1975 NASL Indoor tournament
| NASL Indoor Tournament | |
|---|---|
| Tournament details | |
| Host country | United States |
| Dates | January 24, 1975 – March 16, 1975 |
| Teams | 16 |
| Final positions | |
| Champions | San Jose Earthquakes (1st title) |
| Runners-up | Tampa Bay Rowdies |
| Tournament statistics | |
| Matches played | 20 |
| Goals scored | 230 (11.5 per match) |
| Top scorer(s) |
 Paul Child (14 goals)
|
| Best player |
Paul Child (San Jose) Gabbo Garvic (San Jose)
|
In early 1975 the North American Soccer League hosted its first league-wide indoor soccer tournament over the course of seven weeks. All but four NASL teams participated.
Though the Dallas Tornado had won the NASL's 1971 Hoc-Soc Tournament and the Atlanta Apollos staged two league sanctioned pilot matches at the Omni in 1973, the birth of the modern game in North America can be traced to 1974, when three indoor exhibitions against the touring Soviet Red Army of Moscow club took place. The games were played on a field the size of a hockey rink, with goals 4 feet high by 16 feet wide. Much like hockey, matches were played in three 20 minute periods, allowed free substitution, and featured six man sides (five field players and a goalkeeper). The Soviets beat an outmatched NASL All-Star team 8–4 on February 7 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. The second game against the reigning champion Philadelphia Atoms on February 11, is considered by many as the watershed event of North American indoor soccer. The game stayed close into the third period, though the Red Army squad eventually pulled away 6–3. On February 13 the Russians closed out their tour with an 11–4 throttling of the St. Louis Stars in Missouri before an impressive crowd of 12,241.
In spite of the losses, and because another 11,790 curious fans packed Philadelphia's Spectrum to watch this "new" game, the NASL began considering indoor soccer’s potential to increase fan interest in the sport as a whole. A month and seven days later a Spectrum crowd of 6,314 turned out to watch the Atoms defeat the New York Cosmos 5–3. With this, franchises also recognized that they could generate more revenue from players already under contract. The league hinted at having a 10-game indoor season in early 1975, but by autumn eventually scaled that plan back. The following year the NASL staged an indoor tournament: sixteen of the twenty teams participated. It was divided into four regional tournaments, with the regional winners meeting in San Francisco for the overall title in a similar format to the NCAA college basketball tournament. In the regionals, two teams would play each other, and then winners would play losers in a two-game series. The team with the best record advanced to the semifinals; in the event of teams having identical records, the side with the best total goal differential advanced out of the region. That first year the goals stayed 4 x 16 and the games remained divided into three 20 minute frames like those played against the Red Army club the previous year.
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