Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos

Sean O'Conor

UK | Japan

"When Pele broke our hearts" was the title of Mario Risoli's book about Wales and the 1958 World Cup but it could have been the name of this film.

"Once in a Lifetime" recalls the brief candle that was football in New York in the late 1970s when a team unlike any other created before, the New York Cosmos, exploded in a media supernova of soccer superstars and unprecedented fame and fortune that vanished almost as soon as they appeared.

By 1984 the league was dead and memories of Pele, Beckenbauer, Cruyff and Best performing before 75,000 plus crowds were just that, which makes the Cosmos one of the most curious entries in football history. The assembled dream team, galacticos long before Real Madrid invented the term, were on the highest salaries in world soccer and became heroes in New York and beyond when, for a fleeting moment it looked like football had cracked America.

The sport and the team came from nowhere to be the hottest ticket in the fashion barometer of the Big Apple, so much so that a New York Mets game had to be stopped because Pele's unannounced presence in the stands was causing a commotion. A few years later had vanished without trace is an extraordinary tale indeed.

The twin towers of the Cosmos was the impetus of Warner CEO Steve Ross, a classic corporate dreamer for whom impossible was nothing and the marketing, personality and playing ability of Pele. The Brazilian legend became the face of the Cosmos and the one soccer player all Americans could name.

This fast-moving and entertaining film, by the makers of the magnificent Oscar-winning documentary "One Day in September," is 1970s in its feel, from the period music and on-screen lettering to the monotone backdrops used for several of the interviews.

Anecdotes abound of men painting the grass green in the Randall's Island stadium, Giorgio Chinaglia making Pele cry in the locker room, Cosmos players having sex on the way to a cup final and Rodney Marsh helping arrange a reception of booze and birds to put them off their game.

The Cosmos' success was also their Achilles' heel as the other clubs in the league could not match their spending or star-pulling power and began to fold like dominoes as a result, leaving the New York franchise without a league to play in. When Pele retired too there was nobody of similar stature or fame to fill his boots in the public's eyes.

The interviewees in the film are mildly entertaining if not earth-shattering, the most eye-opening testimony being Johann Cruyff's belief that Europe should adopt the NASL's 35-yard shoot out today and the most recurring theme being that no one connected with the Cosmos finds it easy to say anything good about Chinaglia.

The Welsh-Italian was actually the man who finally finished the Cosmos when he took them over but strangely no mention is made of the tragic final night when a brawl erupted between the Cosmos and Lazio in 1985. There is a lot of talk of the millions Pele collected but not of the main reason he came in the first place – he was bankrupt.

The positive conclusion the film offers is the correct observation that football was invisible in America before the Cosmos but their 15 minutes of fame created the youth soccer boom and nationwide 'soccer mom' phenomenon which has produced the players Major League Soccer relies on today.

When MLS began in 1996 a number of former NASL men returned as coaches or as fathers of players. And lessons they had learned from the NASL included the need for salary caps and a maximum number of foreigners per team – the NASL was guilty of not developing Americans with usually only three on each team.

If there was a moral to the story it is that there are dangers for a league as a whole if one club becomes far wealthier than all the others. The other teams will gamble disastrously to keep up and the league will be destabilized.

The Icarus-like tale of the Cosmos confirmed the prejudice of many Europeans that Americans are only interested in the spectacle and the winning and do not appreciate the heart of the game that has conquered the rest of the planet. Until the USA qualified for Italia 90, hosted the 1994 World Cup and then began MLS in 1996, it seemed the death of the NASL was proof that football would never take off stateside.

Who would have thought with 77,000 people packing Giants Stadium and some of the world's greatest footballers treading the Astroturf that football could vanish without a trace a few years later?

Sean O'Conor

Once In A Lifetime

Directed by Paul Crowder
Narrator Matt Dillon

Starring Shep Messing, Werner Roth, Pele, Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, Johan Cruyff, Rodney Marsh, Denis Tuart

Released 2006