The title of the film about the world’s most famous defunct soccer team was “Once in a Lifetime.”

Anyone for “Twice in a Lifetime”?

The team in question is the New York Cosmos, a club that was the flagship team in the North American Soccer League, which ceased operations in the mid-1980s. Now, a group led by the English businessman Paul Kemsley, and with Pelé as honorary president, has acquired the club’s globally recognized name and on Sunday announced its relaunch. The announcement was made at halftime of the final of Copa N.Y.C. at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

“This is fantastic,” Pelé said in an interview. “We are working very hard to bring the beautiful game back to New York, and now we finally have people who support us. It’s been almost two generations; in 1977 I came here and now this. The game has grown and is growing, and what is important to us, P. K., the Cosmos is to support the base, the young players. Looking back, we know mistakes were made in the league, but that happens everywhere in the world. But the football is the reality, and one day I hope to be happy to see the New York Cosmos playing the Red Bulls in the championship game.”

That might be a few years down the road, perhaps 2013 or beyond, but it is clear that the new people running the Cosmos have a long-term goal to play in Major League Soccer.

“Our plan has several phases, but if you fast-forward, it’s our aspiration to play at the highest level in this country, and that’s M.L.S., ” said Joe Fraga, the executive director of the new New York Cosmos. “And we are serious. We want to make it relevant again; we want kids to know what the Cosmos were and are, to bring the soccer dream back to the city. Pelé is our face, and you couldn’t do better than that, not just for the Cosmos, but for soccer in general. Our goal is to respect history and the legacy, and make it relevant now.”

Kemsley, who at one time held an interest in Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League (and who owns a retired racehorse with the Spurs’ current Manager Harry Redknapp), purchased the Cosmos name from G. Peppe Pinton, who had been the keeper of a flickering flame for many years.

“This is a new era,” Pinton said in a telephone interview. “It took a long time, but I’ve found a man with the vision of Steve Ross to carry on the Cosmos name.” Steve Ross, who died in 1992, was the chairman of Warner Communications, which owned the Cosmos.

Saturday night, Kemsley hosted a dinner at the Per Se restaurant in the Time Warner Center on Manhattan’s West Side. Nearly a dozen former Cosmos players attended on the 87th birthday of Ahmet Ertegun, the music impresario and one of the club’s founders who died in 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a fall at a Rolling Stones concert at the Beacon Theatre that was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as “Shine a Light.”

“The Cosmos name is still a brand name, still after so many years,” the team’s former star Giorgio Chinaglia said. “People still recognize it in Europe. I think this is a good idea, if they can achieve what they say they want to achieve. There’s no question these are serious people. Of course there are going to be expectations, but if they get another team in New York, it would be good, it would be a rivalry, and people will be interested. It would be excellent. We shall see.”

There has long been discussion of bringing a second M.L.S. club to the New York metropolitan area. When Red Bull bought the MetroStars from the Anschutz Entertainment Group, the league reclaimed the territorial rights that had been held by A.E.G. in the hopes of one day adding a second team in the area. The Wilpon family, the owners of the Mets of Major League Baseball, held talks with the league.

But the Mets’ interest in acquiring a team in M.L.S. faded because of the Wilpon family’s investments with the convicted swindler Bernard L. Madoff, scuttling their soccer plans. Perhaps an alliance with Kemsley’s Cosmos could work to their mutual advantage and result in the construction of a soccer stadium as part of the redevelopment of the Willets Point area that is adjacent to the Mets’ Citi Field.

“We are very focused on trying to have that 20th team in New York — a second team in New York, a rival for the Red Bulls,” Commissioner Don Garber said before last week’s M.L.S. All-Star Game in Houston. “We have got a lot of work to do to achieve that. We may or may not achieve that, but that is our goal and our main focus for the 20th team. That would be pretty cool.”

Cool indeed.

“Queens is the sweet spot,” Fraga said. “If there is a scenario that works for everything, it is the Mets and Willets Point.”

Beyond the Cosmos’ M.L.S. aspirations, on Sunday the club announced that it has acquired the Copa N.Y.C. tournament (a 16-team competition, in its second year, that brings together “national teams” of players from the city) and formed a partnership with the 60-year-old Queens-based youth club BW Gottschee. The Cosmos Academy, which will be run by the former MetroStars player Giovanni Savarese, will field teams from under-12 to under-18 and be part of the United States Soccer Development Academy, which is under the auspices of the national soccer federation.