The last time Lothar Pospich, Manfred Norstadt and Eberhard Herz raised the United States Cup trophy together, there were only a few thousand people in the quiet stands of Wrigley Field, a largely abandoned minor league baseball stadium in South Los Angeles.
It was 1964, when the tournament, the country’s oldest national soccer competition, was contested by largely amateur teams representing mainly ethnic clubs and neighborhoods. The players were immigrants or the sons of immigrants, playing a game that was considered a national pastime in the old country but was little more than a waste of time in the new.
“It wasn’t like now,” Pospich, 91, said. “America was in its infancy of playing football.”
Sixty years later, the US Open Cup returns to Los Angeles, giving former LA Kickers teammates Pospich, Norstadt and Herz the opportunity to hoist the trophy once again on Wednesday. They were asked to accompany the tournament trophy to the field at BMO Stadium — less than two miles from where Wrigley Field, demolished in 1969, once stood — ahead of this year’s final between LAFC and Sporting Kansas City.
And this time, the stands are expected to be loud and packed with more than 22,000 people.
“I have to come back to it one more time,” Herz, 90, said. “This might be the last time, I guess.”
Archival footage from the 1960 US Open Cup. (Tryzub Ukrainian-American Sports Center)
The tribute is fitting because Herz, Norstadt and Pospich helped lay the foundation on which football now rests, ranked by a Gallup poll as the fourth most popular sport in this country.
“Football wasn’t rated very highly,” Norstadt said. “But the Kickers were a higher level than any other team in the United States. We had good players on this team.
Herz and teammates Al Zerhusen and Helmut Bicek played for the U.S. national team; Zerhusen would be inducted into the National Football Hall of Fame. But these stars shined mostly in anonymity with the Kickers, who played regular weekend doubleheaders and tripleheaders in front of “crowds” of family and friends at Daniels Field in San Pedro and Jackie Robinson Stadium in the Westside.
“But we talked about football,” Pospich said. And that changed everything.
When the three German-born players last lifted the trophy, the United States was a lost country in international soccer, 26 years removed from its next World Cup appearance.
In 21 months, the country will host this tournament for the second time.
When Herz, Norstadt and Pospich last lifted the Cup, the launch of MLS was 28 years away. Today, MLS is the largest premier league on the planet and its average attendance is the seventh best in the world.
The team they played for, the Los Angeles Kickersis gone now, having been absorbed by the Los Angeles Football Club. Same with the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League, in which the Kickers played. But back when there was no competitive national team and no healthy professional league, the Kickers and GLASL were as good as soccer in Southern California.
The Kickers were founded in 1951 by six German expatriates and played in a highly competitive league against other immigrant teams with names such as the Swiss Football Club, the Los Angeles Scots, the San Pedro Italians and Austria FC.
At the time, the U.S. Open Cup was the country’s biggest prize, but until 1955, when the Los Angeles Danes lost to Herz and New York-based SC Eintracht, no team west of St. -Louis had never played in the final. In an effort to change that, Albert Ebert, one of the founders of the Kickers, began recruiting players across the country to come to Los Angeles and play for his team.
Herz, who came to the West Coast after being drafted into the army, as well as Pospich and Norstadt, who played in Toronto, were among those who answered the call. All three got their start in soccer in Germany and when they arrived in Los Angeles, they set out to transform the sport.
The Kickers, with Herz, won the Open Cup in 1958 and finished second two years later, part of a streak that saw teams from Los Angeles or Orange County qualify for the Open Cup 21 times. final over the next 28 years, winning eight times.
Maccabee Los Angeles, a team of Jewish immigrants, Holocaust survivors and at least one player whose father was a member of the Nazi Party, is one of three teams to win five titles, reaching the final seven times in its brief 11-year history.
Yet few teams have a better two-year span than the 1963-64 Kickers of Herz, Norstadt and Pospich, who in 1963 became the first American soccer club to tour the world, playing the best teams in New Zealand, Australia and Iran. and Germany. In his Glendale home, nestled among his other trophies, Norstadt, the youngest of the three at 87, has a framed copy of the full-page LA Times article announcing the tour.
The team then returned home to win four championships in 1964, including their US Open Cup final.
The last Southern California team to win this tournament was the Galaxy, who won the second of their two titles in 2005. That was also the last time the final was played here. For LAFC, which reached the semifinals before losing on penalties in its first season, in 2018, a title would bring the club its first hardware since the 2022 MLS Cup and end a drought that has seen remain winless in their last four finals, including last month’s League Cup.
Yet they almost didn’t get the chance.
Although the Open Cup, contested by approximately 200 professional, semi-professional and amateur teams at all levels of the American soccer pyramid, has survived two global pandemics and two world wars in its 110-year history , she was almost killed by the MLS commissioner. Don Garber last winter. The addition of the Leagues Cup, a Garber creation that MLS largely controls and profits from, had so crowded the MLS schedule that Garber withdrew its teams from the Open Cup, run by US Soccer.
US Soccer pushed back, blocking Garber’s request to use MLS Next Pro Development teams in the tournament, and a compromise was reached that would see eight MLS teams, including LAFC, join the tournament in the round of 16. This has helped preserve the history and importance of one of the oldest domestic cup competitions in the world.
Sixty years after winning his last title, Norstadt, a former engineer, walks with a cane. Eberhard, who owned a liquor store, bar and restaurant, broke his leg twice playing football before retiring to Woodland Hills, not far from Pospich, who owned a car dealership and played in old-timers games into his 60s and now lives in Calabasas.
On Wednesday, they will gather for a final salute at BMO Stadium, where they will finally receive the applause and recognition they have long deserved.
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” Eberhard said. “Football has always been good to me. I am already like a little child.
And it is partly thanks to him that other little children can still dream of playing in their own US Open Cup final.
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