Vancouver Whitecaps 1979

Welcome back to the NASL madhouse… because for the final episode of our mid-season break, Graham and I are joined by super-guest Phil Craig to relive the glorious, chaotic magic of Vancouver Whitecaps 1979 — the year a club built on steel, structure and sheer bloody-mindedness survived North American football’s weirdest rulebook and ended up lifting the big one.

This is a league where draws don’t really exist, shootouts start 35 yards out, playoff series can be decided by a mini-game, and you can earn bonus points just for scoring goals… because obviously you can. And yet, in the middle of all that chaos, Tony Waiters’ Whitecaps basically said: fine — we’ll just defend our way through it.

We dig into the story from the Whitecaps’ roots in the NASL, the league’s star-powered boom years (hello, Cosmos), and the strange mix of glitz, instability and outright madness that defined football in North America in the late 70s. Then we get into the 1979 team itself: the spine, the characters, the British core, and the central importance of club legend Bob Lenarduzzi — with big-name flair supplied by the likes of Alan Ball, plus the kind of moments you couldn’t script if you tried (yes… we’re talking about Willie Johnston taking a sip of beer before swinging in a corner).

And of course, there’s the boss fight: the Cosmos. The glamour superpower. The brand. The villains. We walk through the playoff carnage, the controversy, the chaos of mini-games and shootouts, the sense that the match might never end… and how Vancouver somehow came out the other side.

Takeaways

• Why the NASL was both brilliant and completely unhinged — rules, points, shootouts, mini-games and all
• How Tony Waiters built a title winner in a league designed for chaos
• The key players and characters: Lenarduzzi, Ball, Parkes, Whymark, Hector, Johnston and more
• The Cosmos showdown: Chinaglia drama, playoff madness, and Vancouver refusing to blink
• The legacy of 1979 — and why this is one of football’s great “you had to be there” title runs

If you love football history, strange leagues, iconic underdogs and proper “how on earth did that happen?” stories — this one’s for you.

Subscribe for more episodes of By Far The Greatest Team and follow along as we rank the greatest sides ever — one glorious rabbit hole at a time.

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