At this week’s U.S. Soccer AGM in Atlanta, Cindy Parlow Cone is running unopposed for a second full term as federation president. In 1990, after hailed for his success as the Soccer Commissioner of the 1984 Olympics, Alan Rothenberg ran for U.S. Soccer president at the AGM in Orlando.
The following is an excerpt from Rothenberg’s new book “The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer.”
In early July 1988, members of FIFA’s Executive Committee gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, to make a final decision between the three candidates for the 1994 men’s World Cup: Brazil, Morocco, and the United States. Whatever the political undercurrents, the Rose Bowl lesson was not lost on FIFA. Fittingly enough, the vote came on the Fourth of July—and it was a win for the United States. We would host the World Cup for the first time ever.
Around the world, news of the United States hosting a World Cup earned a few Bronx cheers. Concerns were raised about the powers that be in the U.S. soccer establishment, and Sepp Blatter and Joao Havelange shared those concerns. They wanted new leadership. When they saw no signs that it was forthcoming, they played hardball and threatened the U.S. Soccer Federation that it was in danger of having FIFA renege on its commitment to host the 1994 World Cup on U.S. soil.
FIFA eventually got the new blood it wanted: in 1990, at the behest of FIFA, I was approached through my former ’84 Olympics colleague, Chuck Cale, about organizing the World Cup, and I was open to taking on the massive challenge. It sounded exciting to me. I knew Georgina and the boys would all like it, too. But there was a catch.
“To do that,” I was told, “you have to become president of the U.S. Soccer Federation.”
I wasn’t even a member of the Federation but learned that the bylaws didn’t explicitly require that. So, I ran for president of the Federation. FIFA had set one condition of awarding the World Cup, which was that the United States needed a new professional men’s soccer league and backers of the current indoor professional league came together in support of my candidacy. There was the usual politicking and back-room bickering before it came to a vote in Orlando, Florida, in August 1990.
I remember in Orlando, Rick Davis, then the best-known American player—the Landon Donovan of the 1970s—urged me to meet Sunil Gulati, with whom I would work closely for years to come and who would play a unique role in building soccer in this country as the longtime president of the U.S. Soccer Federation. Back then, Sunil was very close to Werner Fricker, the president at the time, who was my opponent in the race for president [along with treasurer Paul Stiehl]. When Sunil and I were introduced in Orlando, it was a very short meeting. I don’t think I even shook his hand. He was in the rival camp, serving as basically Fricker’s campaign manager and aide-de-camp, and I was there to find votes. What point was there in wasting time on pleasantries?
“I met Alan at Rick’s insistence, and he spent two seconds and then walked off,” Sunil remembers. “I told Rick, ‘This wasn’t just anybody he was meeting. I’m kind of the secretary of state for Werner Fricker and he blew me off.’ Alan explained it later. He said, ‘Listen, I wasn’t going to spend much time with you, because I knew I wasn’t going to get your vote,’ which made perfect sense.”
The voting strength was distributed one-third to the youth organization, one-third to the adult organization, and one- third to the professional leagues, and I was told that Fricker was somewhat controversial, so the youth and adult votes would be split. A significant number would vote for anyone other than Fricker. If I could get the professional vote, I could prevail, and fortunately I had some useful contacts. I knew Earl Foreman, the commissioner of the Major Indoor Soccer League, from my NBA days. The lawyer for the Kansas City team was my college fraternity brother, law school classmate, and longtime close friend, Herb Kohn, who was also married to Georgina’s college roommate. The general manager of the San Diego Sockers, the most successful team in MISL, was my friend Randy Bernstein, who had worked with me at the Clippers.
I was such an outsider that I knew virtually no one in the youth and adult soccer community but was told to call Marty Mankamyer, the chair of the United States Youth Soccer Association starting in 1984, whom I didn’t know, but who knew everyone in the grassroots and could gather those votes. I placed the call, and when a woman answered, I asked to speak to Marty. She replied, “I’m Marty.”
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The meeting itself was like a high school student council meeting with posters, flyers (including a “hit piece” against me that was slipped under every member’s hotel room door), and speeches. One speaker on my behalf was Charles Marshall from the Oregon Youth Soccer Association, whom I had never met (although subsequently we became close colleagues and he was instrumental in guiding the finances of the U.S. Soccer Foundation, formed with the more than $50 million surplus earned from the 1994 World Cup). The other was Ricky Davis, to whom I had been introduced shortly before he spoke on my behalf. In the midst of the meeting FIFA executive Guido Tognoni called [Stiehl], an officer of the USSF who promptly took the mic and declared that the Federation was in the midst of a “hostile takeover by a foreign entity: FIFA.”
Despite the shenanigans, we prevailed handily. I was elected with 59 percent of the vote to 29 percent for Fricker, with just 12 percent for Stiehl, the treasurer who had received the “hostile takeover” call from FIFA. Ridge Mahoney, writing in the Washington Post, saw my election as good news. “The country known around the world as the sleeping giant of soccer may have opened one eye today when attorney Alan Rothenberg, 54, scored a stunning victory in the presidential election of the U.S. Soccer Federation. … He swept into office on a wave of discontent with incumbent Werner Fricker and promises of injecting sound business practices into an organization plagued by ineptitude.”
There was a famous scene in a 1972 movie with Robert Redford called The Candidate where at the end, the newly elected senator played by Redford pulls an aide aside, and plaintively asks, “‘What do we do now?” I felt a little like Redford as the newly elected president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, but there was no time to figure it out. I’d been elected for one reason—to organize the ’94 World Cup—but the job held other duties.
Rothenberg served as the CEO and chairman of the USA-hosted 1994 FIFA World Cup and as U.S. Soccer President through 1998. He founded Major League Soccer and the U.S. Soccer Foundation.
“The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer” By Alan Rothenberg (Triumph Books).