Dallas Tornado 1967: A Tour de Force

Graham Dunn
Feb 13, 2025
7 min read

Updated: Dec 3, 2025

What makes a successful football tour? A few gentle games to bed in new signings? Time away together to lift flagging team spirit during an arduous season? Increasing shirt sales in core overseas markets? Maybe it’s just about coming back from La Manga without any arrests.

Few have ever matched the scale of the Dallas Tornado 1967 world tour, a six-month odyssey across 30 countries that helped launch American soccer. Before the NASL even kicked off, a squad of amateurs turned adventurers set off from Europe to Asia, surviving riots, missed flights, and culture shock to bring football to new frontiers.

Football clubs are much criticised for the extent to which they use any downtime in the schedule to jet off around the world to play a couple of friendlies or take part in a made-up tournament against a team they could play just by traveling down the motorway.

There are laudable objections to the unnecessary impact this has on the environment and player burnout. For others these tours reek of the ever-spreading commercialisation and globalisation of the game.

But perhaps what is missing is the sheer randomness of tours of the past.

Back in 1978 Ron Atkinson’s West Bromwich Albion were breaking barriers and new ground with their pioneering development of black players and attractive football. Those barriers, as it turns out, also included China.

At the close of a highly successful season, West Brom swapped the Black Country for reddest of countries, becoming the first English professional club to play in Communist China (stepping in when England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup in Argentina left no requirement for a warm weather training camp).

This was much to the bemusement of the players – captured in a World in Action documentary as a camera crew accompanied the Baggies during the three-week tour behind the Bamboo Curtain. It is not entirely clear who had the bigger culture shock. The West Brom players with their insight into basic Chinese life under Communist rule, or the locals coming face to face with a group of 1970s British footballers who had last been on in Alicante.

Ironically the Chinese mainland was pretty much the only place the Dallas Tornado did not play on their pre-season tour a decade earlier, a football odyssey that is the gold standard for football tours.

Beginning with a training camp in Spain in August, the Tornadoes spent six months crossing Europe, the Middle East and Asia playing a string matches in seemingly ever-increasing temperatures.

Incredibly these were the first games the Dallas Tornado – or at least the first original iteration of them – had played.

In an itinerary more closely resembling a backpacker’s gap year than a football tour, the Tornadoes travelled from southern Europe, through Iran, across the Indian sub-continent and southeast Asia into Australasia.

Serial sports entrepreneur Lamar Hunt had established Dallas Tornado as one of the first soccer franchises in 1967 for the North American Soccer League (NASL). As a precursor to the first NASL season, the franchises had been represented by overseas teams in 1967. For this season Matthew, Dundee United will be appearing as Dallas Tornado.

Faced with establishing a team from scratch to play in the debut 1968 season, Hunt recruited Bob Kapp as manager. A Serbian working as a soccer journalist in the USA, Kapp claimed to have studied coaching with the legendary Ferenc Puskas.

With little by way of US players to choose from, Kapp took the unique approach of heading Europe to establish a squad of amateur players from which he would pick a squad of 18 to take part in the tour. This largely comprised of Englishmen and Norwegians, with only one American, Jay Moore, in the squad.

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Players included Brian Harvey, not the East 17 front man but the brother of former Everton player and manager Colin Harvey; Dave Moorcroft, not the former 5,000m record-holder but a centre-back who would go on to play for Tranmere Rovers; and Bill Crosbie, not the now disgraced American actor and comedian but a bus conductor from Liverpool.

The latter’s late call up – he got the call (well, telegram) to travel to Heathrow the next day to fly to Nice to join the squad in September – illustrates the spirit of adventure of the squad. The only caveat to Crosbie (and others’) selection was to cut his hair. That was to meet the requirement to look like an all-American team, rather than the Beatles Sgt Pepper look popular in Liverpool at the time. The all-American look extended to travelling with Stetsons, despite most (if not all) of the team never having been to Texas.

It was to be a true adventure. In an itinerary more closely resembling a backpacker’s gap year than a football tour, the Tornadoes travelled from southern Europe, through Iran, across the Indian sub-continent and southeast Asia into Australasia.

Along the way, these amateurs often played in front of huge crowds - a double-header in Burmah (now Myanmar) attracted over 90,000 fans. Occasionally, the crowds turned nasty. A second match in Singapore in December was aborted after the first game ended with the players being stoned by angry fans amid anti-American sentiment.

That stemmed from opposition to US involvement in Vietnam. Incredibly, given the Vietnam War was raging, 10 days later the Tornadoes arrived in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) for the first of two fixtures. The Tornadoes avoided defeat – a relatively good result for America in Vietnam at the time – as the trip passed with relatively few alarms. Within two months the Tet Offensive would significantly escalate the fighting in Vietnam.

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Neither was that the only time they almost found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Only a twist of fate after the Tornadoes missed their planned flight meant they were not onboard the British European Airways flight from Athens to Cyprus which crashed on 12 October 1967 after a bomb was detonated, killing all onboard.

The Tornadoes wrapped up their tour in Tahiti on 11 February, before finally arriving in Dallas to set up for life in their new home. But surreally within two weeks they were back on the road, as the Tornadoes somehow found time to fit in a four-game tour of Central America before the season started.

Overall they played getting on for 50 matches over six months across nearly 30 countries. They rarely won. Dallas Tornado won 10 games, three of which were in their Spanish training camp back in August. They were not to taste their next victory until late October in Karachi.

Neither did results improve when the inaugural NASL season began. In fact, they got worse. Dallas Tornado won just twice and drew four times across 32 games – conceding 109 goals in the process - as they finished a resounding bottom. Surprisingly, taking a group of amateur footballers on a six-month tour around the world turns out not to be ideal preparation for the season to come.

Kapp was quickly replaced at the helm of the club, not to coach professionally again, and for most of the players this was to be their only season in the NASL. Only Harvey – who featured in the 1970 season as well – and Mike Renshaw played again for the Tornadoes.

In fairness, Manchester-born Renshaw went on to become a Tornadoes stalwart, playing through until 1976 and managing the side in 1980. He even won two caps for the USA before it was discovered he wasn’t eligible to play for them after all.

The all-American look extended to travelling with Stetsons, despite most (if not all) of the team never having been to Texas.

The NASL league was in trouble too. A string of teams folded at the end of that first season as hoped for revenues and interest failed to materialise, and Dundee United were among those to make a further guest appearance in 1969. However, the recruitment of two more teams, the Rochester Lancers and Washington Darts, ensured the 1970 season went ahead and Dallas Tornado were (along with Atlanta Chiefs) the last of the founding members left standing in 1981 (before merging with Tampa Bay Rowdies for the final three years of the collapsing NASL).

They even won the league in 1971. Fittingly, they did so with another great feat of football endurance - thanks to the bright idea of deciding tied games over continuous 15-minute periods of extra time until there was a winner.

What could go wrong?

That became evident when the first of a three-game play-off series against Rochester Lancers was only decided in the sixth period of extra-time by a 176^th minute winner for the Lancers. After squaring the series in Dallas three days later, Tornado secured their place in the play-off final courtesy of a 148^th minute winner in the decider back in Rochester four days later. Tornado won the subsequent play-off series against Atlanta, but only after losing the first game thanks to a goal in the 123^rd minute.

All told they had played 715 minutes – the equivalent of eight matches – bouncing from Rochester to Dallas to Rochester to Atlanta to Dallas to Atlanta across 18 days of play-off football. Now that is something the 1967 tour had prepared them for.

Ranking

We have five categories of greatness from our five-star All-Time Greats category at the top to our one-star Blinkered Greats category at the bottom. With a win ratio of around 20% and just two wins in the subsequent league season, Dallas Tornado should be a Blinkered Great. But the journey they went on defies categorisation, so we plumped for out defies categorisation ranking of

Not Great. But Without Them We Wouldn’t Be Where We Are Today.

Listen to the full podcast:

Join hosts Graham Dunn and Jamie Rooney with guest Philip Craig for the extraordinary story of the Dallas Tornado 1967 world tour — football’s most remarkable adventure.

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