the season that the NASL was on ABC. Though the first game I remember attending was the 1981 ASL championship game won by the host Charlotte (Carolina?) Lightnin'
FWIW, their stadium trek went: Yankee Stadium----> Hofstra University----> Downing Stadium (Randall's Island)---->Yankee Stadium----> Giants Stadium
I think we can all agree, despite the many jokes we all make at the expense of the original NASL, that it was critical to what the game is today, in many ways. MLS 1.0 was also largely a joke, but that era created an opportunity for adults to work/play in the soccer industry after college. Now today's MLS is filled with coaches, executives and an entire ecosystem of 1.0 era people and is critical to today's overall system. Just imagine how much worse 1.0 would have been without the NASL era generation. We almost certainly wouldn't have had 2002 WC success without that foundation, and quite possibly, the league would have died shortly after. Who knows. Now we can all argue how much value those original brands have. The Cosmos and Sounders are two great examples that while the brands have some residual value, the product ultimately matters much more. I'm assuming that the Sounders success would have been little changed if they launched with another name, and that the public demand for the name was driven moreso by the existing Sounders at the time. Had the USL Sounders never taken up the name, I bet Seattle MLS would be something else right now. If the Red Bulls or the Emirates ever sell, the Cosmos wouldn't be a terrible rebrand idea, but the success of the franchise would be hardly changed by the brand.
Plus, there's a non-insignificant faction of the Cosmos hangers on that primarily were in it for the anti-establishmentness of supporting a team "outside of the MLS/Sum/US Soccer Establishment cartel" or whatever ridiculousness the prorel crowd feels like crowing about. Not like those fans are suddenly going to jump on the MetroBulls bandwagon just because they changed the name.
I don't think any of the original NASL brands really had lasting residual value other than Cosmos and maybe Rowdies. The Clash, with a much worse team and no Landon Donovan drew more fans than the MLS Earthquakes did when they were winning MLS Cups with Landon Donovan. Whitecaps was so popular the team were the 86ers for a fair amount of time. The Sounders drew negligible crowds in USL before MLS expansion was announced - way less than the Timbers and Impact did (their USL-MLS cousins) I'm not saying the NASL brands had no residual value. It's just that if Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and San Jose had different nicknames, I doubt the reality on the ground in those cities would be measurably different. DC United wouldn't have been more or less successful than they had been the Diplomats. You can say the same for the Boston Teamen, Dallas Tornado, or Los Angeles Sol. What the NASL, outside of the Cosmos, left us was a generation of assimilated middle-class American youth who fell in love with the game.
I've tried to convince myself that the Bullets wouldn't have changed their name if United had gone with another name that was a lot more ridiculous than anything in the name competition.