Cosmos on the Carpet: The Forgotten Indoor Years
By Jim Whelan and Jerry Cala (Cosmos Country Podcast)
The New York Cosmos are the most famous club in American soccer history. Pelé, Beckenbauer, Chinaglia. Crowds of 70,000 at Giants Stadium. Five league titles.
Almost nobody remembers that they also played indoors. For parts of four winters, the Cosmos played on a carpet in hockey arenas, at the Meadowlands and even at Madison Square Garden. They had stars, a Coach of the Year and one run to a championship series. They also had half-empty buildings, a bad first season and an exit in the middle of their last one.
This is the story of the Cosmos on the carpet.
A reluctant start
The Cosmos’ first taste of indoor soccer was a one-off. In the winter of 1975, the NASL held a 16-team indoor tournament, split into regions, with the four regional winners meeting in a final four. The Cosmos played in Region 1, won one game and lost three, scoring 18 goals and allowing 27.
After that they mostly stayed outside. The late 1970s were the Cosmos’ glory years, with Pelé and then Franz Beckenbauer and huge crowds at Giants Stadium. The club had little reason to care about winter soccer in arenas.
The rest of the country did care. According to the Society for American Soccer History, the Major Indoor Soccer League grew out of Ed Tepper and Earl Foreman’s belief that indoor soccer could capture American audiences while giving domestic players more opportunities to compete. Announced in October 1977, the six-team league began play in December 1978 after competing indoor ventures postponed their plans. Backed by arena owners, the MISL adopted four 15-minute quarters and taller goals to encourage scoring, while requiring at least 10 of each team’s 14 roster spots to be held by Americans.
Its inaugural match took place on December 22, 1978, when 10,386 fans watched the Cincinnati Kids host the New York Arrows, with Kids co-owner Pete Rose delivering the ceremonial first kick. Houston Summit Soccer dominated the regular season, but the Arrows, featuring former Cosmos goalkeeper Shep Messing and emerging stars Steve Zungul and Branko Segota, captured the first championship by sweeping the Philadelphia Fever. With attendance increasing throughout the season and all six franchises completing the campaign, the MISL established a foundation for expansion and indoor soccer’s growth in the United States.
The league caught on fast. By the early 1980s, indoor soccer was where the money and momentum were heading, and even the NASL started running its own indoor season. The Cosmos finally came along.
1981–82: Chinaglia’s winter
The Cosmos’ first full indoor season came in 1981–82, at the brand-new Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands. They came in with the NASL’s best outdoor record. That summer they had gone 23–9, and Giorgio Chinaglia had been named league MVP with 29 goals.
Indoors, the team largely brought its outdoor roster inside: Chinaglia, Carlos Alberto (captain of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup winners), Rick Davis, Steve Moyers, Boris Bandov, Chico Borja, Bob Iarusci and a teenage Jeff Durgan, with David Brcic in goal. Erol Yasin coached.
It didn’t translate. The Cosmos went 6–12, scored 102 goals, allowed 123 and missed the playoffs. One history of the era says the club only half-committed to the indoor game.
Chinaglia, though, was spectacular. He scored 35 goals and added 20 assists in 17 games, more than two goals a game and about a third of the team’s total. Moyers was next with 20 goals.
The Cosmos also weren’t alone in the building. That same winter, the MISL’s New Jersey Rockets played at Brendan Byrne Arena too, two rival leagues fighting for the same fans. The Cosmos averaged about 8,700 over nine home dates. The Rockets were bankrupt by summer.
1983–84: the best Cosmos team indoors
The Cosmos skipped the 1982–83 indoor season, then came back for what turned out to be the NASL’s last. The league was struggling to stay alive, and only seven teams played. But it was the most ambitious indoor season the NASL ever ran: 32 regular-season games, best-of-three semifinals and a best-of-five final.
The Cosmos took this season far more seriously than in years past, calling up marquee players in the final weeks to chase a playoff spot. They split their 16 home games evenly between Brendan Byrne Arena and Madison Square Garden and, under Eddie Firmani, went 20–12, one game behind San Diego. They were nearly unbeatable at home at 13–3. On March 28, 1984, Firmani was named NASL Indoor Coach of the Year, receiving 14 of 21 votes.
The team had real talent:
Chico Borja led the team with 29 goals and 37 assists, fifth in the league in points. Borja played college soccer at Division III NJIT in Newark, New Jersey.
Stan Terlecki, a Polish international, scored 34 goals in only 23 games. Two years earlier he had shared the MISL MVP award with Steve Zungul.
Steve Moyers added 30 goals and Alan Green 28.
David Brcic won 18 games in goal and made the All-NASL second team, along with defender Dan Canter and Terlecki.
Andranik Eskandarian, Hubert Birkenmeier, Roberto Cabañas and Richard Chinapoo rounded out a deep roster.
The Cosmos reached the championship series and met the San Diego Sockers. It was no contest. San Diego won all five of its playoff games that spring, sweeping the Cosmos 3–0 in a series played April 5, 8 and 11, 1984. It was the Sockers’ third straight indoor title across two leagues.
The crowds were the weak point. The Cosmos averaged 4,899 a game, third in the league but well behind Chicago and San Diego, both above 11,000. For a club that once filled Giants Stadium, it was a long way down.
1984–85: into the MISL, and out
By 1984 the Cosmos were a different club. Warner Communications had sold the team to a group led by Chinaglia, and the money dried up. Most of the key players were sold. The 1984 outdoor team missed the playoffs, and the NASL was close to finished.
Near the end of that outdoor season, four NASL clubs announced they were jumping to the rival MISL: San Diego, Minnesota, Chicago and the Cosmos. The club had looked at arenas in upstate New York and Connecticut, but stayed at the Meadowlands.
The roster was thinner. Mark Liverić scored 20 goals in 17 games, Andy Parkinson 15, Angelo DiBernardo 13, Pedro DeBrito 12 and Wes McLeod 11. Chinaglia himself, now part-owner, played four games and scored three goals.
It didn’t last. The Cosmos played their last league game at the Meadowlands Arena on February 19, 1985, and dropped out of the MISL three days later, on February 22, after 33 games and an 11–22 record, citing poor attendance. The NASL folded for good in March. The owners tried an independent schedule that summer, but that drew poorly too. The last Cosmos game was a 2–1 loss to Italy’s Lazio on June 16, 1985. Later that year, the club was gone.
Why it never worked
The Cosmos had everything indoor soccer usually lacked: a famous name, star players, a big market and two major arenas. It still never caught on. The NASL was declining while indoor soccer was expanding. It was a quicker game, closer to hockey than soccer.
Part of it was timing. The Cosmos came indoors late, in 1981, after the MISL had already built its fan bases in places like Cleveland, Wichita, St. Louis and Baltimore. Part of it was commitment. The club treated indoor soccer as a sideline to the outdoor season, and fans could tell. And part of it was New York itself. The region tried indoor soccer again and again in that era: the Cosmos, the Rockets, the champion Arrows on Long Island, and later the New York Express. None of them lasted.
The Cosmos’ indoor story is also a story about the NASL’s decline. The league turned to indoor soccer in its last years because small arenas were easier to fill and cheaper to run than outdoor stadiums. It wasn’t enough to save the league, or the Cosmos.
The Cosmos today
The name has outlived the team twice. A second Cosmos played from 2013 to 2020 in lower divisions before suspending operations. In 2026, a third version returned in USL League One, playing at Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey.
That club plays outdoors. For now, the Cosmos’ time on the carpet remains a strange footnote: a few winters when the most famous club in America tried a game it never quite took seriously, and the game moved on without it.
If you saw the Cosmos indoors at the Meadowlands or the Garden, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Sources
List of New York Cosmos (1971–1985) seasons, Wikipedia
New York Cosmos (1971–1985), Wikipedia
1983–84 NASL indoor season, Wikipedia
1981–82 New York Cosmos indoor statistics, StatsCrew
New York Cosmos (in), 1984/85 roster, National Football Teams
Home Sweet Homes: the Cosmos’ five-decade journey, NY Cosmos
New Jersey Rockets, Fun While It Lasted
The Year in American Soccer – 1984, Soccer History USA
New York Cosmos (2026), Wikipedia
Jim Whelan and Jerry Cala have a weekly New York Cosmos podcast called Cosmos Country.
Comments