Why Football Failed in America

[Music] [Applause] I believe in soccer in America I come to play here because I know in few years we have a good team in America football in North America has been steadily improved improving over the past few years but for such a wealthy and sports orientated Country Have you ever wondered why many in the world sporting and Commercial capital of the world haven't really cared that much about the most popular sport in the world there have been several attempts to drum up interest in several ways and what better way is there to get people's attention

than to rely on the star power of star players zatan Ibrahimovic moved over to Ali Galaxy in 2018 made a lot of noise scored a belter on his debut and dipped 11 years before that in 2007 David Beckham came in great player great career star power brand awareness we know the deal he even ended up becoming an owner of a club and it was that same Club where the great man himself lonel Messi entered the game he took his talents down to South Beach in 2023 and he's even gone on to start up a budding

career in Hollywood bad Bo it seems these efforts are a bit of a work in progress leaning on star power is nothing new these methods are well Antiquated while Messi made a big splash when that deal was announced perhaps no other player has had quite the same impact on football in both north south all of America as the greatest player in World Cup history Pelle although in his case the location was New York and the year was 1975 the impact Pelle had on the sports in America was tremendous for all the right reasons and and

all the wrong ones albeit indirectly he contributed heavily towards its downfall now he didn't exactly do anything wrong because of him football was on the cusp of truly hitting the mainstream sadly his presence led to a domino effect of bad decisions that are still very much affecting the game today so today we're going to talk about Pelle we're going to talk about the meteoric rise and the historic fall of football in the United States of America hello hope you're well I'm well too thanks for asking what better place is there to start than the very

beginning our story starts all the way back in 1967 just to avoid confusion I'm going to have to refer to the sport as soccer for quite a bit of this one all the purists out there you're going to have to forgive me I don't want to do this I have to I don't want to confuse football with hand egg soccer in America was nothing to be impressed by by this point in history leagues had been around stretching back to the late 1800s but this was nothing to write home about however after millions of Americans had

tuned in to watch the 1966 World Cup proving that there was tangible interest in the sport an opportunity had presented itself to a group of investors following a few failed attempts at establishing a nationwide League a few failed franchises and a lot of money lost along the way on the 7th of December 1967 the two most prominent leagues in the country joined forces the national professional soccer league or npsl and the United States Soccer Association or USA no that wasn't a joke merged to make way for the nasl the North American soccer league things that

start out great there was a lot wrong with the league early on in an attempt to Kickstart the professional scene they were going for several foreign players were brought in pretty much immediately by the end of the first season there were only thir American born players across the 17 teams foreign players were pretty much running the show oh uh sorry about that that's that's the wrong logo anyway in this scenario local fans found it difficult to identify with players of foreign backgrounds which didn't help with drumming up interest low ticket sales coupled with low TV

viewership and the inability to appropriately show adverts mid game much like in other American Sports meant that several teams went out of business within less than a year seriously apparently commercials were overlaid onto the screen while the ball was in play you see guys YouTube did not do it first I joke but off the bat things weren't looking good for the nasl there was a slow start but big things were on the horizon and the first big thing was truly massive somehow the boys over at New York Cosmos had convinced the most famous player to

ever step foot on a pitch to sign for them in 1975 Pelle initially there were a lot of questions being asked this was a peculiar move for a few reasons first off Pelle had retired from professional football a year prior he turned down offers from Giants in the game such as Juventus and Real Madrid to hang up his boots second of all nobody outside of America had ever even heard of the club he was going to play for and third of all America really people have been trying to drag this guy out of Brazil for

Years yet he goes to the country whose professional League was only 7 years old at this point Strange however upon realization that according to the New York Times he was paid $4.7 million to play for them over a three-year period things began to make sense the media Behemoth Warner Communications and more specifically their CEO Steve Ross were responsible for founding and funding the cosmos naturally they and more specifically he were the cult culprits behind bringing Pelle to North America and if you're even half familiar with the Warner name at all you already know that they

had the cash to make it happen another thing to remember is that despite the fact that he was a three-time World Cup champion had countless individual and team Awards to his name and was almost unanimously thought of as the goat at that time footballers were doing okay but they weren't earning crazy money in this contract he was set to earn more money than he had ever earned in his previous two decades of football but money wasn't the only hurdle that needed to be jumped to secure this man it's hard to fully paint a picture of

how globally recognized Pelle was in the 70s no Instagram no Facebook no Sigma edits TV radio and print media reigned Supreme and Pelle had been dominating those bases for almost two decades he was a superstar in every sense of the word and in Brazil a national treasure the Brazilian government had no intention of allowing most famous and recognized person to work outside of the country he was the ultimate Ambassador so since he was 21 he was effectively barred from leaving even after he retired getting him to move to North America for a lost dance proved

difficult US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a man who happened to be a massive Pelle fan had to convince them that this transfer would be an important strategic political move to strengthen ties with Brazil and the US in order to let him go this was was a robust operation but a necessary one for the nasl and the cosmos Pelle gave the league The credibility that it had been craving from the start he essentially forced everyone to take the nasl seriously before Pelle arrived according to awardwinning sports writer Gavin nsam soccer in the United States was

dying a slow painful and largely unnoticed death he went on to say that soccer according to an unnamed writer at the time was just a game played by commies and fairies in short pants which is one of the strangest sentences I've read out loud you can tell that it was said decades ago in any case when Pelle stepped in even though the vast majority of Americans were not interested in soccer in the slightest there was a massive celebrity culture and such the vast amount of Americans had very much heard of Pelle again this guy was

a mythical Beast to the general public everyone needed to see him alive to confirm all the story they heard the result America's interest in soccer surged overnight and what followed was undoubtedly the most iconic period for the sport in the country's history the season before Pelle signed cosmos had finished bottom of their Regional division with a record of four wins two draws and 14 losses a 25% win rates when my man arrived third out of five 45% win rates but they were improved M and the silverware would soon come but it's not like any of

that really mattered What mattered what really mattered when it came to this whole project wasn't about what was going on on the pitch soccer was the Talk of the Town again to quote Gavin Nan the impact of Pelle signing was seismic before they had given away tickets with Burger King vouchers and bumper stickers now they had to lock the gates before the ground reached its capacity the cosmos's average attendance per match per season went from about 3,600 1974 the year before Pelle arrived to just under 48,000 by 1978 this is what we call the Pelle

effect and the man still had it too 31 goals and 56 appearances in the league over his three-year tenure was a great return in all honesty as was an nasl MVP award in 1976 so it should come as no surprise that after Pelle several other star players came pouring through most notably Italian Striker xoio chinaglia from latio who was one of the best strikers in the world at that point and France beckenbauer who was France beckenbauer and all of a sudden the winds came pouring in a star sted team that were actually performing to their

potential this is something we can all get behind these guys were winning all of the fans they were essentially rockstars you know how celebrities are always spotted courtside at NBA games well when it came to the Cosmos it was no different everyone wanted a piece of them even actual rock stars you already know Drake would have been there had he been around at the time instead he had to settle for supporting um moving along this time around the fact that many of the players were foreign was actually seen as a badge of honor as opposed

to how foreign players were perceived only a few short years prior we transcended everything every culture every socioecon IC boundary we were International we were European we were cool we were Americans from the Bronx we were everything to everybody the words of Shep Messing the cosmos goalkeeper at the time and in 1977 they finally went all the way New York Cosmos with the soccer ball Champions yes I said soccer ball don't laugh but it's a perfectly normal name said don't laugh anyway times were good until they went the 1977 win was a fantastic victory for

the cosmos they had finally lived up to the hype and weren't done just yet I say this because they went on to win the top division title three more times in the next 5 years however the 77 season was also the last season in pelle's three-year contract for the second and final time the great man hung up his boots and it was a pretty sad day when it happened Pelle closed out his career in a friendly match between Santos and the New York Cosmos the only two Club teams he ever played for in his career

in the second half it started raining and so the very next day a popular Brazilian newspaper printed out that even the sky was crying but there was more misery to come because unfortunately for the nasl almost all of the interest and momentum that the cosmos had built up in the 3 years prior much like Pelle disa appeared not immediately though earlier we took a look at the average season attendance for the New York Cosmos before and after Pelle joined it's not bad as is expected when you're reigning Champions coincidentally this is also a chart of

the increase in plastic in New York anyway below is a chart of the cosmos attendance in the Years following pelle's departure this is what we call the Pelle effect to be real pelle's departure and the League's lack of a star man obvious ly contributed to its downfall however there were a whole host of other reasons for why the walls came tumbling down in short the fall of the nasl can be broken down into four main categories too much hype too much spending not enough regulation and a blatant disregard for the traditions of the game too

much hype the nasl was growing at an incomprehensible rate in the second half of the 70s TV deal sales were being agreed stadiums were being packed and the promise of a growing monetizable audience was becoming very very real jackpot said almost everyone whose money was already tied in the league everyone had seen what Cosmos did in signing Pelle and decided that this model was a winner Johan C Georgie best Carlos Alberto and a whole host of other players were signed by other clubs in an attempt to get their piece of the pie and the League's

commissioner Phil wam aggressively increased the amount of te teams in the league from 18 to 24 in 1977 to reach as many markets and demographics as possible well instead of expanding they probably should have been examining the popularity and performances of the teams already in the league you know a minor detail the average attendance for the cosmos in 1978 was the highest of any team in nasl history like I said roughly 48,000 it's good stuff but the average attendance for the remainder of the League not counting Cosmos was less than a quarter of that about

11,000 and ironically attendance and ticket sales didn't matter all too much to Cosmos they were backed by Warner Communications so they had an unlimited amount of money they could burn through without remorse the rest of the pack that did need those gate receipts did not too much too fast which brings us to point2 too much spending to quote the San Diego soccer owner great team named Jack Daly directly it became fashionable to chase the cosmos everyone had to have a p coaches went around the world on Talent searches forcing the prices up and to make

matters worse not only were the majority of the foreign players brought in in their Twilight of their careers but new regulations advocating for more North American players to feature in each team meant local talent became increasingly expensive again to quote daily our hype tried to present the nasl as a new NFL when we weren't ready to add insult to injury on average 40% of an NFL team's budget went towards wages for the average nasl team at the time that figure was over 70% too much too fast which brings us to number three not enough regulation

the owners of the new clubs that were being brought into the league were not subject to any form of formal vetting at all many of them were the Silicon Valley millionaire type likely never seen a match in their life spending was frivolous unguided and had dire consequences in the 1981 season alone it's been reported that every single team made a loss a total of roughly $30 million is the figure that's being quoted a tremendous sum of money in 2024 a gargantuan amount of money in the early 80s the salary cap was introduced at the onset

of the 1984 season but at that point it was too little too late we spent too much money trying to Market teams as if they were instant Big League franchises before the attendance and money Justified it Chicago's sting owner Lee Stern too much too fast and finally number four disregarding traditions a big reason why the nasl is not remembered too fondly especially by purists is its inconsistency in rule making and alteration of long-standing football Traditions the majority of American Sports are highs scoring affairs so soccer was a deviation from the norm that the decision makers

of the nasl felt was a crutch to minimize offsides calls a rule was put in place that stated that instead of using the halfway line as the point where no off sides could be called a line 35 yards from each goal was the new cut off the clock counted down instead of up like many other North American Sports to prevent draws penalty shoot Tarts were added for all games that ended in a tie the number of points awarded to teams for wins buried considerably season after season the teams were even awarded extra points for goals

scored up to a Max of three points this was all very wild from a fan perspective I fully understand why people were clocking out the NBA the NFL MLB have all gone through rule changes as time went by but they were all rooted in their own unique identity from what it seems the nasl was never sure who or what it really was constantly trying to change the rules and do anything to get eyeballs on its product all signs pointed towards complete collapse drained demoralized and broke team after team closed operations and by 1984 the nasl

was no more the nasl should always act as a cautionary tale for any and every ambitious organization in the world sporting or otherwise be wary of exponential growth because sometimes it really is too good to be true after hearing all of that it's hard not to kind of drift off and imagine what things would have been like if the Pelle signing was simply used as a springboard and the league found a way to grow in a sustainable fashion without the Reckless spending based on how large the general American sporting scene is in today's day and

age I can say with no doubt whatsoever that America would be a superpower the superpower and the irony and all of this corroborating what I just said is that soccer was actually getting popular in the states and millions of children and adults were really getting into it schools were starting to play it more and more adoption was on the way there was clearly an appetite for the game this was on display during the 1994 World Cup which was hosted in the US to great success This World Cup proved just how much local interest there was

in the sport and helped pave the way towards the formation of the MLS however taking all of that into consideration ation for the sake of completion if we're being fair we do have to give credit where credit is due for all the rule changes and inconsistencies we have the nasl to thank for a few very prominent aspects of the sport to make players easier to identify they are credited with being the first to print player names on shirts they were also credited with being the first to do away with the back pass rule whereby goalkeepers

could pick up back passes and the strict salary cap on players that that keeps MLS Club spending in check was likely heavily inspired by the nasl anyway after all of that I would like you guys to walk away from this video with this one very important message this entire video and all my blabbering is just to say that P was 100% to blame for all of this and he categorically ruined football in America I'm kidding of course or am I anyway there we have it that's all for me today hope you guys enjoyed hope you're

having a great day cheers and I will catch you in the next one [Music]