Looking at old NASL tables from the 70s/80s (hey, we all spend our spare time in our own ways) I can't help but wonder how different the soccer landscape could be if the league managed to keep it's momentum going. Granted, I'm fine with the way things are with MLS, and I'm not sure if the league would've stayed afloat anyways, but given how well it was drawing in certain markets and all of the theories about why it failed, I got to wondering when the peak was? If you had to pick a point at which you could say, "that's when they went in the wrong direction," when would it be? 1977 right before Pele left but they added 6 more teams anyways?
Attendance records would be the best evidence but whenever Pele dropped out would be my guess (1977).
There were some good attendance years post-Pele. 1981 was the year the decline in number of teams began (after the 1980 season).
That decline (leading to collapse) traces back to the expansion from 18 to 24 teams, which happened back in 1978. If we go back to that point, attendance was skyrocketing, so there was considerable optimism from investors, but league would've been wiser not to grow at all and instead focus on improving the quality of ownership. Unfortunately, the extra cash from franchise fees was too tempting to resist.
The NASL really never had a chance because they were overeliant on foreign born players thus having a virtually no elite player pool to pick from once the elite players left. You cant make a sport that 99.9999999% didnt even know about and over night make it one of the big 4. It took the NFL quite a few decades to get where it is now. Same with the NBA and NHL.
Clive Toye (who was there and should know) holds the opinion that it was mainly the overexpansion from 18 teams to 24 in 1978 that effectively killed the league. Although that was certainly a factor, I believe other more over-arching beliefs effectively killed the league... IMO, Phil Woosnam and the NASL misjudged the short term benefits of signing Pele and chose to set themselves up for failure by insisting that soccer would be the "Sport of the 80s" in this country... The New York Cosmos became a template for success, rather than the outlier they actually were. At the time, smaller venues were shunned in favor of securing the largest, highest profile stadiums you could find. Didn't matter that your lease terms sucked or that you were drawing less than 10,000 fans per game while playing in a 70,000-seat NFL stadium... all you had to do was hold out for a few years and all those kids playing youth soccer were gonna grow up to be season ticket holders sometime in the 1980's and presto... you too could be averaging 45,000 fans per game just like the Cosmos! And if you're already averaging 30k per game, just add a few more highly-paid, over-the-hill foreign superstars, and you'll be there in no time! The type of ownership attracted by this kind of sales pitch was fickle at best. They weren't in it for the long haul. And when Gulf & Western pulled the plug in 1981, the league dwindled from 21 teams to 14 teams, one less than in 1974.
1974 was a year in which the NASL actually added EIGHT teams after losing two, expanding from 9 teams to 15... the same year an American soccer player from SMU went from obscurity to stardom. Kyle Rote Jr., An Odd Kind of Superstar March 18, 1974 http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20063876,00.html
this NASL failed because there wasn't enough domestic talent to fill the league. It was a league of mercenaries that had no connection to the cities they played in.
As usual, you have oversimplified a complex issue. To answer the original question, the disease seems to have taken hold in late 1977, but didn't really show symptoms until about 1981. The reasons for the decline and fall of the original NASL are many and varied, but include a lack of infrastructure and vision, owners who thought there would be a fast buck in it and who bailed when there wasn't, a sporting public that latched onto the fad but didn't actually make a deep connection and who dropped it just as quickly, and a lot of fly-by-night operators who did more to hurt than they did to help. I also love the guy who says attendance figures are the best indicator (they are one, but not the only) and then chooses a date immediately prior to the league's attendance heyday. The league's legacy was the youth soccer boom that helped produce many of today's stars. For a really nuanced understanding, you kinda had to be there.
They actually DID have a chance. Because Americans couldn't play at that time. We didn't HAVE players. We could not play. At all. I am convinced now there is no topic you won't ( a ) yell about and ( b ) be wrong about.
You said! Those NASL games were the best soccer matches I ever attended! I agree that there weren't any good Americans players from maybe 75-81 but I do believe by 82-84 , they were starting to get better and started holding their own.....
Another thought on the level of play of many North Americans of that time period, I guess you can say the same thing about MLS. I mean players straight out of college currently aren't all that great as college soccer isn't the best option in the world in terms of player development. A lot of times, I think it takes at least 2-3 years of playing experience to learn the pro game. I do believe if those NASL Americans were given more of a chance, they could have developed sooner as there were fine athletes. Werner Roth, Steve Moyers, Kevin Crow, Mike Hunter, Jeff Durgan, Rick Davis, Looking back at the NASL Canadians of the time, many of them were pretty good. Players like Bruce Wilson, Tino Lettieri, Mike Sweeney, the Lenarduzzi brothers, Randy Ragan, Igor Vrablic, and many others were much better than their US counterparts but also because they were given more of an opportunity in league games by Canadian teams and many of those guys went on to form the nucleus of the Canadian national team that made the 1986 World Cup finals.
The percentage of American players in the NASL barely increased from 1974-1984 and Americans (in 1982, at least) accounted for <15% of minutes played. And were it not for the quota system, it likely would have been less than that. Developing the American player simply wasn't a priority. That wasn't what they were about. It's easy to say now that it should have been, and it would have been nice, but the legacy eventually did develop American players. And we tend to romanticize things from our past, so nobody should hold the original NASL up as an example of the game at its finest ever, but it sure was fun and influential in a lot of our lives.
The Americans are much better today and there is no doubt about that. I also agree about all the fun we had. I don't think I ever experienced anything like it. Not even when I lived in Italy, working and watching the Serie A, B & C matches or for that matter, any of the USA World Cup 1994 games including the final I attnded. Of course I was a kid during those NASL times attending games and tailgating and having after game parties with all of my family and friends. Looking back, the nostalgia does in fact come to mind. MLS is a much more organized and structured league. Was it better than the NASL was? The game has definitely changed in the last 30 years. Even top European clubs play at a different level than the great teams of the 80's so its difficult to compare. I'm sure MLS teams today could do well in the old league but still, the skill level of those old players wasn't/isn't the same. For that time anyway, being the first and only American professional soccer league and playing a 5-6 month schedule, it was pretty good tier with great players. Were they here on vacation or was it a retirement league? Not so sure. Again, the Americans were/are much better today but to say that MLS foreigners are or have been better than those NASL guys were, I don't think so. Current QPR man Harry Redknapp who played for the Seattle Sounders in the 70's was asked this same question 2 years ago, I believe when came to San Jose with the Spurs. He was asked if the MLS is/was better than the old NASL was. He said that league had the best players in the world and its a lot different now and difficult to compare. I don't think any of us in MLS have ever seen anyone even close to a Franz Beckenbauer, Chinaglia, Pele, George Best, Johan Cruyff, Gerd Muller, Tefilio Cubillas or a Rodney Marsh in MLS. Even the middle of the road players back then who weren't well known abroad like Steve Zungul, Stan Terlecki, Mike Flannigan, Alan Willey , Alan Merrick , Mike Connell , Steve Wegerle, Karl Heinz-Granitza and Leonard Cuellar were actually very good players and I'm more than sure they could have all played and done very well in the new MLS. To tell the honest truth, I haven't seen anyone in 18 years of MLS play that even comes close to any of those guys and its sad it folded when it did. If USA were to be awarded the 1986 WC, I'm sure the league would have continued and thrived.
Not to turn this into a reminiscence thread, but the caliber of names that dotted the NASL landscape was higher than the caliber that MLS has been able to attract in its history. EVEN THOUGH (except for Trevor Francis) most of those names were 30+ when they got here, they had all, at one point, been among the very best players in the world. The game has changed and the economics have changed. MLS wouldn't have been able to go import comparable players in 1996 (and couldn't do it today), by and large.
Heavens to Metros-Croatia!.... it certainly was alot of fun... I remember going to my first MLS game at Mile High Stadium in Denver and the atmosphere and level of play didn't hold a candle to what I'd experienced in Tulsa. Did anyone bring a book to read? Funny, but I remember looking at similar pics from Spartan Stadium in Kick Magazine way back when (and riding my bike to the corner supermarket to get my copy of Soccer Digest the day it came out!)..... at that time, I thought having the penalty area in red was "so cool." Too bad they couldn't find a bigger stadium to play in...... ;-) Looking at it now, the first thing that catches my eye is how narrow the pitch is; Skelly Stadium had the same problem but it was worse because it had a thin layer of astroturf rather than grass and a really bad "crown." I think of Pele as more "soccer missionary" than actual player... he was traveling across the country spreading the gospel of youth soccer. Before the mid-70s, soccer was confined to smaller pockets of interest in big cities with large ethnic populations or isolated areas where somebody had started a successful college program.... let's see, St Louis, Hartwick, Portland, SMU... there was no way that the US could put out large numbers of quality soccer players in this environment. And the ones who were produced by this "system" (Hermann Trophy winners like Tulsa's Billy Gazonas and Joe Morrone) had their professional growth stunted because they were always relegated to being role players rather than leaders on the pitch... As much as I like to blame Phil Woosnam (RIP) for making bad decisions... everybody has 20/20 hindsight... he rolled the dice and lost... contrary to popular belief, I think his idea for Team America was a pretty good one. I also believe that Howard Samuels could have righted the ship as the NASL's version of Don Garber, but had very little margin for error. I really think if Commish Samuels hadn't died, he could've guided the league back from the brink... And, if memory serves, one of the worst decisions in the history of North American soccer was that of Molson in 1983 to destroy one of the few bright spots the league had after 1980 by turning Le Manic de Montreal into a de facto Team Canada (wouldn't Ottawa or Hamilton have made more sense?)... /rant.
Agreed on Team America. It's easy to call it a stupid idea now, but at the time, again, we could not play on an international level. Our national team needed to play some competition to improve. Of course, we couldn't actually convince players to leave their NASL teams to PLAY for Team America, else it MIGHT have turned out differently. If there had been a carrot to compel players like Perry Van Der Beck and Rick Davis to leave where they were, that experiment might be remembered differently. And the Team Canada thing went over like a bacon burqa, no question.
I also agree that the Team America concept was a good idea at the time. If there weren't divisions among players and if the top American players of that period would have left their clubs, it might have turned into a good idea and who knows, they might have gotten good enough to qualify for the 1986 on their own merit? As I pointed out the in the NYFC thread, there are still a lot of NASL fans leftover who remember the NASL heyday. From 1975 to at least 1984, soccer was on the map and fans were getting pretty educated about the sport as they were watching some of the best soccer players in the world grace NASL fields. San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver at least on the west coast had great fan bases back in those days and those fans were still around in 1990-96 for the MLS start-up so I doubt they will have forgotten the league. That fact that MLS has teams in those towns today are because of the success of those old NASL franchises. Of course folding a professional league didn't help the game and US soccer took 4 steps backwards but it did create a legacy that is still evident and I seriously doubt there will have been an MLS if it wasn't for the NASL. Another problem on why the league collapsed was because there was no organization like MLS has. I also happened to think that Phil Woosnam (God bless his soul) started to believe his own press releases and expanded too much too quickly but he let in too many people he shouldn't have and that also didn't help matters. Letting in corporations like Gulf & Western & Televisa was like basically handing over the folding of those clubs Diplomats and Aztecs, respectively. I'm also sure the sudden death of Howard Samuels didn't help the league either.
I am guessing Woosnam had a mandate from the owners to expand so that expansion fees could cover some losses. Poor planning on everybody's part. The infrastructure, poor TV performance and lack of national team success all played parts as well. Samuels was already captaining a sinking ship. Tote was actually running things at the end and could not save it. The downward slide was obvious. But, man, what a ride.
Don't know why I hadn't noticed this before, but the national team's kits look alot like TA's..... Team America had a pretty good first month to start that season... if they continued that way, made the playoffs, and if Team Canada woulda been in Toronto rather than Montreal?... "If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, oh what a party we'd have."
I also believe another reason for the leagues demise at the time was the conflict between outdoor and indoor soccer and both the NASL and MISL not wanting to work together.