The North American Soccer League (NASL) was the U.S. and Canada’s top flight soccer league from 1968 through 1984 and it was on this day in soccer history in 1970 that the premier team, the New York Cosmos, joined the league.

The Cosmos were owned by brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegün as well as Warner Brothers President Steve Ross.

The Cosmos went on to be the poster team for the best and worst of NASL and was part of the over spending that ultimately drove the league into the ground.

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The team from its founding was geared to bring big time soccer and Pele to the Big Apple.  The Cosmos name came from the shortening of ‘Cosmopolitan’ similar to the way another NYC team, NY Mets from Metropolitans, shortened their name.

Clive Toye, the team’s first general manager, also went with the green and yellow colors not coincidentally the same as the Brazilian national team with the ultimate goal of luring Pele to the Cosmos.

The club eventually signed Pele to the team along with many other big name players from Carlos Alberto to Giorgio Chinaglia to Franz Beckenbauer and were able to fill stadia around the league but it was the high spending and the spending it forced the league’s other teams to try and match that put the league out of business.

Soccer Birthdays

1907 – Lucien Laurent, French footballer (d. 2005)
1935 – Terry Allcock, English footballer
1962 – John de Wolf, former Dutch International footballer
1975 – Josip Skoko, Australian footballer
1981 – Fábio Rochemback, Brazilian footballer
1983 – Habib Mohamed, Ghanaian footballer
1986 – Matthew Bates, English footballer
1987 – Gonzalo Higuaín, French/Argentine footballer

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