By Samindra Kunti
May 23 – The New York Cosmos drew scoreless with Al-Hilal FC in a controversial friendly in Saudi Arabia that coincided with Donald Trump’s visit to the Arab kingdom.
When Clive Toye embarked on his mission to ‘Americanize’ football in the late 60’s, the US football landscape was almost non-existent. “Like landing on the remote coast of Waziristan, walking up from the water, looking over the nearest ridge and asking: where is everybody?” said Toye. To popularise the game he became the master of attention-drawing gimmicks. In 1972 he invited Dynamo Moscow, exploiting the antagonism of the Cold War.
This weekend the Cosmos, who rebooted in 2013 and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy last year, were back again with another ‘high profile’ match-up, visiting Saudi Arabia. It was the 48th country that the New York franchise have visited in their history. In 2014 the Cosmos last travelled to the region when they played in the United Arab Emirates.
The 6,500 mile hike half across the world followed the Cosmos’s embarrassing second round U.S. Open Cup defeat to Reading United. “Our club has had the good fortune to represent the United States during many memorable international matches,” said Cosmos head coach Giovanni Savarese.
“I think that’s absolutely fantastic because it fits in with every trip I thought of for the Cosmos in the old days, where we would get more publicity for being there than all the rest of the bloody clubs in the world,” said Toye. “We went to China right after Kissinger sorted out the Chinese peace talks. It shows true Cosmos thinking.”
The Cosmos PR machine was hitting all the right notes about the Cosmos’s ambassadorial role for American football, but the match raised new questions about the ties between the Cosmos and Sela Sports, a Jeddah based sports marketing company, which has always been believed to be part of the New York club’s past ownership group.
In January Seamus O’Brien relinquished his majority stake in the franchise to Rocco Comosso. A tweet by Cosmos player Ryan Richter referring to Sela Sports and this trip to Saudi Arabia have fueled further speculation about the relationship between the Cosmos and Sela Sports, which owns the exclusive commercial rights of Al Hilal.
In the 8th minute Richter got the Cosmos’s best chance. The game between the defending NASL champions and the current Saudi champions turned into a stalemate as both clubs failed to hit the net at the Prince Faisel bin Fahd Stadium in Riyadh.
The friendly coincided with the visit of US president Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia, his first stop on a foreign trip with Israel and Europe as other destinations. Trump sealed an arms deal worth $110 billion with the Saudi regime and inked other major trade investments.
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