A quarter of a century later, such audacity would be considered suicide. At the ’94 World Cup, Brazil won another final against Italy, this time decided in a penalty shootout after 120 minutes without a single goal. If it had not been for the penalty shots, the nets would have remained untouched for all eternity.
Soccer and the Generals
At the victory carnival in 1970, General Médici, dictator of Brazil, handed out cash to the players, posed for photographers with the trophy in his arms, and even headed a ball for the cameras. The march composed for the team, “Forward Brazil,” became the government’s anthem, while the image of Pelé soaring above the field was used in TV ads proclaiming, “No one can stop Brazil.” When Argentina won the World Cup in 1978, General Videla used the image of Kempes, unstoppable as a hurricane, for exactly the same purpose.
Soccer is the fatherland, soccer is power: “I am the fatherland,” these military dictators were saying.
Meanwhile, Chile’s bigwig General Pinochet named himself president of Colo-Colo, the most popular club in the country, and General García Meza, who had taken over Bolivia, named himself president of Wilstermann, a club with a multitude of fervent fans.
Soccer is the people, soccer is power: “I am the people,” these military dictators were saying.
Don’t Blink
Eduardo Andrés Maglioni, forward for the Argentine club Independiente, won a spot in The Guinness Book of World Records as the player who scored the most goals in the least time.
In 1973, at the beginning of the second half of a match against Gimnasia y Esgrima from La Plata, Maglioni beat the goalkeeper Guruciaga three times in a minute and fifty seconds.
Goal by Maradona
It was 1973. The youth teams of Argentinos Juniors and River Plate were playing in Buenos Aires.
Number 10 for Argentinos received the ball from his goalkeeper, evaded River’s center forward, and took off. Several players tried to block his path: he put it over the first one’s head, between the legs of the second, and he fooled the third with a backheel. Then, without a pause, he paralyzed the defenders, left the keeper sprawled on the ground, and walked the ball to the net. On the field stood seven crushed boys and four more with their mouths agape.
That kid’s team, the Cebollitas, went undefeated for a hundred matches and caught the attention of the press. One of the players, “Poison,” who was thirteen, declared, “We play for fun. We’ll never play for money. When there’s money in it, everybody kills themselves to be a star and that’s when jealousy and selfishness take over.”
As he spoke he had his arm around the best-loved player of all, who was also the shortest and the happiest: Diego Armando Maradona, who was twelve and had just scored that incredible goal.
Maradona had the habit of sticking out his tongue when he was on the attack. All his goals were scored with his tongue out. By night he slept with his arms around a ball and by day he performed miracles with it. He lived in a poor home in a poor neighborhood and he wanted to be an industrial engineer.
The 1974 World Cup
President Nixon was hanging from the ropes, weak-kneed, buffeted ceaselessly by the Watergate scandal, while a spaceship was hurtling toward Jupiter and in Washington an army lieutenant who had murdered a hundred civilians in Vietnam was being found innocent: after all, there weren’t more than a hundred, and they were civilians, and what’s more, they were Vietnamese.
The novelists Miguel Ángel Asturias and Pär Lagerkvist lay dying, along with the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. General Perón, who had burned his mark on Argentina’s history, was on his deathbed. Dying too was Duke Ellington, the king of jazz. The daughter of the king of the press, Patricia Hearst, was falling in love with her kidnappers, robbing banks, and denouncing her father as a bourgeois pig. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.
The dictatorship in Greece was crumbling, and so was the one in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution was dancing to the beat of “Grândola, vila morena.” The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was tightening its grip on Chile, while in Spain, Francisco Franco was dying in the Francisco Franco Hospital, sick with power and age.
In a historic plebiscite, Italians were voting to legalize divorce, which seemed preferable to daggers, poison, and other methods favored by tradition for resolving marital disputes. In a no less historic vote in Switzerland, the leaders of world soccer were electing João Havelange president of FIFA, ousting the prestigious Stanley Rous, while in Germany the tenth World Cup was getting under way.
A brand-new cup was on display. Though uglier than the Rimet Cup, it was nonetheless coveted by nine teams from Europe and five from the Americas, plus Australia and Zaire. The Soviet Union had lost out in the run-up for refusing to play a qualifying-round match in Chile’s National Stadium, which not long before had been a concentration camp and the site of executions by firing squad. So in that stadium the Chilean team played the most pathetic match in the history of soccer: it played against no one and scored several goals on the empty net, to cheers from the crowd. In the World Cup, Chile did not win a single match.
Surprise: the Dutch players brought their wives or girlfriends with them to Germany and stayed with them throughout the tournament. It was the first time such a thing had happened. Another surprise: the Dutch had wings on their feet and reached the final undefeated, with fourteen goals in their favor and only one against, which out of sheer bad luck had been scored by one of their own. The 1974 World Cup revolved around the “Clockwork Orange,” the overwhelming creation of Cruyff, Neeskens, Rensenbrink, Krol, and the other indefatigable Dutch players driven by coach Rinus Michels.
At the beginning of the final match, Cruyff exchanged pennants with Beckenbauer. And then the third surprise occurred: the Kaiser and his team punctured the Dutch party balloon. Maier who blocked everything, Müller who scored everything, and Breitner who solved everything, poured two buckets of cold water on the favorites, and against all odds the Germans won 2–1. Thus the history of the ’54 Cup in Switzerland, when Germany beat the unbeatable Hungary, was repeated.
Behind West Germany and the Netherlands came Poland. In fourth place Brazil, which did not manage to be what they could have been. One Polish player, Lato, ended up as leading scorer with seven, followed by another Pole, Szarmach, and the Dutchman Neeskens with five apiece.
Cruyff
They called the Dutch team the “Clockwork Orange,” but there was nothing mechanical about this work of the imagination that had everyone befuddled with its incessant changes. Like River’s “Machine,” another team libeled by its nickname, this orange fire flitted back and forth, fanned by an all-knowing breeze that sped it forward and pulled it back. Everyone attacked and everyone defended, deploying and retreating in a vertiginous fan. Faced with a team in which each one was all eleven, the opposing players lost their step.