Tag: nasl

Johan Cruyff: the American diaries

Johan Cruyff’s impact on football was far-reaching to say the least. His influence on the game in the Netherlands and Spain has been rightly lauded, and his role in the revolutionary Total…

Teófilo Cubillas: the greatest Peruvian of them all

ON 3 JUNE 1978, Peruvian footballer Teófilo Cubillas broke the hearts of five million Scots with a set-piece of ineffable magic. Moments earlier, Cubillas stood 20-yards away from the Scottish goal, staring…

Why Don Garber went to Zürich

US Soccer’s concept of professional league divisions is a farce and a red herring, because it masks Major League Soccer’s real agenda and intention. • • • • MLS’s real agenda and intention is simple: what…

The Fermi Paradox of American soccer

WHY HASN’T THE UNITED STATES produced a world-class player in the men’s game? That question might as well read like Enrico Fermi’s intergalactic quandary, “Where is everyone?” I imagine physicists and astronomers…

The failed Team America experiment

LONG BEFORE A TEAM OF ANIMATED PUPPETS decided to take on the world under the banner of Team America, a hodgepodge collection of superstars and NASL underlings joined together in 1976 to take…

Janusz Kowalik: the NASL’s first superstar

THE TIME BEFORE PELÉ, CRUYFF AND CHINAGLIA was a barren one for the North American Soccer League, or NASL to you and me. Born in 1968 following a merger between the United Soccer…

How Pelé and the New York Cosmos changed soccer

“The New York Cosmos were the best and worst of American soccer,” Rodney Marsh once said. It’s often rare that one sentence can sum up every argument you want to make; Rodney Marsh does…