As all real football fans know, in 1966, West Ham won the World Cup. But what is less widely known is the direct West Ham connection to the 2026 World Cup.
This summer’s tournament is taking place in the United States, Canada and Mexico, because in the 1970s some of the seeds of football’s current popularity in North America were planted by three former West Ham players, who were already history makers before they crossed the Atlantic – and their story is about to be told on the big screen.
This month, a documentary called Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story, receives its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells East Theatre in Stratford, a goal kick away from the London Stadium.
The Rise of English Football’s First Black Superstar
Its main protagonist is English football’s first black football superstar, Clyde Best, who came over from Bermuda in 1968 aged 17, and went on to score 58 goals in 218 games as a striker for West Ham, before in the mid-1970s, moving to the fledgling North American Soccer League.
Pele and Eusebio landed Stateside at the same time, and in subsequent years were joined by George Best, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Best’s former captain and early protector at West Ham, Bobby Moore, as for a few brief years, soccer meets showbiz became big time box office.
Although the NASL folded in 1984, 10 years later the USA hosted the 1994 World Cup, and in 1996 its successor Major League Soccer was launched, and continues to thrive to this day.
A Fairytale Arrival and the Charles Family
The story of Best, now aged 74, is the stuff of fairytale, arriving at Heathrow Airport on a Sunday night with no-one to meet him, making his way across an unfamiliar city and getting off at the wrong tube station before a helpful local pointed him towards the address he was looking for, the house of the Charles family, whose sons, John and Clive, played for West Ham.
Despite Best’s name being in the film’s title, the stories of Clive Charles and another team-mate, Ade Coker, also feature significantly as the trio were black football pioneers at West Ham, before all ending up in the NASL.
John Charles, a defender, captained West Ham’s 1963 FA Youth Cup winning side, which featured a young Harry Redknapp, and was a first-team regular for eight years before injuries ended his career shortly before his brother launched his.
Pioneers in the Top Flight: Three Black Players in One Team
In March 1972, aged 20, Clive Charles made his debut against Coventry, and a week later, on April 1 1972, late injuries to Frank Lampard and Geoff Hurst meant that Charles and 17-year-old Coker joined regular pick Best in the West Ham line-up that beat Tottenham 2-0, the first time three black players had appeared in an English top-flight team.
Unlike Best, Charles and Coker found opportunities limited at West Ham, but all three flourished in North America.
Coker, born in Nigeria and raised in London, ended up becoming a US international, and Charles went on to have a hugely successful coaching career in both the men’s and women’s game, including coaching the US men’s team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where they finished fourth, despite his having been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he was also part of the coaching staff for the US team at the 1998 World Cup in France.
Tragically, he died from cancer in 2003 aged just 51, a year after his brother John, who was not only West Ham’s first black player, but England’s, having been selected for the national U18 side in 1962, had died, aged 57.
Bridging the Atlantic: The NASL and the 2026 World Cup Legacy
But the film’s American executive producer Dan Egan has given Best and Coker a chance to tell the story of all three of them to an audience who may not realise their importance in footballing history on both sides of the Atlantic.
Egan grew up in the 1970s watching Coker play for the Boston Minutemen, but it was learning about Best by playing alongside his nephew Jerry Best at university that set him on the path to making this film decades later.
Speaking at the film’s launch at the Hyatt Regency London Stratford, close to the London Stadium, Egan highlighted the direct line from US football’s 1970s baby steps to its 2026 World Cup co-hosting.
“Back then many national leagues were mainly made up of domestic players, but the NASL was the first league to bring in the whole world, and a lot of that was built on the backs of black and brown players who established it, then attracted big names from Europe,” he said. “Clyde fitted into both of those groups, and he signalled to other black players ‘we can play here too’.
“Without the NASL, there would be no MLS now, and also people of my age wouldn’t have learnt to play soccer, because of players who came to the NASL coaching us and staying after they retired.
“That’s how Clive ended up winning titles for the University of Portland, with both their men’s and women’s teams, and also the US Olympic teams. He was the backbone of all the success that the US women’s team have gone on to have.”
Coker added: “This is a story that should be constantly told, the film deserves to be seen and needs to be seen.
“It’s an incredible journey, and I’m so happy to be part of it with Clyde. When I was training, I’d always look from my pitch to where the senior players were training.
“I saw Clyde, and I thought ‘I want to be like him, I want to play like him, I want to be where he is’, so to finally play with him was a dream come true.”
The Impact of Television and a Responsibility to History
West Ham historian Tim Crane said the film highlights many pioneering footballers of colour who came before Best but lacked the key stroke of luck he had in the 1970s – television.
“Clyde had the perfect storm,” he said. “You can have a dream, but you can’t follow it on your own – you have Graham Adams, the Bermuda coach who recommended him to his friend Ron Greenwood, the West Ham coach who was a visionary and who was willing to take a chance on him.
“The big difference to those who came before Clyde was television – all of a sudden, he’s being beamed into every living room in the country.”
Best was the ultimate response to the phrase ‘can’t see it, can’t be it’. “One of the most enjoyable parts of the film was interviewing the likes of Ian Wright, future top-level players who watched Clyde and were inspired by him,” explained Crane.
“For black players, Clyde was the tributary, then with Ade and Clive it became a stream, then with West Brom’s Three Degrees (Cyrille Regis, Brendan Batson and Laurie Cunningham), John Barnes and so many more, it became a river.
“The film is very respectful to the players who came before, like Jack Leslie and Arthur Wharton, but West Ham and television made the difference for Clyde.”
The tale of Canning Town-born Leslie, who is honoured with a statue at Plymouth, where he spent 14 years and remains a club legend, is all the more remarkable as in the late 70s and early 80s, he worked in the West Ham boot room, looking after the boots of Best, and crossing paths with the young Tony Cottee.
Despite race obviously being a major part of the film’s story, Cottee was keen to highlight Best’s significance to all fans.
“We all have heroes in life, and Clyde is a hero to me,” he said. “Football in the 70s was a hostile place, so for those players to do what they did, with all they had to face, I have nothing but respect.
“You need someone to give you a chance, and Ron Greenwood and John Lyall didn’t see colour, they just saw a player. If you’re good enough, you play.”
Reflections from Clyde Best: From Bermuda to East London
As for Best himself, his name may be in the title, but he is happy to share the spotlight with Coker and the Charles brothers.
“It’s mind-boggling now to think of this 17-year-old coming over from Bermuda, with no-one to meet him and getting off at the wrong station, but it all started with the Charles family taking me in,” he told Blowing Bubbles.
“I was just interested in playing football, West Ham were a club that gave me the opportunity and I’m truly thankful to Ron and John, and will always be grateful to the club. Having Clive and Ade around, and John who was there before us, definitely made a big difference.”
The history-making game against Spurs in particular stands out in Best’s mind to this day. “Afterwards, when we realised what had happened, it was really something special,” he said. “Their manager Bill Nicholson was amazed by the ability in such a young team.
“For us to go out and put on such a performance against a team with the likes of Pat Jennings, Martin Peters and Steve Perryman, it mesmerized him and it mesmerizes me now.”
Best was brought up a disciplinarian prison officer father, something he says stood him in good stead for some of the tests of character he faced.
“My dad’s sense of responsibility was transferred to us kids,” he said. “You have a job to do, so you have to behave in a certain way. My dad took no nonsense, and as kids we knew that this man meant business, so we did as well.”
Although Best may not have been able to see the likes of a young Ian Wright watching him, he was aware who lay beyond the four walls of Upton Park.
“From the minute I got to West Ham I knew I had a responsibility not to myself but to those coming after me – that’s who I tried to play for, as well as our fans,” he explained. “There’s no point coming all that way and then going out on the pitch to look like a lummox who couldn’t play.
“I had a responsibility to myself, to my family, to Ron Greenwood, and to the kids watching. Ian Wright says the only thing he watched on football was West Ham games and he chose the number 8 shirt at Arsenal because I wore it.”
The Unspoken Legend of the Boot Room
In a parallel universe, it could have been Leslie who was West Ham’s first black superstar, and Best admits he was amazed when he discovered Leslie’s story, as no-one at West Ham mentioned it.
“I only found out years later through his nieces and nephews when they contacted me about the statue of him being put up in Plymouth,” he said. “He was a very softly-spoken chap who never said what he had achieved, but sometimes when he was collecting boots he would give you some advice.
“I would listen to him like I listen to everybody, even the people in the pub, because you never know, they might have something worth hearing. I wish he was here to share this with me as he was a fantastic player and had a big part to play.
“Nobody else at the club said anything about his career either. I just thought he was the boot man, it was only years later that I found out he had scored over 100 goals and could have been England’s first black player.”
A New Chapter in North America
In 1975, Best missed out on playing in the FA Cup final, and in summer 1976, he left West Ham to begin a new chapter of his career playing for Tampa Bay Rowdies in the NASL, having already had a loan spell there before his permanent move.
“Everybody wants to be in the first team, if you want to sit on the bench you’ve got something wrong with you, and over the years I saw other people had left West Ham, so I knew that when the time came for me, it wasn’t going to be any different for me, but I didn’t want to play for any other team in England,” he said. “The NASL commissioner was an ex-West Ham player, Phil Woosnam, and he offered me an opportunity that I thought was good for me and my family, so I took it.
“All my experiences in football come from having been at a club like West Ham,” Best added. “They brought us up the right way and I will always be in debt to the club.
“My brother says when we watched the 1964 FA Cup final and I was 8 or 9, I said ‘one day I’m going to play for that team’, and then in 1966 we saw England win the World Cup with three West Ham players, so it was always where I wanted to go.
“Just before I came to England, Real Madrid legend Ferenc Puskas was coaching in San Francisco, had seen me and wanted me to go there, but I said I wanted to go to the country that I’d seen win the World Cup.”
For a decade at least, the NASL offered an exciting alternative vision of football as showbiz, and ultimately laid down the foundations for the country’s current growing passion for the game, which is now so evident in English football. It also offered a whole new chapter of life for Best, Coker and Charles, culminating in the film.
“Eddie Firmani, the former Charlton manager, was coach at Tampa Bay Rowdies and wanted to take some more players over, so it seemed like the right time. Lots of other great players soon came over too, so you were playing with world class players at a decent level – a lot of people were surprised by the standard of the league.”
The Legacy of Clive Charles in the USA
By this time, Coker had already left West Ham for America, and during a brief spell back in Europe at Feyenoord, Best received a call from Charles, now at Cardiff, inquiring about opportunities across the Atlantic.
“I called Don Megson, who was coach at the Portland Timbers, and Clive never looked back,” Best said. “He stayed on after playing and made a huge name for himself as a coach, in both the men’s and women’s games.
“At West Ham, we had coaches who knew the game inside out and it was an education. Ron Greenwood had a vision back then to play the game like so many other teams play it now, and Clive absorbed all that from him, then had the opportunity to put it across to young players, and to national teams. He’s legendary in the States.”
From Bermuda, to the Charles family home, to the Upton Park pitch with Charles and Coker, to the United States, and now back to east London for the premier of the film telling their intertwined story – and so much more – Best’s journey is remarkable, and he is thrilled the film will receive its world premiere in the shadow of West Ham’s new home, before screenings in Bermuda and across the World Cup host cities.
“How many youngsters leave home like I did, travel so far and deal with what I did,” said Best. “So much of it springs from the Charles family home, as they helped shape me for what I was going to go into, and from West Ham, the club that wanted me to come to England.
“I’m so glad it was West Ham who gave me the opportunity to play the game I loved, and to play in the way we did, so it’s only fair that the documentary journey starts here, too.
“I didn’t get involved in this film with the intention of being in the spotlight, but it’s good for young people to be able to see what is possible to achieve if you put in the time and work.
“My dad always made sure I had things I needed to pursue my dreams, and all the people at West Ham helped play a part. I’m just glad I was able to do it with West Ham. Once a Hammer, always a Hammer.”
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