What killed the NASL?
Posted on August 13, 2012 12:05 am
A while back, this was the million-dollar question in American soccer. There were lots of answers. With MLS seemingly headed toward success (and almost as old as the NASL ever got), not as many people care one way or the other. It’s still an interesting question, however. Do I actually believe that the Colorado Caribous’ fringed jersey pictured above is what killed the NASL? Of course not, but it is symbolic of the overexpansion that I think did kill it.
The most common answer has long been that the death of the NASL was all the fault of the New York Cosmos. That answer has some logic behind it. The theory is that the deep-pocketed Cosmos overspent on player salaries and forced the rest of the league into a spending race that the other teams couldn’t afford. However, I think the real reason was one that damaged the financial foundations of the league a lot more severely than this did.
Three other frequently-cited reasons were the loss of the ABC television contract, FIFA’s decision in 1983 to award the 1986 World Cup to Mexico rather than to the United States and the player strike at the start of the 1979 season.
The TV business did hurt. The contract that the NASL had signed with ABC after its booming 1977 season was severely cut back in 1980. In the 1978 and 1979 seasons, ABC had televised an NASL game of the week The ratings were poor, however, and by 1981, the network was showing only the NASL title game. This was a serious blow to the league, but it was a result of the NASL’s problems. It didn’t cause them.
Blaming the FIFA decision is a red herring. By the time of that decision, on May 20, 1983, Warner Communications, the owner of the Cosmos and the league’s most important financial backer, was being overwhelmed by losses as a result of the video-games crash of 1982. That was the reason why it cut back its spending on soccer, not the World Cup decision. In the second quarter of 1983, Warner lost $283.4 million. Compared to that, the FIFA snub was small potatoes.
The 1979 strike lasted only five days, honored by only a third of the league’s players. It had almost no long-term effect.
The real reason, I think, was the way that, in the late 1970s, the league lost sight of the long-term goal of steady growth and was seduced by the short-term income offered by expansion fees. The league ballooned from nine teams in 1973 to 24 teams in 1978, but then fell back to 14 by 1982. I think that expanding too much and too fast, of which the Caribous were a prime example, was the culprit.
This is the view that is put forth by Clive Toye, who knows this subject as well as anybody, maybe better. All I can do is listen to him and agree that he makes a lot of sense. Toye discusses the matter in some detail in his 2006 autobiography, A Kick in the Grass, talking about a planning group that included himself, Lamar Hunt, Lee Stern and others.
“We spend an entire year [1977] of one weekend a month, to work on the Long Term Strategic Plan, which said among many other things: We have 18 clubs. Six are doing well. Six are okay and can be improved. Six either have to be moved to better markets or taken over by new owners or dumped….Outside that committee, Phil Woosnam [the NASL commissioner] was working on new franchises, at $3 million a pop, and when it came to a vote at the annual meeting, the idea of six new clubs coming in, with $18 million to be divided, was too strong a lure….In the main, the new owners, to put it mildly, did not have a clue….lured by the sight of crowds packing Giants Stadium, and thinking that all they needed was a franchise, a big stadium and some players, and the way ahead would be golden.”
I will concede that there is no unanimity of opinion here. Toye’s viewpoint is not the only one. I think it’s the right one, however.
It is.
That whole big debate about the importance of the 1979 strike that we had when MLS was on the verge of a strike a few years back was laughable. That had virtually no effect, and the stories written in major newspapers by supposedly experienced reporters were ridiculous and lacked even basic fact-checking.
Grabbing the expansion dollars, Atari’s slide, the lack of true infrastructure, the inevitable passing of things that are fads, a great many things contributed, with some having more impact than others, depending on who’s relating the story.
If theat shirt didn’t kill the NASL it should have
Someone needs to get the rights to those Caribous jerseys and start selling them.
Money to be made with the hipster crowd. And people with no taste.
Dag, I am long-in-the-tooth. I forgot about the buckskin fringe.
Thanks Roger for providing background to events behind the events. I was still in high school when the league inflated to 24 teams – and happy that Philadelphia had one to replace the Atoms.
Like any boy that age, my focus was on the important things in life such as girls, cars, girls, beer, and girls. I knew very little about what was troubling NASL and cared even less. Your insight made more sense of what I can remember about the fall from 24 teams to 9 and flirtation with the indoor version.
I’d say the recession of the late 70s early 80s didn’t help.
Except that the NASL had its very best years during that recession, and then died well after the recovery.
I used to frequent a soccer store in Akron, Ohio where they had a genuine game worn Caribou jersey, fringe and all, hanging on the wall. And just for icing, it was a ten shirt. I can’t tell you how many times I fantasized about asking for some shoes that they were going to have to go in the back and get and then grabbing it and bolting for the door.
Really though, it belongs in the Hall of Fame. Which means a box in the back corner of a warehouse in North Carolina.
There you go – the new soccer-wise putdown: “Hey, you ought to be part of an HoF display”.
ANYHOO: with regard to the actual point here, I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of stuff about the NASL. The whole “Cosmos-signed-Pele-everybody-else-went-broke-trying-to-keep-up” meme is an integral piece of the conventional wisdom and, like most such, is pretty much dead wrong.
I would surprise a lot of people to know, for example, that NASL salaries, overall, were terrible. Like, $700 a month terrible. The majority of players had part time jobs. They would have thought the pre-2010 MLS developmental salaries, even adjusted for inflation, were princely.
Finally, despite the “lost the World Cup” theory which you do hear bandied about, I’ve often thought that we were very fortunate that we didn’t get it. It was too soon and rather than give the NASL a boost, whatever effect it might have had would have gone right down the drain with the league.
Then again, I’ve never thought the 94 WC had much to do with launching MLS either, aside from providing $50 million in seed money.
“ANYHOO: with regard to the actual point here, I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of stuff about the NASL. The whole “Cosmos-signed-Pele-everybody-else-went-broke-trying-to-keep-up” meme is an integral piece of the conventional wisdom and, like most such, is pretty much dead wrong.”
I think, as with most issues in society, ppl like to jump to the quickest conclusion that doesn’t require them to delve too deeply into a thing. This simplistic conclusion ignores the fact that MLS might well have ended up dying right around the same time into it’s existence as the NASL did if not for one thing, soccer specific stadiums. You can also add in Soccer United Marketing as an added buffer for the league’s finances, but if it were not for the push to build sss in MLS, this league is probably going under right about now, even without a Cosmos-like team.
People seem to forget that just a few years ago, the league had contracted 2 teams, was hemoraging money, and was down to 3 owners for the entire league. And it didn’t take a NY Cosmos to cause that to happen, simply mismanagement in the early years of the league due to a faulty business-model.
I love NASL history, I think to be interested in US soccer and not wanting to know more about it is like being interested in world history yet never bothering with the Romans. Buuuuut… i’m (just) old enough to remember that the Pele and Cosmos thing did have an effect on the explosive expansion of the league, though where exactly the cause-and-effect were I don’t know enough to say as I do recall the league was growing a bit before Pele came, lets be honest, NASL’s peak of 24 teams came from 1978-1980, after Pele, and can be said to be a legacy of his in fact, in my view. That the NASL didn’t adopt a more careful, measured growth approach isn’t his FAULT but Pele was it’s instigator, no doubt. You didn;t get crowds pre-Pele like you did during and past Pele, that’s what drove the uncontrolled growth of the league.
…to me the thing MLS doesn’t have that the NASL undoubtedly did, was the sheer madness.
Case in point: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1093802/2/index.htm
I think Bill is right that we were lucky that we didn’t get the 1986 World Cup. I think a 1986 World Cup in the United States would have been awful, and would have ended up hurting American soccer rather than helping it. Fortunately, FIFA made the right choice in 1983.
Adjusted for inflation, $700 a month is actually pretty close to $30k in today’s money.
The over-expansion and Cosmos model were part of the same “insta-league” dream. Wonder what Hunt had to say about that “NSC-ASC” set up the year there were 24 teams.
Take for what its worth coming from a guy that was just barely starting to understand that there were professional sports leagues at all when the NASL took a death blow, but I think long term, the death of the league is one of the best things to happen to American Soccer. First, it let an unsustainable model die, and second, it provides all soccer fans in this country a reason for nostalgia (not to mention endless Cosmos revival banter) in thee soccer world. Much happier to have missed pro soccer in my childhood and have a better product for my kids. Had we gotten the 86 WC, we might still be living with a limp and weak NASL or no league at all.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “one of the best things,” but I do agree that American soccer is better off today than it would be if the NASL had survived. If the NASL as it was in the 1980s had survived, that is. The NASL’s legacy would look a little better if the owners had listened to their planning committee in 1978 and reined in both expansion and mismanaged franchises.
In the US I buy the “deep pocket” arguement as to what killed the NASL. However, in Germany you have the deep pockets of Bayern Muenchen essentailly buying up the best players and being record champions and that has not killed the Bundesliga. Once could argue that football is more integratal to their society than in the US, and that is certainly true. But the BL was also less than 10 years old when Bayern started dominating things and yet they have record crowds and very stable teams/clubs.
For me the MLS took it slow, did not allow dynastys to be built and kept parity in the league. That combined with decent TV coverage and the sport taking a greater hold among the youth and ticket prices staying low has lead to the MLS success.
“Then again, I’ve never thought the 94 WC had much to do with launching MLS either, aside from providing $50 million in seed money.”
Other than providing the whole raison d’être. I’m not sure anyone would have tried launching a new DI soccer league had it not been required by FIFA as part of the deal.
The league we had might have eventually gone bigger and grown into that. Might. We’ll never know. But it wasn’t like the LA Salsa was a big success anyway.
Take it from a OSG “original soccer gangster” and Chicago sting fan, the owners and soccer haters killed the league. The owners had no clue and where always going in different directions. “remember NASL indoor”. These owners who were losing money gave up after their fight with The NFLPU aka NASLPU. As soon as MLS got off the ground soccer haters NFLPU organized a lawsuit challenging the MLS business structure. The MLS stated that if they lost that lawsuit they would pull the plug on MLS! The MLS won and hired Garber and the rest is the wet dream soccer warriors are currently living. The haters are still out there but not as vocal, but they still try to block soccer whenever they can.
The NFLPU are not “soccer haters”. True, they used the MLSPA in a proxy fight with the NFL owners, but it had absolutely nothing to do with their feelings one way or the other with regards to soccer.
In 1996 (and, hell, even 2012) the NFL is as threatened by soccer as you or I might be threatened by a Gerbil.
I think they also wanted to throw a dagger at the single-entity structure.
Absolutely true; the SE blueprint scared them to death.
But it’s also true that the NFLPU weighed in with a bunch of dollars that the MLS players could never begin to match and promptly took over every facet of the lawsuit effort to the point where some of the players involved claimed they weren’t even consulted by the attorneys on key points.
By the end it was patently obvious to the players that the NFLPU would be perfectly happy if winning the lawsuit meant that MLS folded, something which the owners said would happen, as long as they got the court to declare single entity legally flawed.
It wasn’t that the NFL people hated soccer; it was more a case of they really didn’t give a crap about it.
By the end, I believe a lot of MLS players had lost interest in the whole deal, and realized what a mistake it all was.
It may or may not have been a bluff that MLS would have folded if they lost. I think the NFL has proven that the single entity model can be effected under a different corporate guise.
Judges have said the single entity model is legal, therefore it is (for now). The niceties of the law provide me with my living, but they do not explain the difference between MLS and NASL. The difference is cultural. I suspect Lamar Hunt is the key to whole riddle.
MLS would have had no reason to keep going had they lost the lawsuit.
Yes, the NFL has a liberal revenue-sharing scheme, but it’s still one where the players get the preponderant share of that revenue, and year-on-year profits are tiny compared to the overall size of the business. MLS had far less revenues and overhead that was much a more significant piece of the puzzle. Frankly, we’re lucky they went on even having won.
I always thought the league’s first mistake was going with the acronym “NASL”, but then again it could have been worse. They could have come up with an acronym that reminds people of some other orifice.
Like, say, American National United Soccer?
I was going to go with Early American Recreational Soccer, but whatever floats your boat Bill.
Voetbal Association for Gynelogically Inclined North Americans
Thank you Roger.
“Seduced by the short-term income offered by expansion fees” you say? Hmm…those who forget the past…
That is exactly why I was worried three or four years ago by the rapid rate at which MLS was expanding. I’m no longer as worried. That rate has slowed quite a bit, and MLS always has been vetting its expansion candidates a lot more skeptically than the NASL did.
What, you don’t think the St. Louis group was solid? Just because their WPS team was vaporized midseason and their USL team is gone?
The last four years of MLS expansion have been an absolute, unqualified success. You shouldn’t be less worried, you should be positively ecstatic.
There was never much cause for alarm. MLS expanded as fast as it did because after the 2004 RSL/CUSA add, not only did the new owners all bring big fees, but more importantly almost all of them had venues and pre-existing fanbases in place. The league would have been dumb to refuse just about any of them.
You’re probably right, but I think it was scary anyway, whether there was cause for real alarm or not. Sort of like being on a roller-coaster.
Either way, I think you’re right that it will go slower now, just due to the lack of those slam-dunk candidates.
it’s plain n simple.
The most popular sport in the US from tots up to collegiates is Football (aka Soccer).
That being said the NFL, MLB and the NBA got together to buy up all the prime tv slots making the newly formed Soccer League impossible to grow.
@nmiss:
Ahhh, no. Not even flippin’ close. No.
The NASL had poor and shortsighted ownership structures that would have hailed Ken Horowitz as a financial sorceror. The LA Aztecs brought in Cruyff and Best – guys who make Beckham and Keane look low-key in comparison – and averaged attendances the Galaxy usually get for an Open Cup qualifier. Naturally, the NASL moved a team from St. Louis to Orange County, in order to capitalize on the Aztecs’ success.
Seriously, picture any of those guys building an HDC or a Livestrong Park.
I think it was Krazy George…
Having been in one little corner of the NASL world (Portland), the thing I knew even then was that US soccer interest at the start of the 1980′s was fad and media-driven broad – and just inches deep.
Statistically, no one played the game for fun, as compared to, say basketball or baseball. The few Americans who could play professionally were only capable of being mediocre defenders; no American player had any real attacking/creative flair.
So, without deep trans-national roots, the sport at the professional level was as permanent as roller derby or a professional wrestling league. If investors saw any financial weakening of the NASL, they weren’t gonna stick around for the (miniscule) love of the sport and throw good money after bad.
But- almost inadvertantly – it got many adults playing the sport. And then their kids grew up with parents who introduced them to the game. So, the NASL failure was almost inevitable, but it jump started what we have today.
Yeah, I think the NASL failed because they were playing soccer, in America, in the 1970s. America just wasn’t ready. The Cosmos didn’t make any money by scrimping and saving in the pre-Pele years, and neither did they make any money drawing 40,000 a game in the ’76-’81 era. It’s a common myth that the NASL tried and failed to take advantage of the ‘soccer boom’ in participation–really, that boom didn’t get big, numbers-wise, until the NASL was in irrevocable decline. It would be closer to the truth to say the NASL helped cause the soccer boom, and just didn’t live long enough to reap what they’d sown.
There’s no doubt that a better expansion policy could have helped. (Here’s a hint, if six teams are willing to pay $3M to get in, maybe you should raise the fee to $4M, and supposing you still have 4 applicants, you haven’t lost much money and can be more comfortable knowing the two teams you didn’t let in were probably the weakest ones). And maybe it’s even true that if you could import modern sports innovations (jersey sponsorships, SSS luxury-box revenues and in-stadium stages) you might have been able to turn the corner on it, but you’d have had to be the Thomas Edison of sports to pull that off. The core reason is simply that not enough Americans in not enough cities were into the game at that point.
Heck, that was still basically true in the 1990s. I was just watching Toronto play SKC (game still ending) and though the fans piled out late, TFC has been mired in abject suckitude for basically the whole 6 years of their existence, and yet the stands in Toronto were 2/3rds to 3/4ths full. In MLS in the 1990s, it would have been a ghost town in almost any city in that circumstance. In the NASL in the 70s, the team would have moved or folded long before that could even happen.
Agreed Stan.
Coming back to some of the specific causes of the NASL decline, one additional question I have heard very little about is the effect of the NFL’s cross-ownership ban in the mid-1970s. The NFL apparently wanted to implement its ban (which dated from the 1950s) on majority owners from investing in another sports team. This was in respect to Lamar Hunt and Joseph Robbie investing in NASL teams in the 1970s. In response, the NASL went to court on the matter in 1979 in order to obtain an injunction against the NFL rule. The case was not decided until 1982 when the US Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit finally ruled in favor of the NASL. Interestingly, the judge mentioned “the characterization of NFL as a single economic entity does not exempt from the Sherman Act”. In many ways, this was little too late and the initial big-time investment window (during that late 70s period) had passed and the country was heading into (lest we forget) an economic recession in the 1980s.
Even if an injunction was obtained in 1979, the overlying threat by the rest of sports major owners vis-à-vis anyone who wanted to also invest in soccer could not have helped the NASL financially. I wonder how much this decision and pressure from NFL owners actually impeded the development of the league in the key years following the Pelé attendance boom.
It is also interesting that the NFL was viewed as a single economic entity even though it is not really one whereas MLS current legal structure is in fact the only real single-entity league in the world. That structure is also probably one of the key success factors for MLS from a legal point of view (think of Caligiuri and the Player’s union case). People like Hunt understood the problems that undermined the NASL and were adamant not to repeat them with MLS. My hat goes off to them!
Long live the Caribous jersey! Who wants to vote for a Colorado Rapids/Caribou special memorial 3rd kit for next season or maybe 2018 (for the Caribous 30th anniversary)? Just imagine…Connor Casey wearing that classic fringe…
I think buckyball is right that the NASL had an important part in creating the American soccer of today. The NASL wanted to start a soccer boom among American youth that would help to carry it to great things. And it did start a soccer boom among American youth that did help to carry American soccer to great things — but not in the NASL’s lifetime.
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