Team America was a professional version of the
United States men's national soccer team
The United States men's national soccer team (USMNT) represents the United States in men's international soccer competitions. The team is controlled by the United States Soccer Federation and is a member of FIFA and CONCACAF.
The U.S. team ha ...
which played as a franchise in the
North American Soccer League The North American Soccer League may refer to:
*North American Soccer League (1968–1984), a former Division I league
*North American Soccer League (2011–2017)
The North American Soccer League (NASL) was a professional men's soccer league b ...
(NASL) during the 1983 season. The team was based in
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, played its home games at
RFK Stadium, and was intended by the NASL and the
United States Soccer Federation
The United States Soccer Federation (USSF), commonly referred to as U.S. Soccer, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and the official governing body of the sport of soccer in the United States. Headquartered in Chicago, the federation is ...
to build fan support for the league and create a cohesive and internationally competitive national team. However, the team finished in last place and drew only 13,000 fans per game.
A "Team America" also played an unofficial exhibition match against
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
in 1976, to commemorate the bicentennial of
American Independence
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revoluti ...
. The players were drawn from North American Soccer League clubs and included
Pelé
Edson Arantes do Nascimento (; born 23 October 1940), known as Pelé (), is a Brazilian former professional footballer who played as a forward. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time and labelled "the greatest" by FIFA, ...
and
Bobby Moore. The match was played in
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
and England won, 3–1.
History
Origins
The origins of Team America came with the ascension of
Howard J. Samuels
Howard Joseph Samuels (December 3, 1919 – October 26, 1984) was an American statesman, industrialist, civil rights activist and philanthropist who served as United States Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the Small Business Administra ...
to the positions of president and CEO of NASL on June 25, 1982. At the time, the league was on the verge of collapsing. The league had 21 teams at the end of the 1981 season, but began the 1982 season with only 14. Attendance was dropping and the league had lost its television contract.
To reverse these trends, Samuels proposed turning the league’s focus away from international stars to domestic players in order to create a larger fan base.
Samuels’ concept dovetailed with a desire on the part of the
United States Soccer Federation
The United States Soccer Federation (USSF), commonly referred to as U.S. Soccer, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and the official governing body of the sport of soccer in the United States. Headquartered in Chicago, the federation is ...
(USSF) to build a more successful national team program. In order to fulfill the twin objectives of nurturing new U.S. talent to reach a greater fan base while feeding that talent into the national team, Samuels and the USSF decided to enter the national team into NASL as a franchise. At the time, U.S. players found it difficult to compete for roster spots against the foreigners who stocked most of the league’s teams. In theory, Team America would only feature U.S. players who would train with each other, fostering a sense of team cohesion which would pay dividends when the U.S. played international games.
The name Team America was a reference to both the U.S. national team as well as the 1976 Team America, a team which combined U.S. national team players with the addition of several NASL international stars, which played in the
1976 U.S.A. Bicentennial Cup Tournament.
Creating the team
Samuels brought in Robert Lifton as the team owner, and in coordination with Lifton and USSF secured
RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. as the team’s home field. In January 1983, the NASL and USSF invited 39 players from the NASL,
American Soccer League (ASL) and
Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL) to tryouts for the 20 available roster spots. However, several top U.S. players, including
Rick Davis
Richard Dean Davis (born November 24, 1958) is an American former soccer midfielder, and former captain of the U.S. National Team for much of the 1980s. He is considered by fans the best U.S.-born player of the North American Soccer League er ...
,
Jimmy McAllister,
Winston DuBose
Winston DuBose is an American former soccer goalkeeper who spent eight seasons in the North American Soccer League, four in the American Professional Soccer League and one in the American Indoor Soccer Association. He also earned fourteen cap ...
,
David Brcic
David Joseph Brcic (born January 21, 1958) is an American former professional soccer player who played as a goalkeeper in the North American Soccer League and Major Indoor Soccer League. He also competed at the 1984 Summer Olympics and earned fo ...
, and
Juli Veee
Juli Veee (born Gyula Visnyei; February 22, 1950) is a Hungarian-American retired soccer forward. Announced as "Double-deuce, triple-E, the one and only Juli Veee", Veee experienced his greatest success as an indoor player with the San Diego So ...
, refused to leave their teams to play for Team America. This forced the NASL and USSF to turn to recently naturalized players -- ten of the 21 on the roster (see below) had been born outside the US, including
Alan Green, who was still a British subject in 1983 (he finally gained American citizenship the following year). Several top U.S. players did join the club, including
Chico Borja
Hernan "Chico" Borja (August 24, 1959 – January 25, 2021) was an Ecuadorian-born American soccer player and coach. He spent time in the several U.S.-based leagues including the North American Soccer League, Major Indoor Soccer League and th ...
,
Jeff Durgan
Jeffrey "Jeff" Durgan (born August 29, 1961, in Tacoma, Washington) is a retired U.S. soccer defender who played professionally for the New York Cosmos and seven times for the U.S. national team.
NASL
Durgan was born and raised in Tacoma, W ...
,
Arnie Mausser
Arnold "Arnie" Mausser (born February 28, 1954) is an American former soccer goalkeeper who played with eight different NASL teams from 1975 to 1984. He is a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame.
Mausser may be considered one of the fin ...
and
Perry Van der Beck. Even
Alketas Panagoulias
Alketas 'Alkis' Panagoulias ( el, Αλκέτας 'Άλκης' Παναγούλιας; 30 May 1934 – 18 June 2012) was a Greek association football player and manager. He managed the national teams of both Greece and the United States. He also ...
, USA team manager (and thus Team America manager by default) was himself a naturalized citizen. (Panagoulis had led the
New York Greek-Americans to three
US Open Cup
The Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, commonly known as the U.S. Open Cup (USOC), is a Single-elimination tournament, knockout cup competition in men's Soccer in the United States, soccer in the United States of America. It is the oldest ongoing nati ...
triumphs in the early 1960s and was later manager of the
Greek national team at the
1994 World Cup, but earned his living selling real estate.)
Season
Wearing a red, white and blue uniform with a horizontally striped jersey, the team began well, going 8–5 (including a shootout win over the Cosmos in front of 31,112 at RFK on June 17) but lost 15 of its last 17 games, finishing at the bottom of the standings with a 10–20 record. (There was one highlight, however: on August 13, the club played to a 1-1 draw with the mighty Italian club
Juventus
Juventus Football Club (from la, iuventūs, 'youth'; ), colloquially known as Juve (), is a professional Association football, football club based in Turin, Piedmont, Italy, that competes in the Serie A, the top tier of the Italian football leagu ...
(which featured six players from the
1982 World Cup-winning squad), in front of 20,111 fans at RFK.)
Lack of scoring punch was the biggest problem: the club scored just five goals in the entire month of July, losing all eight matches; Team America's 33 goals on the season was barely one per game and easily the worst in the league. None of the players were named to the league's
All Star team. As the team stumbled through the regular season, Samuels and Lifton became desperate. On July 27, 1983, they announced that they had approached the owners of the other NASL, as well as MISL, teams about loaning U.S. players to Team America on a game by game basis when the players' regular teams had an idle game day. However, MISL refused the NASL/USSF request for player loans, citing the NASL policy forbidding teams in that league from loaning its players to MISL.
Lack of success on the field led to tensions among U.S. national team players. Some, such as Jeff Durgan, publicly criticized
Rick Davis
Richard Dean Davis (born November 24, 1958) is an American former soccer midfielder, and former captain of the U.S. National Team for much of the 1980s. He is considered by fans the best U.S.-born player of the North American Soccer League er ...
and
Steve Moyers for choosing to remain with the Cosmos rather than signing with Team America.
Mark Peterson, the North American Soccer League's player of the year in 1982, began the season with the
Seattle Sounders
Seattle Sounders Football Club is an American professional men's soccer club based in Seattle. The Sounders compete as a member of the Western Conference of Major League Soccer (MLS). The club was established on November 13, 2007, and began ...
, but joined Team America during the 1983 season after receiving severe criticism from other U.S. players.
Demise
The team's initial attendance figures were decent enough: an average of 19,952 through the first seven home matches. (This was a little misleading, however: the figure includes the 50,108 who attended a match vs. Fort Lauderdale that featured a free
Beach Boys
A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, etc., or biological sources, such as mollusc shell ...
concert; the other six matches averaged just 14,926.) As the losses piled up, though, the fans stopped coming to RFK: barely 55,000 showed up for the last eight home games combined, lowering Team America's average to just 13,002 for the entire 1983 season. This was actually third-best in the rapidly-fading 12-team NASL, but it wasn't enough to avoid severe financial losses, especially when coupled with the USSF's inability to finalize several potential marketing deals. Panagoulis wondered aloud, "Where are we going? What the hell are we
doing? Why do these people keep paying me?" At the end of the season, Robert Lifton pulled the plug on the franchise; afterwards, he, Commissioner Samuels and the USSF engaged in much public rancour and wrangling over who was most responsible for the club's failure.
The Team America fiasco may also have had a hand in the destruction of another NASL franchise, the
Montreal Manic. In his book, ''Soccer in a Football World'', North American soccer historian Dave Wangerin partially attributes the downfall of the Manic organization to the Molson ownership's declaration to attempt to build a Team Canada roster for the 1984 season. The new direction of the club meant many of the Manic's non-Canadian players would be let go; given Canada's poor track record at producing world class soccer talent, fans were put off by the prospect that the team's play would diminish. (The fact the franchise played in
francophone
French became an international language in the Middle Ages, when the power of the Kingdom of France made it the second international language, alongside Latin. This status continued to grow into the 18th century, by which time French was the l ...
Montreal, rife with
separatist sentiment, didn't help.) Sure enough, the Manic managed only a 12-18 mark in 1983 and saw their attendance drop by more than half, attracting only 9,910 fans per contest. Team Canada in the NASL never became a reality, as the Manic (who had already lost a reported $7 million in its first two seasons) folded after the 1983 season.
Roster
Year by year
Honors
U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame
* 2003:
Arnie Mausser
Arnold "Arnie" Mausser (born February 28, 1954) is an American former soccer goalkeeper who played with eight different NASL teams from 1975 to 1984. He is a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame.
Mausser may be considered one of the fin ...
* 2014:
Bruce Savage
William Bruce Savage is an American retired soccer defender. He played four seasons in the North American Soccer League, nine in Major Indoor Soccer League and earned sixteen caps with the U.S. national team between 1983 and 1992. On March ...
Indoor Soccer Hall of Fame
* 2014:
Bruce Savage
William Bruce Savage is an American retired soccer defender. He played four seasons in the North American Soccer League, nine in Major Indoor Soccer League and earned sixteen caps with the U.S. national team between 1983 and 1992. On March ...
See also
*
Pailan Arrows
Indian Arrows (formerly known as Pailan Arrows) was an Indian developmental football club that competed in the I-League. The club was formed by the All India Football Federation in 2010, with a main goal of nurturing young Indian football tal ...
, a similar attempt by the
All India Football Federation
The All India Football Federation (AIFF) is the national governing body of football in India. It is a member of FIFA, the international governing body of football and affiliated to Asian Football Confederation.
It is affiliated to Ministry o ...
to involve the
India U19 team in the
I-League
The I-League (known as Hero I-League for sponsorship ties with Hero MotoCorp) is the second-tier men's professional football competition of the Indian football league system. It is currently contested by 12 clubs across the country with the w ...
.
References
External links
Pre-season article on Team America plus a write-up of the first game, against the Sounders*[https://books.google.com/books?id=1mK2xw1E6dAC&pg=PA211&lpg=PA211&dq=ussf++%22team+america%22&source=bl&ots=FQLfjTj7e1&sig=IUGAOynk8ElmvjIoUkwKgk6UBAg&hl=en&ei=rJSoSZOnFISGngf0lu36Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=13&ct=result#PPA211,M1 Soccer in a Football World]
{{North American Soccer League (1966–85)
Defunct soccer clubs in Washington, D.C.
North American Soccer League (1968–1984) teams
History of the United States men's national soccer team
1983 establishments in Washington, D.C.
1983 disestablishments in Washington, D.C.
1976 in American soccer
1983 North American Soccer League season
Association football clubs established in 1983
Association football clubs disestablished in 1983