For a few humid months in 1968, Atlanta was the world's soccer capital. A group of players from various backgrounds, thrown together by a love of the game, knocked off one of the best clubs on the planet.
No one gave them a chance. Everyone felt the other team would walk over them. The other coach said as much.
Yet the Atlanta Chiefs, in just their second year, not only defeated Manchester City, the newly crowned champions of England, they did it twice, beating "Citeh" again when the European team, humiliated by the loss, brought in some ringers and challenged them to another exhibition game.
None of the players on the Manchester City team that will face Club America at the Georgia Dome on Wednesday was born when those games were played, but the visiting club retains this unique history with the city because of the previous outcomes.
"It would be like some of your boys coming over here to play American football and then beating the team that won the Super Bowl," said Englishman Ray Bloomfield, the captain of that Chiefs team.
The Chiefs were formed in 1967 because Dick Cecil, the Braves vice president and a member of the soccer team's front office, was trying to secure events for the newly built Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Cecil scouted the globe to fill his roster. His only requirement: Every player had to speak English. He reasoned there were going to be a lot of community promotions, and players who couldn't speak or understand the language wouldn't help teach the sport.
Soccer was so foreign to Atlanta that Bloomfield was held up at the airport because customs agents didn't recognize the deflated object in his bag. It was a soccer ball. Bloomfield said he didn't even know where Atlanta was located when he signed with team after leaving Aston Villa, an English first division team.
The ‘67 squad, filled with players from England, Jamaica, Wales and other Anglo-friendly countries, did reasonably well, finishing 10-9-12 and fourth in the NPSL, one of two competing American pro soccer leagues.
The NPSL and NASL merged for the 1968 season, retaining the latter name. The league agreed to bring Manchester City, which hadn't been supplanted by its city rival Manchester United as the dominant team in England, to the states for a barnstorming tour.
Cecil asked the NASL to let his team play Manchester City at the urging of his Chiefs' manager, Welshman Phil Woosnam.
Manchester City figured to have a fun summer by touring the U.S. and beating teams that coach Malcolm Allison said didn't rate, which was an English sporting euphemism for "they stink."
If humiliation was fun, the visitors had a blast.
Scouting being very rudimentary back then, Allison had no way of knowing that the Chiefs were stocked with talented players.
Woosnam and Cecil had put together a squad that combined the experience of players such as Vic Crowe and Bloomfield with faster and younger players such as Kaizer Motaung, an unknown South African who turned into a goal-scoring machine.
Knowing that this was a rare promotional opportunity, Cecil went all out. He hired a woman to dress up like an American colonial figure and ride down Peachtree Street screaming, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" He posed players with cannons for photographs in The Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution.
Manchester City arrived and Allison promptly said his team would win easily.
Many of the players knew each other from their days in England. Woosnam, Crowe and Bloomfield played for Manchester City manager Joe Mercer at Aston Villa.
More than 21,000 people watched the game on May 28. The Chiefs topped mighty City 3-2. A bitter Allison afterward said this of his opponents: "They couldn't play in the fourth division in England."
It was a big moment for the Englishmen on the Atlanta team to knock off their countrymen who had looked down their noses at them and the NASL.
"They had been quoted saying so many things like that this was a poor-standard league and that the Chiefs were nothing to worry about," said Vic Rouse, the Chiefs goalkeeper who now lives in London. "They were a bit laid back and that did wind us up a lot, especially the English players. I don't think they gave us any respect at all and they paid for it."
To be fair, the Chiefs players recognized that Manchester City didn't take the game seriously. Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Furman Bisher was privy to the fact that Chiefs players took some of their opponents out for a night on the town before the match.
"By the time the game came they were wore out," Bisher said.
While the Chiefs basked in the win, Manchester City continued its tour. However, the loss didn't sit well with the brooding Allison. How could a "fourth-rate" team beat a squad from England that featured players who helped the country win the 1966 World Cup? Allison asked for a rematch.
On June 4, the Chiefs agreed. The second game would be played 11 days later. The Chiefs didn't know that Allison was planning on recalling a few players who were touring with the English national team. It didn't matter.
Behind two first-half goals, the Chiefs beat the revamped Manchester City team 2-1 in front of a crowd of 25,000. Papers in England, not known for their patience, had a field day.
"They could cover up once," Woosnam said. "They couldn't cover up twice."
The mailbox at the Chiefs office filled up with newspapers from around the world that ran wire stories or wrote columns about the game. For two months, Atlanta was the soccer capital of the world.
"We were a better team than them," Bloomfield said. "Whether we could have won the [English League], I don't know. But for those two games we were better than them."
Aaron's International Soccer Challenge
Who: Club America vs. Manchester City
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Georgia Dome
TV: ESPN Deportes
Tickets: ticketmaster.com
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