NASL Split Season Proved Its Worth In 2015

The New York Cosmos and Ottawa Fury FC will compete to win a title and lift the Soccer Bowl trophy, but the league’s innovative Split Season has already been one of the winners during 2015 in the NASL.

“The year has lived up to our growing reputation for delivering intense competition week in and week out,” NASL Commissioner Bill Peterson said on Friday at the league’s press conference ahead of The Championship Final. “The Cosmos jumped out to take the Spring Season. Ottawa turned it around to take the Fall Season. We’re excited about what that split-season format provides for our fans and sponsors. It is what makes this a very, very special league.

“It is fitting that our top two teams made it. I guess our system works. For Ottawa it was a great Fall Season. We heard about their incredible streak. You can go on and on and on.”

Peterson added: “The Cosmos jumped out early. That’s an interesting part about our format – after all that it ended up going down to the wire. There’s pressure to continue to win, our game is intense and fun to watch from a fan’s perspective.”

The New York Cosmos, the undefeated winner of the 10-game Spring Season that began in April and ended in early June, had five months to prepare for The Championship, the league’s four-team postseason tournament. After a slow start to the Fall Season and a period where the club lost consecutive games to the league’s two Canadian sides – first Ottawa, then Edmonton – the Cosmos then embarked on a six-game unbeaten streak, five of them victories, to land in The Championship Final.

“It has been a long season,” Cosmos head coach Giovanni Savarese said. “I remember preseason in Hong Kong, starting the NASL season and winning the Spring Season, traveling to Cuba, playing in the U.S. Open Cup, and being able to maintain a good rhythm to the end. I’m very proud of my players, especially because we get to host the final.”

He added: “For us we were focused on winning the Spring Season and doing the job after that. For us every game is important, any kind of match we have we want to be competitive. We were also battling for position and home field. We kept that competitiveness throughout the year. For us there was no change.”

By contrast, Ottawa finished in ninth place in the Spring Season and head coach Marc Dos Santos knew that Ottawa’s route to the postseason meant winning the Fall Season title or finishing among the top four teams in the Combined Standings. After losing at the Cosmos on May 2, Fury FC put together an impressive run the rest of the way – losing only one game over the team’s final 26 games, going unbeaten in 12 games to close the regular season, and taking a 12-game road unbeaten streak to Shuart Stadium, where they beat New York handily, 4-1, on Sept. 22.

“In our locker room from the start the goal was to finish in the top four,” Dos Santos said. “We only talked about winning the Fall Season when maybe there were four games left. We were always focused on looking at the schedule as 30 games and to finish in top four. We were able to do that and much more.”