What ISL should learn from the tale of New York Cosmos

Abhishek Iyer

ByAbhishek Iyer, SportsCafe Editor

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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.

The reading gets a bit sobering and murky when one moves on to the ISL’s impact on sustainable football development in India. Although the domestic player rule means that enough Indian players get a chance, there has been much opprobrium rained down upon the organizers and individual teams for not releasing Indian players to let them attend training camps before important international fixtures. There is a broader scepticism about the shortness of the format itself, questions being asked of the actual amount of long-term development that can happen when the ‘league’ is itself 2-3 months long.

Although not discernible prima facie, there are eerie similarities between the ISL’s current tightrope-walk and a club from the USA that took the world by storm in the 1970s. The New York Cosmos brought football to the US like the ISL is currently attempting to in India – in a maelstrom of glitzy confetti and global stalwarts – and succeeded greatly for a decade before imploding in an unmanageable blob of financial failure and waning public interest. It is worth looking at the rise and fall of the New York Cosmos to draw parallels with the current ISL landscape, take heart from the mistakes made then which haven’t been made now, at least not yet, and touch gingerly upon the mistakes which are being repeated.

Twin Sleeping Giants

If we think India is a nation with underwhelming interest in football, the USA in the 1970s had plumbed new depths of indifference. Although ethnic communities played the beautiful game on the streets of New York, and the US had pulled off a memorable upset by beating England in the 1950 World Cup, the overall standard of soccer was amateur at best. The North American Soccer League (NASL), although seemingly professional in nature, also had bit-part teams playing in front of negligible crowds, with peak crowds barely touching 300. “It was a country where 99.9 per cent of the population had never heard of [the game],” according to Clive Toye, co-founder of the NASL.

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

If it wasn’t for Steve Ross, the founder of Warner Communications and arguably the world’s first media mogul, the heady heights of the New York Cosmos would have never seen reality. Ross, along with Turkish-American brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegün, laid the seeds of the New York Cosmos with a $1 million investment. Although the initial team was replete with part-timers and misfits, and barely got 50 people to attend their games, they won the NASL title and hooked the most important fan of them all: Ross himself. He bought out all other investors’ shares, put the Warner name completely behind the Cosmos, and moved them to Randall’s Stadium – closer to the city – to attract more fans. It would be a while before the sport’s popularity would explode in the US, but Ross’s initial bold moves paved the way for future successes.

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)

Stars of Blinding Light

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.

“Real Madrid and Juventus were sniffing around, so I said, ‘If you go to Real or Juventus all you could win is another championship, whereas if you come with us you could win a country,’” Clive Toye had said.

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.

The ISL has started in a similar vein, roping in famous, albeit waning, stars from around the globe. The steely gaze of Marco Materazzi, the pulverisers of Roberto Carlos, the silky hip movements of Elano, and the mercurial madness of Adrian Mutu: India has gotten a watered down but much-needed contact with football’s greats. However, this won’t count for much going forward unless footballers start looking at the ISL as a viable option in the primes of their careers and not just as an easy buck to be made before retirement. Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia moved to NASL at the peak of their powers, and the Cosmos were much the better for it. The ISL has to jump this final furlong before being considered a part of the big league.

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.

The Cosmos locker room also became Hollywood’s new red carpet, boasting celebrity fans like Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg. Steve Marshall, Cosmos’ travel secretary, recalls: “I remember once, Gordon Bradley, looked over in the corner [of the locker room] and saw this guy with longish hair, skinny as a rail, looked like he was on drugs. Bradley told our security guy, ‘Get that guy out of here!’” The person he was referring to was Mick Jagger.

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?

Star players always come with the added baggage of massive egos that need constant massaging. For the Cosmos, that player was Giorgio Chinaglia. A fiery Italian, who referred to himself in third person, and gave post-match interviews in silk robes, Chinaglia made his self-regard evident to all his teammates including Pelé. He accused the Brazilian of ‘not playing on all cylinders’ and ‘being stingy about passing to Chinaglia’.

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.

Moguls in the Mud

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.

Although the ISL has fortunately not run into any financial worries so far, it is still early days. Moreover, reposing the entire responsibility of running the league on a private entity like IMG is a potential recipe for implosion. Oil isn’t getting any more expensive!

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.

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