Johan Cruyff's diplomatic mission to the North American Soccer League
The Dutch master helped to take football to America and he had opinions. Of course he did.
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Johan Cruyff's diplomatic mission to the North American Soccer League
Growing up as a football supporter in England in the early nineties is something I consider a genuine privilege. Nestled in between the last knockings of the First Division and the Premier League’s accelerated development through the middle of the decade, it was a time of the new replacing the old.
I’m thankful that I was able to experience the way English football used to be and that I was young enough to exist primarily in the game’s modern era. Living through both feels special. Supporters of my age were very lucky and are nicely positioned to confirm that, yes, the nineties really did change everything.
One of the many curiosities of that time was what I remember as a fairly common fascination with the North American Soccer League (NASL). Before the United States of America hosted the World Cup in 1994 and subsequently launched the requisite domestic league in 1996, one might have expected the USA’s soccer stock to have been quite low internationally.
Not so. The fact that the NASL was less than a decade dead and foreign football was still so inaccessible as to be considered exotic meant that nerdy football kids like me grew up on the idea that the New York Cosmos were kind of a big deal.
Seduced by a surface-level and somewhat cartoonish impression of the NASL from books and video clips, the game in America seemed to be almost celestial in its glamour – the ultimate football razzle dazzle.
This was star-spangled soccer so ludicrously extravagant that Pelé was its figurehead. Pelé!
In truth, I was reading books that were published a few years earlier and probably didn’t even realise that he was now in his early fifties and an alumnus of a league that had burned out by the time I was born. But I shared a planet with the glitzy North American Soccer League, if only for a moment.
Pelé was the NASL’s most important acquisition, its biggest star and arguably its greatest player. He wasn’t its only global football icon.
By May 1979, 32-year-old Johan Cruyff had already given football a full career. The Dutch master was regarded as one of the greatest ever players and had the silverware to prove it. In the early seventies he won three consecutive European Cups and he went on to rack up six Eredivisie titles with Ajax before adding another league title with Barcelona in 1974.
Cruyff had almost won the World Cup as part of a revolutionary Netherlands team in which he was a leader and on-field tactician as much as a player. He wore an adidas shirt with only two stripes and, late in 1977 and aged just 30, retired from international football at the age of 30. He later cited quite reasonable family reasons for not going to the 1978 World Cup.
He extended his retirement to club football in 1978, handing in his badge and gun at Barcelona as a three-time Ballon d’Or winner, a serial champion, and a man whose supreme self-importance was outweighed by otherworldly ability and an already well established reputation as a great thinker of the game.
Then he unretired.
Cruyff’s move to the United States was motivated by financial need but he saw his signing with the NASL as an ambassadorial mission for football.
Pelé had retired but Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckenbauer were still playing for the Cosmos. World Cup winners Gerd Müller and Alan Ball were playing in the league, as were Eusébio and Cruyff’s international team-mate Johan Neeskens.
The Cosmos being the Cosmos, the possibility of Cruyff joining Beckenbauer on a loaded roster that also boasted spicy NASL goal machine Giorgio Chinaglia was given due consideration.
“After Pelé, most teams wanted at least one [superstar],” reported Ian Plenderleith in Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer, his excellent 2014 history of the North American Soccer League.
“The Cosmos wanted several, and only pushed Johan Cruyff – who had appeared for them in exhibition matches – towards LA because they realised the need to spread the talent around a little bit in order to prevent their complete dominance.”
Those exhibition matches were significant. Cruyff’s version of events in My Turn is that he played for the Cosmos once and decided there and then that AstroTurf was not for him. There was a conversation rather than negotiations with the Cosmos – who also owned his NASL registration in the event that he came out of retirement – and Cruyff opted to go elsewhere, though he did later acknowledge that the already successful Cosmos didn’t need his pull.
No, California was a much better fit. The Los Angeles Aztecs played on grass at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. If the playing surface was easier on the feet and the knees, the fact that Cruyff’s friend and mentor, Rinus Michels, had just been brought in as the team’s coach helped tipped the balance. A yearly salary of $750,000 probably didn’t hurt either.
The NASL’s 1979 season started with a bitter labour dispute and ended with a Vancouver Whitecaps win over Rodney Marsh and the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the showpiece Soccer Bowl ‘79. Ball was one of eight Englishmen who played under Southport-born Tony Waiters for the Whitecaps. Trevor Whymark scored both goals as they became NASL champions for the first time.
Cruyff boosted attendances at the Rose Bowl and was recognised for his impact on the pitch in his single season. He scored 13 goals and tallied 16 assists in his 23 appearances. As the league’s MVP he took his place in a trio of attackers in the All-Star list along with Chinaglia and Detroit Express striker Trevor Francis.
But the Aztecs fell to the Whitecaps in the play-offs, having finished behind them in the National Conference West Division in the regular season. They were the eighth best team in the NASL in the overall standings and defeated the Washington Diplomats in the National Conference quarter-final before the Caps saw them off in the next round.
No sooner had Cruyff seen off the Diplomats than he was playing for them. Recent developments in collective bargaining have diminished the ability of clubs in the American game to move players around without will or warning but Cruyff experienced the same sudden change of team as any other player traded within the NASL after the 1979 season.
The Washington club was newly owned by the Madison Square Garden (MSG) Corporation under president Sonny Werblin, who oversaw the transition of the NFL also-ran New York Titans into the Superbowl-winning New York Jets in the sixties. Cruyff benefited from their affluence, agreeing to a three-year deal worth $1.5m.
“[The new Mexican owners of the Aztecs] wanted to turn it into a Latin American enclave, so I didn’t fit with their vision for the club,” wrote Cruyff in his autobiography. “The owner of the Washington Diplomats came knocking and, almost immediately, I was sold on.”
“I’d made no transfer request, nor been asked if I wanted to leave, or where I wanted to go…I had no contract with the club, just with the NASL.”
The Diplomats coach was Gordon Bradley, a Wearsider who moved from Carlisle United to Canada in the early sixties and became a United States international. Bradley was still playing when he became the first head coach of the New York Cosmos, where he remained – notwithstanding the small matter of being fired in the middle – until leaving for the Dips in 1978.
Bradley moved to DC as a two-time NASL winner but that don’t impress Cruyff much. The player’s notoriety as a troublesome charge and tricky team-mate had crossed the Atlantic with him and flourished on the Pacific coast. Now, in the capital, his lack of regard for Bradley was unhelpful.
Carmine Marcantonio, who played in the Diplomats midfield against and then with Cruyff, told Plenderleith that, “Johan…at the time, he wasn’t a great friend of British football. So with a British coach, Gordon Bradley, and a British assistant coach in Joe Mallett, it was a clash of tactics.”
If you clashed with Johan Cruyff on tactics, you clashed with Johan Cruyff in life. While the player himself seemed to harbour no enduring disrespect for Bradley, the atmosphere in the dressing room was laden with tension.
Cruyff wasn’t altogether adored by his colleagues, some of whom were “pissed off” by him according to defender Don Droege. Bob Iarusci believed the Diplomats should have won the Soccer Bowl in 1979, telling Plenderleith that they “didn’t have any pricks or problem players.” Cruyff was traded there in February 1980.
Cruyff wasn’t quite at his best on the pitch either, frustrated and stifled by playing out wide and rarely unwilling to throw around the full weight of his opinion on the matter. After intervention from the team’s management and peace-making by Mallett, matters were resolved. Cruyff moved into the middle of the pitch, the Diplomats’ tactics came into alignment and Cruyff anchored their improved fortunes.
The Diplomats finished second in the National Conference Eastern Division behind the Cosmos and lost to the Aztecs in the Conference quarter-final. Cruyff was an All-Star again but his American mission was in its last days. The Cosmos went on to win the Soccer Bowl and Cruyff left for Spain and Levante, returning to the USA to make a handful of appearances for the Dips in 1981 after falling out with club officials in Valencia.
The Diplomats missed out on the play-offs entirely in 1981 and Cruyff moved back to the Netherlands. Despite the dressing room drama and relative lack of achievement on the field, Cruyff regarded his time in DC as a key period in his professional development as well as the origin of what became the Johan Cruyff Foundation.
“I had two fantastic years there,” he said in My Turn. “Washington is unique. Everyone who goes there is only passing through, and no one I met seemed to have been born there. And everything there is politics.”
Quite why the city appealed to football’s arch politician is anybody’s guess, but the man whose influence on Cruyff would last the longest was Andy Dolich, the Diplomats’ General Manager, about whom Cruyff spoke in consistently glowing terms.
Cruyff admired Dolich’s running of the club, specifically referencing his understanding of the dynamics and performance implications of players with differing levels of wealth sharing a dressing room.
When he moved to California, Cruyff saw himself as an advocate for the sport within America – a role he sought to fulfil by presenting a television show covering the basics for new fans of football – and indeed for the NASL itself.
FIFA’s railing against the NASL’s adaptation of the laws of the game fell on deaf ears at the league’s headquarters and Cruyff was no stick-in-the-mud when it came to innovation. He expressed his desire for the rest of the world to adopt the NASL’s NHL-style shoot-outs over penalties.
But the demise of the NASL was already in motion and the shoot-out would disappear with it at the end of the 1984 season.
MSG were losing money on the Dips hand over fist and the team had in fact folded in 1980; Cruyff’s few appearances for the Diplomats in 1981 were for the relocated Detroit Express and that version of the Diplomats folded in turn after one season.
The league was falling apart at the seams. The Aztecs folded in 1982 after moving out of the Rose Bowl. The league limped through 1983 and 1984 with the deluge of teams dropping out growing ever larger. The Cosmos withdrew prior to the 1985 season, for which only the Toronto Blizzard and Minnesota Strikers were signed up when the NASL was spiked before a ball was kicked.
Cruyff was back in Europe, winning the Eredivisie with Ajax and Feyenoord three years in a row and sowing his strength of conviction far and wide before winning everything all over again as the head coach of Ajax and Barcelona. His famous coaching career extended into backroom roles too, officially or otherwise, and his input as a technical director was a natural purpose for a Michels acolyte with an ego and the chops to back it up.
His mission to the United States was not in vain. Though Cruyff’s time in the NASL was brief and coincided with the cracks in the edifice becoming irreparable, the league’s legacy was bigger than the superficial flashing lights and disco balls of my childish imagination.
High school soccer experienced a significant growth in participation in the last decade of the NASL, laying the foundations for an even bigger increase around the 1994 World Cup and launch of Major League Soccer. In 1997, the year of the second MLS season, around half of soccer participants in the USA were between the ages of 6 and 11.
In total, US Youth Soccer participation rose from 100,000 players in 1976 to almost 2,000,000 in 1989.
Cruyff might have been a forthright and occasionally difficult character but his love and sense of responsibility for football were always beyond question. Being a part of that growth was a pioneering act and, hopefully, one that gave him a great deal of satisfaction.
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Loved this or anything about him, Johan Cruyff is the greatest player & thinker in the game ever, as incredible player as he was his ideas on the game are still being seen today, any arguments about his ego are diminished by the facts that he was pretty much consistently correct about the game, development & tactics today.