A Not So Great Moment in American Innovation
The Major Indoor Soccer League (1978-1992) was going to fix everything that Americans find boring about soccer.
Americans love to tinker, to innovate, to suggest changes, especially when it comes to the world’s most popular sport, soccer, much to the annoyance of soccer fans abroad.
A forgotten episode of American innovation was the Major Indoor Soccer League, founded in 1978 near the peak of the success of the outdoor North American Soccer League, which was paying huge sums for aging foreign legends like Johan Cruyf, the Bobby Orr of the Netherlands who revolutionized the game by playing all over the field. The New York Cosmos signed Pele and Franz Beckenbauer and averaged over 40,000 in attendance for a few years.
There was much talk at the time that soccer’s conquest of America would be as inevitable as the metric system displacing the USA’s obsolete imperial measures, which the Ford Administration was promoting. Soon, we’d all have forgotten doomed American sports like tackle football and instead be watching soccer stars take penalty kicks from the 11 meter spot.
On the other hand, once they had a chance to see it, not all Americans turned out to be fully thrilled by soccer:
Playing soccer in 80,000 seat American football stadiums had multiple downsides for American fans:
They are more expensive to rent than smaller facilities
The crowd experience was desultory due to the less packed stands.
It’s hard to pick out the famous soccer player you’d come to see from the nobodies from all the way up in the stands.
And that world-renowned 30-something you wanted to boast of having seen might only touch the ball a few times per game.
In soccer, nothing very exciting happens far from the goals, but it takes a long time to advance the ball from one end of a football field to the other.
It’s hard to score with your feet against 11 defenders, so you have a lot of nil-nil draws.
To the American mind, indoor soccer looked like a solution: play 6-on-6 soccer on carpeted hockey rinks with capacities of around 10,000 to 20,000. Scoring would be higher, stars would handle the ball more, less time would be wasted in midfield, and the fans would be packed together.
And, indeed, the Major Indoor Soccer League did pretty well for a few years, averaging, it claimed, over 8,000 in attendance in the early 1980s. This was enough to start a bidding war for players with the outdoor North American Soccer League. The NASL struck back by starting its own indoor soccer circuit.
I had totally forgotten until several weeks into this World Cup, but I finally recalled paying to attend two indoor soccer matches in the 1980s. I believe one was the MISL and the other was the Los Angeles Aztecs of the NASL, who played at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1980-81.
My main memories of the Aztecs game is arriving with my friends and thinking, “Hey, we got lucky! Look at these great seats in the third row.” But it turned out there was nobody sitting much beyond the fifth row.
And practically no spectators were sitting behind either goal, which led to my single vivid memory of professional indoor soccer:
Paywall here.
