Clive Toye traveled to Jamaica and walked unannounced into the hotel where the Brazilian club Santos was staying ahead of a friendly against the Reggae Boyz in January, 1971. Pele was sitting by the pool, and the New York Cosmos general manager began the cold call that changed US sports history.
“You could go to Juventus, you could go to Real Madrid, yes, you could win a championship. But so will other people,” the 90-year-old Toye recalled telling Pele. “You come to us, you can win a country and nobody else could do that except you.”
Dozens of meetings over four years led to Pele agreeing to sign with Cosmos in June, 1975. His 2½ seasons in New York put US soccer on a path to holding the World Cup in 1994 and launching Major League Soccer two years later.
“There are probably two athletes that have transcended their sport and transcended sport overall in our lifetime,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said Thursday night after Pele’s death at the age of 82. “One was Muhammad Ali and the other was Pele.”
The Cosmos averaged 3,578 fans in 1974 – a figure that nearly tripled to 10,450 the next year, with people lining the sides of the Triborough Bridge approach to watch games at Downing Stadium on Randalls Island.
In 1976, the Cosmos averaged 18,227 at Yankee Stadium and then 34,142 at Giants Stadium in New Jersey the following year for Pele’s final season. Boosted by the Pele buzz – along with players Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia – the Cosmos averaged more than 40,000 the following two years before a tailspin saw the league fold after the 1984 season.
From that first meeting in Kingston, where Toye brought along US Soccer Federation’s Kurt Lamm for support, Toye traveled to Brazil several times and finally persuaded Pele to agree during a meeting in Brussels. The formal offer came a few days later in Rome.
Pele signed the contract in Bermuda for tax reasons, what Toye recalls as a US$2.7-million, three-year deal, and the Brazilian was introduced during a news conference at 21, a hangout for New York’s movers and shakers.
When Pele led Brazil to his third and final World Cup title in 1970, the primary way to watch the tournament with English-language commentary in the US was on closed-circuit television in arenas like Madison Square Garden. Toye and North American Soccer League commissioner Phil Woosnam had the league purchase US rights that year for US$15,000 but could not find a TV network that would agree to broadcast.
“There were still people, you’d say to them soccer, and they’d say, ‘What’s soccer?'” Toye said, speaking from his home in Mount Pleasant, SC “And then we’d talk to people about the World Cup, and they would say, ‘Oh, what’s the World Cup?’ This last World Cup you couldn’t bloody switch on any channel without seeing something about it.”
Pele was 34 when he joined the Cosmos and scored 37 goals in 64 regular and postseason matches. He agreed to countless interviews and promotional appearances as part of a mission to make soccer mainstream.
“The Cosmos was the spark that lit the fire that has become a conflagration of soccer in our country,” said Alan Rothenberg, a former US Soccer Federation president and the head organizer of the 1994 World Cup. He had vivid memories of leaving the Plaza Hotel with Pele and jaywalking through traffic to Central Park.
“Cabs came screeching to a halt. They started screaming ‘Pele! Pele!’ It was like the Red Sea parted,” Rothenberg said.
Pele played for Santos from 1956-74 and for Brazil from 1957-71, making his mark on a sport that had largely bypassed an American fanbase fixated on Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA, college football and college basketball.
“The NASL set the stage for what soccer in America is today, both from a grassroots perspective but also at the professional level,” Garber said. “He came here and said: This sport matters. I’m going to make it bigger than anyone ever dreamed it could be. And all of us who are in the sport today, whether a lover of the game or a player or administrator, we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for Pele deciding to come to the United States.”
Sunil Gulati, another past USSF president and a member of FIFA’s ruling council, first met Pele when he got an autograph at Dillon Stadium in Hartford, Conn., where the Cosmos played the Connecticut Bicentennial.
About 30 years later, Gulati accompanied Columbia women’s All-American soccer player Sophie Reiser to a suite at Hofstra because she wanted an autograph.
“Pele, one more, please?” Gulati recounted. “He turned to me and smiled and said, ‘There’s always one more.’ It was absolutely fantastic. He did everything with a smile.”
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