Episode
426.5: The NASL Players' Strike of 1979 – With Steve Holroyd [ARCHIVE RE-RELEASE]
- Podcast
- Good Seats Still Available
- Published
- Dec 29, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 6654
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Summary
[We say goodbye to a crappy 2025 with a fond remembrance of frequent guest and long-time friend-of-the-show Steve Holroyd - whose untimely passing earlier this year still stings mightily. In this classic ARCHIVE RE-RELEASE from April 2019 , we tapped Steve's encyclopedic knowledge of US soccer history for an essential look at an oft-overlooked event in the life of the original North American Soccer League (1968-1985) , that arguably marked the "beginning of the end" of that influential circuit.] + + + Professional union labor lawyer and Society for American Soccer History sports historian Steve Holroyd returns to the podcast to go deep into one of the more curious rabbit holes in North American Soccer League history. In early 1977, Ed Garvey, a labor lawyer and head of the newly-formed National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), recruited Washington Diplomats midfielder John Kerr to help gauge interest among his teammates and those of other clubs in forming a similar organization for the suddenly ascendant ten-year-old NASL. By the end of that summer, player representatives from all 18 league clubs agreed in principle to create the North American Soccer League Players Association (NASLPA), and on August 29th, 1977 – the day after the New York Cosmos' dramatic Soccer Bowl victory over the Seattle Sounders in Pele's US swan song – officially sought recognition by NASL owners to become the players' collective bargaining entity. Commissioner Phil Woosnam and league ownership quickly refused, fearing a threat to the still-fragile circuit's integrity by a group run by a union of the NFL, with whom NASL owners already had a tenuous (and in the cases of Ft. Lauderdale's Robbie and Dallas' Hunt families, common ownership) relationship. With no progress towards recogni…