Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  There were enough bolshies. Amnesty International had taught a lot of sports journalists the rudiments of Argentine politics, and ignoring the danger, many told the truth. Hundreds of articles invoked Hitler’s Berlin Olympics; two German TV commentators spent the opening ceremony of the World Cup educating their viewers about the “disappeared”; and TV crews from around the world filmed the photogenic Madres at their weekly protest. One Frenchman, hearing distant gunfire during the World Cup opening ceremony, reported that people were being shot on the streets outside. He was not to know about the shooting club beside the River Plate stadium, and he paid for his mistake: Argentine journalists beat him up at the press center. Few of them liked the regime (many Argentine journalists had “disappeared”), but this affront to their nation was too much to bear. They themselves had been ordered not to criticize the Argentine team or its manager.

  The generals would have treated these foreign subversives as they had the local press, except that they feared giving the world’s newspapers more material. But they were outraged. They had fed these foreigners, they had taken them to Mendoza to taste wine, they had shown them real Argentine hospitality, and this was their thanks! As for the expected tourists, they had failed to materialize. There were only a few hundred Scots, for instance, when at one point half the nation had vowed to go.

  All in all, the World Cup was no coup for the generals. Rather, it helped the rest of the world to see what a nasty lot the militares were.Every Spectator at the World Cup,

  Every Spectator at the World Cup,

  A Witness of the real Argentina

  as the Montonero slogan had it. Europeans suddenly found themselves reading about Latin American politics and society over breakfast, and they saw or even bought a World Cup bumper sticker that depicted a soccer covered by barbed wire. “It’s thanks to the Mundial that we became known in the world,” the Madres told us. (And they added, “That was the only good thing about the Mundial.”) Thanks to foreign publicity, Pérez Esquivel and a few other prisoners were freed from prison on the day before the final. “I was able to watch the final against Holland here in my home,” he recalled happily. (Admittedly, he spent the next 14 months under house arrest.) The World Cup was bad for investment and tourism in Argentina, and good for human rights.

  Yet when the hopeless referee Gonella blew his whistle to end the final of the last World Cup ever staged in South America, the generals were happy men. For there the people of Argentina were, all together, and undeniably dancing in the streets. Buenos Aires was packed all night. “To see all those people cheering on the streets without anything being done to stop them—it was quite a shock,” Daniel Rodriguez Sierra, a teenager in 1978, told me. “It was very painful, very terrible, to watch the euphoria on television,” said Mrs Bonafini, “and to us it seemed very dangerous.” Not to celebrate was to be for Holland, and the Madres were made to feel like strangers in their own country.

  The junta tried to capitalize on the joy. “The day that 25 million Argentinians aim for the same goal, Argentina will be a winner not once, but a thousand times over,” the Finance Minister Dr. Martínez de Hoy, an Old Etonian, told a lunch for meatpacking executives. The head of state, General Videla, drew the same moral in a televised speech. It seemed that soccer was the new opium of the people: give your subjects a World Cup and they will love you.

  So it seemed, but it was not so. “Argentina, campeón,” Bayer writes in Fútbol Argentino, “but the joy is not joy. It is a kind of explosion of a society which has been obliged to keep silent.” The Argentine poet, academic and journalist Carlos Ferreira, in his poem “Mundial,” recalls the days after the celebrations:and singing the song of forgetting.

  . . . the bad part was the end,

  undignified and muddled,

  those cadavers returning

  to the riverbeds,

  to the mass graves,

  shaking their heads,

  and singing the song of forgetting.

  And we are there,

  with those drums,

  with those crazy sweating flags,

  with the world upside-down . . .

  Only the generals had forgotten the cadavers. People can think. If they are poor, and frightened, and champions of the world, they are pleased to be champions of the world and upset to be poor and frightened. Maybe bread and games are all the people want, but as Bayer points out, in 1978 they had lots of games and little bread. The fans made no mental connection between the national team and the junta. They cheered the players and (some of them at least) whistled at General Videla when he appeared in a stadium. Five years after the World Cup, the generals gave way to a civilian government. If they had thought they could save their jobs by spending Argentina’s money on soccer, they were naïve. Their use of the World Cup shows not how Machiavellian they were, but how stupid. They were the bullies at the back of the classroom who had taken over the lesson.

  The generals had a simple, fascist view of society. A country must be strong and united. If all the people are cheering as one—if, to quote General Enciso, “there is only one flag, the flag of Argentina”—the country is strong and united. The way to bring about this happy state of things is through triumphs. Triumphs are not boring achievements like providing work, housing, and a stable currency. No! Triumphs are military victories or great patriotic occasions. A triumph is whatever brings people onto the streets cheering “Argentina! Argentina!” Stringing together triumphs was the generals’ one policy. The biggest triumphs they scheduled were the hosting and winning of the World Cup, and the invasion of the Falkland Islands. This was all the same thing, so much so that the World Cup song, “Vamos Argentina, Vamos a Ganar” (“Go on Argentina, Go and Win”) was cranked out again during the Falklands War. (There is an exact parallel with Brazil here: the marching tune, “Pra Frente, Brasil”—“Forward, Brazil”—written for the 1970 World Cup, became the theme tune of the Brazilian military regime.)

  “These generals were kids,” agreed Graham-Yooll. “In 1982 they launched a military invasion and thought the world would applaud them!” Why were they so naïve? “Our military never had to play politics. They have been brought up from the 1920s to believe, ‘You bark an order and everyone does as they’re told.’ At the World Cup, they said, ‘Now you bloody well enjoy yourselves!’ and they thought everyone would.”

  The generals had planned another triumph for 1978, but it never came off. Since 1977, they had been arguing with Chile over three islands in the Beagle Channel. (You will be stunned to hear that each country claimed the islands as theirs.) An international court of arbitration ruled in favour of Chile. Argentina rejected its decision. Tension grew; and then, in June 1978, in the middle of the World Cup, the Argentine defense minister said Argentina would “take action” to recover the islands.

  The idea was to translate the patriotism created by the World Cup into an immediate war. Fascist governments aim for perpetual motion—the crowds must always be on the streets—and so the junta bought body bags, and told hospitals to keep beds free.

  The war was aborted at the last minute. It seems that the junta voted to start fighting but was vetoed by Videla. By then the Catholic church was mediating, and in Latin America it is not done to defy the Vatican. By the end of 1978 it had forced a settlement. The junta began to look out for other triumphs, and in 1982 it sent the body bags and arms for the Chilean war that never was on to the Falklands. In a sense, the Falklands War belongs to the aftermath of the World Cup. And it is said that one reason why the regime surrendered to Britain when it did, in May 1982, was because Argentina might otherwise have had to miss the Spanish World Cup.

  The generals silenced public debate, the Madres apart, but as in all dictatorships there was coded protest. If we believe Cesar Luis Menotti, manager of Argentina in 1978, he protested in the language of soccer.

  Menotti is a thin, big-nosed, chain-smoker who grew up in Rosario, birthplace of the Peruvian keeper Quiroga. It is a town with tradit
ions of radical politics and stylish soccer, and Menotti inherited both creeds. For Menotti, soccer is a form of art, and he won the 1978 World Cup with Rosarian soccer played by men like Ricardo Villa, Osvaldo Ardiles and Mario Kempes—though not by Diego Maradona, much to the 17-year-old’s sorrow. “It is a homage to the old, beloved Argentine game,” said Menotti after the final. It was a coded protest.

  By beating Holland, the radical appeared to have saved the generals, but as soon as it was safe to do so, Menotti argued otherwise. He was often attacked, he writes in Fútbol sin trampa (“Soccer without Tricks”) for coaching Argentina under a tyranny that “contradicted my way of life.” But what should he have done? “To coach teams that played badly, that based everything on tricks, that betrayed the feelings of the people? No, of course not.” Defensive soccer, like dictatorship, imprisons the free spirit. Instead, writes Menotti (or rather Carlos Ferreira, his ghost), by playing free, creative soccer, his team evoked not only Argentine soccer as it once had been, but also the memory of a free, creative Argentina.

  It is easy to scoff at this. For a start, Menotti sounds like a man desperate to excuse himself for winning the World Cup: he will not accept that he won it for the generals. Also, Ardiles has praised him precisely for teaching the players discipline. “Many Argentinians, South Americans, don’t care about bread, but only about the honey you put on it,” the Spurs manager explained. And the Argentinians still played “tricks.” Menotti’s squad included a few traditional butchers, and even a couple of players called Killer; Peru was bought; and it seems that under orders from the junta, the players had drug injections. One source says that Mario Kempes and Alberto Tarantini were still so “high” after the Peru match that they had to keep running for another hour before they came down again, and that Ocampo, the team’s waterboy, came up with most of the post-match urine samples; though there must have been other suppliers too, for after the final, one sample showed a player to be pregnant. The Dutch left saying that Argentina could only have won the World Cup in Argentina.

  The final argument against Menotti is that the generals themselves had asked him to play open soccer. It helped public relations, and his talk of a traditional Argentine style suited their quarrel with “the influence of foreign ideas and Communism.” Argentina was the greatest country in the world, and the World Cup proved it.

  And yet Menotti is in earnest: evil, for him, is dictatorial rule and the style of play propagated by Carlos Bilardo. Menottismo and Bilardismo are two opposing attitudes to life.

  Bilardo has a big nose too, and he also won a World Cup for Argentina, in 1986, but there his kinship with Menotti ends. A boy of good family and, like Crippen, a qualified doctor, Bilardo played his soccer for Estudiantes, a team legendary for a certain lack of nobility. “We tried to find out everything possible about our rivals individually, their habits, their characters, their weaknesses and even about their private lives, so that we could goad them on the field, get them to react and risk being sent off,” Juan Ramon Veron, another Estudiantes player of the 1960s, has explained. The fame of Estudiantes spread to Europe too, because from 1968 to 1970 the gang were champions of South America, and they played horrifying World Club Cup finals against AC Milan, Manchester United and Feyenoord. The Argentine team of the 1966 World Cup, who struck Alf Ramsey as “animals,” were part of the same wave.

  “He was very clever,” Wim van Hanegem of Feyenoord says of Bilardo. “A skinny little guy, but he was very skillful. Mean? Yes, That’s true, but I didn’t mind that so much. What was less pleasant was that he used to spit. I can’t stand that—I’d rather be kicked.” Against Feyenoord, Bilardo snapped the spectacles of Joop van Daele. Today he says, “I can’t remember that,” and he probably can’t.

  Dr. Bilardo became manager of Argentina, and built a manly team. Argentina won the World Cup in 1986, and reached the final in 1990, but to the untrained eye they looked like a street gang. Perhaps the defining act of that side was Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal: a classic Estudiantes ploy, except that no Estudiantes player would have bothered to offer an excuse. It was Bilardista soccer, though Bilardo refuses to see styles of play as philosophies. He thinks soccer is just soccer, and that in soccer only winning matters.

  “I am ashamed as an Argentinian,” pronounced Menotti in 1990, “because what I see of my country at this World Cup has nothing to do with our true character. Everywhere,” he continued, “in literature, in art, in soccer, you can roughly identify two schools. One that treasures aesthetics, and another that tramples on beauty. This Argentina looks like a dead end street in China.”

  Menotti is becoming a café philosopher, and with the generals safely back in the military academy, Argentine soccer is no longer politics by other means; but in January 1993, when Tenerife met Sevilla in the Spanish league, there was a final episode of Menottismo vs. Bilardismo.

  Bilardo was by then at Sevilla, where he had built another team from a horror movie. They stacked up fouls, and during one game, in full view of the TV cameras, Bilardo abused his team’s physiotherapist for treating an injured opponent. The Sevilla squad included two Argentinians: Maradona and Simeone.

  The new Menotti was the Tenerife manager, Jorge Valdano. A columnist for the Spanish quality newspaper El País, Valdano likes soccer even though he played for Bilardo at the 1986 World Cup. In his team at Tenerife were three Argentinians: Redondo, Pizzi and Dertycia.

  When the two teams met, the Buenos Aires press corps dropped everything and flew over. Everyone was ready for the dirtiest match since the Battle of Highbury, and Maradona failed to defuse matters. He told the press that he could never forgive Redondo. Why not? Once, years before, that Satan had dropped out of a friendly international to sit an exam.

  Came the day, and it was not so much Menottismo vs. Bilardismo as Bilardismo on both sides. Tenerife won 3-0, thanks to two penalties, both scored by Pizzi; there were 13 yellow cards, and three red cards, one for Pizzi, and one for Maradona, who tried to get Redondo sent off; a brawl involving Bilardo; and an encounter between Simeone and police officers that prompted the civil governor of Tenerife to order an investigation. Bilardo called Valdano “a thief with white gloves on.” Valdano said: “It is a significant fact that despite leading his country to two World Cup finals Bilardo is regarded as Public Enemy Number One in Argentine soccer.”

  Independiente vs. Huracán was the first match of the 1993 Argentine league season. The players took the pitch to a volley of fireworks, some of which were thrown straight at them—the Independiente stadium is compact, and the fans are bonkers. The match started, and the teams aimlessly kicked the ball back and forth, until in the eighth minute Independiente’s Hugo Perez hit a 35-yarder which went in off the post, prompting more fireworks. Not long after, Huracán’s left half hit a pass with the outside of his right boot to his center-forward, who lobbed the ball over the Independiente goalkeeper on the volley. It was a marvelous goal, and quite fair, but neither player bothered to protest when the referee disallowed it. Minutes later, however, half the side raced up to threaten the linesman after an eccentric offside call.

  Independiente went 2-0 up, but the game was briefly halted while their fans threw missiles at their own goalkeeper, Luis Islas. After a couple of minutes, the referee returned Islas to his goal, and the match went on, though the shelling did too. Then Huracán’s Cruz fouled Independiente’s Guillermo Lopez, and with admirable openness, punched him in the stomach. A free-for-all followed, after which Cruz, and Moas of Independiente, received red cards. Independiente won 3-1.

  I asked Lopez, victim of Cruz’s foul, why the match had been so violent. He explained that Huracán were poor losers: “In the first half, five violent tackles were committed on me: two on my ankles, three on my left knee, two of these five with the score at 2-0. In the second half, I was tackled with violence twice more.” He added that the referee should not have sent off Cruz and Moas.

  A statue was to be unveiled, in a Buenos Aires park, to celebra
te the centenary of Argentine soccer. Though the newspapers had announced the event, the spectators were two old men, two small girls, myself and two English friends. At seven o’clock a few dozen old men in suits toddled up from the Argentine FA’s building and began to greet each other. “They see one another every day,” one of the small girls explained, “but they like to make a big show of hugging and kissing.” The sight of old men embracing in front of a figure covered in a sheet attracted only three more people. Argentinians are used to ceremonies: in front of an adjacent tree stood a plaque in praise of trees.

  The bobos (Ruud Gullit’s word seemed to apply) untangled themselves after a while, and unveiled the monument. It was a straightforward, life-size, metal soccer on a pedestal. “My son is the sculptor!” one bobo shouted, and they all photographed each other for approximately 20 minutes. I asked the girl whether any of them were famous ex-players, but she said not.

  One elderly spectator pointed at us and shouted, “You taught us soccer in 1893!,” meaning that the British had. This is true of almost every country in the world, but the Argentinians know it better than most. At times Argentina can seem like a former British colony, a Spanish-speaking version of Australia or India. When Argentina first beat England, by 3-1 in 1953, a politician exclaimed, “We have nationalized the railways, and now we have nationalized soccer!” Long before the Falklands, England was the country Argentinians most wanted to beat, and when the war came the generals had an easy job of mobilizing feeling. One bumper sticker printed for the conflict showed the little Gauchito, mascot of the 1978 World Cup, posing with his foot on a hapless British lion. And in 1986, most Argentinians felt that the Hand of God goal was exactly what England deserved.