Actual Factual Georgia

A: Let's kick this around for a bit.

The Chiefs were Atlanta’s first pro soccer franchise, which was around from 1967-72. You might remember some of the names. There was Graham Newton and Manfred Kammerer, Sven Lindberg and Kaizer (Boy-Boy) Motaung, a high-scoring South African. And this might be tough to believe, but the soccer team sprouted from baseball.

When the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, the club purchased a franchise in the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL).

Who said baseball and soccer fans can’t coexist?

So, sticking with the Native American theme, the new soccer team was called the Chiefs, which wouldn’t be too politically correct these days. Phil Woosnam, who was from Wales, was hired as coach and the Chiefs played their first game at what was then Atlanta Stadium on April 16, 1967.

The NPSL became the North American Soccer League in 1968 and the Chiefs won the NASL title that year behind Woosnam’s leadership and the scoring of Newton and Motaung. The Chiefs continued through 1972 before changing ownership and their name to the Apollos for one last season in 1973. Woosnam played and coached for two years before becoming commissioner of the NASL in ’69 and an ambassador for the sport.

He was 80 when he died in Marietta last July from complications related to prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. “There’s no one person that you can point to that had more to do with success of soccer in this country than Phil Woosnam,” Dick Cecil, who hired Woosnam to coach the Chiefs, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year. “He was the pied piper of the game. He really brought players and people out to spread it into the suburbs. He took it to a whole new level.”

The Chiefs were resurrected in 1979 and fielded indoor and outdoor teams until folding in 1981.