Kicked into touch

This intriguing documentary tells what happened when Steve Ross, the rich and powerful founder of Warner Communications, decided that soccer was going to be the next big thing in America.

He bought a failing team, called the New York Cosmos, paid Pele, the Brazilian superstar, a mountain of money to join them, and the massive international publicity thus generated attracted huge crowds to the matches.

Later, Germany's Franz Beckenbauer, Italy's Giorgio Chinaglia, Brazil's Carlos Alberto and our own Rodney Marsh, nicknamed "the white Pele", joined the team.

For a brief period in the Seventies, Ross looked like a genius. But, alas, US television, upon which all depends, never took to the game and the Cosmos petered out.

While they could, the superstars took every advantage of the money, the booze and the sex readily available to them in the last years of their footballing lives, but still scored enough goals to keep the crowds happy, even if the scheming Chinaglia proved a good deal less likeable than Pele, ever the affable, smiling celebrity.

Pele did, however, refuse to play his second game for the Cosmos because he was also convinced that the pitch was so bad he had grown fungus on his feet and boots, but was later satisfied that it was only green paint smeared on the ground to suggest grass.

Those Yankees would try anything. Paul Crowder and John Dower's film shows, with some flourish, how soccer, hitherto the domain of newly arrived immigrants (hyphenated Americans as they were called), had its moment of glory over there.

Yet, oddly, it only gives the briefest of mentions to the women who took it up and went on to produce the best female team in the world.

Once In A Lifetime