I'm looking at the Kicks kits and I don't ever remember a white one with black sleeves. They were always light blue, white and orange. Gotta love the 70s!!!
What is this NASL of which everyone speaks? (By the way, Washington Diplomat, those NASL stickers pop up like weeds on eBay. Get them all and you get puzzle pictures of Werner Roth holding the championship trophy, Rodney Marsh, and a third player I can't recall.)
Just curious. Who else around here followed the NASL before Pele arrived? ....not that I'm old or anything...
I was, as were many others... What would you like to know about the era when quality soccer was actually played?
Ahhh yes.....that's when men were men. We didn't need no SSS - hell, we didn't need no grass. Just a round ball and a bunch of guys with funny accents and we were good to go. True story: Grew up in Dallas but had to move to Mississippi (apparently to pay for some horrible sin) in my teens. One day I got out my soccer ball; a couple of guys thought it was an ABA basketball.
I started following the league in 1973; Philadelphia got a team that year, so it was actually on the local sports radar.
Wow that is a great site....me grumbles about Pound/Dollar exchange rate....I didn't follow NASL and the NY Cosmos but I saw a documentary about the New York Cosmos recently and it was really good.
What I would like to ask the senior big soccer members. Is it correct that television was handled very poorly by ABC and the league itself?
Depends on who(m) you ask. ABC will tell you that they devoted tons of resources to it, including having Jim McKay call the games, but they also didn't show the 1981 Soccer Bowl live in Chicago, opting instead for a Love Boat re-run. Lee Stern said they were playing games on afternoons in the summer when no one could be expected to watch. Other league types have said that perhaps they should have walked before running. There weren't that many games on, and they weren't on in a regular slot. More info here.
Kenn, I heard all the 20/20 hindsight conventional wisdom telling us that the NASL died because it overexpanded in 1978... does anybody know if ABC applied some pressure on Phil Woosnam and Co. to make sure the league had 24 teams? Just curious.
I've never heard that. The expansion came well before the ABC contract. I think the NASL just got greedy. People saw this new thing and believed Woosnam when he said it was the wave of the future and they got in and found it wasn't and then got out. I am not one for conspiracy theories, mainly. That's the first I've heard of that one. The other one, that baseball conspired to get the NASL out, is another one that's a bit outlandish for me.
So the main reason of the NASL demise was too many businessmen jumping on the bandwagon without having enough money nor knowledge ?
I don't know that there is a "main reason." Patience would have been another virtue in short supply among some of those folks. The quick 1977-78 expansion is often cited as one of the primary reasons, but it's too complicated to bumper sticker.
I think THAT may be as big a reason as there is. I suspect you could go back to many of the decisions made during that time and find they were a result of wanting it all now. Of course, the prevailing attitude with some in the league was that pro soccer was going to be the biggest thing to hit these shores. The infamous, "Soccer is the sport of the 70s" wasn't quite the albatross that it would become. And frankly, if you looked around the league, there were some cities with support that made you think it was possible. Even Howard Cossell once said on some radio sports' program he had, (following a Minnesota game that drew 40K+, if I recall correctly), that if the NASL can draw like that in the middle of the country (I forget his exact wording, but I think he meant outside the major markets) it was here to stay.........oh well.
''Patience would have been another virtue in short supply among some of those folks'' yes, a lot of them surely expected too much too soon, so they had to pull out the plug a few years later But, do you think that the USA without much youth nor college soccer was ready for a BIG professional soccer league? If even MLS was and is still struggling 30 years later, what were the chances of the NASL to succeed?
Infrastructurally, no, there was nothing underneath it. They were skipping the main course and going straight to desert. You sound like someone writing a term paper.
''Infrastructurally, no, there was nothing underneath it'' That was THE main problem to me, almost no youth soccer, amateur soccer, knowledge of the game, SSS, passion nor tradition. If MLS with a serious businessplan in a very different landscape is still losing money, what were the chances of the NASLto succeed ? Could England have a succesfull MLB or Italy a NHL right away? I don t think so neither, when there is almost nothing underneath, it takes at least 20 to 30 years, if not more.
Depends on your notion of "success." If you're just trying to have a league, you can have a league. Hell, the ABA has been in existence since 2000 and it's a complete mess. You can be a cockroach and continue to play games as a league. But if you're trying to compete and be a big-time player of a league, you need something beneath it. The NFL and other major sports of today have decades behind them and infrastructure and, oh, by the way, millions of people who love the game on its own merits as a spectator sport. We have more of that today than we had in the 70s and early 80s, but we're still working on it.
Way more chance of soccer becoming big in the USA than American football ever taking off anywhere else on the planet...(ask NFL Europe for an update)
i like to think of the NASL as a buncha soccer missionaries..... especially in Tulsa where organized recreational soccer had only started a few years before 1978... I saw Pele at a downtown arena before Tulsa got its team... in '78, ManU played and exhibition match in Tulsa but nobody knew who they were (apart from a few of us soccer geeks who were also watching Monty Python, listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall, and getting set for Toby Charles' "Soccer Made in Germany on PBS).... I think cable tv was too young to be an effective venue for the NASL on tv...... ABC was too big so the pressure was too much for them to keep showing games-- unlike today's WNBA and Arena Football...
You NASL fans with old jerseys need to check out http://www.oldfootballshirts.com/en/index.php Anyone can add a picture of any old outdated jersey. If your team isn't listed, you can add the picture and the website owners say they will add a category for your club. IMHO, that Colorado Caribou jersey MUST be added to that site.