Cosmos 3: Back To Jersey

A little housekeeping before we dive into this thing:

Morning Kickaround is coming into its own, covering American soccer stories from the bottom to the top. This week we did an interview with John Smelzer, president and founder of AV Alta. The club is based in Lancaster, CA and is making waves in its first season in USL League One.

I loved his comment that because League One offered a financially viable place to launch a professional soccer club, AV Alta can be "nobody's farm team". Yes, sure, as one pedantic person told me on Bluesky, "every club in the world save a few are farm teams", but it's easy to see what Smelzer meant.

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If I get this thing posted early enough, you might be reading these words before the next edition of The Best Soccer Show on Thursday night. We're going live at 9 PM Eastern. It's the first show since the Gold Cup final, so I bet you can guess what we'll be talking about.

Reflections on the Gold Cup, thoughts on some USMNT player movement happening this summer, and a few MLS items of note.

American soccer has its fair share of axioms. Several of them involve Bruce Arena, there's the one about bald goalkeepers, and then there's the one we're reminded of today.

If you just wait long enough, someone will try to revive the most famous name in messy and dysfunctional history of the game in America: The New York Cosmos.

Today, it appears we've waited long enough.

A couple of months ago, USL announced that it had awarded a League One franchise to a group called North Jersey Pro Soccer that planned to launch a pro outfit out of Paterson's historic Hinchliffe Stadium. League One is expanding at an insane rate (see above) and there's certainly enough soccer culture in that area to support a team aiming at attracting 5,000 or so fans to games. Some of the people involved—like former Red Bulls and Cosmos exec Erik Stover—gave the effort an extra air of legitimacy.

Just two months later, North Jersey Pro Soccer has announced a name for the team they will enter into League One starting in 2026.

Rather than come up with an original identity for the club, perhaps tapping into the specific Jersey flavor that permeates places like Paterson, Clifton, Teaneck, Passaic, Hackensack, etc., NJPS decided to lean into the cheapest heat available.

Following Hudson River Blue's initial reporting, it is now confirmed.

The Cosmos are back (is back?)...baby.

There are a few wrinkles to this I find intriguing. Rocco Commisso, the guy who bought the last version of the Cosmos (the second version, revised in 2010 in the second version of the NASL, because American soccer is both dumb and amazing) and then ran them for a few years before launching into a quixotic quest to take down US Soccer and MLS through an anti-trust lawsuit, is a minority owner in the third version. Jeff Rueter of The Athletic reported that the Jersey group bought the intellectual property from Commisso, so I'm curious to see how involved (if at all) the cable baron/American soccer boat rocker will be in the new team.

Outside of underwriting the lawsuit (which is dead but also kinda not, I think), Rocco has been absent from American soccer while he runs Fiorentina. If you ask me, American soccer has been poorer for it. I may not have always agreed with Rocco's bombastic approach to advocating for change in the game in the US (changes that would have greatly benefited him, natch), but I did recognize his value as a catalyst for pushing the sport forward—or at the very least, questioning the status quo.

If you're interested in a look at the Rocco Era Cosmos shortly after the collapse of the NASL 2.0, here's a show I made with Nipun Chopra back in 2018.

Needless to say, the Cosmos name has a spotty history and it's at least a little risky for the new club in North Jersey to take it on.

On the one hand, the name brings immediate attention (i.e., The Athletic piece) that is tough to come by in an area that exists in the shadow of New York City and all that metropolis has to offer.

On the other, no iteration of the Cosmos has ever stood the test of time and co-opting the history of the name means taking on the bad along with the good. There's Pele and Beckenbauer, but there's also playing in a minor league baseball stadium and devolving into a sort of ghost team over the last half decade. The shine came off the Cosmos name awhile ago.

The power of nostalgia in this instance is a curiosity for me. The implosion of the original NASL somehow froze the Cosmos in time as a glamor team full or glamor players, even though most of those players had retired or left by the end of the 1970s. There's a fetishization of failure that lifts the Cosmos name forty years after the club played any decent soccer and it seems to be combining with a natural desire to celebrate whatever shred of soccer history we have in America.

If this version of the Cosmos doesn't last (and I'm hoping it does!) you can bet that someone else down the line will make an attempt to reanimate the brand.

How many of the new club's fans will even know where the Cosmos name comes from? For those that do remember some version of the Cosmos (almost certainly the NASL 2.0 version), will that attract them to the new team? The last version of the Cosmos thrived on Long Island, a place that might as well be Mars when it comes to North Jersey.

I'm not the one footing the bill or putting in the work, but it feels like centering the identity of the club around the local community is a much better approach then counting on a questionable legacy with no throughline to this new effort. The only real thread that ties this new club to the original Cosmos is the fact that when the Cosmos were a world famous outfit featuring the greatest player of all time, they played at the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

During that stretch, the club dropped "New York" from its name to be known simply as "Cosmos". That's part of the revived brand as well.

Look, I want to believe. I want this Cosmos to be the last Cosmos because it's the Cosmos that lasts. There's a stadium, there's expertise, and there's a New Jersey soccer legend in Giuseppe Rossi to run the playing side of the organization. Those are all reasons to hope that this team, whatever it chooses to call itself, can be a success in the mold of other USL League One teams that have set the standard over the last five years.

Rossi, despite his international career, is a true believer in the possiblities of American soccer and is committed to create paths for young players to grow within the game. I talked to him as part of a video series for the UPSL last year and came away very impressed by his thoughtful approach to the issues that impact the game at the youth levels.

All the hearts appear to be in the right place (though I'm not yet informed on the club's other primary owner, Baye Adofo-Wilson) and they've already checked a few key boxes. Those things matter much more than identity.