Photograph by Harry Benson/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Atlanta has contributed more than just the Chiefs, Apollos, Generals, Silverbacks, Beat, Atlanta United, and an upcoming National Women’s Soccer League team to soccer. In 1967, when Atlanta’s first professional soccer team, the Chiefs, started, they broke traditions involving statistics and player signings simply because winning was more important than norms.
“A lot of things in sports were just mythical,” Bob Hope, the Chiefs’ public relations director, says.
The Chiefs weren’t interested in myths.
The first norm broken involved signing players from Africa, which was an intentionally untapped scouting area for teams in the National Professional Soccer League in 1967, which became the North American Soccer League in 1968.
Chiefs coach Phil Woosnam signed players from Ghana and Zambia in 1967, and another from South Africa in 1968. Those players helped the Chiefs win the NASL championship in September 1968, the city’s first professional sports title.
Other NPSL teams in 1967 featured players from countries in South America, Central America, Europe and the Caribbean. No teams, other than the Chiefs, featured any players from Africa.
“It was Phil’s vision,” Hope says, noting that tradition didn’t mean much to the coach. “It was considered outrageous when Phil started bringing in players from Africa. It didn’t exist.”
Scouting players from Africa was also rare for most European teams at the time, other than a few in Portugal and France, which began to benefit from a migration of players from current and former African colonies. NASL teams began to follow the Chiefs’ practice in 1968. Baltimore signed two players from Ghana. Boston signed one player from Ethiopia. Detroit signed one player from Ghana. Washington signed three from Ghana. The Chiefs had four on the 1968 team: Emment Kapengwe and Freddie Mwila from Zambia, Willie Evans from Ghana, and South African standout Kaizer Motaung.
“To some degree, Phil showcased really good players who could compete,” Hope says.
Keeping track of how the players were performing was believed to be another Chiefs’ initiative.
During the team’s second season in 1968, Braves public relations director Lee Walburn, who later became editor-in-chief of Atlanta magazine, drew a shot chart for the soccer team. (The Chiefs were owned for a few years by the Braves, so there were some shared services.) He borrowed the format from ones used by basketball teams.
The idea of recording soccer stats, other than the final score, was born.
“We didn’t know anything about soccer,” Hope says. “Every sport in America had stats. We were just doing the same thing.”
It was a simple white sheet, 11×17. The team recorded shots, shots on goal and corner kicks, Hope says. The Chiefs would send out the sheet to media outlets around the city so that they could accurately report on the team. Soccer was still new to the Atlanta, and news outlets weren’t very familiar with the game and its mechanics. The Chiefs wanted to be able to provide more information to help them understand how to cover the team.
The NASL recognized the benefit of having these statistics league-wide and asked the Chiefs to send copies of their sheets to other teams.
“[There was] a lot of balking, because it was a tradition that you didn’t keep stats,” Hope says. But by midseason, teams had come around and were logging information.
Today, dozens of sites track stats from thousands of teams around the world. And FIFA announced in March that it will make available to the 48 teams competing in the World Cup a large database of information that can be used for self-scouting and match preparation.
