Product Description

In 1971, Warner Brothers bought a local football team, the New York Cosmos. In 1975 the club signed a three-year deal with Pele, the greatest player the game had ever known. More big name signings would follow: the German superstar Franz Beckenbauer, the charismatic Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia and Brazil's 1970 World Cup winning captain, Carlos Alberto. Almost overnight, the Cosmos became the hottest ticket in town. Celebrities like Robert Redford, Mick Jagger, Barbara Streisand and Steven Spielberg attended games. Cosmos players were mainstays of the hedonistic club scene at Studio 54. Set against the backdrop of a city on the edge, Once In A Lifetime is much more than a football book. It is a vivid evocation of the mania that surrounded the Cosmos at the height of their powers in 1977 and the explosion in new forms of popular culture, the debauchery of Studio 54 and the razzmatazz and conspicuous expenditure that surrounded them. It is a story that embraces millionaires, superstars, gangsters, groupies, glamour, power struggles, alcoholic excess, drugs, and full-on fistfights. It also has some of the greatest football players ever to grace the game.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54547 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
GAVIN NEWSHAM is a journalist and writer based in Brighton. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maxim, the world's biggest-selling men's life style magazine and is a regular contributor to the Observer's Sport Monthly magazine. Previously, he has been the Senior Writer at the groundbreaking football magazine 90 Minutes and the Chief Features writer on the multi-award winning FHM magazine. His first book, a biography of the golfer John Daly, Letting The Big Dog Eat, met with widespread critical acclaim on its release in June 2003.

Customer Reviews

Out Of This Cosmos
Having spent alot of time in New York during the mid-Seventies I was really excited when a friend told me about this book. I went to see a couple of Cosmos games and this book really captures the feeling of the City at the time and the boom-bust attitude of the team's owner and many of the players he recruited. He wanted the best and got the best. Including Dennis Tueart. This book is really well researched and a thoroughly entertaining read. It also contains many pictures which made my memories of that time come flooding back. So thanks for that.

New York Was Never the Same Again
If you like football, clubbing, New York, tales of Pele, Beckenbauer etc this is the book for you. Author Gavin Newsham has done a great job of recreating those few years in the 1970s when America finally realised what football was all about; and when the cream of European and South American football, imported by the Cosmos, realised what New York was all about.
It's a great read.

A waste of a great story
It should have been a back of the net certainty. The story of how football (I won't call it soccer, I won't I won't I WON'T) took off big in the US in the 1970s and how the New York Cosmos attracted Pele and a whole host of stars to town. There is undoubtedly a fascinating story in here... You're waiting for the 'but', aren't you?

The 'but', I'm afraid, is that author Gavin Newsham can't write for toffee. He unearths very little that is new - American sportswriters are fantastically ignorant about the game, Pele really is a very nice bloke, New York is the glamourous heart of the US that has to be conquered by any sport, there were loads of groupies and probably quite a lot of Colombian marching powder too - and the way he tries to blend in the story of the Cosmos with what was going on in society as a whole falls flat on its face. At times, this book is cringe-makingly embarrassing to read.

Most disappointingly, he frequently touches on the real heart of the story without probing further. We all know Pele came for a last hurrah (he never got rich from being a footballer, though he's done fine out of being an ex-footballer) and that loads of journeymen made the trip and enjoyed it. But the real dark heart of the Cosmos and the whole NASL was Giorgio Chinaglia, a prodigiously gifted and prodigiously arrogant Italian who spent most of his career at the Cosmos, openly berating Pele at some points and personally seeing off a whole series of managers. Newsham either can't or won't get into this story. Maybe a better qualified writer will.