I'm sure they all lie. Commisso though isn't a known mafioso though even though he was born in Marina di Gioiosa Ionica, a hotbed for mafiosi. My uncle is an antimafia judge in that town and has to be escorted by guards each night. They put a bomb in his car just but it was fake. They claimed that they put it in there just to scare him. Mamma Mia!
Lol, my hometown (Perugia, Umbria) biggest scandal was probably the Amanda Knox case. People there were rallying against her due to obvious anti-foreigner sentiments even though she was acquitted of any wrongdoing.
Yeah I moved back to California right when all that happened. My God I felt so sorry for that poor girl. She was presumed guilty from the outset. I think there was some kind of screwy sex game involved but I don’t think she killed her or was the she devil the media made her out to be. What a nightmare! Bringing it back to the Cosmos, I think at the same time Giorgio Chinaglia made a pact with the Roman and eastern euro mob bosses to buy Lazio from Lotito. He then couldn’t go back to Italy and sadly never went back because he was a wanted man. Same with former Perugia owner Luciano Gaucci. RIP to both!
If you want to succeed in New York you have to constantly be in people's faces. 25 years is way too long to completely disappear off people's radar. NYCFC's owners are finding this out. The marketing is pretty lame, I don't see any ads that would tempt me to go to a match not that individual matches are even marketed. And the lack of a big name to build the club around just make things worse. The number of people I've met who don't know that NYC has a team, or confuse NYCFC with the Red Bulls is depressing. Maybe the Cosmos would have drawn some more fans but attendances in our first season were fantastic, but any momentum has been lost.
I'd like to see MLS buy up the intellectual property rights to the NASL and license them when able. Creating throwback thirds kits in MLS cities and allowing USL teams in other cities to use the branding. Showing my age here but my first exposure to soccer was when two Rowdies players gave a demo at my elementary school in Orlando back in the 1970s. As a result, I have nothing but love for the old NASL.
You have to be careful about this. The Saputo family has (quite literally) a large white shoe law firm that doggedly pursues anyone who dares to point out that their patriarch, Lino Saputo, was in fact Joe Bonanno's sponsor for Canadian citizenship when he was on the run from the US DoJ. And there's no question that Montreal is a major mafia activity hub, and has been forever. People don't get that Montreal is not a French city it's an Italian one where they speak French. When it all came to light, Saputo claimed that he didn't know Joe Bonnano was head of one of the five NY families, which would have made him the only person in North America who didn't, let alone the only Sicilian. But as I said, anyone publishing these things finds themselves in court so mostly journalists shy away. Bottom line, the Saputos are hooked up from way back. Inside Lino Saputo's secret past dealings with a mafia boss - Enquête - YouTube
Yeah I know them all well. My uncle was the Bonnano family;s lawyer when they live din San Jose and they lived near me in the 70's and early 80's . The youngest girl was in my sisters class at her all girl high school.. I think they are all in Arizona now and basically retired. Rosalie may still be alive but Bill died a while back.
Kind of reminds me of when the New York Mets (speaking of three-ring circuses disguised as sports teams in NYC . . .) tried to play Juan Samuel, a career 2nd basemen, in center field. Let's just say it didn't go well. Someone went up to Samuel and told him he played center field like Willie Mays. Samuel took the bait and thanked the person, who then added, "But remember that Willie Mays is now 56 years old."
Some of those logos were kind of funky. It was the late 70's and it was a time of Peace , Love , Disco and Weirdness. I was just a kid and couldn't enjoy it that much until maybe 77 & 78 but still have fond memories and remember having a lot of fun at Spartan Stadium...
Same thing in the end though. Still grating AF... The sad part of it all is the club could have had enough of a following to be a stable 2nd division club. They just blew through a lot of money unnecessarily and alienated everyone who wasn't a die-hard from day one.
lets say that the 90's in MLS were a little experimental ... but it was also good times, you could know the names on every team and know their team status. Now?, I can only track people on one team barely.
You mean when there were 180 players total in the league? (10 teams x 18 players per roster). But then, MLS teams would only travel with 16 in the game day squad back then. Is there anything that makes a league look more small time than that? At one point, the Hyundai A League was only traveling with 15, which is awful.
That's my biggest issue with the whole thing. They paid large sums of money for guys like Cantona, who I adore but it was only for the PR. Paid to trot Pele around like a show pony. All these old guys, all the billboards and media receptions and on and on. Cost a fortune. Then they said that they decided that $100 million for MLS expansion was just wasting money that they'd rather spend on players, building a world class team. Then they signed cheap guys like poor, sad, Danny Szetela and a host of other MLS rejects. My theory then, and it still stands, was that they should have done what they promised and actually spent a bunch of money on really good players. I mean, how much would you have to spend to pretty much buy the best team in North America? $30 million do it? 40 ? Then you could win USL, win US Open Cup, win CONCACAF and put a ton of pressure on MLS: if the best team in America doesn't play in America's top league, then MLS has some splainin to do. That was always the only way: start beating MLS and force them to the table. But they never tried. They talked a lot about winning Open Cup but showed up every year with a Division II roster. They complained bitterly about not getting in to CCL, at one point even petitioning CONCACAF for a special slot based on their wonderfulness. (As if Sunil Gulati was ever going to let that happen.) You had to beat them on the field. Show that you belonged. But it was cheaper to just hold media luncheons and haul out Pele.
As a high-schooler in the '90s, I'll have you know that the Mutiny logo was badass and I'm sad they're gone. Also, I desperately aspired to Cobi and Alexi's level of hair and accessory perfection. Alas, I have neither the African nor Irish ancestry to pull it off...
The San Jose Clash was a joke! Nike in their infinite wisdom came up with this idea to have them play with a scorpion logo playing in celery colored jerseys? Something to to with Clash of the Titans playing at Spartan Stadium! Whatever....
Oh I agree... it was small time, but good memories nevertheless... nostalgia of course. I was a kid on those days
Personally I've always argued they never had the finances they pretended to have and that was a load of poop that they shoveled out to the masses.
I remember when Cosmos twitter account invoked a MLK quote and compared the civil rights movement to the de-sanctioning of NASL, as if NASL could operate with four teams, two of them eventually folded. They had 8 years to figure it out! Unfortunately, that's not the most inane thing they ever done in their entire revival.
I warned everyone on the NASL boards that the Delta's seemed like a shit show and them folding would be disasterous for the league. Most of the posters here from the area said the team seemed sus and they're "press" was cringe worthy. They certainly were the straw that broke the USSF back with regards to sanctioning.
I knew the Deltas wouldn't last. Not sure why but for whatever reason, San Francisco has never been a hotbed for soccer. For as long as I can remember living in the Bay Area, San Jose was always the main place for soccer. I think the Oakland Clippers and later the Stompers tried for a year or or so but never really lasted more than that...