The Utah Golden Spikers

The 1976 Team Time Forgot

The Utah Golden Spikers

The first professional soccer team in Utah was called the Golden Spikers.

They almost lasted a full season.

The team shot up out of nowhere in March 1976.

From The Deseret News, March 2, 1976, page 18

They were a new expansion team for the American Soccer League.

The American Soccer League, once the premier league for association football in the United States, was barely even a minor league by 1976. Always looking for gimmicks, the league had placed former basketball star Bob Cousy in as commissioner. Cousy was awful as an ambassador for a sport that he didn’t understand, and presided over this and other failed expansion efforts.

The Utah Golden Spikers apparently played at the old Salt Lake Fairgrounds, located in approximately this area:

There actually was some support for the team in the early days, though they really weren’t very good. However, problems caught up with the club ownership in a hurry.

From The Salt Lake Tribune, June 21, 1976, pages 22 and 23

In the end, the Golden Spikers were kicked out of the league before the end of the season.

From The Deseret News, August 3, 1976, page 16

They were replaced a few days later in a very suspicious manner by a team called the Utah Pioneers, owned by a loan shark company in California.

From The Daily Spectrum (Logan, Utah), August 10, 1976, page 6

The Pioneers assumed the won-loss record of the Golden Spikers, but apparently did not take on any of the club’s debt.

However, neither local fans nor the press bought into the franchise change. None of the local Utah newspapers continued to cover the sport, even though the Pioneers made the playoffs.

From The Deseret News, August 14, 1976, page 7

I couldn’t find any Utah news articles or advertisements for the August 17 game, which I believe was the final home game the Utah Pioneers ever played. The local papers were kind enough to print this summary of the playoff game, which the Pioneers lost:

From The Deseret News, August 20, 1976, page 51

From The Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1976, page 20

I presume that the “Special to” byline indicates that this was an Associated Press or UPI article, and that neither paper bothered to send a reporter out to cover a team that was sure to fold anyway.

And so that’s how professional soccer started in Utah. There was no other mention of the Utah Pioneers in the local newspapers. The team simply faded into obscurity.

As much as I dislike Major League Soccer — it could always be worse, couldn’t it?