NASL Archives - Generation Zero

June 20, 1975: The Night They Came for Pelé

June 20, 1975: The Night They Came for Pelé

By Hal Phillips|2026-03-15T09:24:57-04:00January 6th, 2023|GZ blog|

[Ed. This excerpt was taken from Chapter 1 of "Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories and the Making of Soccer in America," by author Hal Phillips. It was published by Dickinson-Moses Press in June 2022.] 1. Hotbeds: When they came for Pelé that brisk June night, the locals ripped the shirt from his back. They absconded with one of his shoes, too, and tore his vintage Seventies-era short shorts. Global sporting icons deserve far more solicitous treatment, we can [...]

How Superstars Shaped a Generation: The Legend of Kyle Rote, Jr.

By Hal Phillips|2026-04-04T16:19:48-04:00August 11th, 2022|GZ blog|

When my friends and I gathered in the Bates School gymnasium for our first-ever soccer tryouts in the spring of 1974, we were stunned to observe that coaches had failed to set up an obstacle course. As 9-year-olds in the mid-1970s, our pre-adolescent understanding was simple: Any athletic activity worth a damn required an obstacle course. Without one, we reasoned, how exactly could the nascent Wellesley United Soccer Club hope to parse the athletic attributes of all these kids? [...]

Will MLS on AppleTV Create a new Paradigm?

By Hal Phillips|2026-04-04T16:52:06-04:00June 25th, 2022|GZ blog|

The North American Soccer League breathed its last in October 1984. Earlier that year, during the Super Bowl, Apple ushered in the age of personal computing with its famously Orwellian commercial spot. Thirty-eight years down the road, these two streams — one sporting, the other technical — have crossed once again. On June 14, 2022, Major League Soccer — the single-entity spawn of NASL — announced it will exclusively stream every MLS match live, via a dedicated app on [...]