By Samindra Kunti and Paul Nicholson
December 15 – The news that New York Cosmos owner Seamus O’Brien has cut playing and coaching staff and trimmed operational overhead at the club just days after winning the North American Soccer League (NASL) is a hammer blow to the league that is desperately scrambling to sign up new clubs for the 2017 season.
The NASL is the US’s second tier league but has struggled to build its footprint and faces the 2017 season with potentially just seven teams, including the Cosmos if they continue.
O’Brien says that a seven team league does not make a viable business case and that the Cosmos need 12 teams to make it both competitive and justifiable.
Next season the NASL lose the Tampa Bay Rowdies and Ottawa Fury FC to the USL while expansion side Rayo OKC are not expected to return for a second season and the perennially troubled Fort Lauderdale again look under threat. The league is scrambling to bring in new teams and said in November that a number of conversations were in progress – a San Francisco franchise has signed on – but is currently staying quiet on the situation.
In the meantime Cosmos is battling with its own demons, including being sued for unpaid rent on its Long Island office premises, though in the grand scheme of things perhaps the least of its problems.
Cosmos occupy a special place in US and world football history, having launched in the original NASL in the 1970s with a playing roster that included Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Bobby Moore – three of the greatest players of all-time.
Re-launched in 2010 under new ownership, the club initially made a statement hiring Eric Cantona as director of football. That didn’t work out, not least because the club wasn’t committed to a league. The Cosmos joined the NASL in 2013, about the time O’Brien came in with Saudi investors Sela Sports. Under the coaching of Giovanni Savarese, the Cosmos became a dominant force again in the NASL. signing players of the calibre of Marcos Senna and Raul. They won three NASL titles in four years.
If the Cosmos have failed then it is as much a failure of the NASL to establish itself with a higher profile in the US’s football consciousness – for overseas football fans the Cosmos is still an instantly recognisable club name with positive associations. Few would be able to tell you what the NASL acronym stands for.
But quite where O’Brien takes the Cosmos now is uncertain. In media interviews he has repeatedly emphasised that he isn’t closing the doors but that the business is acting responsibly to assess its options.
“We aren’t closing the doors. We are just mindful of the fact that if you can’t play in a league as it is now going forward, and that was the decision we made, then we just take back operations to what you need to keep it going and look at what your options are moving forward,” O’Brien told the US website Empire of Soccer.
Those options do not include joining the MLS – that ship has sailed and MLS commissioner Don Garber has said that with the entry of NYCFC into the MLS alongside the New York Red Bulls there is no room for another New York franchise. O’Brien has ruled out any application as well, and says that playing in the third tier USL is not an option either for a brand like the Cosmos.
But if the NASL folded and the USL became the de facto second tier, then perhaps the situation may change and O’Brien and his board could change their position – certainly the USL currently has no problem finding new teams and the Cosmos would be a spectacular addition to the model.
Not all the Cosmos failings were of their own making. The long-awaited 25,000-seat stadium at Belmont Park never got further than the drawing board, and the NASL struggled to deliver sponsors and expansion even though competition on the field was competitive.
The elephant in the room of any NASL conversation is always the involvement and ownership position of sports marketing agency Traffic Sports – the agency at the centre of the corruption scandals in international football exposed by US Department of Justice indictments. The league say it has put that relationship behind it, but the association still lingers.
For O’Brien it now appears to be a waiting game. He made his money as the principle of the World Sport Group, the sports marketing agency that held all rights to Asian Football Confederation events and then sold out to global ad agency Lagardere. He is no stranger to sports rights alchemy.
As one insider said: “I have seen Seamus come out the wrong end of situations many times. It would be a mistake to under-estimate his ability to pull the rabbit out the hat.”
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