When Pele conquered America with the New York Cosmos

NEW YORK: Pele was 34 and semi-retired when the New York Cosmos fended off interest from Juventus and Real Madrid to lure the world’s greatest player to the footballing backwater that was America in 1975.

“If you go there all you can do is win a championship. You come here, you win a country,” Englishman Clive Toye, then the Cosmos’ general manager, recalls telling the three-time World Cup winner.

And capture a nation Pele did. In just over two years, he transformed “soccer” in the United States from a sport barely anyone cared about to one attracting sell-out crowds of 80,000.

He won a North American Soccer League championship, launching an era of dominance for the Cosmos, and opened the door for a host of other stars, including Johan Cruyff and George Best, to play stateside.

The Cosmos were a motley crew of part-timers and journeymen pros playing in front of just a few hundred fans when flamboyant owner Steve Ross, boss of cinema giant Warner, and Toye decided they needed a marquee signing to spur interest in their team and the flagging NASL.

The pursuit of Pele took Toye around the world, including to Jamaica, Brussels and Rome, with the Englishman recalling that the Brazilian required an “enormous amount of persuading.”

“At first he asked what the hell I was talking about,” Toye, now 89, told AFP in September 2021, recalling his “win a country” pitch.

“But finally, finally, finally we got him to understand fully what that meant and what he could do. It was an incredible chase, but it was worth it.”

Pele, suffering some financial difficulties back home, signed a three-year deal worth around $4.5 million, although senior Cosmos executives have all cited different figures.

Brazil’s president Ernesto Geisel