The brief, tumultuous marriage that seeded a love of soccer in New York City
On July 19, the FIFA World Cup Final will take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A little over 50 years ago, on the same site, there was a different stadium and a different team playing there, But something just as momentous happened: the birth of a sporting phenomenon that helped America fall in love with soccer.
And it was all thanks to one man — Pelé.
A three-time World Cup winner with Brazil, the man born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was known across the world as being the greatest player that had ever graced a soccer pitch and now he was here in America, a country whose indifference to the sport couldn’t have been more pronounced.
When Pelé first stepped onto the field for the barely-known New York Cosmos in 1975, American soccer changed overnight. The Brazilian icon arrived in a country where his sport existed largely on the margins, competing for attention against more established, mainstream sports.
Within months, crowds that had rarely paid attention to soccer were flocking to see the three-time World Cup winner in action and the Cosmos, a club going nowhere fast, soon became a cultural event. Celebrities filled the stands, television cameras followed their every move and soccer suddenly occupied a place in the national conversation in a manner not dissimilar to Lionel Messi’s arrival at Inter Miami in 2023.
Until Pelé arrived in 1975, the game the rest of the world called “football” had been dying a slow and largely unnoticed death in America. Indeed, in the five years that the North American Soccer League had existed, it had singularly failed to ignite any public interest in a sport that most every other country on the planet clutched to their hearts.
Even before the NASL began, the odds were stacked against pro soccer succeeding, especially when faced with the hegemony of baseball and the other kind of football. Certainly, the massed ranks of the nation’s press seemed dead set against giving it any kind of opportunity to flourish. In 1968, for example, the San Francisco Examiner wrote despairingly of soccer’s influence around the world: “In Europe, as in South America, they go raving mad over the game. Pray that it doesn’t happen here.”
Even in New York City, perhaps the most ethnically diverse metropolis on earth, there appeared to be little appetite for the game, with the city’s soccer franchise, the New York Cosmos, “drawing less than the skin flicks on Eighth Avenue,” according to one of the Cosmos players, Shep Messing.
But the turning point came when global entertainment giant Warner Communications acquired the Cosmos and put its visionary chairman, Steve Ross, in charge. Ross didn’t know a goalkeeper from a zookeeper, but he was determined to break the Cosmos — and soccer itself — in the United States. Prior to the change, the team had been little more than a ragtag assembly of part-timers, students and foreigners who played their games at Downing Stadium, a crumbling wreck of a site under the Triborough Bridge at Randall’s Island.
Now, with the financial might of Warner Communications behind them, the Cosmos were transformed from a team on the brink of collapse to one with lofty ambitions, one of which, ridiculously, was signing 34-year-old Pelé, the greatest soccer player that the world had ever seen and who had recently retired from playing.
In basketball terms, it was like a 40-year-old Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for a Turkish basketball team nobody had ever heard of.
The idea came from the Cosmos’ general manager, Englishman Clive Toye. “There was only player in the world who could break through this crust of indifference — and that was Pelé,” he said.
The idea appealed to Steve Ross, a man drawn inexorably to star names and supersized personalities.
So began a four-year, 300,000-mile odyssey for Toye, where he pursued the Brazilian around the world as though he were a fugitive, eager to lure him out of retirement and back on the football pitch.
There were meetings in London, Frankfurt and Toronto, in Santos and Sao Paolo, none of which yielded the result Toye wanted. It was only when Pelé’s financial woes caught up with him in late 1974 that Toye’s hand was suddenly strengthened. Waylaid by a succession of bad business deals and poor legal advice, the player was in dire need of money and the Cosmos, thanks to the deep pockets of Warner, had bags of it.
The deal Toye finally struck with Pelé guaranteed the player more money in three years than he had earned in his entire playing career with Santos – nearly $3 million (around $18 million today). Not only was it a world record package but it was over twice that what the rest of the Cosmos squad earned combined. Add in two homes, one in Manhattan and one in Connecticut, a lavish office at Rockefeller Plaza and guaranteed spots for his children at the city’s top schools, and Pelé’s compensation package was staggering by the standards of any era.
The Cosmos management also went out of their way to ensure Pelé paid as little tax as possible, preparing a succession of contracts for him, with just one having any mention of soccer in it. Aside from the three-year playing deal, there was a 10-year deal for the global marketing rights to the Pelé name and likeness and a 14-year PR contract for Warner Communications. One agreement even had his position within the corporation as that of a “Recording Artist”.
But it wasn’t just money that tempted Pelé.
When Clive Toye made his sales pitch to Pelé, he convinced him not to join one of the big European clubs, like Juventus in Italy or Spain’s Real Madrid, that had been keen to secure his services. “I said if you go there, all you can do is win another championship. If you come here, you can win a country.
“He and he alone could do something no one had ever done and bring soccer to the mainstream.”
Those dreams would go through the nation’s largest city during one of its most difficult periods. In the fall of 1975, New York was a city on the brink.
Mayor Abe Beame’s administration had overseen the city’s worst-ever fiscal crisis, with thousands of city workers and public-sector workers laid off, wages frozen and essential capital improvement projects shelved indefinitely. With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, Beame had been left with no option but to seek financial assistance from President Gerald Ford.
Just a couple of weeks after Pelé’s unveiling as a Cosmos player at the 21 Club on June 10, 1975, Beame and New York got their response from the White House, a rejection that gave rise to the famous Daily News headline: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.” (The actual history is a bit more complicated, but that’s a story for another essay.)
Even as the city spiraled, the Cosmos, now with the world’s greatest ever player on their roster, went stratospheric. They moved into the revamped Yankee Stadium and then, in 1977, moved into Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, where, against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers on August 14, 1977, they pulled in a new NASL record attendance of 77,691.
Uniquely, the Cosmos blended sport and celebrity culture — Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Robert Redford and Muhammad Ali were all regular attendees. In disco-era New York, they had managed to take soccer beyond the confines of the stadium. For the players, that invariably meant jumping in limos and heading straight to legendary super club Studio 54 after the final whistle, where they could skip the queues and get the party started.
There were drugs on the dance floor, sex in the toilets and the Cosmos in the VIP section. As team captain Werner Ritter said: “That club was one of the home bases for the players. It was pretty standard Cosmos treatment. The mob would part, the velvety ropes come open and you’d be taken into a VIP room there. We got superstar treatment.”
Pelé’s part-missionary, part-mercenary Cosmos career finally came to an end on October 1, 1977. In a farewell game at Giants Stadium against Santos, he played one half of the match for the Cosmos and the other for the only other club he had ever played for. As the game drew to an emotional end, the heavens opened over the stadium, drenching the 75,000 in attendance.The following day, a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: ‘Even The Sky Was Crying’.
The Cosmos without Pelé were a different matter entirely. Devoid of his box-office appeal, the club floundered. In 1985, with interest waning and crowds a tiny fraction of what they used to be, the Cosmos folded.
For the most part, the NASL had been like building a house and starting with the light fittings; the stars were there before the infrastructure, the marketing before the grassroots and the entertainment before the sustainability.
For a time, it worked. But when the novelty wore off, the cracks that had always existed became impossible to ignore.
Fast forward half a century. The NASL is long gone, but it has been replaced by a new league, Major League Soccer (MLS), that has benefited enormously from learning the lessons of the Cosmos era.
Rather than relying exclusively on imported stars, the league has invested heavily in soccer-specific stadiums, youth academies, training facilities and expansion markets with committed ownership groups. Growth has often been slower than supporters would like, but it has been built on firmer ground.
The Cosmos believed stars would create a soccer culture; MLS has spent the last three decades trying to build the culture first and let the stars enhance it rather than define it.
Since the demise of the Cosmos, MLS has driven a steady rise in soccer participation and fandom in New York City through the establishment of clubs like New York Red Bulls, New York City FC and the latest iteration of the New York Cosmos. Regular top-flight matches, youth academies, and community outreach programs have helped embed the sport more deeply in the city’s sporting culture and increased grassroots uptake across all age groups.
Over the past 20 years, for example, K–12 soccer in New York has grown mainly through a mix of community programs, after-school initiatives and youth club development pathways. Key successes include the NYC Soccer Initiative, which has built mini-pitches and expanded access to the sport in underserved neighborhoods, and Soccer for Success, a large after-school program serving thousands of children with both soccer training and life-skills education.
Alongside these, clubs such as Downtown United, Asphalt Green and FC Harlem have strengthened organized youth development, while MLS-linked pathways like the New York Red Bulls Academy have created clearer routes into elite and professional soccer.
And so, as the United States prepares to host the biggest World Cup in history, soccer is no longer a source of mockery and befuddlement among domestic sports fans. In 1975, American soccer relied on one iconic player to capture the nation's imagination. In 2026, it will showcase a more mature soccer ecosystem that includes professional clubs across the country, booming youth participation, dedicated stadiums and a generation of homegrown talent competing at the highest levels of the sport across the world.
Half a century after Pelé transformed a struggling team into a genuine cultural sensation, American soccer finds itself back in New Jersey again, preparing for another historic moment. The difference is that this time, the game is no longer trying to introduce itself.
It has, finally, put down roots.
