After 4 years of persecution, Pelé put a pen on a piece of hotel paper to the highest-paid athlete on the planet.
When the world’s largest football player landed in New York in 1975, the team joined a crowd of academics and semi-professionals playing on ground fields filled with glass fragments.
When the New York Cosmos won the 1977 Soccer Bowl, in Brazilian striker Pelé’s last competitive match, he boasted of the World Cup and record crowds, partying with celebrities and having lunch with presidents.
Backed by Warner Communications from media mogul Steve Ross of Warner Bros. and Atlantic Records, the Big Apple Galacticos were treated like rock stars and also behaved like them.
It was an age of champagne in which the franchise, like football, went from one boom to another in a decade.
Cosmos, as expressed by a former public relations guru, a massive aphrodisiac. Now you’re about to start a new bankruptcy in your story.
It took something special to put the North American Football League (NASL) in the spotlight. The ratings figures were so bad after its first season of 1967 that CBS canceled its television contract. Cosmos, founded in 1970, was far from a surname. His maximum significant media exposure was when goalkeeper Shep Messing posed nude in Viva magazine.
“The state of football in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s is pretty pathetic,” Toye, former executive leader of Cosmos, told the BBC World Service in 2015.
“No one was interested and no one knew what footballArray was. The only player in the whole universe that the average American had ever heard of Brazil.”
Toye, the New York Cosmos and the NASL are all Pelé.
A former Daily Express sports reporter, Toye had first met Santos’ striker in 1971, after his third World Cup win with Brazil last summer. Three years later, and Pelé had hung up his boots, he felt a chance.
Juventus and Real Madrid were looking to get the superstar out of retirement, but English pitching piqued Pelé’s interest.
“I said, “Okay, if you go, you can win a championship.” If you come with us, you can win a country,” remember.
Toye sued Pelé Jamaica, Frankfurt, Brussels and Rome. They had lunch in Guaruja and held other meetings in Rio and Sao Paulo. Finally, the 34-year-old football legend passed a medical exam and signed a three-year package that included marketing, public relations rights and a musical contract worth a total of $4 million (about $20 million in existing terms).
The agreement was rejected through U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sent a telegram saying that the attacker’s arrival “would be a great contribution to closer ties between Brazil and the United States in the sports box,” with a similar call coming from Brazil. Minister of Foreign Affairs.
On June 10, 1975, Pelé performed as a Cosmos player at the iconic 21st Club in Manhattan.
Football, or football, little discussed in the media at that time. The name First Cosmos in 1972 had hardly caused a sensation. Now there were a lot of hounds piled up at the press convention to take a look at a star.
“The news can spread that football, however, came to the United States all over the world,” proclaimed “the king,” two hours before its presentation.
Pelé scored on his debut, a 2–2 draw in a friendly against Dallas Tornado on June 15, 1975. A crowd of 21,000 spectators saw Downing Stadium, the Cosmos box on Randall’s Island, where the worn countryside was painted green. for TV cameras.
Five days later, Pelé and Cosmos traveled to Boston. Nearly double the capacity of 12,000 Nickerson Field crowded at the university stadium. Viewers huddled along the band line and set out to see the Brazilian take on the wonderful Portuguese Eusebio, who had signed up for Boston on loan.
With 11 minutes to go, the enthusiasts rushed to the synthetic court to mobilize Pelé. “They invaded him, burying him for several minutes,” john Powers of the Boston Globe wrote.
The star of Cosmos had to be rescued through her bodyguard and carried on a stretcher. Football mania had landed in the United States.
New York was nicknamed “Cosmos Country”, and Pelé’s arrival was not enough to help the franchise succeed in the 1975 play-offs, a record crowd would see him play in other cities.
For Warner’s boss, Ross, it’s a marketing dream. A photographed shot kicking in the White House with President Gerald Ford, globetrotter Cosmos has finished two exhibition tours in seven months and players have enjoyed a five-star trip with all expenses paid.
The effect dominated the arrival of stars in other franchises: George Best joined the Los Angeles Aztecs, partly owned by Elton John, Geoff Hurst moved to Seattle Sounders and Rodney Marsh crossed the Tampa Bay Rowdies.
When he brought it as “the White Pelé,” Marsh jokingly responded: “No, Pelé is known as Rodney Marsh Black.” That earned him a kick from the Brazilian in their first match.
The flamboyant Englishman Marsh and his Tampa teammates had a circular up their sleeve to keep Pelé and her husband Giorgio Chinaglia in silence when they found the semi-finals of the 1976 Conference.
“We had a limousine that greeted them from the plane with two women and two bottles of Chivas Regal,” he said in the documentary “Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos.”
“Twenty-four hours later, or they came to the box with a much worse look for wear.”
Tampa won 3-1. But this first taste of true good fortune is not far away.
The offering came here out of nowhere. Steve Hunt joined education at Aston Villa in November 1976 and learned that the club had accepted an offer for him.
Hunt, then 20, had never heard of Cosmos. When he found out he was doing a pre-season workout with Pelé in Bermuda, it took him 10 seconds to take it.
“Now it sounds a bit like a fairy tale,” Hunt told BBC Sport. “I’ll probably play Preston Reserves this weekend and end up flying to Bermuda.”
The winger, who had married a month earlier, then played away games in Hawaii and Las Vegas. As the age of the houses faded, he moved to New Jersey, away from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, mingling more with the other British and American players in Cosmos.
“I was surprised through the standard,” he says. “I came here to perceive the logo of Cosmos and how global its Array is”
The franchise, playing with Ralph Lauren-designed T-shirts, moved to the newly opened 80,000-seat Giants Stadium for the 1977 season. It’s a completely Americanized delight: Bugs Bunny as a mascot, part-time bands and the Cosmos Girls team.
Warner Supreme Ross would host an endless list of celebrities: Barbara Streisand, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg were all there. Cosmos games have the paparazzi’s dream.
“I compared it to a rock ‘n’ roll football team,” says Hunt, whose highlights come with Rolling Stones leader Mick Jagger and the iconic encounter with Pelé and Muhammad Ali.
“The doors opened in the locker room 10 minutes after a game and the whole entourage came in and you never knew who you were going to see.
“I heard someone scream, “Where’s the English?” I looked around and maybe I saw this guy in a hat. Jagger. He asked me to get informed, it was massive, he congratulated me on the game and all I was looking to do was communicate. about rock and roll! “
The team’s main assembly ranks the 54 world-renowned celebrity studio, but life remains just as frantic on the road. Club secretary Steve Marshall compared Cosmos’s trips abroad to touring with the Stones, while PUBLIC relations guru James Trecker said some of the travelers enjoyed a culture of sex, drugs and alcohol.
“They were a team that knew how. Array knew where and with whom,” he told “Once in a Lifetime.” “There were groupies in the hotel, groupies in the lobby, groupies in the stadium.”
It’s a story that some ex-players of the e-book ‘Rock’ n’ Roll Soccer” are contested. Bob Iarusci called the film absurd, while Charlie Mitchell said he didn’t know that”we could get into any New York nightclub “like the Jets. , Giants or Yankees.
After a stuttering start to the 1977 season, the stars covered Cosmos, which invested in two World Cup champions: Brazilian captain Carlos Alberto and German legend Franz Beckenbauer.
“Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto took us to the level,” Hunt recalls.
“It’s not just the aspect of football, it’s the way they behave and have time for people. I enjoyed your company as much as I enjoyed betting with them.
“Beckenbauer had that elegance in him, he was very fluid and that’s how he’s off the field, just a great guy, a team member.”
But it was an energetic and larger former Italian alien than life growing up in Cardiff that made Cosmos vibrate.
Giorgio Chinaglia as prolific as it is problematic. He scored 193 goals in 213 games for Cosmos, making him the all-time NASL’s all-time scorer. He’s had almost the same number of fights with his teammates.
“I had a fight with him in a month,” Hunt says, laughing. “I lazy it so he gave me one and we tried it.
“You play with those other people, so you have to correct the nice things, we discussed it and it was that I was there to give you opportunities to score. I had to, so we did well.”
There was a notable change in the locker room with Pelé, Chinaglia would have made him cry after insisting more for the Brazilian to pass.
“Giorgio is a player,” Beckenbauer told the New York Times. “But he has no career as a diplomat.”
Hunt said Chinaglia “expressed his brain and isn’t afraid of people disappointed,” adding, “But he was the most sensible scorer I played with. Your penalty kick rate is ridiculous. He’s exceptionally good.”
While Pelé is prosecuted around the world, Chinaglia’s signature is almost exactly the opposite.
Born in Tuscany, Chinaglia moved to Cardiff with his circle of relatives as a child and began his career in Swansea, before returning to Italy for military service and signing for Lazio.
When he broke into Clive Toye while on vacation in the United States in 1975, Chinaglia had sent Lazio back to Serie A as the division’s most sensible goalscorer and won 14 international matches.
According to Toye, the Italian, whose wife Connie American, said he was looking to make a signal for Cosmos or that he would simply buy his own franchise.
He temporarily left his mark. He adored through Cosmos owner Ross, who accompanied him to Frank Sinatra’s birthday party, but not through Chief Gordon Bradley, who fired in season 77 with Chinaglia influencing the appointment of his successor. Toye, someone else to face the impetuous striker, is gone, too.
“Sometimes I didn’t like it, but I don’t care. If you don’t have an epass in life, especially in sport, you probably won’t go far,” said Chinaglia, who commissioned two portraits of himself through The American Impressionist. LeRoy Neiman as if to emphasize this point. In one, he puts on a silk robe in Cosmos’s dressing room.
In the normal 1977 season, Chinaglia scored 15 goals for Cosmos to triumph in the play-offs.
He scored another, and Pelé dos, in a 3-0 win over Tampa Bay, before a hat-trick forward from Gordon Banks in an 8-3 win over the Fort Lauderdale Strikers against a NASL record of 77691 enthusiasts at Giants Stadium. Training
His total of nine play-off goals, along with five for Pelé and 4 for Hunt, made Cosmos triumph in the Soccer Bowl, where they would face the Seattle Sounders in Portland in what would be Pelé’s last professional match on August 28, 1977. . Training
“This season is true to Pelé,” Hunt says. “I had to go out myself because I’m a new guy from Birmingham, England, and they didn’t know me. I was tasked with settling there.
“We wanted to get it right and when we got to the final, it was the motivation: for Pelé to come out on a smart note.”
This new Birmingham boy played his component in a feature that earned him the Soccer Bowl Most Valuable Player award.
The long-haired winger hit Seattle goalkeeper Tony Chursky to sneak into an empty net for the inaugural game and aired through Pelé and Chinaglia to celebrate.
English striker Tommy Ord drew shortly thereafter, but, in the 81st minute, Hunt won a Pass from Pelé from the left, pitched a centre and ruthless Chinaglia topped the winning goal.
“Give Steve Hunt the credits for the party,” Chinaglia later told reporters. “That ball you gave me is beautiful. I just jumped in and pointed in.”
As the champagne flowed through the locker room, Pelé searched through the reporters.
“After 3 World Cups, now that,” he said. “I can prevent now, as a champion, I can die now. They gave me everything I wanted in my life in football.”
A month later, after a two-week tour of Japan and China, Pelé played his last match, a testimony broadcast around the world opposed to the other club he has represented, Santos.
He played a role for all the teams as the rain fell at Giants Stadium, which led a Brazilian newspaper to report, “Even the sky crying.”
This time, the ultimate iconic figure in football had retired forever. He’s about to turn 37.
Time would also soon run out for NASL, despite its tender years.
Without Pelé, Cosmos again won the Soccer Bowl the following season in 1978. They won it in 1980, then once in 1982 to win four championships in six seasons.
“It’s an adventure,” Beckenbauer said in “Once in a Lifetime.” “It’s like an explosion. It’s like a family, it’s fantastic, a delight I’ll never forget.”
Hunt joined Coventry City after the good luck of 78, before betting alongside Johan Cruyff when the Great Dutchman joined Cosmos for an exhibition, but returned on loan for the 1982 season.
“I’m disappointed, ” said Hunt. “The franchises had closed, the news started and it was maintained.”
The Cosmos still had stars in Chinaglia and Dutch legend Johan Neeskens, but the number of spectators had begun to decline. The NASL dropped dramatically.
Overexpansion, mismanagement, and groups that spend generous sums on an effort to adhere to Cosmos began to affect. Most franchises had hemorrhagic cash.
Cosmos had been a futile task for Ross, and in 1984, after Warner’s finances were affected by the collapse of Atari, a video game console company in which he had invested, he sold the majority stake in Chinaglia.
That year, the league collapsed. Cosmos continued to play in the Major Indoor Soccer League, but retired in February 1985. In June, the dream officially ended.
However, 35 years later and after several fake leaves, adding a legal war with Eric Cantona, the New York Cosmos revived.
Away from the glamour of its predecessors, he is expected to play at the Independent National Football Association, the third-tier American equivalent, in August.
It has been a decade since Pelé first announced the return of Cosmos and harbored ambitions to play in Major League Soccer (MLS). The club never ceased to exist entirely, moving away from the highlights with its series of youth camps.
Nevertheless, they reappeared in the reformed North American Second Level Football League in 2013, attracting former Spanish star Raúl, winning 3 league titles and hiring Cantona as the club’s football director: the Frenchman was sacked after hitting. photographer in 2014 and sued the club for unpaid wages.
Several obstacles meant that a change had never been made to the MLS, and this is a case of déja vu for the NASL.
The league disbanded after the 2017 season, leaving Cosmos ‘paused’. That’s so far, after joining NISA for the fall 2020 season of the competition.
They will be modest reboots for a club that was once idolised around the world and the possibility of competing in the MLS remains remote, the organization hesitates to raise a third New York franchise, after the New York Red Bulls and New York City FC, to their list.
But the Cosmos logo and legend endure.