Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Organizing a World Cup keeps you busy. Scott Parks LeTellier, chief operating officer of the 1994 World Cup, presumably had lots to do, but he rang me back when I left him a message. I told him about the Santa Barbara fans, and asked if it worried him that they seemed to have no idea of what was going on. “That is a phenomenon of Southern California that is bewildering to me,” he said. “You see people here streaming out of the Super Bowl midway through the third quarter, and it happens at our baseball games too. A columnist on the LA Times, in his coverage of the 1984 Olympics, said that the Southern Californians’ penchant for leaving an event early reached its high point when a significant number of people left with two seconds to go in Carl Lewis’ ten-second hundred-meter dash.”

  In Santa Barbara, on the pitch after the game, Dinu held court to the American press. He was in a good mood and glared only at the unhappy Julian, who was interpreting again. A local journalist asked what the American team had done best. Julian translated, “They’re very nicely dressed. They’ll need a hundred years to play soccer. The Americans only scare us if they bring aircraft carriers. I respect their coach. Yugoslavia has produced many great coaches. I know, because I’m Yugoslav myself, on my mother’s side.” The journalists looked hurt. “I do have great respect for the American people, civilization and democracy,” the ex-minister consoled them. What prospects did this young Rumanian side have? “All the Latins have great trust in the next generation. We’ve always thought that what will come in future will be better than us. That’s what has always fooled us.”

  Then as all the other journalists watched, Dinu strode over to me, followed by Julian, and presented me with his card. “He thinks you’re very professional, you’re very good,” Julian explained. Three months later, Dinu was fired.

  CHAPTER 16

  ARGENTINA, CAMPEON!

  ARGENTINA PLAYED BRAZIL TWO days after I arrived in Buenos Aires. Officially the match celebrated the centenary of Argentinian soccer, but the real cause for joy was the return of Diego Maradona, playing his first match for his country since his ban for taking cocaine. “They all take drugs. Everyone takes drugs,” one fan explained to me.

  It was a pleasant walk to the River Plate stadium, for the area around the ground is unlike the rest of Buenos Aires. Whereas my lasting impression of the city is of broken paving stones and sewer smells, the streets around the River Plate stadium are broad, and even quite clean. The neighborhood looks like Maidstone, and River, once the club of the English, are now known as los Millionarios.

  My friends parked in the shooting club opposite the ground, a few hundred yards away from the old Marine School of Mechanics, EMSA. In the 1970s EMSA was the Argentine Navy’s torture camp and was known as the Auschwitz of Argentina, but when Argentina staged the World Cup of 1978, it was used to accommodate players. The 1978 final had been played in the River Plate stadium.

  The ground was noisy for the game against Brazil. At times, in response to the chant, “If you don’t jump you’re an Englishman,” half the crowd leaped into the air, but most of the time, I was told, they just sang: Maradona’s an Argentinian

  Brazilians, Brazilians,

  How bitter you look,

  Maradona’s an Argentinian

  And he’s better than Pelé.

  The Argentine President, Carlos Menem, was missing, but 500 journalists from around the world had come. I was able to identify the ones from Brazil because they were wearing their national team shirts. The word “Press” on the back of the shirts proved their objectivity.

  Soccer does not get any bigger than Argentina vs. Brazil, even without a hundredth birthday to celebrate, and with both teams calling on their players in Europe, the combined salaries of the 22 starters came to $60 million. These two sides were probably the best in the world, and yet all attention was on one little man. He announced that he felt “peaceful.” Anyone else would have taken the money and run years ago, but Maradona is not like that. He was going up in the elevator in a grand hotel once when, to the astonishment of the patrons, he suddenly rattled on the elevator doors and screamed, at the top of his voice, “Argentinaaaaa!!!” The man is what they call a winner. He has taken so many painkilling injections that he might end up in a wheelchair, and he has won everything, but he keeps playing. That night he warmed up amid hundreds of photographers. They snapped and snapped, and the match started ten minutes late, disrupting TV schedules all over the world.

  From the kickoff, the scene was instantly familiar. The yellow-blue-and-white of Brazil, the blue-and-white stripes of Argentina, the white confetti streaming down, the smoke bombs, the incessant noise—long before you see Argentina vs. Brazil you know what it looks like. This meant that actually to be in the stadium was disappointing, like watching a film for the tenth time. It was impossible to see things afresh—unless you were an American. “I’ve never seen home side advantage like this,” murmured my neighbor, the New York Times correspondent. The crowd protested whenever the Brazilians strung two passes together, and each time the culprits would quickly return the ball to its rightful owners. The first half was all Argentina.

  It has been said before, but Maradona can play. He had lost weight since I had seen him wander about for Sevilla against Español, four months before to the day, and he broke open the Brazilian defense at will. Several times he chipped passes onto his strikers’ right feet, but each time they fluffed them. Even so, Argentina scored first. Mancuso aimed a weak shot at goalkeeper Taffarel, and the ball bounced through his hands into the net. Despite the setting, a common-or-garden blunder.

  Maradona continued to play with concentration. The referee, Filippi, had to cope without his advice, he mishit barely a pass, and in the 26th minute, he gently nudged a 25-yard free kick onto the Brazilian crossbar.

  Yet he had changed. He was an older, wiser, fatter man now, without the strength to dribble through half a team, and he limited himself to hitting passes from midfield. His teammates had to walk the ball into his feet, and the next day’s Buenos Aires Herald had the audacity to note that Leo Rodriguez, the man he had replaced, was quicker.

  By the second half Maradona was finished, so he just walked around and gesticulated at Filippi when Filippi was not looking. At one point he even kicked a clod of mud the referee’s way, though he did not mean to hit him, proof of which is that the clod missed. It was ungrateful behavior nonetheless, for Filippi had entered into the spirit of the evening by giving a free kick every time the great man overturned. With Maradona only present in body, Brazil soon equalized. The match degenerated in the final minutes, with the Argentine Ruggeri and the Brazilian Valdo living up to the centennial slogan “100 Years with the Same Passion,” and being sent off for fighting.

  A few hundred journalists and I waited outside the changing rooms for the players to emerge. Hanging about for inane quotes is the dark side of journalism. We stood there for nearly an hour, until, with deadlines looming, the men at the front began to bang on the doors. These stayed shut, and I left. Two hours later, at one in the morning, I was still wandering around the stadium looking for a bus.

  The oracles must eventually have appeared, or else the journalists made up the quotes themselves, for the papers were full the next day. The Argentine substitute Alberto Acosta was quoted as saying, “Maradona? I have seen him speaking with such emotion that I have no doubt he will soon return to his greatest form.” The Brazilian manager, Carlos Alberto Parreira, called Maradona “a player from another planet,” a phrase his striker Careca modified to “a player from another world.”

  Whether or not Maradona turns out to be from another planet or world, he has a weird life. On the day before the match he had attended an Argentine FA banquet at which he was named the country’s player of the century. (His response was to say that Alfredo Di Stefano was better.) The match against Brazil was on a Thursday, and on the following Saturday he flew to Spain, to play for Sevilla against Logrones on Sunday. On Monday, he flew back home, to play against Denmark on We
dnesday, and in between he made time to insult the Sevilla board and to apologize again. No wonder he ended up on cocaine.

  “Soccer and politics! What an original theme!” General Enciso explained, when I told him the subject of my book. The General was very kind. In Argentina at least, it is an unoriginal theme. There, soccer and politics is a respected academic field, almost like particle physics or neurology. A particular focus of research is the World Cup of 1978.

  Argentina, the host nation, won the trophy that year. General Enciso is no fan, and during the final against Holland he found himself the sole passenger on a Buenos Aires bus, but he remembers that night. “There was an explosion of ecstasy and hysteria. All the country was on the streets. Radicals embraced with Peronists, Catholics with Protestants and with Jews, and all had only one flag: the flag of Argentina!” Would he compare it to the Falklands War, when the crowds filled the streets of Buenos Aires again? “Exactly! It was exactly the same!” The General beamed with delight—he is a charming man. I suggested that since soccer was such a great healer, it would be nice if every country could stage a World Cup every year. He laughed: “It would be very costly.”

  FIFA awarded Argentina the World Cup of 1978 at the start of the 1970s. In 1976, the Argentine army seized power in a coup.

  Coups were regular events in Argentina. A favorite local joke was to declaim, when passing the Military Academy: “Look! There, our future presidents are being trained.” (The same joke is made in Africa.) But the new bunch of generals was not funny. They set up a new organizing body for the World Cup, the Ente Autarquico Mundial, but its chief, General Actis, was shot dead as he travelled to his first press conference. The generals began to fight a “dirty war” against their own people. Eleven thousand “subversives” (a term the militares interpreted broadly) “disappeared,” were held in camps and secretly killed. A favorite method was to drop them from airplanes into the River Plate.

  One Sunday morning in Buenos Aires, I discussed the deaths with Osvaldo Bayer, historian and film director, who spent these years in exile in Germany, the land of his fathers. Bayer opened a bottle of champagne and told me, “I would never have thought that in my country, this Roman Catholic country, there could be such brutality. General Pinochet of Chile was an angel by comparison, because he only executed the people.” Bayer’s work includes a film and a book called Fútbol argentino.

  I also spoke to Hebe Bonafini, a maternal woman who echoed General Enciso: “The World Cup was like the Malvinas. The flags, the drinking, the crowds, the ‘Argentina, Argentina.’ For the crowds it was a fiesta—for the families of the disappeared, a tragedia.” Mrs. Bonafini is president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose children “disappeared.” Argentina became a democracy again in 1983, but to this day, every Thursday, the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared demonstrate on the Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires. They want the full story of the murders and they want to see the generals punished. On other days, a dozen Madres assemble in a small office in central Buenos Aires, ostensibly to file press articles about their cause, in truth for the company. To most Argentinians, the women are a disquieting image of the past. People wish they would, somehow, disappear.

  Mrs. Bonafini, wife of a factory worker, had lost both her sons. One was tortured in her own house before being taken away, and she had found blood and water on the bathroom floor. I was at first ashamed to ask her about soccer, but she found the topic quite natural. In the 1970s, as the world began to notice the murders, the generals ferociously planned the World Cup. A smashing Mundial won by Argentina, they reasoned, would make up for the occasional death at home. It was their chance to reunite the nation.

  They made sure the World Cup would not fail for lack of money. From nothing, concrete stadiums arose that could accommodate more spectators than the cities in which they stood could provide. The generals built new roads to link World Cup sites, improved communications and introduced color TV to Argentina.

  Argentina had no money to spare, so it was found elsewhere. Vital projects that did not serve the World Cup were cut. As The Times reported in February 1978, the popular phrase in Argentina was changing from, “It will be done mañana,” to “It will be done after the Mundial.” Of course it was not the World Cup by itself that ruined Argentina: during the rule of the generals inflation fell, from 600 percent in 1976 to 138 percent in 1982—but that was still the highest rate in the world.

  The junta’s slogan, “25 Million Argentinians Will Play in the World Cup,” was soon popularized to “25 Million Argentinians Will Pay for the World Cup.” How much they paid is one of the secrets of the military era. Four months before the tournament, in February 1978, the finance secretary of the military government, Juan Alemann, admitted that the final bill would probably come to $700 million, against an original estimate of $70 to $100 million. Had the junta known this beforehand, Alemann added, it would never have staged the Cup.

  If we accept the figure of $700 million, the 1978 World Cup cost several times more than any previous World Cup, and almost three times as much as the tournament in Spain, four years later. However, the true figure may be far higher than $700 million. Firstly, it is notoriously hard to assess the cost of corruption. The usual estimate of the informal extra bill for the Argentine World Cup is $300 to $400 million, but perhaps it should be higher. Admiral Carlos Lacoste, for one, who succeeded Actis as organizer of the World Cup, and who was vice president of FIFA at the same time, is now growing old in some style in Uruguay. (He organized the World Cup badly. The grass at the River Plate stadium was foolishly sprinkled with seawater, and died. A new pitch was hurriedly laid, but its bounce was odd.)

  Then there was the cost of bribing Peru. Argentina met Peru in a second round group match, and had to beat them by at least 4-0 to reach the final. This appeared to be out of the question, Peru being a decent team, as Ally MacLeod’s Scotland had already found out. But Argentina had to win the World Cup, and the Peruvian generals were short of cash and happy to help a fellow junta. Lacoste made the arrangements. Argentina shipped 35,000 tons of free grain to Peru, and probably arms too, while the Argentine central bank unfroze $50 million in credits for Peru. Argentina’s manager, Cesar Luis Menotti, barred the goalkeeper and all the substitutes from his team talk, and Argentina beat Peru 6-0 to reach the final. It may be the only World Cup match so far to have been won with a bribe.

  We cannot be certain that bribes were paid. The story was told in the Sunday Times in 1986 (on the day that England played Argentina) but the newspapers’ main sources, a senior civil servant of the junta and two soccer officials, understandably chose to remain anonymous. The author of the article, Maria Laura Avignolo, was put on trial for “moral turpitude” and other crimes, but was acquitted. In Lima, the Peruvian Manzo, the reserve goalkeeper at the World Cup, got drunk once and said his team had taken dollars to throw the game; but the next day he denied it. As for the game itself, no soccer match can provide incontrovertible proof of foul play. Peru played in white shirts instead of their usual strip, missed several simple chances, and their goalkeeper, Quiroga, a naturalized Argentine known as El Loco, played more eccentrically than usual. The Peruvian lineup included four inexperienced reserves, while one defender was used up front. But Graham Taylor came up with bizarre teams all the time, and no one was shipping him grain.

  Every Madre we spoke to brought up the match and recited the evidence of foul play. “The soccer fanatics don’t believe this,” added Mrs. Bonafini. “Soccer fanatics, religious fanatics, political fanatics —fanatics are always dangerous.”

  The generals staged the World Cup to impress their own people and the world. The World Cup would bring thousands of journalists to a nation whose very coups had seldom earned more than a few paragraphs abroad. “If it were necessary to make some correction in the image of us which exists abroad, the World Cup will be just the occasion to show the Argentine’s real way of life,” said General Merlo.

  Th
e generals hired a New York public relations firm, and the country was prettified. How to make Argentina look rich? Destroy its slums. Bulldozers were sent in to villas miserias, and their inhabitants were banished to provinces not lucky enough to stage World Cup matches, or into the desert of Catamarca. Along the main road into Rosario, the generals built a wall, painted with the façades of nice houses, to hide the city’s slums from the view of passing foreigners. The “Misery Wall” was shortlived: at night the slum dwellers would steal the slabs of concrete for their own houses.

  The Misery Wall is a particular obsession of Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, perhaps because he is a sculptor and a former professor of architecture. “They produced a grand piece of stage scenery to hide the misery and oppression of the Argentine people,” he told me in his house. A rail-thin man with glasses, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. He was an enemy of the junta, and was arrested in 1977 when he went to a police station to renew his passport. He stayed in jail until one day before the World Cup final. “He is a totally discredited man in Argentina,” General Enciso warned me.

  Before the World Cup, said Pérez Esquivel, the militares carried out Operation El Barrido, raiding flats and “disappearing” up to 200 people a day. They did not want the politically suspect to be around to meet foreign journalists. As the Mundial drew nearer, many prisoners were killed, to prevent discovery, and some secret camps were moved to remote spots where journalists would not find them, or were relocated onto barges. It is unclear whether these measures were recommended by the public relations firm.

  Soldiers patrolled the streets, guarding against Montonero attacks, and some foreign journalists were fooled by the peace and quiet. David Miller of the Times reported that most Argentinians were “transparently neither unhappy nor, any longer, repressed.” Andrew Graham-Yooll, an Anglo-Argentine journalist who fled the country in 1976, remembers British journalists coming home and telling him what a beautiful country he had. “There was the bolshie press and the tame press,” he says.