Body stockings, buzzers, microchips: League 1 America, the failed attempt to revolutionize soccer

The history of soccer in the United States is littered with failed leagues, all attempting to do the same thing: Americanize the world's game. For nearly a century, proponents of the sport in the U.S. altered the long-standing rules of the game to make it more high-scoring, more action-packed, less... foreign.

Some of those rule changes and innovations — the use of substitutes, for example, or the backpass law — were truly groundbreaking and ended up being adopted globally . Others, including the 35-yard shootout and the countdown clock, were interesting ideas that eventually fell by the wayside.

And then there were the truly atrocious ideas: larger goals, " stampede kicks " and brown cards for flatulence .

In the early 1990s, around the time the United States was preparing to host its first World Cup, Chicago-area businessman Jim Paglia made an attempt to fully rework the rules of soccer. His concept, which he dubbed League 1 America, made the mascots, cheerleaders and rule changes of previous leagues look staid and traditional. Paglia's game would be played on a pitch ringed with buzzers and lights, and players would wear skin-tight body stockings embedded with microchips. Eight officials would keep watch as participants launched shots at four different goals. They would play in futuristic stadiums built into shopping malls in every corner of the United States.

It sounds like a fever dream but in 1993, Paglia's idea grew legs. He earned an audience with FIFA , the sport's global governing body, and with the U.S. Soccer Federation. He crisscrossed the United States in search of funding, and major corporations expressed interest. He went head to head with the group organizing Major League Soccer in an attempt to earn division-one sanctioning and got a crash course in the complicated, insular politics of American soccer. And then it all fell apart.

Nowadays, the remnants of League 1 America live in a box in Paglia's attic, a forgotten afterthought in the history of the sport in the country, while MLS has become the most successful professional soccer league in U.S. history. Flipping through those documents makes for a fun thought exercise: what if all of this had played out differently?

Paglia was not a newcomer to the game of soccer when he started working on his League 1 America pipe dream in the early '90s. He'd gotten his start in the sport as a jack-of-all-trades for the Rochester Lancers during the halcyon days of the North American Soccer League (NASL) in the 1970s. There, Paglia worked closely with the club's owner, John Petrossi, and had a front-row seat to the club's — and later the league's — total collapse.

Paglia had taken notes in terms of what had worked and what hadn't in the old NASL. By the time he found himself working with the 1994 World Cup organizing and venue committee for the city of Chicago, he felt well-equipped to take a swing at starting a league of his own.

The American soccer landscape was bleak at best. There was the American Professional Soccer League (APSL), a ragtag collection of a few dozen teams, all of whom seemed to be mere minutes away from folding. The Continental Indoor Soccer League (CISL), the country's indoor top flight, had its own issues, as did the U.S. Interregional Soccer League (USISL), a massive network of lower-division teams in every corner of the country.

FIFA had awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States in 1988, but chief among its conditions was that the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) create a proper, first-division league by 1991, something the U.S. had lacked since the NASL collapsed in 1984. The USSF was tasked with determining the standards of what a first-division league looked like and, crucially, recommending one particular league to FIFA to receive a first-division sanction.

That stipulation created a scramble in the early '90s among investment groups. Immediately, the APSL organized a bid, led by William De La Peña, owner of the league's flagship franchise, the Los Angeles Salsa. There was a competing bid — something called Major League Professional Soccer (now MLS) — backed by L.A.-area lawyer Alan Rothenberg, the man who had spearheaded efforts to land the World Cup.

And then there was League 1 America.

Paglia thought that any successful American soccer league would need to feature a version of the game tailored to American audiences, who were largely accustomed to watching sports that were more high-scoring and less free-flowing. Off the field, Paglia felt it essential to make the sport part of a larger entertainment vehicle. Smaller, soccer-specific stadiums in his league would need to be part of a larger real estate development, surrounded by retail shops, bowling alleys, "virtual reality centers" and the like. Matches would need to be affordable and aimed at working families.

"Professional soccer," Paglia eventually wrote in his pitch to U.S. Soccer, "is simply not viable as an end unto itself."

Some facets of Paglia's plan feel familiar to MLS. Paglia called for a "single-entity" structure where the league owned all of the teams and player contracts. But League 1 America would have even more influence over its teams than MLS. Each team would only be allowed two players from outside North America, for example, to create a "made in America" product, according to Paglia's proposal. Other ideas were downright progressive — League 1 America's players would have access to profit-sharing, an idea that has only recently come to American professional soccer .

Paglia had kicked around a few rule changes during his time at the Lancers but said his on-field vision for League 1 America truly took shape when he met Jay Kessler, a D.C.-area doctor and professor. Kessler, a lifelong soccer fan, also had a radical vision.

"He brought me the idea of ProZone Soccer," Paglia told The Athletic. "He flew out to meet, we spent a couple of days together. He's seen my name in the media and said, 'I think you're the guy who could bring this to life.' He had cancer and knew that he wasn't going to live long.

"We sat for a couple of days, he turned over all of his ideas. All of the details that I've ever shared about how the field is set up, the players, that all came from Jay. All I did was try to bring it to life."

Kessler's creation kept the basics of soccer but changed many facets. Matches would be divided into three 20-minute periods and teams were allowed to completely change their lineup between each of them. The field was lined with six chevrons, each representing a position — defense, midfield and attack. Players from each "zone" would wear different-colored jerseys, to make them easy to spot, and those jerseys would be embedded with a microchip, which would set off a series of buzzers and lights around the edge of the field when they strayed too far. Defenders weren't allowed to get closer than 15 yards to their own goal, which would promote scoring.

The league's scoring system was set up to reward teams for attempts from distance. Attackers, for example, would get a single point for a goal. Defenders, who by rule would never be closer than 45 yards to the goal, would get three. All players would be shooting at four goals, not two. A standard-sized, 8-by-24-foot goal would sit within a slightly larger target. If players managed to place a shot between the posts of those two goals, they'd get an extra half-point.

It sounds wacky, but this mode of thinking was not uncommon at the time. MLS, for example, would trial the idea of larger goals — as well as kick-ins, shorter halves and tie-breaking via counting corner kicks — in America's lower leagues, eventually incorporating a few oddball rules of its own when it debuted in 1996. In Kessler and Paglia's view, League 1 America's rules and zones would provide American consumers with something a little more rigid, like American football.

"Sports-minded Americans view (soccer) as an outdoor game with no structure," Kessler told English newspaper The Sunday Telegraph in the early '90s. "And Americans like structure. With soccer, fans are faced with a great open field and a game of constant improvisation. This continuous flow can cause spectator fatigue for fans accustomed to time-outs and commercial breaks."

Carter G. Woodson High School sits in Fairfax, Virginia, a Washington D.C. suburb. You'd never know it, but the school has a unique place in American soccer history. In 1976, Pele and his New York Cosmos came here to play a match against the Washington Diplomats of the NASL. Thousands of fans mobbed the tiny high school stadium, storming the field at the final whistle as Pele ran for cover under the bleachers.

Eighteen years later, Paglia brought League 1 America to Woodson High School for a dry run. Two teams, assembled from local semi-pros and former pros, took the field in front of a few hundred observers. Those attendees weren't run-of-the-mill soccer fans. Quite the opposite, actually. Paglia populated the stadium with consumers who knew little to nothing about soccer. Some had even told a market research firm that they actively disliked the sport.

Each spectator was given a notebook and instructed to jot down their observations as the game played out. Of particular interest to Paglia was how long it would take the crowd to grasp the fundamental rules of his version of soccer. Spectators were asked to glance at the game clock and note how far along in the match they were when they started to understand what was going on.

Paglia remembers that number being an average of 12 minutes, impressively quick. Fans, he remembers, enjoyed the game.

"The intention was to make it more spectator-friendly and easier to comprehend for those who either didn't know soccer or were just there for the entertainment value," said Paglia. "We felt we accomplished that. We simplified it. The color coding made a big difference. People could recognize that if a player got to a certain point on the field the lights went off. And that meant he had violated the space. They took to that very quickly."

While Kessler was hard at work on the rules, Paglia busied himself trying to secure financing for his nascent league. He put in options on a collection of potential stadium and development sites and worked his long-standing contacts at major corporations to find investors.

"My background was in marketing," said Paglia. "I had people lined up here in the States, various brands that expressed significant interest in participating in it and I had no doubt we'd do very well there. Nobody was willing to write a check but everybody was saying, 'If you pull this off, I'm on board.'"

In September 1993, Paglia's group caught the eye of FIFA. Sepp Blatter, then the secretary general, invited Paglia to make a presentation at FIFA headquarters in Switzerland. Years later, Paglia remembered the meeting fondly enough, saying that FIFA's executives were "cordial and gracious" and that the governing body wasn't dismissive of the idea.

If FIFA was taking Paglia seriously, the USSF certainly wasn't. Neither were former USSF president Sunil Gulati, Rothenberg nor others within the MLS bid. They were interested in Paglia's development concept — the real estate portion of it, that is — but felt strongly that the version of soccer played in America should closely resemble the one played abroad. They also expressed doubts, publicly and privately, about whether League 1 America could attract any significant investment.

"The ridicule that I got, that was painful," said Paglia. "Everybody thought I was a kook, for the most part. They were very vocal about it. I never ridiculed them. There was plenty of room to do that. I ran into Sunil Gulati a couple of times. He would always go out of his way to ridicule it, and I asked him why. He could never give me an answer."

For his part, Gulati said he didn't remember the specifics of any meeting with Paglia.

"But I can imagine we said something along the lines of, 'Are you kidding?'" Gulati told The Athletic. "'How are you going to do this? How are you going to get anybody to pay for this?' I can imagine that, sure. I don't think we were condescending, I think we were very skeptical."

Members of the press took their jabs. Perhaps no pundit was as blunt as legendary Soccer America columnist Paul Gardner, a writer who has never pulled a punch.

"On we go, deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of soccer varieties," Gardner wrote. "Lurking down there, we find one Jim Paglia, who is threatening the sport with yet another version, this one so arcane that it defies description."

Major League Soccer's bid had its own problems. Rothenberg, the man heading the MLS bid, was also the president of the federation that would be deciding which bid to select. A lawyer by trade, he had been a constant presence in the game of soccer since the '60s, and his association with the group heading MLS' efforts was a constant source of heartburn for more than a few pundits and fans. The federation had made it clear that Rothenberg wouldn't be involved in any decision-making surrounding the sanctioning, but many remained understandably concerned.

"There was an underlying concern, if not a fear, that I was grabbing too much control of soccer in the United States," Rothenberg, now 85, told The Athletic. "I didn't come from the history of lining the fields, refereeing the games or being out there every Saturday with the kids. I came from it from the business and professional side. There were a lot of people who didn't think I was 'one of them,' if you will, so it's understandable that they'd put a little bit of a jaundiced eye on an outsider."

Rothenberg had arrived at the USSF presidency in 1990 at least partially because of FIFA, which had grown concerned with the federation's shaky financial footing before the World Cup. In many ways, he had been its chosen candidate, having worked with FIFA years earlier while organizing the 1984 Summer Olympics. Rothenberg had a close bond with Blatter and FIFA's president Joao Havelange. He was deeply connected within the federation, which would be choosing a league, and FIFA itself, which would be bestowing its blessing upon it. And he was a notoriously hard-working and dogged negotiator.

"I don't beat up people because I enjoy beating up people," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "But if I have to leave some strewn bodies to win, within the rules, that's the way you have to do it."

Burton Haimes, a member of the federation's board of directors, chaired the committee tasked with establishing division one standards and was intimately involved in the federation's ultimate decision to go with MLS.

"We had a legal opinion we did at that time from Kirkland and Ellis, a pretty reputable firm," said Haines. "We dug into it, and we felt we could (award the sanctioning) for a period — 'an incubation period' were the words we were using. But it wasn't easy when you've got the guy who's also the president of the federation, who's also the head of the league, it did create a delicate situation that we had to handle."

The APSL's bid was also flawed in its own way. Officially, the league had division two sanctioning — "That was being generous," remembered Rothenberg — but it had had a monopoly of sorts on anything approaching top-flight soccer in the United States for a half-decade by the time the MLS bid rolled around. Rothenberg's MLS group, seeking to quash the competition entirely, offered the APSL some $1.5 million for all of its assets. The APSL declined.

"It would be very hard for the APSL to walk in and say, 'We are going to be the new top league,'" said Gulati. "They hadn't done anything like that before, and they'd had ample opportunity to do so. It was easier to pitch a blank piece of paper than to say, 'We're gonna be a great league, starting... now.'"

Paglia felt the federation had no business sanctioning a single first-division league, suggesting that maybe the three proposals could merge into a "superdivision" that would feature inter-league play between the three. De La Peña was even more blunt, threatening to sue the federation if they went through with their plan to sanction a single league.

On Dec. 3, 1993, Paglia, De La Peña and Rothenberg made their pitches to the USSF. By then, Paglia knew his efforts were largely dead in the water.

"(The federation was) very polite, they asked a few questions, were very non-committal, and that was it," said Paglia. "It was a dog and pony show, they just wanted to see what we had. I had meetings with Rothenberg and Gulati, who wanted to merge our ideas, and then De La Peña, he wanted to merge as well. Everybody was looking to cut deals. In the end, we didn't get a single vote."

The APSL received five votes, largely from board members concerned with Rothenberg's involvement and the potential of antitrust litigation. MLS, the winner of the day, received 16. In the end, Major League Soccer simply had the power and financial wherewithal to overwhelm its competitors, and the USSF wasn't interested in sanctioning something that wasn't exactly soccer. Paglia's group had lofty goals, aiming to raise $700 million and build 12 stadiums in under 18 months. Years later, it certainly feels unrealistic.

"League 1 America may be an interesting concept," said Haimes. "And it may be an interesting game. It just wasn't soccer, or it wasn't football, whatever you'd want to say. It wouldn't have satisfied FIFA, either. I don't think it was an issue, at the end of the day, we just didn't take that seriously."

Paglia soldiered on, even after the federation made its choice.

"When we started this, we were outsiders," Paglia told Soccer America in the days following the federation's decision. "Now that the board has made its choice, we're still outsiders and we're still going ahead. Nothing has really changed."

He continued to pitch his concept to investors, hoping his league would prove a potential competitor to MLS. He talked about going head-to-head with MLS in the New York and Los Angeles markets and accused the federation of restrictive trade practices and favoritism. Rothenberg and others continued deriding his efforts in the media. Asked whether he had written Paglia off after winning the sanctioning battle, Rothenberg didn't hold back.

"He was never written in to begin with," he told Soccer America.

U.S. Soccer made its recommendation to FIFA at the 1994 World Cup draw, in Las Vegas, just weeks after approving the MLS bid. The league initially wanted to start play in 1995 but ended up pushing its debut back until 1996 as it worked to lay roots.

By the end of 1995, Paglia had given up on his dream. The APSL collapsed in 1996, dissolving into the USISL. Even the CISL, the country's indoor league, collapsed in 1998.

Thirty years on, the USSF can feel vindicated in its decision to back MLS. Soccer, it turns out, had not failed to gain traction in the U.S. because it wasn't American enough. MLS had its own Americanized quirks, like the 35-yard shootout , but they were phased out quickly. The league continues to battle for relevance in the American sports landscape but is unquestionably the most successful professional soccer league in American history.

Paglia has remained involved in the game since his League 1 America efforts fell apart, mostly as a coach. Three decades after he stuck the league's business plan in a box, there's still a little disappointment and resentment in his voice when he talks about his former vision.

"Nobody likes to fail," says Paglia. "And we failed miserably with it. It cost me a great deal of money and it took me a long time to recover the financial losses. I really did go all in on it."

(Top photo: ; design by Eamonn Dalton)