It was the summer of 1977, and Pelé was making the rounds at New York’s hottest club.
Studio 54 had its grand opening only a few months before, and now everyone who was anyone was inside. It was a wild time to be in New York. The city had flirted with bankruptcy and watched Martin Scorsese offer his paean to the city’s grit and grime. Meanwhile, disco was turning itself into a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon and wealthy real estate developers were starting to smell opportunity.
David Hirshey, then a reporter at the Daily News, was at the club to cover Pelé, the Brazilian soccer star who had reinvented himself in his late 30s as the leader of a glitz and glam machine of a team called the New York Cosmos. The Cosmos, owned by Warner Communications, were the tip of the spear of a strategy to bring soccer to the United States through the North American Soccer League. And after a few years of struggles, they were finally starting to be successful.
Pelé was already one of the most famous people in the world, and now he was playing alongside global soccer icons like Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia. And thanks to the connections and promotional skills of the team’s owners, the Cosmos were one of the buzziest tickets in New York, frequently outdrawing professional sports teams with much longer histories in the city. Their image was only helped by the fact that Pelé didn’t mind a night out.
“[Studio 54] was a haven for people who were so famous they were known by single names: Cher, Mick, Liza, Andy, Pelé,” Hirshey told me. On that night in 1977, sporting a white suit with a blonde woman on his arm, Pelé was joined by a man who would also grow into being mononymous — Donald.
“We were in the VIP lounge and Pelé was engulfed by his new friends when my eye caught a lean, sandy haired man hovering on the edge of the celebrity scrum,” Hirshey said. “I asked Pelé’s bodyguard if he knew who that man was, and he said some real estate guy.”
It was Trump.
An essential part of the clubbing scene and a magnet for stars and those who wanted to be them, Studio 54 was a natural place for Trump to be, and the Cosmos were a natural team for him to admire. The soccer team was not a hallowed institution like other major sports franchises, but a brash arrival eager to disrupt the status quo, much like Trump. The team was also backed by the kind of new, international money that was starting to show itself in the city and that would define its next decade — a scene that Trump himself helped to define with his own flashy investments.
It’s not clear if Trump ever actually attended a Cosmos game. The White House directed a request for comment to the Trump Organization, which didn’t respond. But the president himself has referenced Pelé and the Cosmos multiple times when talking about his interest in soccer and why he was excited for the World Cup’s arrival in America.
“Many years ago, when I was young, they brought a player named Pelé to play,” he said in 2025. “And he played for a team called the Cosmos, and Steve Ross at Warner Communications, a friend of mine, he was the inspiration behind — and this place was packed. … I would say Pelé was so great.”
When he attended the World Cup draw last year, Trump once again acknowledged Pelé and the Cosmos as fueling his admiration for U.S. soccer.
“For years, they thought soccer would be so big and big fast,” he said at the event. “Many years ago, I remember watching Pelé on a team called the Cosmos. I assume he is one of the greats. I said, ‘That man can play!’”
The presence of Pelé, who played on the Cosmos from 1975 until his retirement in 1977, represented a high-water mark for the league. And Trump, who was in his early 30s at the time, was perfectly primed to appreciate the Cosmos. Were he any younger or older, he likely would have seen soccer as a dreary sport confined to the backwaters of American culture, much less relevant than football, baseball, basketball or even hockey.
Instead, this Goldilocks moment, with an up-and-coming team that echoed Trump’s own ambitions, let the future president see soccer as a sport that could attract American fans with just the right packaging. As multiple people suggested to POLITICO Magazine, it may have even planted the seeds of enthusiasm that would come in handy years later in the long quest to win Trump’s support for hosting a global soccer tournament in the United States.
Without the Cosmos, the 2026 World Cup might be somewhere else.
“We caught lightning in a bottle,” Jim Trecker, the longtime public relations guru of the Cosmos, the 1994 World Cup and the Joe Namath-era Jets, said about the late 1970s version of the soccer club.
The rapid success, thanks in large part to Pelé, certainly required some luck. But it was also meticulously planned by people who understood the entertainment industry.
The brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, a co-founder and top executive, respectively, of Atlantic Records (then a subsidiary of Warner Communications), convinced Ross that a soccer league could work in the United States. They helped found the league in 1968 and went about scouring for ways to make it dramatic and profitable. When they lured Pelé over with a massive payday, they had their star.
“Pelé is sui generis. There’s no one like Pelé,” said Lawrie Mifflin, a journalist who covered the team for the Daily News. “Wherever he went, people followed him and were asking for his autograph. I’ve never seen anybody like that before.”
But Ahmet Ertegun in particular knew the name wasn’t enough. He helped to set up an entire apparatus around the team — cheerleaders, music, video entertainment. Much of what we associate with a modern sporting event didn’t exist in the late 1970s, except for at the Meadowlands where the Cosmos played.
“It was the beginning of an event as an entertainment spectacle, as a destination,” said Trecker. “Certainly Namath was famous and the Knicks were famous, but they were fairly mature sports. This ‘I gotta be there’ type of feeling was very prominent as a Cosmos thing.”
The team included big names, but they were also aging, no longer the best players in the world. What the team did manage to attract were the biggest stars in the world.
“It was the trendy thing to do and to be seen there,” said Michael Lewis, a soccer writer from New York City who was covering the Rochester team of the North American Soccer League at the time. “Mick Jagger was at games. I think it was the first time I can recall that celebrities were going to sporting events, in the realm of soccer definitely.”
Mifflin said that she saw Jagger in the locker room. Hirshey said that Henry Kissinger once pushed him into Pelé’s lap. Trecker included Aretha Franklin on the list of notables at games.
“It did, without any question, marry sports and culture at the same time,” said Trecker. “It can’t be talked about really in isolation.”
In the summer of ’77, that meant major preoccupations for a certain crowd in New York were getting past the door at Studio 54, avoiding the “Son of Sam” serial killer on the loose and getting a ticket to a Cosmos game.
The excitement surrounding the team was thanks in large part to their relationship with the city, which was cultivated by Ahmet Ertugan.
“One day we were nobody, and the next there are limos picking us up to take us right to Studio 54 after the game,” Shep Messing, a goalkeeper on the team, told The New York Post.
On the road, it was like a “traveling circus,” according to Mifflin. To further boost attention, the team would pay for journalists to travel with them. The big papers paid their own way, but local and ethnic newspapers in New York used the team’s budget to send reporters. What seemed like an organic spectacle to the public had in fact been carefully crafted.
It didn’t survive for long.
The Cosmos and the North American Soccer League were ultimately relevant in the national sporting scene for only around five years — from 1975 to 1980, when the league’s financial problems began to overtake it amid over-expansion and the broader economic recession in America.
But according to Trecker, without “the Cosmos and their panache,” America would not have been in the position to successfully bid for the 1994 World Cup. The same may be true of the 2026 competition.
Early in Trump’s first term, the U.S., Canada and Mexico officially launched their joint bid for the tournament, with support from the president. And while those plans had been in the works for a long time, the bid faced headwinds in 2018 ahead of the official FIFA vote due to a strong, late push from Morocco — as well as a pervasive fear about visa issues in the United States as Trump issued more draconian travel restrictions.
But in 2018, Trump reportedly sent three letters to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, detailing how he would let visiting players and fans into the country without problems and insisting that any stance he was taking on visas would not apply to the World Cup. At the time, the issue seemed somewhat moot, given that it was likely a theoretical second term for Trump would end before the World Cup, but it reassured FIFA officials.
It’s somewhat remarkable that in the midst of a chaotic first term, Trump took the time to support the country’s bid for the tournament and told international officials that he would suspend some of his most significant policy priorities in order to make the event a success. (Of course, that was years ago, and his earlier promises haven’t stopped some visa issues from cropping up.)
“I was a young guy, and I came to watch Pelé, and he was fantastic,” Trump said last year about the Cosmos.
If he did, he got to see a show — one that he will try to top almost exactly 50 years later, when the World Cup Final takes place at the Meadowlands, the very same site that made soccer famous in the United States in the first place.
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