What ISL should learn from the tale of New York Cosmos

Now that the dust has settled on two seasons of the ISL, the time is right to make an initial assessment of its impact on football viewership and sustainable football development in India. As far as football viewership goes, the verdict is resoundingly positive. IMG and AIFF pulled out all the stops for the competition, taking care of everything from extensive TV coverage and gilded star names to a viewer-friendly format and generous sprinklings of Bollywood and cricket. This confluence of hype, talent, and visibility went down well with Indian crowds, with many franchises already garnering a loyal fan following and domestic football being talked about with a ferocity and loudness hitherto never seen in the country.

Twin Sleeping Giants

In comparison, India seems positively football-crazed. Although the I-League has paltry crowds and minimal television presence, there are notable exceptions (The teams from Bengal and Bengaluru FC to name a few) where hordes of supporters get behind the teams. In addition, the English Premier League broadcasting explosion in the subcontinent over the past decade has left in its wake millions of fervent fans who swear by Manchester devils and Liverbirds. Although the ISL has done a fine job in bringing a successful franchise-based football tournament to India, its feat is dwarfed by what Steve Ross did for North American soccer.

Benevolent Moguls

Closer to the here and now, IMG has played an even more pivotal role by practically setting up the entire ISL in collaboration with the AIFF and Star Sports. Bankrolled by business magnate Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, IMG is responsible for the sponsorship, advertising, broadcasting, merchandising, and franchising of the ISL. Cynics murmur about sports and entertainment companies being good havens to convert black money into white, but regardless of these extraneous objectives, it can’t be denied that IMG’s ownership and proactivity have played a large part in ISL’s strong showings so far.

(Also Read: An open letter to Nita Ambani from an Indian football fan)

Although the NASL and the New York Cosmos were trudging along, hardly anybody in the USA knew or cared. Reporters hardly visited any soccer games, and the only mention the Cosmos got in the papers till 1974 was a full page nude spread of their goalkeeper Shep Messing in an adult magazine. 1974 is when things changed for good.

Pelé – worldwide soccer sensation, multiple time World Cup winner, Brazilian national treasure – had just retired from his lifelong club Santos. The Cosmos had already tried to sign him in 1970 after seeing him at the World Cup, but to no avail. They weren’t going to miss this second chance. Might and muscle – both financial through the monetary prowess of Warner Communications, and political through the cajoling of unlikely soccer fan Henry Kissinger (former US Secretary of State) – were employed to ensure that Pelé chose the Cosmos over other suitors such as Real Madrid and Juventus.

The signing of Pelé immediately tripled attendance figures for the Cosmos and even raised the roof at opposition stadiums. Swarms of journalists started covering soccer where earlier there had been virtually none. Other NASL franchises scouted and secured their own ‘marquee’ signings such as Gordon Banks, George Best, and Rodney Marsh. But none of them could match the resplendent stardust of the Cosmos: after Pelé, they bought Giorgio Chinaglia, prolific Italian striker from Lazio, Carlos Alberto, Brazilian captain of the 1970 World Cup winning team, and Franz Beckenbauer, German heavyweight in his prime. The Cosmos were hipster Galacticos, building star-studded teams before it was cool.

All of this sporting effort and financial outlay paid off in 1977, when the Cosmos sold out the 80,000 Giants Stadium and won the league in Pelé’s last game at the club. American interest in soccer had reached fever pitch.

Made-To-Measure Football

The NASL knew that only big-name hires wouldn’t be enough to sustain public interest; the sport itself would need to be morphed to suit the American palate. The entire league was centred around entertainment and results. The NASL Shootout was introduced to ensure that all games ended with a victor: something that Americans consider sacrosanct. Cheerleaders were brought into the picture, mascots joined in the act. The game was Americanised, with families bringing barbecue-laden cars outside the stadium and making a day of the occasion.

In comparison, the ISL has not really Indianised the sport as much as IPL-ised it. All the baubles and trinkets that were well-liked in the IPL are back: Bollywood stars screaming from the rooftops, fireworks at kickoff, live pitch-side interviews during the match, and an intense 2 month league format ending with high-octane playoffs. The intrusions of tinsel-town are tolerable, but the truncated league format really has well-wishers of Indian football fuming and rightly so. A two-month league may be good for holding the gnat-like attention spans of the Indian public, but only a year-round league can lead to overall footballing development and a concession of seriousness from the global fraternity. The fact that the ISL exists parallel to I-League is another bugbear. For all its tinkering, the NASL was a year-round league.

Blinding Stars or Red Giants?

Intriguingly, Chinaglia had converted one fan: Steve Ross. Chinaglia always had Ross’ ear, and the Warner boss could often be seen walking around in the Italian’s soccer shorts. After Pelé retired, Chinaglia’s corrosive power within the team grew even more, and he convinced Ross to fire the manager and himself took over the role of player-manager. Needless to say, that didn’t go too well and played a sizable role in the Cosmos’ eventual demise.

Player and league power have reared their ugly heads in the ISL too. Multiple franchises didn’t release Indian players for important World Cup qualifier matches, citing the importance of ISL matches as a laughable reason. The case of Nicolas Anelka is also well-known: personal differences and bust ups led to the premature departure of multiple members from his coaching staff, he publicly lambasted the Mumbai FC team in the press conference after a heavy defeat, and the caustic cloud of Le Sulk destabilized his team to no end. The AIFF will need to balance out the seemingly unlimited power that IMG has over the ISL, and the ISL franchises in turn will have to balance out egos of star-players with accountability of success.

The dangers of sporting teams being completely backed by corporate houses is that the sporting team is usually the first project to be shelved when other arms of the corporate house go awry. So it was with Warner Communications. Wrong allocation of funds in movie and video game deals, production failures, tax burdens, and the steep fall from grace of Atari (the video game division of Warner) meant that the firm was making losses left, right, and centre. The New York Cosmos was a vanity project at the best of times, and with other facets of business faring badly, Ross and co. had no other option but to jump ship.

What ailed the Cosmos ailed the NASL at large. With Pelé’s retirement, there was no personality big enough to prop the league up, ABC discontinued their broadcasting agreement in 1980, and most franchises were not earning enough while still paying their superstars sky-high wages. With deserters and detractors everywhere, the only direction the NASL could take was down.

To sum up, there are many similarities between the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of the New York Cosmos with the story of the ISL unfolding before us now. There are a few things that the Cosmos and NASL did well that are being repeated by the ISL, but there are also worrying road-bumps that are being driven over again with no regard to the accidents of the 1970s.

Einstein rightly said that insanity was doing the same thing again and again while expecting different results. As a country, let us hope that ISL has their sanity with them and is cognizant of the past while deciding for the future.