The Colorado MLS franchise has turned to NASL veteran Bob Houghton as its head coach.
Many are the players who deny their careers are ending, and facing such a harsh reality at an age most players hit their prime is particularly onerous.
Carlos Alberto Parreira turned to training in his mid-20s, and in 1970, at the age of 27, he sat with Mario Zagalo during Brazil’s triumphant march to its third World Cup. The pair were reunited at USA ’94 — this time with Parreira as head man — for Brazil’s tetra, after Parreira had coached in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
Bob Houghton has yet to win a world title, but he was in charge of the Swedish club Malmoe that reached the European Cup final in 1979. At the age of 46, his coaching career extends back more than two decades, including several seasons —
and two trips to the Soccer Bowl — with the Toronto Blizzard of the North American Soccer League.
More than a decade after the NASL folded, Houghton is coming back to North American soccer as head coach of the Colorado Rapids.
“His track record of winning, and winning with a number of different styles and in different situations, spoke well to what we were looking for in this league,” said Denver general manager Rich Levine.
“You’ll see players in the player pool from all continents … and we thought with coach Houghton’s background, ability and experience to meld different talents together to produce a winner, we just couldn’t go wrong.”
Since leaving the Saudi Arabian club Al-Ittihad — where he coached former U.S. international midfielder Hugo Perez — last year, Houghton has been working for FIFA conducting seminars and lecturing.
But the classroom isn’t, and never has been, his preferred milieu.
“What I enjoy most is being out on the field,” he said one day before being presented at a Rapids press conference Dec. 11.
“I’ve missed the weekly challenge. It’s the first time in 20 years I’ve gone that long without the Saturday-Sunday every week. It’s something you get used to, preparing a team from once match to the next according to what happened in the last game.”
Playing career ended early
Houghton cites two powerful influences for his early move into coaching. One is ex-England national team coach Bobby Robson, whom Houghton says encouraged his younger players to learn about coaching. He was just 21 in 1970 when he joined Ipswich, coached by Robson. Houghton had already acquired his first English Football Association coaching license.
The other influence, he admits, was a noticeable dip in his performance on the field.
“For me, it was a fairly easy decision,” says Houghton, “because my coaching abilities were considered better than my playing ones. My playing career was heading rapidly in the wrong direction.”
After two years at Ipswich, he dropped into the lowest tier of the English League with Maidstone for a season as player-coach. His English FA contacts yielded an offer from Malmoe, which had just qualified for the European Cup as Swedish champion.
“It was a great move for me,” Houghton says. “A super place, a very good club, good leadership, a great staff, and eventually, we got to the European Cup final, the first Scandinavian club that ever got there.”
Malmoe lost that final to, ironically, an English club, Nottingham Forest. Trevor Francis — another name recently circulated by the MLS league office as a coaching candidate — scored the only goal of the game with a spectacular diving header.
Houghton moved on to coach clubs in Greece and England before accepting the job of revamping the Blizzard, which had won just seven of 32 matches in 1981.
Toronto improved to 17-15 in Houghton’s first season, then reached the Soccer Bowl in 1983 and 1984, losing both times. It had shifted from Exhibition Stadium to Varsity Stadium for the ’84 season, and attendances had improved, but the floor dropped out when the NASL folded in early 1985.
“We were devastated,” says Houghton. “In Toronto, unlike the rest of the league, we were going in the other direction. Suddenly, there was no league anymore.
“It was a strong league, a very good league, but it was very much a foreign league, wasn’t it? When I started at Toronto, we had three obligatory [North] American citizens. That was all, so we were fielding eight foreign players. By the time the league folded, we were fielding eight Canadian players.”
The Rapids have been allocated just one player, forward Roy Wegerle. As far as building a team from scratch quickly, Houghton admits, “It’s quite a challenge. Everyone is scampering around, making sure they have as much information as they can, looking at tapes and videos.
“At the combine, our opinions will be substantiated or destroyed.”
by Soccer America senior editor Ridge Mahoney