In 1974 the New York Cosmos ‘soccer’ team (for we are in America) consisted of an enthusiastic yet unskilled rabble of part-timers, playing in a disused sports ground on the city’s Randall’s Island, on a pitch so bad the groundsman spray-painted the muddy patches green. A year later they signed Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the greatest footballer ever – Pelé to you and me. The man behind this most epic of coups was Steve Ross, the boss of Warner Communications, an ambitious, single-minded tycoon whose remit included movies, popular music and the rise of video games. In fact, Pelé’s signing was immediately preceded by that of Dustin Hoffman, for the film All the President’s Men.

So Once in a Lifetime is not the biopic of Talking Heads then, but a documentary about the Cosmos, a team whose overnight success and ego-fuelled demise is yet another allegory for ‘the American Dream’. Only in America did they refer to their teams as ‘franchises’. And only in America could a team as insignificant as the Cosmos have the audacity to lure Pelé away from his beloved Santos, making him the highest-earning athlete in the world. For owner Ross, the Cosmos were as much about showmanship as they were about winning games.

At their peak, the Cosmos had become an international living museum of footballing greats, wowing 70,000 fans by day and partying in Studio 54 by night. For a few short years everyone wanted in on the action, from President Ford and Henry Kissinger to a worse-for-wear Mick Jagger – once almost ejected from the Cosmos’ locker room when mistaken for a drug-addled impostor by their manager. But within a decade the bubble had burst. When the North American Soccer League lost its TV deal with ABC, when America’s bid to host the 1986 World Cup lost out to Mexico, and when the Cosmos’ management began to turn on each other in the 80s, there was only one result: ‘soccer’ left America and returned to the lands of ‘football’.

Once in a Lifetime, not the most promising of concepts, actually turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining and engrossing film. Football fans will appreciate the archive footage of Pelé’s sublime goals, but there is much here to commend to others. The most endearing characters of the film are the original American Cosmos players, who humbly tell their anecdotes of the pre-Pelé days with fond humour. There is also a villain of the piece – Italian striker Girogio Chinaglia – a Machiavellian suck-up who slithered his way into Ross’s affections and eventually ruined the club. Add to this a funky soundtrack that captures the mood of the hedonistic summer of 1977, occasional narration from Matt Dillon, and fast-paced, imaginative editing, and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ shoots and scores.

(4½/5)