The New York Cosmos’ 2014 season was launched on a chilly Friday afternoon with an event at a midtown Manhattan pub. Players had gathered upstairs at the Football Factory at Legends, on Thirty-third Street, waiting to be interviewed about the season opener, against the Atlanta Silverbacks. As two dozen journalists sipped Amstel Lights, Blue Moons, and soft drinks at the open bar, Shep Messing, the Cosmos’ goalkeeper during the nineteen-seventies, when the organization brought international superstars like Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer to the United States, spoke enthusiastically about the reincarnation of his former team.
The original Cosmos folded nearly three decades ago, but not before earning a permanent place in U.S. soccer lore by winning the North American Soccer League championship in 1977 and 1978. (When the team returned from the ’77 Soccer Bowl, a Talk of the Town piece noted that the players were greeted by “the most excited crowd that has hit Kennedy Airport since the Beatles came to New York in 1964 to do ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’”) The former general manager G. Peppe Pinton held the team’s rights, and did not relaunch the team for more than twenty years, before selling the brand to a group headed by Paul Kemsley, an Englishman, in 2009. In 2012, after ten million dollars and still no team on the field, Kemsley left. The club fell under the auspices of Sela Sport, a marketing company based in Saudi Arabia, and Seamus O’Brien became its chairman. The Cosmos started playing in the new N.A.S.L. last summer. Led by the head coach Giovanni Savarese, they won the 2013 Soccer Bowl. “It’s just unbelievable to me that a team, after so many years, started with a front office, hired a coach, got players, and went on to win the championship,” Messing said. “I think it’s the miracle of New York.”
Messing then introduced Erik Stover, the Cosmos’ C.O.O., who is trying to return the team to its late-seventies peak. That would be difficult even in the top-tier organization in the U.S., Major League Soccer, where the average attendance per game barely reaches twenty thousand. The Cosmos and M.L.S. had talked about a deal, but ultimately the team wound up joining the N.A.S.L. instead. The club must accomplish its ambitions within the confines of a three-year-old startup league that’s far below M.L.S. in terms of talent, reach, and viability. “We don’t look at ourselves as second division in any way,” Stover said. “We’ve said from the beginning as we’ve taken over this project that we want to be at the top of the pyramid at the United States.”
For now, the Cosmos and the N.A.S.L. have a symbiotic relationship: the N.A.S.L. wants the legitimacy that the Cosmos brand brings, and the team needs the league because it needs competition. “When the Cosmos came into this league, they brought with them the benefit and the burden of the Cosmos legacy,” Bill Peterson, the league commissioner, told me over the phone. They are already one of the most visible American soccer brands, and have the connections to match: Pelé attended Sunday’s opener, at Hofstra University’s James M. Shuart Stadium, and the airline Emirates sponsors their jerseys. The Cosmos continue to get more press coverage than one would expect, considering their low place in the world soccer hierarchy. “While we get a lot of headlines, we’re also very cautious about growing smartly, growing in a controlled way,” Stover said in the Football Factory lounge. His players sat in small groups, talking mostly to one another but also to the occasional reporter. “We’re not trying to be overly aggressive and blow things up. We think smart growth is what we need to do.”
But the Cosmos have money to spend and want to use it to rebuild their already well-known name into a major international force. Sela Sport doesn’t seem to be concerned with making a profit immediately. (O’Brien told the Times last year that the club was on target for “modest losses,” owing to startup costs.) The Cosmos are proposing a privately financed four-hundred-million-dollar, twenty-five-thousand-seat stadium in Elmont, on Long Island. I was told that the team had the N.A.S.L.’s highest payroll in 2013; Marcos Senna, a thirty-seven-year-old Brazilian-born midfielder, who won a European Championship, in 2008, playing for Spain, earns a six-figure salary. The Cosmos easily finished first in the fall portion of the split season, winning seven of its final eight games, and defeated the Silverbacks in the Soccer Bowl. Senna scored the championship game’s only goal.
The team only got stronger (and more expensive) in the off-season, and it is expected to win the Soccer Bowl again. It’s possible that the Cosmos could pull off the “treble”—winning the N.A.S.L.’s spring season, the fall season, and the playoffs—after poaching one of the league’s best players, Hans Denissen. The thirty-year-old Dutch forward scored twelve goals for the San Antonio Scorpions in 2013, and was named a league all-star that year. The Cosmos swooped in with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “It was so ridiculous that I honestly sat with Hans and I said, ‘For the good of your family, how do you say no to this?’” the Scorpions’ president, Howard Cornfield told the San Antonio Express-News in January. According to the article, Cornfield also called Denissen’s contract with the Cosmos “ludicrous” for a league of the N.A.S.L.’s size.
When I spoke to Cornfield two weeks ago, he had backed off those comments a bit, noting that he was speaking “out of frustration” at the time. “I’m not a proponent of a salary cap,” he said. “I’m a proponent of everyone in the league working together for the good of the league.” Cornfield, who added that his team made “a lot of money” in 2013, allowed that New York teams in particular have other considerations: “The Cosmos have a huge challenge, in that they are competing in a difficult marketplace, a crowded marketplace, and they have to do things bigger and better than some of the other teams in our league.”
One of the league’s two newest expansion teams, Indy Eleven, based in Indianapolis, is off to a strong first year in the N.A.S.L., having sold seven thousand season tickets, with a waiting list forming months before opening day. The ten other teams in the league last year had an average attendance of 4,670 per game. (The Cosmos averaged 6,859 in 2013, second only to the Scorpions’ 6,937.) Three more teams will join the league in 2015, and the hope is that there will be eighteen by 2016 or 2017. The early success of Indy Eleven shows that there are cities around the country with enough potential fans to sell out stadiums, but even ten thousand spectators per game is a long way from M.L.S. levels of success.
I asked Peterson if the N.A.S.L. saw itself as a competitor to M.L.S. “We don’t see ourselves competing with anyone right now,” he said. “That does us no good, and there really is no competition. We are focussed on being the best professional soccer clubs we can be in our communities. There’s nothing else for us to worry about until we are filling all of our stadiums every night and we’ve stopped expanding.” He went on, “There’s no purpose or point to worrying about what other people are doing.”
Stover has a different agenda for the New York Cosmos: “We want to be in our own stadium. We want to have what we believe to be the best roster in the United States. We want to be competing in CONCACAF for a Champions League title. And we want the N.A.S.L. to be as good or better than Major League Soccer.”
But, in 2014, the N.A.S.L. is simply a minor league struggling for relevancy and solvency. On Sunday, in the season opener, the Cosmos played against the Atlanta Silverbacks in front of 7,906 fans at Shuart Stadium. In the twenty-third minute, the defender Carlos Mendes, the team captain, scored the first goal of his professional career, slamming home a rebound off a free kick by Senna. Fifteen minutes later, he tallied his second. The Cosmos won, 4-0, moving to the top of the N.A.S.L. table once again.
Above: Carlos Mendes is mobbed by teamates after scoring a goal in the thirty-eighth minute against the Atlanta Silverbacks; Hempstead, New York, April 13, 2014. Photograph by Mike Stobe/New York Cosmos/Getty.
