In 1975 a struggling New York soccer team signed Pele, and for a few years afterward professional soccer looked like it might actually take hold in America. This film traces the rise and fall of the New York Cosmos through the executives, players, and fans who lived it, including Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, and the Warner Communications money behind Steve Ross that bankrolled the whole experiment. Interviews describe sold-out crowds at Giants Stadium, the team's after-parties at Studio 54, and a locker room where egos from half a dozen countries collided as hard as any opponent. Archival match footage and news clips track the North American Soccer League's brief boom and its collapse once the star power aged out and the league's finances caught up with it. The film treats the Cosmos less as a sports franchise than as a cultural moment, a glimpse of celebrity-driven excess arriving a decade before American soccer had any real infrastructure to sustain it.