Pele and Pre-Soccer Mom Soccer

During the Sixties it was tough to just find a real soccer ball in sporting goods stores around NYC, and almost as tough to gather a bunch of kids with whom to play a game. Soccer was popular mostly with small communities of immigrants, such as the Scandinavians and Greeks, although their American-born children typically showed little interest in the game. They wanted to fit in with the other kids. Those who did play would often have to improvise, using football or baseball fields, and sometimes bringing portable goal nets with them.

Things started to change in the Seventies, although slowly. My high school had intramural soccer games amongst home room teams, plus impromptu matches in gym classes, but no serious team. By contrast, we had every level of basketball, baseball, track and football. Those of us who did enjoy soccer were typically not the athletic crew, but we enjoyed the casual games, in which nobody cared much about rules (indeed, few of us knew the “official” soccer regulations). Gym teachers weren’t much help, since they didn’t know the rules much better than we did, and were more interested in coaching the more serious jocks. The few soccer moves I learned came from a Norwegian guy who lived up the street from me, who demonstrated a few basics to my pals and I.

The one person who did the most to promote soccer in the United States, and our town in particular, was one Edison Arantes do Nascimento, universally known simply as Pele, the Brazilian superstar who joined the short-lived New York Cosmos in 1974 and helped propel them to the championship of the North American Soccer League. The Cosmos paid him $7 million for a 3-year contract. Pele was to soccer what Babe Ruth was to baseball or Mohammed Ali was to boxing; much more than an athlete, he was a fascinating character of whom the public could simply not get enough. The brief spurt of popularity which the Cosmos experienced ended soon after Pele retired in 1977, but at least a sizable chunk of the public had seen a real soccer match.

Another trend which helped promote soccer in our town during the Seventies was the arrival of a great deal of immigrant kids. Note my words here; as I said before, children of immigrants did not seem terribly interested in soccer (or most of the other things that distinguished them from the other kids). But kids from abroad, who grew up playing the game, wanted to continue with it. As their communities grew, these children, and to some extent their older relatives, were able establish teams and draw fans (something rather important to teenagers).

Finally, there was Title IX and the rise of girls’/women’s sports in schools. It’s easy to forget that, prior to this legislation, girls’ team sports, at least in most working and middle-class communities around NYC, were not taken very seriously, apart from phys ed classes. You had girls’ softball and volleyball, but even these were not very popular. But, for whatever reasons, soccer proved very popular with girls.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon of the “Soccer Mom” was virtually non-existent, except perhaps for parents of very small children. Most of the games we played were conducted either at school athletic fields, or local parks. Kids walked, or took public transit (and, believe it or not, just about none were abducted or abused!) In addition, this not being the ‘burbs, NYC moms had to work.