In this five-part series on the return of the New York Cosmos, site editor Chris Nee looks at all aspects of the club’s meteoric ascent back into the world soccer consciousness. The series is examining the Cosmos in more detail - who’s running the club, who’s playing for it and where it’s all going to happen - and will culminate in the Cosmos’ entry into our Icons series. Here’s the second post in the latest twofootedtackle.com series: Reviving the Cosmos.
The New York Cosmos approach came to define the North American Soccer League. The foresight and influence of Steve Ross enabled him and his Cosmos colleagues to attract the biggest name of them all to play for an otherwise unspectacular team in an otherwise invisible league. Pele, and by extension Ross, made the Cosmos what they were, and the Cosmos re-created the NASL into the league we look back on with fascination even today. The Cosmos, with all their qualities and foibles, left an indelible mark on American football for both the better and the worse.
The Cosmos’ spend big, get stars style was clearly imperfect. It attracted enormous crowds to Giants Stadium in the club’s heyday, and it won titles. It also created a long-lasting global football icon that hailed from a market generally considered to be the world’s great exception to the universality of the game. But it also proved unsustainable both for the New York club and the rivals who tried to keep up, and the NASL collapsed as a result.
The ultimate aim for the reincarnated Cosmos is to join Major League Soccer, preferably in 2013 as the 20th club (the league has indicated a preference for the next expansion club after Montreal to be a second from New York), but the ethos of the league and the tradition of the club don’t seem to sit well with one another. They were, after all, built entirely on opposing foundations. The Cosmos became the Cosmos because Ross and his army of superstars flashed the cash and hit the dancefloor at Studio 54 on a regular basis. MLS is different specifically because of NASL’s demise. The single entity system, by which the clubs share certain revenue streams and cost liabilities, is very un-Cosmos. The MLS salary cap and the Cosmos name are worlds apart, although it’s clear the new Cosmos have embraced this as they approach absorption into the league.
The celebrity angle to the new NY Cosmos outfit has been pored over and is the most obvious link between Cosmos MkI and Cosmos MkII, but the big-name quality at the new club goes right to the top. Chairman and CEO Paul Kemsley, who heads up the star-studded new club, is a horse racing pal of Harry Redknapp and a former director at Tottenham Hotspur. He is a very controversial figure and will be a familiar name to supporters of Crystal Palace. When the offloading of Kemsley’s Rock Investment Holdings and Rock Join Ventures property empire was started by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2009, Palace’s Selhurst Park stadium was a headline item. The club and stadium are now united in their ownership.
Then, there’s Terry Byrne. He’s the vice-chairman of the Cosmos and has, like Kemsley, become a man viewed with suspicion by many football supporters. In his book The Beckham Experiment, US journalist Grant Wahl neatly highlights the moment Byrne’s loyalty to a megastar friend in his darkest moment set him up for a bright future:
“A former London cabdriver and later a massage therapist and equipment manager for Chelsea and England, Byrne earned Beckham’s everlasting gratitude for his support on the worst night of his career. It was Byrne who accompanied Beckham to the locker room after he’d been ejected from England’s second-round loss to Argentina at the 1998 World Cup. And it was Byrne who stood by Beckham as the British tabloids turned him into a scapegoat who became the target of death threats. Beckham hired Byrne (a godfather to Beckham’s children) as his personal manager in 2003, and Byrne had increased his stature as Beckham’s straight-talking right-hand man ever since.”
Byrne’s involvement in American soccer began when, as a business associate of 19 Entertainment, he played a key role in greasing the gears for the former England captain’s move to the LA Galaxy. The power he would allegedly come to wield at the club defies belief.
The third and final big cheese in the boardroom is another Brit, Carl Johnson. Inevitably, given the current status of the Cosmos as an exercise in advertising a myth, Johnson is a former Chief Operating Officer of TBWA\Worldwide, a global advertising powerhouse, and is now the top dog at Anomaly, a very well-known “new-model, multidisciplinary marketing communications firm / advertising agency”. No surprise, then, that the snake oil has been promoted so sleekly so far. The Cosmos will be back, of that I have no doubt, but it’s been intriguing to watch the peddling of thin air over the last several months.
Then, of course, there are the stars, the names that suggest that the Cosmos 2013 will be the Cosmos in more than just name. A fourth Brit, Rick Parry, who made his name with the Premier League and Liverpool before seemingly losing out in a test of strength against then Reds manager Rafael Benitez, is a director. He’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fame in the New York Cosmos’ new incarnation.
The headline act, as always, is Pele, the man whose signing was the making and eventual breaking of the Cosmos and the North American Soccer League. Now the President of the club, the Brazil legend has been a prominent and vocal figure in the rebuilding of the club. One of the most fascinating aspects of his time with New York in the mid-1970s was his relationship with the brash Italian goal-machine Giorgio Chinaglia, whose comments in the Cosmos documentary Once In A Lifetime are laced with indifference towards his team-mate. Chinaglia is also part of the new club, acting as International Ambassador.
From outside the original Cosmos pool, the new club went right to the top, successfully appointing Eric Cantona as Director of Soccer. Cantona’s signing was the one that grabbed attention worldwide, creating widespread coverage in the UK including television features and interviews all brimming with Cosmos branding. In a traditional line management system he would, bizarrely, now be the boss of former Coventry City player Cobi Jones. The snaring of Jones was just as big a coup for the Cosmos as Cantona; he played over 300 games for Major League Soccer’s biggest club, LA Galaxy, and has been involved in coaching there ever since. Poaching a Galaxy hero was a significant statement of intent domestically.
Of course, none of this will work if it’s only about glitz and glamour over substance. Joe Fraga, an Executive Director, has a solid sports background. Giovanni Savarese (Academy Director East) and Ted Chronopoulos (Academy Director West) have both playing and coaching pedigree, both having played international football (albeit a single US cap for Chronopoulos).
But the real unsung heroes are not the guys pulling the levers while the famous people give interviews and promote the name of a football club that doesn’t exist, they’re the people making those interviews happen and getting the name out there to the point where it’s now become unavoidable. If the big stars are important, Chief Marketing Officer Dan Cherry and Communications Director Theresa Tran are the club’s real tricks up the sleeve.
Big names and good football are crucial but what could make the Cosmos unique on a global scale is the publicity engine that’s been set up to exploit the club’s other assets. With the backing and control of Anomaly and the influence of Cherry (who has the branding of Nike, Michael Jordan, Umbro and Budweiser on his CV) and Tran (who spent nearly a decade at Nike and was the Head of Global Communications for the Michael Jordan brand), the New York Cosmos have a different edge to its would-be competitors in MLS.
If - and I mean if - the club ever sees the light of day, it could change the face of American soccer forever. Again.
UPDATE: Earlier today, the Cosmos announced the signing of a new International Ambassador: none other than Carlos Alberto.
Tags: New York Cosmos
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