Peppe Please Don't Let MLS Have The Cosmos

Billions and billions are the reasons why the Cosmos should not join MLS.

The Rainbow Room shouldn’t sell out to Chilis.   Spago shouldn’t accept a bid from Jack in the Box.  The Russian Tea Room shouldn’t join the Hooters empire.  The Cosmos shouldn’t surrender to MLS.

Cost, Club and Crowd Controls not Cosmopolitan

Rumors abound on the world wide web.

In a related story, cows eat grass.  

Nevertheless, one rumor regularly grabs the attention of American club soccer supporters, and global football fanatics alike:  The one about the New York Cosmos being next in line for resurrection into MLS, after the mock promotions of the Sounders, Timbers, and Whitecaps are completed.

Should the most recognizable crest in the history of American club soccer become a property of MLS?  How could one of the most storied clubs in a century of American soccer sell out to a league that enforces mediocrity in their quest for parity and in order to shield owners from financial risk?  Why would the Cosmos relinquish their name to a league whose supporters use their experience to rationalize the corporate, one-size-fits all model that MLS embraces to avoid the problems that NASL encountered while forcing the same closed, domestic sports model onto our club soccer? 

It would not a metaphoric sell out.  Virtually every MLS club is majority owned by the league.  MLS pays players directly – not clubs.  They control dozens functions of every club.  Their entitlement to first division status is written in indelible ink.  Their overarching power is very real.

In the rest of the soccer universe, clubs are independent.  They set their own spending limits, choose their own players, and their destiny is ultimately controlled by the quality of their play.   That’s the universe the Cosmos need.

The Cosmic Scapegoat for the Bermuda Triangle of Club Soccer

Most clubs are not subjected to the host of controls that MLS applies, because they are not saddled with the closed league structure most noted for success in our more domestic sports.

Yet, ask any staunch supporter of the MLS single entity - and the closed league system in which it is rooted - to defend it.   More often than not, they will cite the Cosmos, and lay the dramatic fall of NASL at their feet.  They will go on at length about how NASL freedoms sank that league by allowing one visionary owner to take his club as far as he and his supporters could take it.   They’ll tell you that Pele, Chinaglia, Beckenbauer, Alberto et al. ran the league into the ground by being so popular.

In fact, NASL got it half right.  Unlike MLS, they allowed clubs to strive for their own destinies.  They didn’t limit any club from the league level.   As a result, the Cosmos drew more fans than the Yankees and the Giants, in Giants Stadium.  The league averaged more TV viewers for regular season matches than the average MLS Cup audience.  Perhaps most importantly, they left a legacy of new clubs, like the Sounders, Timbers, Rowdies, and soccer towns like Rochester. 

The half they got wrong was the part about promotion and relegation, a decision for which they can’t be fully blamed.   American club soccer in the 1970s was vastly different than today.  The American talent pool was razor thin.  One of the two leagues that merged to form NASL actually imported entire clubs from Europe and South America to play a summer season in the states.  The gap between NASL and ASLII, which had been eking out an existence as a semi-pro league since the 1930s, was vast, and there was no sanctioned pyramid.  The inability of our federation to form a pyramid was only the tip of the iceberg.  USSF was still racked by the internal divisions that resulted in the demise of the first ASL.   They played virtually no role in NASL.

Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for the Cosmos, American soccer might not have changed much since the summer of love.  When the league started, American soccer was in a coma.   Soccer fields were few and far between.   Like today, the World Cup was drawing a healthy number of American TV viewers.  Like today, a few NFL owners led the charge to cash in, by pushing the game into their beloved closed model.   Initially, like today, owners banded together to keep in on a tight leash. 

Thank goodness they didn’t institutionalize their anti-competitive behavior in the single entity.  It left the door open for a renegade, and a new dawn in American soccer.

Before Steve Ross took over the reigns at the Cosmos, the league was drawing tiny crowds.   Within five years, the club was the toast of the town, and the most successful club in the long history of American soccer.  NASL had TV contracts.  Youth participation experienced an exponential increase.

Nevertheless, they suffered the same fate as all of their closed league predecessors.  The league developed along the same lines as every preceding effort to jam the game into our local model.  It was separated into haves and have-nots.   The have-nots rotted in the cellar, waiting to fold, or to be purged.   The haves finished in the running every year.  Franchise fees were set low to promote the entrance of new clubs to the league, but this only served to strengthen the stratification. 

Despite the best efforts more conservative NASL owners, the Cosmos left American soccer in far better shape than they found it.  By 1986, soccer had become the most popular youth sport in the USA.  In 1990, we reached the World Cup Final for the first time since a dishwasher combined with the father of a couple of famous NFL kickers to stun England forty years earlier.  Cosmos fans comprised the core of that national team. 

They defibrillated the American professional club game, forty-five years after ASL crashed down in closed league chaos. 

NASL freedoms did not sink American club soccer, they sank American closed league soccer.   The application of our local closed league model defines the Bermuda Triangle of the beautiful game.  A half-dozen leagues of note, and hundreds of clubs, lay under these closed waves.

Closed League Failure Not an Option

Bring on the 1990s.  Alan Rothenberg wrestles the USSF Presidency away from Werner Fricker, and promises a new day for our club game.  In order to placate FIFA demands for hosting the World Cup ’94, while acquiescing to owner demands for a closed league format, he lines up another in a long line of closed soccer leagues bankrolled by owners of other domestic pro sports, along with a couple of new twists.

He would trade away virtually all first division club autonomy in his bid for billion-dollar backing, and at the same time, form a real live divisional pyramid per the FIFA host committee mandates.

On one hand, we finally had the European structure that proved so successful in producing the best clubs, the most passionate supporters, and that took the club game to the ends of the earth.  On the other, Rothenberg immediately gutted it.

He sold off the top to the highest bidder, and allowed them to draw the same arbitrary lines between that suited our domestic leagues, in domestic sports, whose domestic clubs were shielded from real international competition.

Not a proud place for one of the greatest clubs in American soccerhistory.

MLS Relativity

Twenty-seven since the failure of longstanding closed ASL II, and two dozen years since the NASL funeral left just three functioning outdoor professional clubs intact in the USA, things are dramatically different.

Today, we can hold MLS and USSF accountable for keeping our pyramid as closed as Circuit City, and for popularity ratings that pale in when compared to the stature of the game in the USA.

We lead all nations in World Cup ticket sales.   More of us watched the last World Cup than NBA Finals or the World Series.  We have a pyramid.  Still, every single American  club is limited by our unique closed structure and/or the single entity policies that randomize outcomes of matches thru tight controls on their autonomy.   Given the tight regulations, MLS owner entitlements, and clubs marooned in lower divisions, the game is valiantly trying to escape our local box.  Thanks to the pyramid, we still have thirty-four functioning professional outdoor clubs in three top divisions, and a fourth composed of both professional and amateur clubs.

Rare is the American supporter who doesn’t recognize the benefits of the open system in quality of play, and the meritocracy of promotion and relegation.  

Yet the institutional dependence on the closed league is stronger than ever, and heavily fortified by the US sports establishment.  Both our first division and our federation sing from the same hymnal, and the connections between them can be measured in hard dollars.   Like their predecessors, and chain restaurants, and Wal Mart, MLS is designed for bankruptcy, not divestiture into the independent clubs required to join the system that brought club soccer across every kind of geographic, political, and economic border on the planet.

Today, a captive USSF does the bidding of an ownership group for whom profits and protections have always come before performance.  In Seattle, season ticket sales are capped three months before the season begins, with the stadium half open.  Top clubs are prohibited from freely using profits to improve their team.  Supporters are expected to trade limits on club performance, stadium sizes, and even crowds for randomized match outcomes and to be thankful for the mere existence of an American first division.  The President of US Soccer takes a paycheck from an MLS owner.

Clearly, nothing would threaten the American professional sports establishment entitlements more than a successful open league, featuring promotion, relegation and independent clubs, in any sport.  

The Big Bang is Coming

Suffice it to say, the Cosmos did more for American soccer in five years than MLS did in fifteen.  I know you understand all of this, but it bears repeating:  The confined, controlled, and convoluted MLS is not a proper environment for the Cosmos.

Imagine instead a Cosmos on the forefront of a revolution – not one in Foxboro.  See them retain their spot in American soccer culture as the leading edge of the drive towards the open leagues, and unlimited, independent clubs that we deserve.  

Whatever happens, don’t join a league that cannot accommodate Cosmos incredible legacy, or vast potential.