It is 50 years since the Tampa Bay Rowdies came into existence – and the team has had a number of links to West Ham United since almost the very start.
Having been created the previous year, the Rowdies won the North American Soccer League (NASL) Eastern Conference and Play-Offs in their inaugural season. Among their star players were Clyde Best and John Sissons, who both spent the summer of 1975 on loan with Tampa Bay, Best from West Ham and former Hammer Sissons from Chelsea.
Wearing the No9 shirt, Best scored twice on his home debut in a 3-1 win over the Boston Minutemen, then netted in away victories at Connecticut Bicentennials, San Antonio Thunder and Philadelphia Atoms and a home success over Miami Toros.
Having topped the Eastern Conference, the Rowdies then defeated Toronto Metros-Croatia 1-0 in the Play-Off quarter-finals, with Best scoring the winning goal. And the Bermudan was on target again in the final, known as the Soccer Bowl, netting the second in a 2-0 win over Portland Timbers in San Jose, California.
Sissons, who had won the FA Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup with West Ham in the mid-1960s, was by now 39 years old, but the winger still had magic in his boots as he scored a hat-trick in a home thrashing of Baltimore Comets and totalled eight assists, including two in a Play-Off semi-final win over Miami Toros.
Both men were given Honorable Mentions in the NASL All-Star voting.
Although he never played a first-team game for West Ham, Rodney Marsh did spend a year or so at the Academy of Football as a teenager in 1959/60, before going on to star for Fulham, Queens Park Rangers and Manchester City.
In 1976, aged 31, the talented, flamboyant Marsh moved to the Rowdies, and went on to spend years in the US, first as a player and then as a coach. The majority of that came with Tampa Bay, where he reached two Soccer Bowls, was a four-time All-Star and was never far from the headlines. He departed in 1979, but returned to the Rowdies as coach from 1984/86, then finished his career playing indoor football for the club in 1987, aged 42.
During Marsh’s spell away from the Rowdies in the early 1980s, another player with West Ham links spent time at the club – Sam Allardyce.
It was 1983 and the 28-year-old Allardyce had found himself frozen out of the first team at Millwall, so spent the summer on loan with the Rowdies. He played eleven times, while also taking advantage of the club sharing facilities with the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers to learn new practices which he would take into his more famous managerial career.
Allardyce would join West Ham as manager in 2011 and immediately lead the Hammers to promotion back to the Premier League, then help reestablish us there over the next three seasons.
Last, but not least, 1999 FA Youth Cup winner and Hammer of the Year, England international and West Ham great Joe Cole joined the Rowdies in 2016 at the age of 34.
Cole lit up the NASL in his first season and was nominated for the league’s Golden Ball award. He went on to play 86 games across three seasons, scoring 20 goals and being appointed Rowdies captain for the 2017 and 2018 campaigns. He was also appointed as an assistant coach for his final season in Tampa Bay, and returns regularly to the area to visit his former teammates and colleagues.
With current midfielder Lewis Hilton being a lifelong West Ham supporter, and the Hammers training at the Rowdies’ facility during the Sunshine State Tour, the links between these two historic, iconic clubs in world football remain strong, too!
