18 It has now been almost 41 years since the November 1984 day when ESPN announced that it would not renew its broadcast deal with the North American Soccer [Football] League (NASL). This was to be the final blow in what had been a slow but unceasing decline for the league, which would fold outright shortly thereafter. Five years prior to the NASL losing its broadcast deal, North America’s habitually loss-making soccer league thought it had hatched a plan to achieve profitability by way of indoor soccer. The NASL had toyed with the idea of indoor soccer since the early ’70s, adopting the format in exhibition tournaments scheduled in the off-season. These tournaments grew more elaborate each time they were held, and eventually the NASL staged what was billed as an “Indoor Season,” taking place in the winter of 1979-1980, involving 10 out of the 24 participants of the “regular” NASL season in the summer. The following “Indoor Season” saw the number of participating NASL teams grow to 19, and the third season to be staged (in 1981-82) had the finals broadcast on ESPN (which was created in 1979). While many parallel variants of indoor soccer have developed across the world, all involve a smaller field and fewer players than a usual game of soccer, with matches tending to be faster paced and higher scoring than soccer played on a full field. Many associate indoor soccer with recreational leagues and amateur play, especially in places like the U.K., where it’s common to hear people refer to variants of the sport with the names, “Five-a-side football” or “Seven-aside football.” In Italy, people might refer to it as “Calcetto,” which translates to “small soccer.” However, some indoor football variants do have professional traditions. Futsal, for example, is an indoor soccer variant popular in South America and Iberia, where the sport has been professional since the late 1980s. The indoor soccer variant adopted in North America by the NASL included raised sideboards that stopped the ball from rolling out of play, further increasing the action and excitement. The smaller arenas that typically hosted matches also helped keep costs contained. Together with containing costs, increasing the perceived excitement of football was a recurring objective of the NASL. Bold steps had to be taken to make football appetizing for North American audiences, and by extension, resolve the sport’s profitability problems. The fears weren’t unfounded. The NASL was plagued by financial difficulties right from the moment it transitioned into a fully professional league in the early 1970s. A recurring theme is the wide spread between resources available to different franchises. Large-market teams, most notoriously the New York Cosmos, could benefit from a large body of fans augmented by, among other things, ready-made interest from immigrant communities originating from countries where soccer was already popular. This translated to financial firepower, which in turn allowed the Cosmos to field high-profile rosters. During the 1977 season, the Cosmos team boasted three former World Cup winners, two of which were former Brazilian national team captains (Carlos Alberto and the legendary Pelé), while the third was a former West German national team captain (Franz Beckenbauer). Also on the roster were Giorgio Chinaglia and Ramon Mifflin, who had played for the Italian and Peruvian national teams, respectively. Smaller market teams habitually fell into a double-bind. They wanted to attract local fans to this minority sport by promising exciting matches. However, to play exciting matches they felt compelled to spend money they didn’t have to attract high-profile players they couldn’t afford. It also didn’t help that the NASL expanded quicker than the nascent U.S. soccer ecosystem could supply players. Some observers saw indoor football as the natural solution to these problems. Matches were fast-paced and high-scoring, while the smaller number of players needed made maintaining a roster less expensive. Some franchises, such as the Edmonton Drillers (from Alberta, Canada), who were crowned indoor champions in the winter of 1980-1981, saw more fans show up to fill indoor arenas than showed up to outdoor matches during the regular season. But while initially heralded as a lifeline, indoor football would ultimately contribute to the NASL’s demise. Emboldened by indoor soccer’s popularity, in 1978, a fully-fledged indoor league was founded (dubbed, “Major Indoor Soccer League” or MISL). A deal was struck first to broadcast matches on the USA Network, and eventually playoff matches moved to CBS. In 1982, one NASL franchise, the San Diego Sockers, even defected from the NASL to the MISL. When ESPN dropped the NASL to give space to the nascent United States Football League (a short-lived but high-profile alternative to the NFL, playing in the spring/summer), the only other network interested in soccer, CBS, already had the MISL’s soccer product on their schedule. Without a broadcaster, at the end of the 1984 season, the NASL franchises Chicago Sting, Minnesota Strikers, and even the marquee New York Cosmos left the NASL to join the MISL, driving the NASL to fold outright. But the MISL wasn’t exempt from issues either. Like the NASL before it, the MISL also struggled to find welcoming markets for many of its franchises. In fact, absorbing NASL teams may have been a white elephant, as the season prior to their joining the MISL had seen three franchises fold. The New York Arrows were among the teams that went bust, a harbinger of things to come for the Cosmos, which had been brought in to replace them. Amid this confusion, indoor soccer’s broadcast ratings slipped and advertisers balked. With a schedule already featuring the NFL (American football), NBA (basketball), college basketball, golf, and tennis, at the end of the 1984-1985 season CBS chose not to renew its deal to broadcast indoor soccer. Like the Arrows before them, the marquee Cosmos also folded at the end of the 1984-1985 season. The MISL was nonetheless able to wrangle exposure on regional sports networks (including PRISM-Philadephia, and Home Team Sports in Bethesda, Maryland), as well as occasional ESPN coverage. With a more regional focus, billing itself as affordable family entertainment in mid-size markets like Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Kansas City, and most prominently of all, San Diego, the MISL continued to operate until 1992. That year, the league finally folded amid internal disagreements on strategy (some owners wanted to re-launch the league in a bid for national exposure), along with increasingly high-profile plans emerging to launch a new professional outdoor league based in the United States, known today as Major League Soccer, or MLS, which began to play in 1993. By Yuri Serafini TV’s Role in the Demise of Indoor Soccer and the Success of the Outdoor Variant VIDEOAGE January 2026 The Sports Page
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI4OTA5