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In this five-part series on the return of the New York Cosmos, site editor Chris Nee looks at all aspects of the club’s meteoric ascent back into the world soccer consciousness. Later posts will examine the Cosmos in more detail - who’s running the club, who’s playing for it and where it’s all going to happen - before the series culminates in the Cosmos’ entry into our Icons series. Here’s the introduction to the latest twofootedtackle.com series: Reviving the Cosmos.

To most of us, football is the most natural pastime in the world. Imagine you’re on a school playground, in an aircraft hanger, on the beach, on an army base, in a field with a couple of friends. All you’d need to entertain yourself is a ball. In our minds, that is where football begins: 22 men are playing football on a patch of grass and the lines are painted around them, followed by goalposts, a referee, managers, spectators, grandstands, floodlights and, ultimately, advertising hoardings. In the middle, the players haven’t even noticed.

In the case of the New York Cosmos MkII, the process is happening in reverse. Ever since Peppe Pinton, the former General Manager of the previous Cosmos incarnation and a man said by other former Cosmos officials to have remained in control of the club’s name and history simply by virtue of being the last man standing on the rubble, sold the name to a group of investors led by the controversial British property magnate Paul Kemsley, suspicion about the Cosmos’ intentions and capabilities have been rampant. Are they just a brand without a team? At the moment, it’s difficult to see them any other way. But plans are moving apace to turn the Cosmos back into a footballing powerhouse, and it all began with a robust PR function and shrewd merchandising.

The New York Cosmos transcend United States football and will be a deserving addition to the Icons series in a week’s time. This is a global giant, remembered by millions with a mixture of awe and ridicule as the team that established, defined and then killed the North American Soccer League (NASL).

Warner Brothers president Steve Ross gave much to American football, single-mindedly dragging the Cosmos from turd-ridden wasteland to packed houses at Giants Stadium. Throw in Pele, Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer and all of a sudden soccer is making a splash. Shep Messing, the goalkeeper who witnessed the entire process and can now be found providing colour commentary for the New York Red Bulls, was clearly a man in demand. He famously got Little Shep and his two centre backs out for a raunchy magazine shoot as if to demonstrate exactly what the Cosmos had become: superstars.

Of course, NASL is held up today as a beacon of shoddy business and the absolute antithesis of the principles that underpinned Major League Soccer’s inception. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the league burned to the ground. With Pele, Chinaglia and Beckenbauer pulling the strings on the east coast their competitors followed suit, littering the league with megastars (on megastar salaries, naturally) that the clubs simply couldn’t afford. It’s just one of the reasons for the NASL’s demise, but it’s a particularly convincing one.

MLS, NASL’s single-entity and strictly controlled descendant, had until recently shied away from resurrecting - or absorbing from the lower divisions - the identities of NASL’s fallen clubs. As well as the San Jose Earthquakes, Seattle Sounders fans must take a portion of the credit for this reversal, having forced the Sounders name back into the reckoning despite its original absence from a public vote ahead of the club’s 2009 expansion season in MLS. Vancouver Whitecaps and Portland Timbers joined this year and suddenly there are clubs in the league with genuine history, character and longstanding credibility.

The Cosmos will supposedly one day follow in their footsteps, bringing the most iconic name in American football history with them. The club’s a shadow of its former self, at least if one takes as the point of reference those star-studded nights at Giants Stadium, cameras flashing and the original Galacticos entertaining the great, the good and the rest. But the name Cosmos evokes exactly those images and the new club seems to welcome the name’s aura, and indeed stigma, with open arms.

As if to prove the point, Kemsley and his associates - who include in their number Terry Byrne, close friend and trusted confidant of David Beckham - have appointed a bewildering array of big names to senior management or ambassadorial roles. Pele is Honourary President, and his charismatic former team-mate Chinaglia is International Ambassador. Former Liverpool suit Rick Parry is a director and sits on the Cosmos board, while Cobi Jones landed a role as Associate Director of Soccer, presumably reporting into none other than Eric Cantona. It is, as I’ll discuss later in the series, all very ‘Cosmos’.

Just as the Cosmos have a board and management, they also have a rather beautiful heritage strip and some merchandise items that have gone down a storm even among supporters with no previous affinity with the club. They have a future, too. MLS commissioner Don Garber has hinted on more than one occasion that he would like the league’s 20th club, set to join in 2013, to be a second New York club - albeit closer to the city itself than the Red Bulls. While the location of the 20th club is yet to be confirmed, and other ownership groups are said to be under consideration in New York itself, it’s difficult at this stage to see the Cosmos as anything other than the favourite for 2013 expansion.

Also in the club’s possession is a remarkable, explosive history, highlighted by the original trophies, which were, like the dregs of the club’s reputation, meticulously looked after by Pinton and handed over as part of the sale of the club to Kemsley, Byrne et al.

But however one looks at the Cosmos today, it is little more than a brand controlled by a well-known advertising agency. And what they don’t have, of course, are two crucial elements of any MLS club and indeed any club anywhere: a team and a stadium. The establishment of each of these forms a post in this series in its own right; the development of the Cosmos’ squad is particularly fascinating and the idea that the club has no intention of fielding a ‘proper’ team until such a time as it has a spot in MLS is more than a little difficult to get one’s head around.

The concept of “Inspiration Matches” - exhibition matches or friendlies to you and me - was mentioned a few times in the early days of the Cosmos’ reincarnation, with the difficulty being working out how exactly a team of Cosmos-ready rockstar players could be attracted to such a scheme. More importantly, the two Cosmos academies (one in New York, one in California) could well make the Cosmos a new kind of MLS club. I’m sure they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Throughout the next week and a bit we’ll be publishing posts about the new New York Cosmos, covering some of the most interesting topics that will be part of the club’s make-up over the next five years or so. It is by no means a comprehensive review of the club’s prospects, business methods or capabilities. It also won’t touch on perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Cosmos’ rebirth: the ownership. Kemsley’s property empire took a serious beating during the early knockings of the current global recession, impacting, among others, Crystal Palace Football Club. According to Byrne, private investors’ money has been supplemented by “a lot of personal money” that has been pumped in by former Tottenham Hotspur director (and Harry Redknapp’s horseracing colleague) Kemsley.

There’s also the Beckham question. The former England captain comes to the end of his MLS/Galaxy contract at the end of the current season and has long been expected to take ownership of a club during his retirement. New York seems a natural destination, and with Garber welcoming a second New York club and Byrne in the team office, it’s difficult not to hypothesise that Beckham’s hand is going to end up pulling a string or two. That is purely conjecture at this stage, but there’s something unsettling about seeing Byrne and English associates operating without their most powerful pal. He might, of course, just be striking out on his own. That’s certainly the contention of Byrne himself, who says that Beckham has no part to play.

Instead this series will represent nothing more than a neutral’s perspective on the characteristics that make the Cosmos one of the most fascinating clubs in world football even today. They are expected this year to begin announcing player signings (I believe there might be one or two in place already) and fixtures for inspiration matches. 2013 will be a huge year for the future of the Cosmos. 2011 is just as important.

Tags: New York Cosmos