Pelé signs for the Cosmos. American soccer gets a celebrity, a packed Giants Stadium, and a memory it will spend decades trying to live up to.
The North American Soccer League is a patchwork. Warner Communications writes a check. Pelé, three-time World Cup winner, puts on a Cosmos shirt in 1975. Suddenly the league has photographers. Giants Stadium fills. Beckenbauer and Chinaglia follow.
The NASL will overspend and collapse. MLS will start from a more careful business plan. The Cosmos years remain the proof that the United States will watch soccer if you give it a star and a night out.
Pelé does not make America a soccer country. He makes it impossible to say the country cannot be one.