The End of the Strikers

Classic NASL

We all know that the league started falling apart in the off season, with teams like Rochester, Washington again, and Houston folding up. It would be a continuing trend until the league fell apart before the 1985 season, from all the overexpansion and massive salaries. Pele, had retired by the start of the next decade, and the league had failed to replace him with a big name. Yes George Best and Johan Cruyff were in the league, but we didn’t have anyone transcending the sport in New York. Down to Girogio?

Let’s flash forward to the 1983 season, Fort Lauderdale is in their current cycle of replacing their managers every year this time, the fourth in the last seven years. . They reached back into their past and brought in the original player in David Chadwick, a former striker. Just as with any hire at a top club, each hire is looked at as a way to turn the club back to the top. However, they fell to the worst record they have had in a while, their first and only losing season a 14-16 record, but making the playoffs.

. In the playoffs they did hit a record they haven’t in six years, beating the Tampa Bay Rowdies. As cross state rivals then, and still, that was a big record for the club at the time. However they couldn’t defeat one club, the Tulsa Roughnecks, both in the regular season and the playoffs. The one consolation prize in this, was that Tulsa won the Soccer Bowl that year. Not all is lost with the club at the time, future first league manager Brian Kidd. Thomas Rongen, and Ray Hudson are at the club.

The bad news would come during the last month of the year, the Sun Sentinel, would report on December 1^st, “Strikers pull up stakes, Minnesota is the home” The Robbies would end up taking the team up north because the league saw the future in the sport, the indoor league. South Florida didn’t have the proper facilities for an indoor game, to complement the outside season. They however didn’t have the attendance either, something that is plaguing the league anyway.

Ray Hudson would end up in management first in Miami with the MLS’s Fusion, before the MLS contracted that club. There was some of that team, who are in media also, Eric Waynalda who works for Sirius Xm and Fox spent a couple of years down there, and the media mogul himself Brian Dunnseth played for a while with Ray. Kyle Beckerman, and Nick Rimando are among the only two left from the last time the league had a team in Miami. Ray currently is works on the Football Show on Sirius XM in the mornings.

Gerd Muller died in 2021, and had been associated with Bayern Munich after his playing days.