The question as 1961 began was how the ISL would take the next steps to embed itself into American sporting culture, and spread from its sole base so far in New York. The ISL’s impresario, Bill Cox, said the league had made a small profit in 1960, despite spending a fortune bringing over teams from Europe and South America. The ISL was ready to expand its horizons.

The Future of American Soccer?

Cox also faced the challenge of working with the existing soccer infrastructure. Could he find a way to develop the league for the long-term benefit of American soccer? Or would he have to take on the entrenched forces head-on, and beat them dollar for dollar? The American Soccer League – the country’s existing, established national league, albeit one of lower quality than the ISL – had long been making its money by arranging exhibition tours with high-profile teams from overseas. This was precisely the market Cox was trying to corner.

Cox had, though, so far kept relations with the ASL warm enough. A few of the New York Americans’ own ethnic players had come from ASL teams, and the ISL had a formal tie to the ASL.

Cox continued his efforts to keep the ASL and the United States Soccer Football Association (the USSFA – later to become the USSF) onside with his venture. In January 1961, he went on a media blitz offering support for the future of American soccer, especially the Olympic team, struggling on an international level.

“In every year from now to the next Olympics in 1964, our league is willing to help with clinics, travel expenses for amateur players and other expenditures to a modest degree,” Cox said in widely quoted remarks. “The International Soccer League is prepared to contribute money, ideas and personnel toward the development of improved amateur players. In its first season, the league has stimulated interest in this sport on the secondary school level.”

His efforts bore fruit, at least for his own league in the short-term. In the summer of 1961, the American Soccer League only scheduled one international exhibition game during the ISL season. And the USSFA would soon play a key role in ensuring the league could continue without FIFA sanction.

Montreal Concordia

Crucially, the league also took its first step to expansion outside of the New York metropolitan area. Concordia Club of Montreal would play at the 25,000 capacity McGill University Stadium in the 1961 season, Cox revealed. Indeed, Cox’s aim was to make Montreal a second base for the league, with the initial plans stating that seven games would be played there, along with the first-leg of the two-legged final, scheduled for August 3rd.

Concordia were backed by Joe Slyomovics who was, according to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, a “millionaire Czech immigrant.”

Concordia also played in one of Canada’s two small-time professional soccer leagues, the National League, containing six teams from Toronto along with Concordia of Montreal.

The ISL saw an opportunity for soccer to establish itself in Canada as baseball had declined in popularity, the attendance numbers for the Montreal Royals in International League baseball having collapsed. The Star-Phoenix confidently asserted in January 1961 that “Pro soccer, making a second bid for a Canadian foothold, has recorded uneven progress, but the roots are apparently firm and the future bright. The game still has a long way to go but already it has supplanted baseball as one of Canada’s Big Three in team sports, joining hockey and football.”

Slyomovics announced that Concordia would only retain half-a-dozen of its players from 1960, including left back Hector Lopez, left half Tommy Barrett, inside forward Hector Daderio, two goalkeepers and fullback George Savage.

Like New York, the Canadians would look to stock most of their roster with quality international players, especially from the Britsh Isles. Cox stated that because of the ISL’s success in 1960, foreign teams were far more confident in loaning out their top players.

“All doubt has vanished now,” Cox said confidently. “We are being offered not the reserve players we had to take last year but the foremost ones. This means our New York team should be the equal of the foreign invaders, and that Concordia also will be well stocked with the best foreign performers as [well as] its own Canadian stars.”

The rumour mill began to spin. Saskatchewan’s Leader-Post reported that Concordia had offered Leicester City’s Welsh international forward Ken Leek – who had been in Wales’ 1958 World Cup squad as an eighteen-year-old – £50 a week to join them. Leek, only 20, had requested a transfer after being dropped for Leicester’s defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in the 1961 FA Cup final. The speculation was spot-on, as Leek soon signed on loan with Montreal (during the ISL season, Leicester would transfer Leek permanently to Newcastle United).

The wages being offered by the ISL were, by 1961 standards for British professionals, enormous. In 1960, the maximum wage in the Football League stood restricted at £20. Led by Jimmy Hill, England’s professionals were agitating hard for the maximum wage restriction to be abolished. In January 1961, the Football League capitulated and the maximum wage was abolished.

The New York Americans stocked their roster with talent that their player-coach, Welshman Alf Sherwood, described in glowing terms: “We had only six chaps from England on the team last season,” he explained. “all young and not with a great deal of experience. This time we not only have more English players, but more formidable, well-known performers as well. Every man in this group has been playing top-level soccer for eight or ten years.”

The imports included Ken McPherson, a prolific scorer for Newport County and Scottish centre-forward John McCole of Leeds United.

But the ISL’s growing stature and appeal to leading players had begun to cause international irritation. Cox received a blow in January when the West German league became the first to bar its clubs from entering the ISL. Bayern Munich would not return for a second season, though the league would eventually lift its ban, allowing Karlsruhe to represent West Germany in the 1961 ISL season, replacing Eintracht Frankfurt, who had originally been scheduled to play.

Expansion

As the winter of 1961 moved on, Cox soon began announcing the final line-up of teams to the league, now to be enlarged to 15 teams from 12 in 1960. Everton were the marquee English representative, a real coup for Cox, the Liverpudlians having made a considerable splash with their transfer spending in the previous 12 months (they would eventually finish fifth in the First Division, shortly before the ISL began play). Also from the British Isles came Ireland’s Shamrock Rovers, League of Ireland champions in 1959.

Along with Montreal representing Canada and Karlsruhe of West Germany, six other nations would make their debuts in the ISL with Turkey’s Besiktas, Romania’s Dinamo Bucharest, Czechoslovakia’s Dukla Prague, France’s Monaco, Israel’s Petah Tikvah and Spain’s Espanyol all scheduled to take part.

Returning were champions Bangu of Brazil, along with the defeated finalists, Scotland’s Kilmarnock. Yugoslavia’s Red Star Belgrade also made their second appearance as did Rapid Vienna of Austria (the latter would hope to improve on their 1960 performance, where they had lost all four of their games).

The ISL divided the 15 teams into two sections of play once again, with the winner of each section to play in the final. Montreal competed in both sections.

Field of Dreams

Yet before the season even started, the ISL’s long-term plans received a considerable blow. The City of New York had taken over the ISL’s main venue, the dilapidated Polo Grounds in Manhattan, and in March 1961 confirmed its plans to demolish the stadium and build a public housing project on the land. The City did confirm that the 1961 sports’ schedule would go on as planned, but the future suddenly looked less clear for the ISL beyond that.

The Polo Grounds were a mess. The ISL’s attendance in 1960 – averaging well over 10,000 at the Manhattan stadium – did not look so bad when the brand new professional American football team in the city, the Titans of New York, only drew around 15,000 fans for their debut season in the autumn of 1960, also played at the Polo Grounds.

The owner of the Titans, Harry Wismer, later recalled the poor conditions, worsened for his team by the ISL’s games in the summer of 1960.

“From our clean, sunny, New Hampshire camp we were scheduled to make our league debut in the shabby, desolate Polo Grounds, which had been deteriorating steadily since the New York baseball Giants moved to San Francisco for the 1958 season. A soccer league had played on the “pitch,” but that merely aggravated conditions for football. The stands and seats were encrusted with grime. There was not enough parking space. The neighborhood was not good. In brief, this was the worst possible place to attract paying customers.”

The Polo Grounds, April 1963

A Renegade League?

International entanglements caused other problems. On May 21st, only four days after the ISL’s season opener, FIFA suddenly announced that the ISL was an unauthorised league and any club competing in it would be suspended from playing in all affiliated leagues; Everton, waiting to play their ISL opener against Montreal, became very nervous and said they would wait to hear official word from the Football Association before taking part in the league.

FIFA had passed a new rule in April, stating that international tournaments had to be under the control of national associations. The controversy erupted due to comments made by Stanley Rous, a FIFA Vice-President (and soon to be president), that the league had not sent in the correct papers showing it adhered to this rule. Montreal’s owner Joe Slyomovics was dubious about the concerns: “Each team participating in the International Soccer League has received permission from the governing bodies in their own countries,” he commented, adding “Rous is only one man, and I don’t see in what capacity he made the statement.”

The ISL said that there had been a “technical difficulty,” with its paperwork lost somewhere between between New York and Switzerland. It was affiliated to the USSFA, it said, through its relationship with the ASL. Not having heard back from FIFA after sending in the required schedule and affiliation information, the ISL said it had presumed it could proceed. James McGuire, the Vice-President of the United States Soccer Football Association, stated that he had asked FIFA officials in Zurich to “phone me collect” to clear up the misunderstanding, explaining that he had sent a cable stating any obstacles to the ISL proceeding as planned “would be extremely harmful to the sport in this country.”

At 4am New York time on the morning of Everton’s game against Montreal on May 23rd, McGuire received his collect call from Zurich, FIFA’s executive secretary Dr. Helmuth Kaeser calling to say that “as long as the rules and regulations are on the way, we have no intention or desire to stop the tournament.”

The ISL’s second season could, after all, continue as scheduled.

To be continued. . .

• Read Part One of the International Soccer League story
• Read Part Two of the International Soccer League story

“I think my experience behind the counter at the butcher’s shop helped because it made me fairly good at chatting people up,” he wrote in his 1976 autobiography, Jack Taylor: World Soccer Referee. “Although you are dealing mainly with women in the shop, human nature is much the same in footballers. For instance, sometimes when an old dear comes into the shop you can tell as soon as she steps through the door that she is in a frightful mood. Maybe she has had a row with the old man or the kids have upset her. She has clearly come in sparring for a row so you mention that her hair looks nice. Or, if she looks rough, ‘My, I bet you had a fair old time last night.’”

You think that’d work on Ronaldo today?

The Accidental Referee

Taylor, it seems, rather fell into his career as a referee in the 1950s. This was an age before full-time referees – indeed, even by the conclusion of his career in the 1970s, Taylor still writes that “I do not think we will ever have full-time referees in England.”

When Taylor began refereeing in his teenage years – he was a keen player, but not good enough to turn pro – he had little idea or ambition to move up the ladder, at least initially.

Yet once he had risen rapidly up the ranks, Taylor did not think refereeing should stand still while the rest of the game rapidly modernized in the 1960s. His career traversed the gap in England between notions of amateur idealism that staidly stuck with its administrators and into an era of modern professionalism, intense media coverage and of television saturating the game.

Taylor freely admits that “I resented television totally when it first arrived because it seemed yet another way of pointing out my mistakes to the world. I had now not only twenty-two players and forty thousand fans to put up with; another fifteen million were looking in on television and I suspected that every one of them delighted in proving me wrong.”

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Taylor soon concluded that “I could not have been further off the mark for, as I gradually learned to live with television and to understand the effect it was having on everyone, I realised it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to football.”

Taylor was a man more than willing to adapt to the modern game, and indeed, use it to his advantage. Initially fearful of the media, he soon developed close relationships with several journalists who proved trustworthy and supportive of him: “I can count on one hand the number of journalists who have let me down and broken a confidence,” Taylor writes.

Building relationships was critical to Taylor’s rapid progress from parks’ referee – getting his start at the age of 17, talked into it by a friend in his butcher’s shop – to international referee. First it was Jim Lock, a local experienced former referee and soon his mentor; then Percy Harper, the 1932 FA Cup final referee who he met by chance and who quickly became another mentor; and then Teddy Eden, a Birmingham FA official who helped accidentally land him his first full international refereeing assignment at the age of only 23, running the line for a France-Spain international in Paris.

His age quickly made him stand out. Taylor was youthful and flashy compared to his colleagues, unencumbered by a wife or a mortgage, and he wrote that I “like to think of myself as a trend-settter and I was always buying new gear and trying out new things. I always trained in a flashy track suit and had a white flash around my badge. . .I think I was one of the first referees to get in step with the fashions being set by the players by turning my shorts up.”

At 25, he was the youngest linesman in the Football League. Not that there was any training: “You just had to pick it up as you went along,” Taylor recalled. Almost straight away, he was picked on in the London press for one decision he still defended in his memoir that was seen by one reporter to have been “terribly wrong in flagging Fulham out of the cup with the worst offside call I can recall.”

Taylor, though, says that even at 25 he already knew another questionable decision would come up soon enough, and the incident would be forgotten. He could at times be quick to anger (something he learned to control), but he had a relaxed approach to dealing with the game as a whole, feeling it helped him handle pressure far better than building up tension or blowing up the importance of what was, after all, a game he loved.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in British football, Taylor had an open-minded view of the world. He clearly loved to travel; unlike his father, whose life was contained solely in his butcher’s shop, Taylor enjoyed his many trips abroad. Approaching the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, he poo-pooed English fears that there would be trouble on the field due to the aggression of South American teams, commenting – based on his past experience refereeing on other continents – that “Obviously there will be tension, because the will to win is there, but I think there is a fair standard of sportsmanship throughout the world today.”

Taylor had already observed the lack of understanding of overseas cultures in the preparation of referees for the 1966 World Cup in England: “In 1966 the referees were gathered together in London only three days before the opening match. On the whole, they were well prepared physically but they were ill prepared as a group for what lay ahead. The teams taking part had been painstakingly trained for many months. When the referees arrived in London they were given a few inadequate lectures, and they had barely enough time to get to know each other before being divided into groups and sent to the various centres around the country.”

Importantly – given the events that followed at the 1966 World Cup that so infuriated all parties – Taylor goes on to observe that “There was not enough consideration given to the different styles of football played in South America and in Europe: not enough understanding of the sort of things that referees allow on one continent but not on the other.”

It was no surprise, then, when the referees – almost all European – so unsatisfactorily controlled matches involving South American teams, who felt they were kicked out of the competition by a European conspiracy. “It is not difficult to imagine the thoughts which haunted the Brazilians, Uruguayans, and Argentinians as they packed their bags and left for home early,” Taylor concludes.

By 1970, though, FIFA had learned from their mistakes in 1966: the sole Englishman in Mexico, Taylor was one of the referees given extensive training and careful preparation by the Referees’ Committee, who looked for input from referees from each country to figure out how officials could work together. “Bit by bit we talked our differences out. The interpretations put on things in South America and Europe were compared and from this we agreed on a system of cooperation between the referee and his linesman,” Taylor recalls. In the event, the dangerous tackle from behind was clamped down on and not a single player was sent off in the entire tournament.

Taylor believed in discipline, but he also believed in understanding the actions of players and managers, and the pressures and aggression they were often responding to. “We all have a breaking point,” he writes. “When a player loses control of himself and retaliates I cannot excuse what he does, but at least I ought to try and understand it. If someone said something terrible to me how would I react? As a kid I had a temper. How would I have reacted if someone had come up behind my back and whacked me so that I had no chance of playing the ball? I must condemn the offender and I must take positive action. You will never stop trouble, so you have always got to try and understand.”

Nastiness, though, was something Taylor had trouble understanding – and even more troubled by the growth of in the modern game.

Dirty, Dirty Leeds?

One thing he was sad to see change was the attitude on the field; when Taylor began his career as a referee in the Football League in the early 1960s, it was “the closing stages of a golden era in English soccer. . .a new, tougher, breed of professional was beginning to introduce a win-at-all costs attitude that we’d never seen in this country before, while most of the game’s administrators refused to face up to reality.”

Referees were rapidly becoming a big deal, targeted by players and the media. In the old days, “on the park, we could have a quiet word and a joke. There aren’t many jokes on a football pitch today.”

Taylor saw how this spilled into the attitudes of the younger referees in the 1970s, who now “start to wind themselves up on a Thursday for a game on Saturday.”

This was the era of hard men. Yet a Times’ report on what might have been a brawl of a game between Chelsea and Leeds in January 1975 particularly praised Taylor’s handling of the game: “It was a proud match for heroes, flowing with endless action and entertainment, devoid of bus fires and anger and beautifully, even unobtrusively, handled by Jack Taylor, the World Cup final referee.”

If there was one man who could handle Leeds United, it was Taylor, who was assigned to their games 11 times in one season. He was even able to have a laugh and a joke with them: “I do not accept that players like Gabriel and Norman Hunter, of Leeds United, are dirty,” he says in his memoir. “They are hard and they push their luck a long way at times, but they should not be pilloried for having an aggressive style. Players like that, by the way, often have a good sense of humour.”

For Taylor, such a write-up mentioning his unobtrusiveness was surely the highest praise: being the centre of attention was not the purpose of refereeing, he makes clear in his memoirs. Taylor was a tall, imposing figure, confident in his own abilities, and felt no need to prove his place on the field. “The referee will never become as big a personality as the player. He must not. In some countries he is glorified, over-publicised and over-filmed . . . but the referee will never be a true artist.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Taylor recalls he “slept like a log” before taking charge of the 1974 World Cup final.

Jack Taylor performing the coin toss for the 1974 World Cup final with Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer

In the event, Taylor did become something of the star of the show when, feeling he had no choice, he awarded two penalties within 25 minutes. He remains convinced that from his angle, on each call, he made the correct decision.

The second was the most controversial, but in retrospect, Taylor had no regrets: “As Hoelzenbein went over, I thought to myself ‘It’s not as bad as you’re trying to make it look, old son’, but the Laws state that attempting to trip an opponent is just as serious an offence as actually tripping an opponent, and, as the German had pushed the ball two or three yards ahead when the tackle came, Jansen was certainly not going for the ball.”

Take a look, and see if Taylor’s explanation rings true for you.

Taylor was also the referee for the 1966 FA Cup Final – which, by the way, he said was a greater honour than refereeing the World Cup final for an Englishman – and here’s how he picked the ball:

“After breakfast I went for a walk in the park with ‘Tich’ Harding and then on to Lancaster Gate to select the match ball. They laid out about thirty balls, each one identified only by a number. You have to pick three and only after that has been done can you find out the maker’s name.”

That process is a bit different these days (“Neo is your new football”), but for Taylor, that probably wouldn’t have mattered too much. Despite some sadness reflected in his memoir at the changes from the sport in his early days of involvement, Taylor has remained a part of the game to this day, surely still appreciating the “fairy story” he says he has lived in the start of his memoirs.

As summer drew on, much of the city still mourned the absence of National League baseball, especially the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had moved to Los Angeles less than three years earlier, while the Giants had also moved to California around the same time.

Only the Yankees were left, and they played in the American League. Roger Maris led the league in RBIs and slugging percentage, but it was not a particularly remarkable year for the New York Yankees, though they still reached the World Series, losing in game seven to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Bill Mazeroski hammering the winning home run for Pittsburgh in the ninth inning. The Maris and Mantle magic would really start the next year.

A new football team was on the horizon – the Titans of New York (later to become the Jets) would begin play in the autumn of 1960 in the brand new American Football League at the Polo Grounds. The New York Giants, meanwhile, were already playing a key role in the growing popularity of professional American football – far from the behemoth it would later become – reaching but losing in the NFL championship game in both 1958 and 1959.  The Giants had moved from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, their home from 1925 until 1955, and now played at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx.

In ice hockey, Original Six member the New York Rangers had not won the Stanley Cup since 1940, in the early decades of suffering through the “Curse of 1940″.

All in all, the ground appeared fertile for the International Soccer League (ISL), one of four major attempts to create a lasting outdoor professional soccer league in the United States during the twentieth century before the formation of Major League Soccer, according to the Society of American Soccer Historians.

As Sports Illustrated put it in early summer 1960 in a piece titled In Lieu of Giants, “Sport drew the world a little closer together last week when some of Europe’s top footballers arrived in New York City for an off-season of international soccer. This experiment in global unity was no bit of dreamy idealism on the part of well-intentioned do-gooders, but a solidly businesslike and sense-making piece of sports promotion, and as such we applaud it.

“Since the defection of National League baseball to the West Coast, New Yorkers have been hungry for a good summertime sport. Since New York is a cosmopolitan town, veteran Sports Promoter William D. Cox concluded it might prove a fertile field for soccer.”

As we saw in the first part of this series, the ISL was put together by former Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Cox, aiming to appeal to newly-arrived immigrants on the east coast already keen on soccer. They would, he thought, flock to see the world’s best teams play in America, importing 11 teams from overseas while founding one local team, the New York Americans. His business plan, while not skimping on expenses, was not outrageous: the league could break-even with average crowds of around 10,000 per game.

The ISL kicked off in 1960, with the schedule dividing the teams into two sections of league play, with the winners of each facing each other in the championship game in early August. Kilmarnock won section one, finishing ahead of Bayern Munich, Nice, Glenavon, the New York Americans and English champions Burnley in June, and we left off our account just before the start of the second section’s season in early July.

In  May and June 1960, the ISL had gotten off to a decent, if not remarkable start. All the competing international teams sent their best players – including several national team stars – and attendance was strong at the games at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Games were competitive and hard-fought. The reviews of television broadcasts proved positive. Few fans, though, showed up in Jersey City for games at Roosevelt Stadium. Cox’s dream would depend on how the rest of the season panned out, but so far, he had shown a strong head for marketing and promoting professional soccer in North America.

Importantly, the ISL had become the first American league to feature regularly on national network television, with ten games broadcast in primetime on a Saturday night. High profile media coverage was evident in the extensive coverage given to the league by the New York Times.

The first section had consisted of a majority of British teams and players (even the New York Americans featured six British professionals). The second section Cox put together was far more multi-ethnic. It would put to the test Cox’s belief that appealing to numerous ethnic minorities in New York by bringing over high-quality teams from their homelands would bring out big crowds for the round-robin games to be played between July 2nd and July 30th by the six teams in section two, with the winning team to play Kilmarnock on Saturday, August 6th. This time, all the games would be played in Manhattan at the Polo Grounds.

From Yugoslavia came Red Star, league champions, featuring the enormously popular and gifted Dragoslav Šekularac, known as a showman. From Austria came Rapid Vienna, champions of Austria. The important Italian representative was Sampdoria, who had just finished eighth in Serie A. Also arriving were Sporting Club of Lisbon, who had just been pipped to the Portugese title by Benfica, and the Swedish champions, Norrköping. The division was completed by perhaps the most interesting team, the only South American side in the ISL, Bangu of Rio de Janeiro – who would later play in the 1967 United Soccer Association as the Houston Stars.

Cox had originally invited the state champions of Rio and São Paulo, Fluminese and Palmeiras respectively, but both were already committed to another tournament. Bangu, runners-up in Rio, were the next to be invited, and quickly cancelled their plans for a tour of Europe to head to New York instead – seeing the competition as a genuine club world championship that would establish an international reputation for themselves. Bangu sent 17 players, along with a radio journalist to cover the event and the club’s president, Cesar Mauricio Buscácio. Amongst the 17 was Zózimo Alves Calazans, who had been part of Brazil’s 1958 World Cup winning team.

Bangu began with a, uh, bang – they won their first two games comfortably, and even more importantly for Cox, helped to draw the league’s largest crowd to date at the Polo Grounds on July 10th as they took on Rapid Vienna: 19,804, paying between $2 and $4 each, provided strong gate receipts. The game was half of a double-header that also saw Sporting defeat Norrköping 4-3. Bangu’s game was no less exciting, as they defeated the Austrians 3-2, in hot, humid weather.

Notably, the New York Times reported the results not by using the club names, but by the respective nationalities, emphasising the ethnic nature of the intended appeal (see lineup cards to the right).

The physical play that had peppered the first section of games in June appeared again in the second section. Against Rapid Vienna on 13 July, three times the Swedes were reduced to ten men for extended periods as players received treatment on the sidelines, though their neat and tidy passing still led to a slightly surprising 3-1 win.

Bangu soon proved they were the class of the competition by crushing Sporting 5-1 at the Polo Grounds in front of 8,441 fans on 16 July. Bangu’s stars were their tricky wingers, brothers Beto Rinalho Macedo and Luis Carlos Macedo. The former had scored five goals in just three games. The game was marked by an unsavoury incident when several Portugese players chased around the referee, who had overruled his linesman to allow a Bangu goal. In the New York Times, Gordon White reported that  the Sporting players pushed the referee and “had some help from eager fans who pushed a bit, too, but gave up, after a few minutes.” Before the end, a Sporting player was sent-off for kicking the ball away after a Bangu goal: this, according to White, “gave the fans a chance to sound as if they were old Brooklyn Dodgers rooters.”

The second double-header of the second section, on July 20th, attracted a solid 12,338 fans to the Polo Grounds. They saw Red Star defeat Sporting 3-0 while Norrköping – the surprise package so far – held Bangu to a 0-0 draw, the first game the Brazilians had failed to score in a game.

Sampdoria’s third game against Norrköping – they had been poor so far with one draw and one loss – was eagerly anticipated due to the arrival in America of Sergio Brighenti, an Italian international forward just purchased by Sampdoria, who had scored 43 goals in 95 games for Padova before his transfer (he would go on to be the top scorer in Serie A in 1960-61).

The game, though, was overshadowed by fan violence that left Norrköping goalkeeper Rune Lind unconscious and with a broken tooth. After a challenge in the box on Italian forward Bruno Mora that left him in a heap, 20 irate Italian fans ran onto the field and attacked the Swedish team, some – including the spectator who struck Lind – wielding sticks, swinging wildly. Order was soon restored – amazingly, no arrests were made – and the game continued, Sampdoria winning 6-4.

The Italians would have to win their next game, against Rapid Vienna, to retain any hope of catching Bangu at the top of the division. This they did on July 23rd in a controversial game. Gordon White was again forced to lead with a report of spectator misdeeds instead of the exciting play on the field: this time, right after a goal by Sampdoria in the first half, “a half-dozen fans in the crowd of 6,129 ran onto the field and attacked one linesman from the rear.” The linesman reportedly received a “hard punch” to the face.

This was quite a shame, as the crowd trouble deflected attention from the brilliance of Brighenti: he struck a hat-trick  in Sampdoria’s 3-2 win.

That result kept the Italians alive, just, in the race for the title: along with Red Star, they sat two points behind Bangu heading into the final round of games.

Ahead of the last set of games, Cox gathered his investors and the media for a luncheon at the Playbill Room in the Manhattan Hotel to outline his future plans. The league had been a success so far, Cox said. Once the league had moved past its initial error in scheduling games in New Jersey, moving all the matches for the second section to Manhattan, attendances had risen and the league might even break even, despite the expenditure of $400,000 in 1960 money. The league would be back in 1961, he said.

One thorny topic, though, was the fan violence marring the competition. A Brazilian suggested the ISL build a moat around the pitch to keep invaders out. Increased policing was more seriously discussed.

The next day, July 28th, the final round of games began with a double-header. Sampdoria lost to Sporting 2-1, eliminating them from contention for the title. Red Star, though, not only won but moved ahead of Bangu on goals scored average with an impressive 4-0 defeat of Norrköping.

That set up the competition’s final game perfectly. Red Star would meet Bangu on July 30th at the Polo Grounds, with a bumper crowd expected for the winner-takes-all match up, though the Yugoslavians also knew a tie would secure them the section two crown.

A fierce thunderstorm ruined the scene in Manhattan on Saturday night. The game was postponed, and rescheduled for the afternoon of the next day.

Over 20,000 fans still attended (20,017 to be precise), by far the largest crowd the ISL had attracted. The Brazilians were superb, and controlled play from start to finish. Bangu won 2-0, their second goal scored by José Maria Fidélis dos Santos, who would go on to play for Brazil at the 1966 World Cup. Eighteen-year-old Ademir da Guia, who later played nine games for Brazil and starred for Palmeiras, was named MVP of the second section.

Bangu had won section two, and would now face Kilmarnock of Scotland in the final. Little-known now both teams might be, but both unbeaten sides had generated considerable attention and praise for their achievements in this summer of international soccer in New York.

The Scottish team flew back for the game on August 3rd, greeted enthusiastically by KLM Airlines:

The ISL’s expectations were more than met by the crowd at the Polo Ground for the first ISL championship game for the “American Challenge Cup”: 25,440 enthusiastic fans saw a high-quality contest that raised hopes for the league’s future. Gordon White reported that “Competition next year is virtually certain. The fans left with the realization that they had seen what was probably the best match played in the United States in many a year.”

In a tight game, Bangu, in their red and white stripes, scored early on, but their second, title-sealing goal did not come until the 87th minute, with both goals scored by inside-left Valtor Santos. After a season with many games showing ill-feeling, there were no reports of crowd trouble, and mutual praise flowed following the final whistle. The Bangu players said Kilmarnock were the best team they had ever played, and the Scots returned the compliment. White concluded that “By winning, Bangu added considerably to Brazil’s growing prestige as an international soccer power.”

Only a couple of months after the final, the momentum of an exciting event was not something Cox was going to let dwindle. Sensibly, his first move to ask fans what they wanted, with more than 450 responses to an ISL questionnaire. Fans responded that they wanted more double-headers, and more games on Sundays instead of Saturday nights, and Cox moved to accommodate this. Instead of a single-game final, Cox announced the 1961 championship final would be a two-game series, with total goals determining the winner.

Another fan-friendly move came with the announcement by the City of New York that it would run special soccer trains to the Polo Grounds on gamedays, to reduce parking problems, leaving from 168th Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, stopping along the way in Manhattan to pick-up up to 2,000 fans per train.

Most importantly, Cox announced the league had made a small profit in 1960, and was expanding in 1961. The ISL would also feature on national network television again.

Cox held a media luncheon at the Manhattan Hotel, and his ambition seeped into his verbiage: “Soccer will be a new major sport here in 1961. Instead of six clubs in each of the league’s two sections, we will have eight teams, not necessarily all from Europe.”

Cox announced that Bangu would return, while the newcomers would be Besiktas of Turkey, Espanyol of Barcelona, an Israeli team, and possibly a French and a Canadian team (a Montreal entrant was soon announced). Most of the 1960 teams would return, Cox revealed, a sign the tournament had been successful for the competing clubs as well.

What about the Americans? Perhaps recognizing that New Yorkers had not identified with a team called the “Americans” with barely a native-born North American on it, Cox said that in 1961 “we’ll have five or six top American players”.

As 1960 drew to a close, Cox would have been happy to see the ISL featured in the New York Times review of 1960 in sports, a dramatic year of expansion in professional sports across the United States. Soccer hoped to catch this wave, while taking advantage of unusual room in the New York market for a summer sport. The International Soccer League “burst on the New York scene” in 1960, the Times enthusiastically mentioned. What would happen next?

To be continued. . .

Click here for Expanded Dreams: The International Soccer League, Part Three

The 102nd Mayor of New York City, Robert F. Wagner, was at the announcement at City Hall on October 28th 1959 that a new professional soccer league would begin play exclusively in his city the next summer, with all the games to take place at Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island. $75,000 would be spent to upgrade the floodlights at the 25,000 capacity venue. Tickets would be priced at $2 for general admission and $3 for reserved seating, while 1,200 box seats would also be installed. One American team would play alongside star teams from Britain, continental Europe, and possibly South America. All expenses would be paid for the visiting teams, with cash prizes for the winners. The total cost of the venture was estimated at around $2 million in today’s money.

At the same time, in London, Cox – to be president of the league’s only American team, a New York entry – made the same announcement. The Times of London reported that “The Football League, the Scottish League, and the Northern Ireland and Eire leagues have approved the proposals subject to the agreement of their clubs.”

The competition was planned to take place between May 25th with its first section (comprising six teams), ending June 26th, with the second section (also comprising six teams) beginning June 29th and ending August 3rd. The winners of each section would then play each other for the championship title.

Mayor Wagner was enthusiastic: “Many of our citizens in the city are foreign born. They all are fond of soccer and they have instilled that fondness in their children. This new league will give us a chance to see the greatest players in the game competing against a New York team. The city will cooperate in every possible way to help this league succeed.”

Cox, the league’s impresario who had made his money in the lumber business, had a mixed track record as a sports promoter. His involvement in American football in the 1940s with football teams the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers had not been a success, and nor had his involvement with the Philadelphia Phillies in Major League Baseball: though the team improved under his tenure in 1943 and attendance rose, Cox was forced to depart when it was found he had bet on his own team (“sentimentally”, he claimed).

Cox announced that the ISL would begin play with section one featuring Scotland’s Kilmarnock, England’s Burnley, France’s Nice, West Germany’s Bayern Munich and Northern Ireland’s Glenavon.

While those names outside of Bayern Munich may not sound all that glamorous, that was not the case. Burnley, in fact, were the reigning champions of England. The timing of Burnley’s triumph, mere weeks before their opening game in the ISL, showed either great serendipity or remarkable foresight on the part of Cox. As Brian Glanville wrote, “Burnley, whose colors are claret and blue, is thus a most happy and long-sighted selection for the tournament in New York.”

Burnley featured the flair of Irishman Jimmy McIlroy, and the stoutness of Jimmy Adamson.

Glenavon, meanwhile, were the champions of Northern Ireland. Nice had finished ninth in Ligue 1 in 1960, but had been champions in 1959 when they’d been recruited for the league. Kilmarnock had just finished as runners-up in the Scottish Cup.

Each brought strong teams. Nice, for example, regularly fielded almost the entire XI who had recently taken on Real Madrid at the quarter-final stage of the European Cup, including Georges Lamia, Alphonse Martínez, César Gonzales, François Milazzo, Jacques Foix, Héctor de Bourgoing, Omar Keita Barrou and Victor Nurenberg.

Glenavon, Bayern Munich, Kilmarnock and Nice arrived in New York by chartered plane, while Burnley took a leisurely steam ship journey across the Atlantic.

New York’s entry was coached by Al Stubbins, a former Newcastle United and Liverpool forward. Stubbins is best known for being the only footballer to feature on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The forty year-old hoped he could help show the beauty of soccer to a new American audience.

“The new fan should observe both the individual play and the team play,” Stubbins told the media ahead of the ISL’s inaugural game. “When a player has the ball to himself, he can employ great dexterity with his feet, deception, and tricky ball-maneuvering. No player except the goalie may touch the ball with his hands. While the individual is showing his own style, he is at the same time advancing the fortunes of his team. In team play, the thing to watch for is the pass patterns. These are short and executed with a minimum of delay.”

Al Stubbins, New York Americans' Coach

The media supported the ISL in at times breathless style. A month before kick-off, Allison Danzig wrote that “Soccer is making a comeback in the colleges and being taken up by thousands of high schools. The International Soccer League matches Cox is bringing to New York may be the greatest shot in the arm the game has known in this country.”

The hype helped Cox earn the fledgling league a television contract, with ten games to be televised on WPIX in New York, nine of them live in a prime Saturday night spot. That left WPIX the challenge of finding an announcer who could both explain the game while relating to an American audience. The Vice-President of WPIX’s Operations Department Levitt Pope admitted that “The best soccer experts are British. But I suspect British announcers are too reserved for our purposes. We need someone to talk it up and give the game color. On the other hand, I don’t know if it would work out in trying to take an American announcer and make a soccer expert out of him. What we are looking for is a British Mel Allen, if you can imagine such a thing.” (Mel Allen was the well-known voice of the New York Yankees)

The teams playing in section one were introduced to the media on May 24th 1960 by Mayor Wagner, and a lady described by the New York Times as “Miss Soccer 1960″ – Dolores Armada, Brooklyn-born of Spanish descent, who played on the women’s team for Club Espana and was a secretary of the Dutch Airline that had flown the teams in.

Not everything had gone to plan for the ISL. The games did not take place as promised at Downing Stadium. Instead, the schedule was split between games at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan and Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey. Each of the six teams would play each other once in a round-robin format, with two points awarded for a win and one for a tie.

10,444 fans attended the inaugural game at the Polo Grounds on May 25th 1960, as Kilmarnock – trailing 1-0 at half-time – defeated Bayern Munich 3-1, a deserved win by all accounts. The ISL had been anticipating a crowd of over 15,000, leading to some disappointment, though far from despair. Those that did attend were engaged in the game; Michael Strauss reported that “They cheered, they applauded and they rooted. . .The fans were soccer-wise ones. They knew the game. They booed decisions they considered unjust in the same way that a baseball crowd reacts on close calls made at home plate. They cheered plays at midfield as well as near the nets. They even cheered technique.”

Fancy dribbles by Miloš Milutinović had the crowd shouting “Just like Bob Cousy” at him, referencing the famous Boston Celtics point guard of the time renowned for his ball-handling skills and movement.

The “American” team began play the next day: without a single native American on the team. At the try-outs in late April, Cox had justified the domination of the team by overseas player by saying “It wouldn’t be out of place if we had all foreigners on our squad. After all, the New York Rangers’ hockey team doesn’t have an American among its regulars.”

Ten of those selected were, though, at least New York based, such as John Kriesche, the manager of a Brooklyn butcher shop and a local player for Blau-Weiss Gottschee (a club who still play today).

Referees, meanwhile, were also imported, mostly from Britain.

The New York Americans started out – unsurprisingly – poorly at the first game held at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, losing 5-1 to Glenavon. Discouragingly, only around 3,000 fans showed up, quiet in the face of the poor performance of the home team.

The ISL, though, had certainly attracted attention. The Yankees’ Yogi Berra was reported to hold a considerable interest in the league. “Tell you what we’ll do some night, Howie.” Yogi told his teammates at the end of May. “We’ll go to the Polo Grounds and watch the international soccer. That’s a great game, soccer.” Berra had grown up playing the same in St. Louis, Soccer City USA.

Attendance hovered at levels that meant the ISL would struggle to break even. 5,916 saw Kilmarnock defeat Glenavon 2-0 in both teams’ second games, at Roosevelt Stadium on May 29th.

Encouragingly, June began with a record crowd of 13,013 watching the ISL’s remaining unbeaten teams Kilmarnock and Burnley go head-to-head at the Polo Grounds, the Scots triumphing 3-0 in a foul-ridden game. Michael Strauss reported that “members of both teams shook hands after the game. This sudden cordiality caused considerable merriment in the crowd. For the players had hammered at each other as if they were mortal enemies.”

The disparity in attendance between Manhattan and New Jersey – games at the former outdrawing games at the latter by more than 2 to 1 – began talk that the second series may play only at the Polo Grounds.

Meanwhile, soccer debuted on WPIX Channel 11 on Saturday, June 4th, kicking off at 8.30pm and going head-to-head against professional American football, with the Baltimore Colts playing the Green Bay Packers on Channel 9. WPIX had been unable to find their “British Mel Allen.” Pope had interviewed several Brits, but had been unable to find his man, concluding that “we felt that a combination of presenting a sport relatively unknown to so many Americans and an accent that Americans often find amusing would be too much of a handicap.”

Instead, Canadian Monty Hall – a former soccer player – and veteran sports announcer American Win Elliott presented the show. Cox found a sponsor for the show: F&M Schaefer Brewing Company, brewer of the best-selling beer of its age.

A double-header at the Polo Grounds on June 4th saw considerable improvement from the New York Americans, who held Burnley to a 3-3 tie, with the tying goal coming from a free-kick by the Americans’ Ukrainian star Gene Vinyei in the 83rd minute. Burnley played the final 22 minutes with only ten men, after a leg injury forced out Brian Pilkington, their right-back (substitutions were only allowed for injuries to the goalkeeper).

Matters were not helped by both teams wearing white jerseys: they were distinguished by red shorts in the Americans’ case, and black shorts for the English.

Perhaps not ideally for an American television audience, the televised second game also ended up without a winner, as Bayern Munich and Nice drew 2-2. A solid crowd of 10,414 attended.

The first television reviews proved positive. Jack Gould wrote that “Soccer, the most popular international sport, may turn out to be the newest hit on American television. At least the professional brand of game played Saturday night by Nice of France and Bayern Munich of Germany made for exceptionally good viewing over WPIX.”

Gould continued, “The incredibly deft footwork of the players in the International Soccer League, who will appear on Saturday nights for the next nine weeks over Channel 11, is something to be seen by anyone, whether a sports fan or not. The control of the ball, deception of opposing players and artistry of movement border on the fabulous.”

Unlike many later American commentators, Gould concluded that “The sport, known as football in most parts of the world, appears to be made for TV.”

And similarly, unlike many others who would unfavourably compare the athleticism of soccer to American sports, Gould concluded that “For stamina, the soccer players make most athletes look like weaklings.”

Gould observed that the producers had found ways to impose Schaefer’s beer advertisements into the program without interrupting play too much, with “modest commercials over the action on the field”, determining that “Thoughtfulness is always sound advertising.”

A few days later, play resumed with Nice somehow holding Kilmarnock to a tie: the Scots bombarded Nice’s goal, 27 saves made, but could only score once, and the French found an equaliser. The league was seemingly growing in popularity perhaps thanks to the television coverage, a new record for a single-game set with 12,861 attending. Ill-feeling broke out after the Scots felled two Frenchmen, prompting Nice coach Jean Luciano to rush onto the field, who then apparently spat on the referee, Tom Callaghan, as well as two Kilmarnock players. Luciano was ordered off, but refused to leave the bench, later declaring “I never spat and I will never spit.”

Kilmarnock’s failure to win left the section one title still up for grabs for the next two games at the Polo Grounds two days later. The double-header, with Nice playing the Americans and Burnley facing Glenavon, attracted 11,864 fans.

The Americans secured their second tie in a 1-1 game, though injuries had left Nice playing with only nine men by the end of the game. The Americans did feature a native-born American, with Kevin Hoy in goal.

The second half descended into chaos. Americans’ defender Les Locke was twice headbutted to the ground, with the game stopped three times when the teams began fighting. Vinyei had given the Americans the lead, but Georges Lamia, Nice’s goalkeeper, felled Locke shortly after when he felt he’d been roughly challenged.

The second game went off without incident, Burnley beating Glenavon 6-2.

Nice then defeated Glenavon 3-2 a few days later, another poor crowd attending the game at Roosevelt stadium, with only 3,391 present.

After four games played, then, Kilmarnock led the way with seven points, Burnley and Nice just behind with five points each, New York on four points, Bayern Munich on three points and Glenavon on only two points. One round of games remained to determine the champions of section one. Kilmarnock’s chance to clinch the title would be shown on tape delay on WPIX on Saturday, June 25th.

Burnley put the pressure on Kilmarnock by winning the first game of the double-header at the Polo Grounds, 11,704 in attendance. They defeated Nice 4-0. Kilmarnock, though, continued their fine, speedy play with a 3-1 win over the Americans to capture the section one title. New York were hampered by the departure in the first half of their captain Alf Sherwood, who was later awarded the MVP for section one, concussed and taken to hospital. Sherwood was a Welsh international imported for the tournament from Newport County, and known as the “King of the Sliding Tackle.”

Kilmarnock claimed a prize of $1,000 and advanced to the “America Cup” final, while Burnley received $500 as runners-up.

Days later, the New York Times published a letter from a reader proposing some changes to the way the game was played:

“I am sure the game will appeal to the American public only if some changes are made in the playing rules. For instance: (1) Players should be allowed to charged the goaltender the instant he leaves the goal post. (2) An injured player leaving the game should be replaced. (3) Players should be allowed to charge each other in a legal way. (4) Penalties should be called for two, five or ten minutes, according to the seriousness of the infraction.”

Regardless, Kilmarnock would have to await the results of the second section to know who’d they play on August 5th at the Polo Grounds for the inaugural International Soccer League championship. Cox’s expensive experiment was off to a modest but successful start, and much would hinge on the appeal of the second section and the championship game.

Continue to Part Two of this series, as we look at how the ISL’s debut season shaked out.

This was a man who presided over the joint-worst World Cup performance of all time, but also a man who as a goalkeeper had once rivaled Lev Yashin in many eyes, who had played in Los Angeles, San Diego, St Louis in a pioneering era of American soccer; a man who as coach took two African countries to unprecedented heights – and managed to change the course of world sporting history, by tipping off Horst Dassler just in time for the Adidas head to back the right man in the 1974 FIFA presidential election.

Let’s start in the middle. It’s the beginning of a new decade, the 1970s, and the beginning of a new career for Blagoje Vidinić. He has just retired from playing after ending his career in North American soccer, having kept goal most recently for the St Louis Stars in the North American Soccer League, where he was known as “Barney” Vidinic. The 1968 season, Vidinić’s last as a goalkeeper, was not particularly successful, as he conceded 35 goals in 23 games, St Louis finishing third of four teams in the Gulf division during the NASL’s first season.

Vidinić is in the center in the top row. Photo via www.nasljerseys.com

Vidinić had previously spent two years playing for two incarnations of the Toros in the NPSL, having been part of a Yugoslavian invasion of American soccer in 1967, with no fewer than 25 of his compatriots joining him across the Atlantic. That season was not a success for Vidinić, either, as his LA team finished rock bottom of the Western Division, with Vidinić conceding almost two goals per game, then going on to play a handful of games for the San Diego version of the Toros before his spell in St Louis.

It was an inauspicious end to what had previously been an impressive career: in international play for what was then Yugoslavia, Vidinić had won a silver medal at the 1956 Olympic Games, a gold medal at the 1960 Olympic Games and had been part of the team that finished second at the 1960 European Championships. Facing the Soviet Union in the inaugural final of the latter competition, Vidinić uncharacteristically spilled a shot by Valentin Bubikin, allowing Slava Metreveli to equalise, with the Soviets going on to win in extra time.

Exactly how, following his North American adventure, Vidinić next ended up coaching Morocco isn’t clear – though the connection may well have come via former Yugoslavian international Bob Kap (Božidar Kapušto), who had also moved to American soccer – in his case to coach – and had been part of the Dallas Tornado’s unlikely world tour in 1968 that included a trip to Morocco (Kap, incidentally, went on to play a crucial role in “soccer-style” kicking coming to the NFL).

Regardless, Morocco’s recruitment of Vidinić would change his life. He took Morocco to the World Cup in 1970, held in Mexico, the first African nation to take part since Egypt in 1934. Morocco first faced West Germany, the 1966 finalists, and the Africans gave the Europeans an almighty scare, taking the lead into half-time thanks to a goal by Houmane Jarir – and not an entirely undeserved one at that, the Moroccans creating a good number of chances on the counter-attack (though West Germany did hit the bar twice, and missed a couple of fine chances to equalise before the break).

In the second half, Uwe Seeler equalized and then Gerd Müller found a late winner, the game ending 2-1 to West Germany, but it had been a fine showing by Vidinić’s men. Morocco again looked well-drilled by Vidinić in their next game in the first half, holding a talented Peru team scoreless for 65 minutes, though a trio of goals quickly came to end Morocco’s hopes of advancing any further in the competition.

Morocco did, at least, earn their first ever World Cup goal and point in their final game against Bulgaria, a 1-1 tie.

(How about those low-cut Bulgarian v-necks, eh?)

Vidinić had made his mark in Mexico. And someone else had made his mark on Vidinić. When he had taken charge of Morocco in the run-up to the World Cup, Vidinić found scant resources for his team, but soon received some unsolicited: boxes of Adidas equipment began arriving for his use with Morocco, boots even delivered for the team on their arrival in Mexico. Following elimination, Vidinić encountered the man who had provided the goods – part of his drive to win African support in his attempt to globalise his flourishing apparel business and increase his influence in FIFA circles. It was one Horst Dassler whom Vidinić met in Mexico City, who told him that “From now on, your family and mine shall be friends.”

Vidinić moved on to coach another African team, then known as Zaire (now DR Congo), in 1971. Zaire had only begun playing international soccer in 1963 (having gained independence from Belgium in 1960), and had never qualified for a World Cup, or come close to doing so. Indeed, no sub-Saharan team had ever qualified for the World Cup.

Zaire did, however, have a talented team: Hungarian coach Ferenc Csandai had led them to their first international honor with victory in the 1968 Africa Cup of Nations. But the team had not performed well at the 1970 Africa Cup of Nations. They quickly improved under Vidinić by taking fourth place at the same competition in 1972, as he instilled confidence and a greater understanding of modern tactics. Vidinić led Zaire to qualification for the 1974 World Cup with victory over his former team, Morocco, sealing their place with a 3-0 win in Kinshasa in December 1973.

In recognition of the achievement, the man whose money had brought him to Zaire gave Vidinić “a sack of banknotes”: Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s authoritarian dictator.

Vidinić was recruited just as “Mobutisme”, a crude personality cult, was being instilled in Zaire, and the national football team did not escape from it – in fact, the international exposure it gave the country made it a key tool for Mobutu. The team suddenly became known as the Leopards, Mobutu known for his leopardskin hat.

Vidinić called up his new friend Horst Dassler, and Adidas got to work on a design for the country’s shirts that displayed the desired identity, in brilliant fashion:

In the lead-up to the World Cup, Vidinić oversaw Zaire’s victory at the March 1974 Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt, defeating Zambia in the final 2-0 in a replay.

In West Germany for the World Cup in June 1974, the political pressure from home – with expectations raised and the presence of a phalanx of officials created an uncomfortable atmosphere for the team – was hardly helpful as they prepared to play in a group containing reigning World Cup champions Brazil, and fancied teams from Yugoslavia and Scotland.

Vidinić’s team first faced Scotland at Westfalenstadion in Dortmund on 14 June, with the Scottish entering the game with expectations of winning by a double digit margin against the unknown Africans – skip to 5:49 in the video below.

While the Scots lined up nervously, Zaire looked dandy in their Adidas three-striped warm-up tops.

Zaire unsettled Scotland early in the game, Vidinić chain-smoking on the sideline as his team stroked the ball around. The breakthrough came, to considerable Scottish relief, in the 26th minute, a free kick leading to a header by Joe Jordan – marked weakly by Mwanza Nel Mukombo – landing perfectly on the foot of Peter Lorimer, the Scottish striker lashing in a volley from 15 yards out. The second goal came after an awful defensive lapse by Zaire only eight minutes later, as Joe Jordan ran in on goal completely unmarked from a free kick and headed straight at goalkeeper Kazadi Muamba, who could only fumble it ineptly over the line. Zaire, though, held on for the remainder of the game, a 2-0 defeat disheartening but not devastating.

Devastation would come in their next game against Yugoslavia on the 18th of June, with a 9-0 defeat. Yes: Nine, Zero.

As well as the humiliation of conceding nine goals, Zaire suffering the joint worst defeat in the history of the World Cup, there came with it a seemingly inexplicable minute of madness (hit 20:38 on the video above). In a bizarre move, Vidinić replaced Kazadi Muamba in goal with Tubilandu Ndimbi after Yugoslavia’s third goal, even though the goalkeeper himself had done little wrong in the game.

Ndimbi conceded a goal within seconds of arriving on the field from a free kick, Vidinić having curiously sent him on as Yugoslavia took their kick adjacent to Zaire’s penalty area, and in the chaos that followed with Zaire’s complaints about a supposed missed offside call, Ndaye Mulamba received a red card.

Sadly for Ndaye, and as an explanation for the vociferous protest that followed his dismissal, it was not him who had kicked the referee, but his teammate, Ilunge Mwepu. Later, Ndaye would say that “You can tell from the referee’s behavor that they can’t tell us apart. And they don’t try to either. I cried terribly when I was sent off. I told the referee that it wasn’t me, and Mwepu said “I did it, not he.” But the referee wasn’t interested. All the referees here are against the black race, and not only the referees. Scotland’s Number 4, the captain [Billy Bremner] shouted at me a couple of times during the match, ‘Nigger, hey nigger!’ He spat at me too, and he spat in Man’s face. Scotland’s number 4 is a wild animal.”

The game continued with Zaire down to ten men and at 5’4”,  Ndimbi provided an even weaker target for Yugoslavia’s shooting practice. Vidinić’s compatriots scored with almost comic ease, a very valuable result as their qualification to the next round would likely hinge on holding a healthy goal difference.

The Yugoslavian connection immediately raised questions about Vidinić’s decision-making. Why had he removed Muamba?

Vidinić provided a plausible answer that should remove concerns about his supposed collusion with his countrymen the next day. Vidinić explained that a Ministry of Sport official had ordered the goalkeeping substitution, and promised to never again accept such an order. The explanation’s veracity, one supposes, is proven by the fact that Vidinić remained in charge for the remainder of the tournament.

Meanwhile, in the background to the 9-0 defeat, an expensive billboard displayed a message paid for by Mobuto, with a word little associated with his country during the years of bloodshed he had overseen: Zaire-Peace. There would be no peace for the Zaire players following this result, though, and this would have even more memorable consequences.

Mobutu did not enjoy his country’s humiliation on the world stage in front of his billboard. The message was soon conveyed to the army of his officials in West Germany with the team, who had been busy greedily creaming off many of the gifts promised for the players – Vidinić already having had to quell one mutiny as a result.

Now, it was not gifts that Mubutu’s henchmen offered, but bald threats. Facing defending World Cup champions Brazil in their final game, Zaire were not to lose by more than three goals, they were ominously told. They would, at best, not be allowed home should that happen.

3-0 down to Brazil with just a few minutes remaining, panic and protest at the horrible situation the dictator had placed them in manifested itself as Brazil lined up a free-kick 25 yards out.

What followed is one of the most laughed-at moments in World Cup history, guaranteed to show up in the next blooper reel you see.

The context of it was not so amusing for Zaire’s players, pawns in what was no longer a game for them. Mwepu Ilunga’s inexplicable decision to rush from the wall and strike the dead ball down the field has added much to the legend of African naivety. Of course, it’s hugely unlikely a player with Ilunga’s experience would not know the rules on free kicks. Ilunga later told World Football that he kicked the ball as an act of protest: “I did that deliberately, I was aware of football regulations. . .I don’t regret it at all.”

Zaire kept the score down to 3-0 and were able to return home, but most of them faced futures far less grand than Mobutu had promised them before their departure to West Germany.

Vidinić, meanwhile, had been busy repaying his debt to Horst Dassler, with some interest.

On 11 June 1974, two days before the World Cup began, the FIFA Congress held in Frankfurt elected Dr. João Havelange  of Brazil as the first non-European president of FIFA. It was the first time two men had stood for the FIFA presidency, and Havelange’s defeat of incumbent Englishman Sir Stanley Rous dramatically altered the course of the sport’s history.

It was a result that, if it hadn’t been for Vidinić, would have surprised Horst Dassler, who until the day before the election had been backing his old ally Rous, thinking his victory was inevitable, still chagrined that Havelange had previously refused an approach from Adidas to outfit the entirety of Brazilian national sport. Dassler, though, had underestimated the deservedly bitter feelings towards Rous in Africa, and was perhaps unaware of just how successful Havelange’s “little gifts” had been in wooing African votes. The night before the election, Vidinić and Dassler met, and the Zaire coach told Dassler all the African federations had met and agreed to back Havelange. Dassler was backing the wrong horse, an unappetising prospect for Adidas.

“Here’s Havelange’s room number,” Vidinić told his friend. “Tell him you had been backing Stanley Rous but you have been defeated, and from this moment you will be at Havelange’s disposal.”

Dassler took his advice, met Havelange, and came back with champagne for Vidinić.

In fact, according to Andrew Jennings,Vidinić had good reason to be so sure of Havelange’s impending victory based on African votes: “Vidinic was in Frankfurt in 1974 paying cash for votes to elect Joao Havelange President of FIFA,” Jennings writes.

Following Havelange’s victory the next day, Dassler and sports marketing whizkid Patrick McNally quickly met the new FIFA president for dinner, and the multinational transformation of the World Cup was roadmapped for the first time.

The partnership between Dassler and Havelange, between Adidas and FIFA, would transform world football. As Tomlinson puts it in FIFA and the Contest for World Football, Dassler was the pivotal figure “that would catapult sport into a new phase of economically and financially lucrative transnational practice.”

It would not be Vidinić’s last act in what had rapidly become the murky world of FIFA politics. Jennings again: “Sixteen years later, in April 1990, Vidinic was with Havelange in Guatemala City at the CONCACAF Extraordinary Congress to make sure Jack Warner was imposed as President of CONCACAF.”

By that point, Vidinić was working directly for Adidas in Strasbourg with frequent trips back to North America, his final coaching spell with Colombia in the 1970s having come to nothing, and he would stay involved with Adidas until his death in 2006.

Vidinić had moved from enmeshment in one murky world to another during his globe-trotting career, curiously changing the course of sporting history in the process.

Cricket seems to have had more high-profile cases of sportsmen whose clinical depression have come to light than most sports for a variety of reasons explored in the show, including the long overseas tours (sometimes lasting months) that take fathers away from their families, situations that can exacerbate situations for those ill with depression. Cricket is known to have the highest suicide rate in professional sport (with over 150 known cases throughout the twentieth century), with suicide rates running higher among cricket players than in the general population in all major cricket-playing countries. There’s even a book about it. Of course, not all of those cases would be due to clinical depression, but the BBC programme certainly threw light on a subject too often swept under the carpet in sporting culture.

‘Illness’ was perhaps the keyword of the commentary by cricketers including Marcos Trescothick and Matthew Hoggart, who emphasised that a sportsman can no more choose to become ill with depression than he can choose to become ill with laryngitis. Admitting the problem of a mental illness, as we all know, is far more challenging than discussing an obviously physical one in everyday society and even more so for those in the public eye presumed to be living the “good life” of comfortable sporting wealth.

Cricket might present unique challenges for international sportsmen suffering from depression, but many of the same issues are present in soccer, and we can presume – given around 15-20% of the general population will suffer from clinical depression at some time in their lives – that there are literally hundreds of professional players around the world privately struggling with a debilitating mental illness.

The most high-profile case in international soccer illustrates the tragedy that can result from depression only too clearly. In November 2009, as you may recall, German international goalkeeper Robert Enke took his own life. Enke’s situation was extreme – his daughter died in 2006 aged two due to a heart defect. After his death, Enke’s widow revealed that he had been treated for clinical depression for six years, and had been concerned about the consequences that might result from this becoming public knowledge.

Regardless of the specifics of Enke’s tragic case, there is no doubt that to be male and to be a professional sports star and to be depressed is not something many find comfortable to talk about. As Dave Zirin put it with regard to the Vince Young incident in 2008, “superman isn’t supposed to get depressed.”

Sportsmen have in the past been ridiculed for showing the “weakness” of having the misfortune to have a mental illness. British boxer Frank Bruno was subjected to the newspaper headline “Bonkers Bruno locked up” when he was hospitalised for his condition in 2003. In the Premier League, Stan Collymore found no sympathy from his own manager at Aston Villa when he admitted to his depressive illness in 1999, practically mocked in public by Villa boss John Gregory – an ignorant reaction that brought shockingly little opprobrium upon Gregory. In the Guardian, following Collymore’s admission to the Priory clinic for treatment, Paul Weaver mocked that “sometimes it is difficult to muster any sympathy” for well-paid players suffering from stress.

Little had apparently changed since the 1970s, when upcoming England star Kevin Beattie’s career was derailed by mental distress that resulted in him disappearing from England camp in 1974, his “weakness” pitilessly mocked across the British press. In the Daily Mail, Jeff Powell wrote that a “lot of hard-up kids were sick at the news of one of their own kind running away home instead of coming of age with an England cap.”

Bobby Brandon put it this way in an article following Enke’s death: “The difficulties of admitting to depression are magnified for professional athletes, in a world where bravado and hyper-masculinity can mean money, fame, endorsements and women, it becomes nearly impossible to admit to what many perceive as a weakness without realizing the courage it takes for a man to admit he has a problem.”

Sport itself is now being recognised as a potential pressure cooker. Enke’s death prompted this thoughtful commentary from Gabby Logan in November 2009:

Is the sportsman predisposed to mental illness or does the sport induce it? Sport-induced depression seems to develop through different triggers: the stress of continued peak performance, the despair in long periods of injury and the futility of life in retirement. The highs and lows of sport are so intense, focusing on such small detail to gain advantage and then enjoying victory for just a few snatched moments before the next goal is laid down.

It does seem – largely due to the death of Enke and the openness of prominent cricketers about their situations – that thankfully the ignorant perspective on mental illness in professional sport may be changing, at least in British sporting discourse. Listening to the two hour BBC show (nationally broadcast) mentioned above with numerous sportsmen openly and honestly discussing the pain of depression and the ways they found to cope with it surely makes it easier for the taboo to start to fade away.

In England, the Professional Footballers’ Association has produced a new guide book for its members for the 2011-12 season that looks at the unique stresses of being a professional sportsman and suggests ways to handle them. Let’s hope this sets an example for others to follow.

Sadly, it is hard to argue with Lahm’s conclusion, though it should be noted that there is now an openly gay footballer – Anton Hysén, son of former Liverpool player Glenn Hysén (who coaches Anton’s fourth division Swedish team, Utsiktens BK). Anton came out in March in the Swedish soccer magazine Offside.

Anton is as far as I know the first professional player to openly come out since Justin Fashanu in England two decades ago, and he spoke about the challenges he thought his decision would bring:

I want to prove that there is no big deal if I’m a footballer and also gay. If I perform as a footballer, then I do not think it matters if I like men or women…There will always be people who can’t tolerate gay people, just like there are people who can’t tolerate immigrants. A club might be interested in me and then the coach might change his mind if he finds out I’m gay, but that is his problem not mine.

That’s brave of Anton, but obviously still points to the problematic situation facing players who might want to no longer have to hide their sexuality without damaging their professional prospects. And of course, the spotlight on a player higher up in football’s pyramid would be even harsher.

Tragically, it is still generally presumed in elite soccer circles that coming out would result in prejudice that could even impact on a player’s career on the field, nevermind the abuse players may fear from the terraces or gutter press. Justin Fashanu, a couple of decades ago in England, epitomised all those issues as the world’s first openly gay footballer, disowned by his own brother, eventually committing suicide partly as a result of the homophobia he encountered.

Times are, however, a-changin’ in professional sport. Even a decade ago it would be hard to imagine a Football vs Homophobia day in England being preceded by Justin Fashanu’s induction to the Norwich City Hall of Fame with a banner sponsored by the Justin Campaign, an organisation set-up in Fashanu’s name to fight homophobia in sport.

That said, English football and world soccer in general still lags behind other sports in taking pro-active strides to make its space feel comfortable for gay players. In baseball, the San Francisco Giants recently released a video in support of Its Get Better, aimed at LGBT youth. In rugby, Welsh player Gareth Thomas famously came out last year with very little noticeable negative reaction.

Just as importantly, recently retired England rugby international Ben Cohen – a gay icon but straight and married with kids – has launched a foundation, StandUp, to fight bullying, in particular homophobic bullying, that has attracted international support.

In the NBA, of course, mixed messages are coming out seemingly monthly.

Efforts to fight homophobia in soccer certainly do exist: the Justin Campaign has been a key part of that, receiving considerable support from Brighton and Hove Albion. The English Football Association, in a seemingly well-meaning but misguided manner, bungled the release of an anti-homophobia video just last year.

In the US, the Columbus Crew are organising a tournament for gay and allied players that is welcome. But there has been little done that I know of by MLS or US Soccer on the men’s or women’s sides of the game – which brings us to the difficult question of the culture of the sport beyond just sexuality, but into gender as well. As Jennifer Doyle put it: “Homophobia animates hostility towards the women’s game – so much so, it is indeed hard to tell the difference between it and simple sexism. (For women in many parts of the world – including England – just playing soccer is enough to make you a “dyke” and target of homophobic abuse.)”

It will take work by clubs, governing bodies, fans, gay and straight players to help fight homophobia and discuss these issues in the public sphere, something that could help soccer not only move towards a culture accepting of openly gay professional players but that would also have a positive influence at amateur and youth levels for LGBT youth involved in the sport, and for all who want to enjoy soccer without a side-dish of discrimination.

Who will take the next steps to stand up against homophobia?

I suppose those were the good ol’ days.

As Tim Vickery puts it in an important historical reminder of all that today, there is a reason much of the rest of the world is less up in arms about the Blatter era than the English press.

There was no pre-Havelange and Blatter garden of Eden — just a different FIFA with different defects. With its lack of historical context it is unclear whether the current hysteria in the English press is motivated by a genuine desire to carry the game forward on a global basis — or by nostalgia for when English rule was unchallenged.

The lack of accountability of the current FIFA is surely unsustainable, the quasi-feudal personal fiefdoms that develop inside the organization are disturbing and the fat-cat lifestyle of some of those at the top makes the stomach turn. But for all its flaws and problems, it is not hard to understand why much of the developing world prefers the post-Havelange FIFA to what came before.

Of course, from any objective standpoint of the good of world soccer, the fact that FIFA was f*cked up in the pre-Havelange era doesn’t make it any more right for it to be f*cked up in the post-Havelange era. Havelange and Blatter have made corruption and commercial exploitation a way of life in the sport’s global governing bodies. That may beat colonialist arrogance as a defining ruling trait, but not by a lot.

The cesspool of corruption that has followed the game’s drastic commercialisation under Havelange/Blatter is a great betrayal of the movement that overthrew Rous’ arrogant rule. The overthrow of Eurocentric rule in the 1970s was born of a genuine desire to spread the game around the world and allow more nations into the World Cup, a development that has allowed it to become a kaleidoscope of global talent on display.

Back then, there were administrators from the developing world who wanted to use their growing voice within the game to end discrimination and racism in sport, and to protect world soccer from the deleterious effects of rampant commercialism.

What would Ydnekatchew Tessema, the head of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in the 1970s and a true visionary of the game from Ethiopia, make of today’s farcial FIFA election? Or that each FIFA confederation (perhaps excluding UEFA) is run by a tainted leader?

It was Tessema who helped forge the coalition that ousted Rous in 1974 with the election of Havelange, but it was not with CAF being used as a tool of Havelange – rather, it was a necessary move by CAF to end the roadblock to African development Rous seemed insistent upon. As Paul Darby wrote in his excellent book Africa, Football and FIFA:

The fact that Tessema was in a position to threaten the withdrawal of African support for Havelange’s presidential challenge illustrates that CAF was not only gaining confidence to assert itself within world football politics but was also beginning to recognise the potential that its voting powers offered the African continent. Indeed, it is clear from African accounts of the 1974 FIFA Congress . . . that the African nations did not see themselves merely as pawns in a power struggle for the control of FIFA. Instead, they saw Havelange as the means through which to achieve a realignment of the distribution of power and privilege within world football which would more adequately reflect their growing stature.

Tessema led the push for Africa to receive more places at the World Cup by fighting for the principle that each nation should have one vote within the governing body, one that Rous had tried to circumvent. Rous was blunt about his belief developing nations did not deserve the same rights within the global game:

Many people are convinced that it is unrealistic, for example, that a country like England, where the game started and was first organised, or that experienced countries like Italy and France, who have been pillars of FIFA and influential in its problems and in world football affairs for so many years, should have no more than equal voting rights with any of the newly created countries of Africa and Asia.

Tessema was curt in his response to this patronising attitude.

Although we acknowledge the role played by certain continents in the creation of FIFA, its development and their moral, material and financial contributions, we estimate that democratic rule dictates that all rights and duties that form an international organisation should be the same for all. This is why in the framework of legitimacy, and by following a process consistent with the interests of world football and its unity, a progressive equilibrium of the representation in the heart of FIFA and its competition is required.

At the same time, Tessema was cautious about submitting to the tide of dollars flooding into the sport: Tessema fought against alcohol and tobacco sponsorship in African football, and warned against the consequences of young talent leaving African shores. In the mid-1980s, not long before his premature death from cancer, Tessema stated:

African football must make a choice! Either we keep our players in Africa with the will power of reaching one day the top of the international competitions and restore African people a dignity that they long for; or we let our best elements leave their countries, thus remaining the eternal suppliers of raw material to the premium countries, and renounce, in this way, to any ambition. When the rich countries take away from us, also by naturalisation, our best elements, we should not expect any chivalrous behaviour on their part to help African football.

It is sadly now the case that FIFA under the Havelange-Blatter regime has largely made African football a pawn for its own needs by submitting world football to the power of money for its own rapacious greed, with the corruption that has wrought around the world. That money is now the tool by which Blatter maintains his fiefdom, and that corrupt the successors of Tessema. There are no Tessemas today.

Nor is there any chivalry in the way FIFA operates. One example can be seen in the distribution of money from the 2010 World Cup held in South Africa – most of the money, of course, kept by FIFA itself.

Sepp Blatter explained that the money actually paid out was to be given to those who had developed young talent. “We are pleased that we can share the success of the 2010 FIFA World Cup with the clubs by providing them a share of the benefits of our flagship event, in particular to recognise their efforts in the development of young players.”

Those payments did not go to the countries from which these players developed and that desperately need it, but to the rich European clubs who poached them at young ages. The largest payments from FIFA after the 2010 World Cup went to clubs from England ($5,952,133.30), Germany ($4,740,666.70), Italy ($3,880,666.70), Spain ($3,699,066.70), France ($2,202,666.70) and the Netherlands ($1,858,266.70). The first African nation in the list is South Africa, with its clubs receiving $662,666.70.

FIFA uses its largesse to cement the support that earns Blatter 186 votes even after all the revelations of the past year, and indeed, past decade – the rest of the world is also bought off by dubious development programmes whose monies often end up in brown envelopes, as we wonder where the development actually is.

FIFA has certainly overseen a massive expansion of the game’s popularity worldwide since the Rous era, and part of that does explain the continued support for the Blatter regime as Vickery says. The English FA’s hypocrisy is hard to stomach, given their willingness to play FIFA’s game until their failed 2018 World Cup bid and the lonely fight against FIFA’s obvious corruption that Andrew Jennings was left to.

Still, that is no reason for the rest of the world to say that makes turning a blind eye to Blatter OK. FIFA has co-opted and corrupted the growth of world soccer for its own benefit rather than fostered it in a truly beneficial way for the grassroots of the sport – at least in the postwar era. The history of the treatment of women’s football (short shorts?!) or the struggle it took for African football to gain recognition in the halls of FIFA is evidence of that, nevermind the blatant bribery present and submission to the power of the dollar above all. The support for Blatter in the FIFA Congress is not high-minded, it is deeply self-interested.

And when we are left hoping for sponsors to save the world’s game from FIFA, remember this. The last few weeks have certainly dented FIFA and Blatter, but it’s hard to see where the movement to truly reform it for the good of the goddamn game will come from in this day and age.

While to fans of MLS it may seem normal for a league to span two countries, the existence of Swansea in the Premier League, Cardiff City in the Football League and Newport County, Wrexham, Merthyr Town and Colwyn Bay further down in the English system remains a subject of some controversy to UEFA and within Welsh and English football. A potted history of Welsh football is in order to explain this anomaly.

The Welsh national association is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1876, 13 years after the English FA and three years after the Scottish FA. Its original hotspot was in North Wales, mainly around Wrexham, where the sport had crossed the border from Cheshire in England. In south Wales though, rather than Association Football taking hold, it was Rugby Football that became the most popular organised game in the country in the late nineteenth century.

This distinction can be seen in the contrast between the country’s biggest professional clubs – Wrexham in the north date back to 1872, while in the south of the country Cardiff were founded in 1899 and Swansea in 1913. This delayed national development provided an immediate impediment to a strong Welsh league developing in the crucial early decades of organised football in Great Britain, and was unlike the story in Scotland, to contrast to another English neighbour. Challenging issues of north-south transit in Wales also proved to be a challenge to national play in the country.

Welsh participation in the English league system thus dates back to the country’s oldest club, Wrexham. Located close to the border with England adjacent to the Northwest hub of English football, it actually proved to be more profitable for the club to play in the English Combination minor league that ran from 1890 to 1911 than in the nascent Welsh League, with the inferior competition in Wales dettering spectators and players alike (Wrexham briefly played in the Welsh league from 1894-1896, easily winning it both seasons they participated in). Wrexham eventually rose up the English system to the Football League, and the newer professional Welsh clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff followed them across the border in the early twentieth century.

Cardiff had the strongest run of success in English competition in the twentieth century, winning the FA Cup in 1927, three years after finishing as runners-up in the Football League’s top division. Swansea themselves rose to the top flight in 1981 after three successive promotions from the basement division under John Toshack. They finished in sixth place in the 1981-82 season, but just as quickly fell back to the bottom tier by 1986.

Meantime, the Welsh teams playing in the English league system were still allowed to compete in the Welsh Cup, of course dominating it. This provided Welsh clubs with a route to European competition. This issue has proven to be controversial: in the early 1990s, a national Welsh Premier League was established, featuring both professional and semi-pro clubs, with all Welsh clubs invited to join it. The professional clubs from four of Wales’ biggest conurbations – Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and Wrexham – all refused to join, remaining in the English system. Clubs playing in the English league system were thus banned from participating in the Welsh Cup in 1995, removing that route to European competition for clubs such as Swansea and Cardiff – though that may be about to change.

The Welsh Premier League even had considerable trouble attracting the smaller Welsh teams, issuing sanctions that forced clubs such as Merthyr Tydfil (now Merthyr Town) to take court action to be able to play their home games in the English system within Welsh borders. The Welsh Premier League struggles due to the absence of clubs such as Swansea, though it does allow for some glorious moments for some very small clubs in European competition – the champions of the league qualify for the UEFA Champions League, with Barry Town beating an admittedly weakened FC Porto team 3-1 at Jenner Park in Wales in 2001 (they still lost 9-3 on aggregate, though!).

All that said, Swansea City’s promotion to the Premier League is a fantastic achievement, and brings a touch of Welsh exotica to the league – along with a welcome commitment to continue playing attractive soccer from their manager Brendan Rodgers.

(Though, honestly, I preferred this Kings of Cascadia display from last year – less self-reverential. And of course, the Space Needle tifo.)

With that very much in mind, Seattle fans in the Emerald City Supporters’ group set out to do something special of their own for the team’s first MLS meeting with Portland at QWest field this past Saturday night.

On their opening night, the Timbers Army stepped up their game. ECS finally has a rival supporter group to truly compete with. They raised their game, and everyone and their mothers are drooling over what they saw at Jen-Weld Field the rainy night of April 14th. Many have already forgotten that the bar for atmosphere and passion was set by the ECS and Sounders faithful. An atmosphere that put MLS Commissioner Garber in tears, it being a real life expression of his long term dream of what MLS and soccer in this country can be. May 14, 2011 will be the day we all remind the world who is king in Cascadia. It is the day we will all put forth the support that rightly puts us at the top of supporter groups in North America!

Forget the ahistorical silliness of “ECS finally has a rival supporter group to truly compete with”, Seattle fans did produce a display worthy of the occasion. It was the right way up, and everything:

It pains me as a Fire fan to say it, but that’s some world class tifo from ECS. Scale, execution and concept are all top-drawer. Steve Kelley was certainly impressed:

Moments before kickoff, the Emerald City Supporters dramatically unfurled massive banners that commemorated the rivalry.

Large drawings of former Sounders Marcus Hahnemann, Preston Burpo and Jimmy Gabriel floated down the south end zone along with pictures of assistant coach Brian Schmetzer (the Sounders’ USL coach) and forward Fredy Montero.

Then slowly another banner rolled down from the deck above, displaying a picture of a fist crushing a Timbers ball and proclaiming, “Decades of Dominance.”

Finally, from below, a banner with a drawing of Portland nemesis Roger Levesque unrolled with a jab at Timbers fans that read, “48 seconds.” In the 2009 U.S. Open Cup against Portland, Levesque scored in the first 48 seconds.

So maybe this wasn’t Arsenal and Tottenham or Manchester United and Manchester City, but it was a celebration of what the game slowly is becoming in this country.

The banners were spectacular.

Eh, I can’t say I’ve ever seen EPL fans unveil anything even remotely in the postcode/zip code of a major MLS tifo display. Certainly nothing they’ve created. It added to an outstanding atmosphere in the stadium. This is what Portland-Seattle should be about, not the hipster-rivalry nonsense this rather incomplete Wall Street Journal article got into last week.

Nitpickers might say of the display that ‘Decades of Dominance’ is a little overwrought, but if you’re going to say something a little over the top, may as well display it in an epic fashion. This was epic.

It should also certainly be noted that Portland fans brought an impressive away tifo to the table as well at the game, something we hopefully will see more of in MLS and difficult to do away from home:

Where does all this tifo fit in MLS history? I guess we’ll leave that for Shawn Francis to figure out. There has been impressive stuff done in many places now over the years, each spurring on rival groups to greater heights. And finally, MLS front offices and headquarters seem to realise the value of these displays to the culture and promotion of soccer in North America as something distinct from other sports here.

At the end of the day, the purpose of tifo is to inspire your team and your fans and in a rivalry stoke the embers: on Saturday night, both sets of fans did this in a manner that can only engender more DIY supporter culture in North America, a really healthy development for the sport here. The good part about this for Cascadia is that it helps make the rivalry between Portland and Seattle about devoting what you can to do support your team in a positive fashion, and not about fighting or other nonsense.