Long-suffering fans of the bygone Cosmos have pined for the return of their team, like those of the Cleveland Browns and Brooklyn Dodgers. Will they end up like the former or the latter? We’ll know more Sunday, when Pele himself is slated to make a big announcement at the Mayor’s Cup in Flushing Meadows.
They’ve been exceptionally quiet about the actual details of the relaunch of the team, to Area 51 levels, which has led to erroneous information and rampant speculation, everything up to a Harlem Globetrotter-style barnstorming show straight out of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.
What we know is scant, but noteworthy. English businessman Paul Kemsley _ a former vice chairman at the EPL’s Tottenham Hotspur _ recently bought the name and image rights to the New York Cosmos club from Peppe Pinton with the idea of re-launching the team. After his property empire floundered, he left Lloyds Banking Group and moved to New York to oversee his Cosmos project.
Last weekend, it was Tottenham’s present manager, Harry Redknapp, that came to the area for the Red Bull-hosted Barclays New York Challenge and invoked the Cosmos name, saying “In New York, it used to be the Cosmos who drew what, 70,000? Hopefully, we’ll see that again.”
Perhaps. Kemsley has been working with New York-based marketing company Anomaly, which is run by Carl Johnson and has a host of soccer relationships, including Manchester City. (It should be noted that Umbro not only sponsors Man City, but will produce the new Cosmos gear, available this summer).
The Cosmos drew record crowds with Pele as the star attraction before he retired in 1977 _ ironically playing his last competitive match in the Soccer Bowl against Redknapp’s Seattle Sounders.
They collapsed seven years later, and are seen by some as a cause for the collapse of the NASL, which couldn’t sustain an arms race with the huge club. Now Kemsley has a plan to bring them back, although exactly what shape that plan takes won’t be clear until Pele makes his announcement Sunday.
Despite telling the Wall Street Journal that the revival would include merchandise, “grass-roots soccer camps for youth”, an “inspirational travelling team”, and a “fully competitive side,” multiple people in the Cosmos reboot have insisted to The Post that there will be no all-star barnstorming team involved. The Cosmos are expected to join forces with famed Blau-Weiss Gotschee, allowing the Queens-based club to offer admission to its Academy teams free of charge.
They also denied any involvement by David Beckham, although a source indicated to the Post that the Galaxy and England National Team star has at least had conversations on some level with the group. The content of those talks is unknown, as is whether MLS was part of them, but it is germane that Beckham has a clause in his contract that allows him to buy into the league.
Whether Beckham is part of the Cosmos project or not, the fact is MLS commissioner Don Garber has long stated a desire to have a second team in New York, and both he and the Mets have told the Post that they’ve had continued dialogue with the Wilpon family about putting a team in Queens near CitiField.
“We very much want a second team here,” Garber said two weeks ago, never specifically mentioning the Cosmos by name. “I continue to have discussions with the Wilpon family of the New York Mets about seeing whether we could convince them that soccer would be better in Queens than hockey. We have work to do with the city to get their support for building a stadium.
“I think if we’re able to really make a lot of noise here, get lots of people to come out, have this team resonate throughout the tri-state area, it will be that much easier to convince everybody we need to convince about that second team.”
With the diverse population in that part of Queens, combined with the convenient location _ the subway, Long Island Railroad and LaGuardia Airport for public transportation, and Grand Central Parkway and Long Island Expressway for drivers _ CitiField would be a prime location, although Reuters reported that Fred Wilpon was sued yesterday over alleged losses suffered by retirement plan participants at his Sterling Equities firm.
For their part, New York’s present team, the Red Bulls _ who play in a brand-new 25,000-seat stadium in Harrison, NJ _ claim they welcome any completion, be it Cosmos or otherwise, in Flushing or anywhere in the Five Boroughs.
“We like the competitiveness. We can’t say we don’t like when there’s another team here. We want to have competiveness, so if there’s another team coming, we will be better,” Dietmar Beiersdorfer, head of Red Bull global soccer, said at the July 15 introductory press conference for Thierry Henry. “Yes (it’s a positive).”
But will it be a reality? There are many forms a Cosmos team can take _ from starting at a grassroots level to the United Soccer Leagues _ that do not include MLS. Or at least, do not initially include the country’s first-division league.
What form will the re-branded Cosmos take? Will they be wise enough to try to get former Cosmos like sports agent Shep Messing _ now doing TV commentary for the Red Bulls _ to come into the fold? Will they understand the ground-up infrastructure that’s needed, something the MetroStars/Red Bulls rarely understood, until the present Erik Soler/Hans Backe regime?
Apparently we’ll have to wait for the greatest of all the Cosmos to let us know…which just seems fitting.