If one searches for the human activities that simultaneously and on a global scale gather people’s interest, it will be difficult to identify any that has a greater impact than the FIFA World Cup. With the passing of the years, the World Cup has conquered an increasingly central place in the life of societies, in every country, during the period in which it is held. Perhaps the fact that it is held every 4 years helps in this, as it makes the period of its staging less ordinary. Beyond the countless social activities related to it, the personal and collective memories that are created, society as a whole, in every part of the world, seems to be transformed for this period. Naturally, economic activities, within a set of interconnected opportunities, revolve around this central competition. The streets, food-service businesses, clothing shops, fill with the colours from the flags of the whole world, ultimately changing also the appearance of cities, of the places where people live. No other competition manages nowadays to change to such a degree the appearance of cities — the Olympic Games usually transform only the city or the country that organises them, but never does an event that takes place in America change the appearance of the streets of an Asian or European city. In this sense, the World Cup cannot be discussed only in footballing terms, although of course football is its central subject and — fortunately — football, as a sport, is what evolves through it.

Beyond the economic activities, which in essence aesthetically affect social life, there is also political power, however, which takes an especially zealous interest in this competition. The participation of a country in the football World Cup is elevated into the mirror of its social development, a kind of secondary national value, not measurable in economic and social indicators, especially indeed in periods when those indicators do not follow a positive course. It is characteristic that the presentation of the squads of Spain and Norway for the forthcoming 2026 World Cup was made by the kings of the two countries, in corresponding videos. Why would a monarch sit down to present 26 footballers who will travel to a country to play football? This is a question whose answer is simple to those initiated into this global mystagogy, yet it seems a paradoxical phenomenon to those who consciously or unconsciously abstain from understanding it and from — in whatever role — participating in it. And of course it is not only monarchs: one of the last activities of the national team of the most republican country in the world, France, was the photo session with President Macron, before the journey to the other shore of the Atlantic. One might say that politicians want to participate in the glory of champions, to present their successes as successes of their own governance, yet here it is not a matter of photographs after victory, but of the operation of rallying a people, a nation as their bourgeois political conception understands it, around a group of people which, without having been elected, instead has been selected on the basis of criteria of footballing excellence, and represents everyone at the most important level. No corresponding video was ever made for the appointment of a country’s Ambassador to the UN, while no great campaign ever moved the masses by supporting some fellow national candidate for a Nobel Prize. Yet it seems entirely natural that something like this happens for football.

Thus naturally the question arises: why does all this happen for football? The answer is everything that happens in the project of futbol, that is, the analysis of the reasons why a sport, on the basis of specific characteristics, is, according to Pasolini, “the last sacred ritual of our time”. It is the way it appeared, the way it covers specific human needs, the particular way in which it is able to cover these needs within the specific social and political framework of human exploitation, the way it developed socially, that is, a set of small and great emotions that football has the power to create in people. In order, that is, to understand why the World Cup is so important, one must begin from the reasons why it exists — both itself as a competition, and football as a sport. Although the overall History of football, its relation with societies, nations, cultures, the way it was shaped by all these and shaped them, is a larger discussion and a broader field of inquiry, the way football became World-wide is, more or less, the history of the World Cup — because a sport could be played in every corner of the Earth, but it would never have had the same value if it were not played, by everyone, in such a global central arena.

In the articles on the Prehistory of Football and the Birth of Football in Britain, the historical mechanisms were analysed extensively through which a game that, in various variations, was played by many civilisations, as a continuation of the game of British peasants, was codified, became the property of the ruling class, but immediately, almost in parallel, became a beloved occupation of the working masses in an era when anything British was conquering the entire world. The course of football towards the whole world was explained, together with the expansion of the British Empire, but above all the transmission of these British social habits, such as British sports, wherever British economic activity was expanding, with Central Europe and South America as characteristic examples, which were presented analytically in the corresponding articles. It would therefore be repetition to spend ourselves, in this inquiry whose focus is the World Cup, on this part of History. Instead, taking as given the fact that already from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the masses embraced the sport, transforming it indeed into a creator and carrier of collective identities, what is useful and crucial for the understanding of this global institution is to examine its material basis and the causes of its creation, outside indeed the traditionally British framework that gave birth to the sport. At the same time, we shall also consider as given the fact that an activity with such social resonance gathers the interest of political power; the reasons do not need to be explained here, only the way in which this was expressed.

In contrast to a multitude of other sports, which are codified and, with the existence of the Olympic Games, acquired global participation and interest, within the framework of an athletic ideal, football constituted a social mass sport that only for a very short period of time — that of British amateurism — seemed to claim such an identity. From the beginning of the existence of professionalism, which began at the end of the 19th century in Britain and meant a series of things, such as that footballers represented a whole which participated materially (by paying a ticket) in the existence and functioning of the football club, that clubs constituted an institution with ties to local society, at a territorial or factory level, football had no relation with “the road and the wrestling and the stone”, that is, the — even if imaginary — refined form of sports with the aim of a generally defined emulation. On the basis of these characteristics of it, it never gathered interest within the framework of the Olympic Games, a competition which in its first years had strict terms for the exclusive participation of amateurs, giving particular emphasis to the successes of physical strength, to the triptych “faster, higher, stronger”, rather than to the success of collective victory against an opponent.

Thus, one could wonder whether football is indeed part of a more general athletic framework. The answer could perhaps be twofold: as regards the methodology for achieving athletic performance, that is, training, physical exercise, the evolution of the body’s ability to execute complex, almost acrobatic, movements that help in achieving the aim, that is, victory in a game, then football certainly resembles all the other sports. As regards, however, the reasons why someone wants to win a football game, these seem from the start to be very far from generally defined athletic emulation. Here quite a few become confused, accusing football as “dirty” because it is not “clean” as a sport, with the guileless will for the best athletic performance as its only characteristic. Yet this is perhaps a crooked way of reading society itself, since the need for victory of a collective identity is probably something more complex, greater in impact and certainly more mass and collective than the individual victory of the body. In this sense football democratises athletic success, allowing the existence of many roles, which contribute to this success, which comes materially from the actions of 11 people.

In this sense, football, which is always found among the interests of “dirty” social activities, will not stop existing when this dirt that surrounds it is eliminated, but instead will mirror whatever society is created through the overthrow of today’s relations of power, expressing collectivity again in a different way. It is probably the bourgeois Olympic Ideal that will not be able, in such a condition, to express a new collective conception of victory — but certainly the other sports too will evolve in a way that allows them to fit within this society, potentially liberated until today.

And here is a central question with which one must deal when examining the History of the World Cup: does the fact that the World Cup was, through time, an object of interest and exploitation by ruthless dictators, authoritarian regimes, powers that used it even as a mechanism of repression, mean that by nature it is something that expresses global reaction? The analysis of the evolution of phenomena only “from above” could arrive at such a conclusion. Yet such an analysis is superficial — because in the World Cup the way football is played evolved, on the basis indeed of ideological convictions that were not at all aligned with those of its organisers and abusers, while it also created popular expression, popular memory and collective experiences, beyond the framework of national antagonism and exclusions, which the powers in exploitative systems have historically represented. If the position that football is only a tool of power were valid, many of these phenomena would never have existed — and thus, instead of making yet another analysis of the relation between exploitative power and football, it is much more useful to examine everything that truly happens in the History of human beings, which is not a fairy tale only about princes and princesses, but about peasants.

The Global Foundation of Football

At the turn of the century, developed British football, with the professional championships, the clubs that counted thousands of supporters, the evolution of football tactics, ideologisation and the international (within a British framework) competitions, was no longer alone in the world. Beyond the 4 “domestic” federations, that is, those of England, Scotland, Wales and British-ruled Ireland, national federations were also being created in continental Europe, from North to South, with Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Germany having founded their own institutions at the end of the 19th century, while Argentina, Chile and Uruguay had corresponding federations of their own. To all these countries, for reasons of completeness, must also be added the football federation of Gibraltar, as well as that of Singapore, states which of course constituted part of the Empire.

All these Federations had one thing in common: they were constituted to a large degree by English migrants or expatriates, with their officials naturally being members of the British bourgeoisie who were active internationally, having indeed ties of dependence with the mother of the sport, the Football Association. Thus, although football was a sport that had already begun to be played internationally, there was no particular reason for a corresponding international or world confederation to exist, since the FA had a dominant role in everything that concerned its administration.

Football remained a British sport in an era when sport as a whole was changing — but not by the English. The initiative for an international and potentially global governance of sport began from Britain’s rival power. Perhaps the most important institution, which led to the construction of the first global athletic edifice, was the Union des sociétés françaises de sports athlétiques, known by its initials as the USFSA. Founded as a union of two athletic associations, which came from the clubs of the bourgeois class of Paris, Racing Club de France and Stade Français, as well as other French nobles initiated into British athletic organisation, from 1890 the USFSA undertook to play a pioneering role in the organisation of the international framework of sport, in a field that had been left free by the British. The truth is that the English bourgeois and aristocratic class was not so interested in the ways in which it would share its occupations, neither with other cultures nor with other classes. Besides, it intended football itself for itself, only to find itself before accomplished historical facts when the masses did not stop playing the sport that constituted an evolution of their own game.

The USFSA, with two rings as its symbol, which symbolised the union of these two athletic unions of Paris, also constituted the organisational structure for the creation of the modern Olympic Movement, which, with the corresponding symbolism of 5 united circles, corresponding to the continents, began in 1896 the first great multi-sport competition, that of the Olympic Games. The fully aristocratic origin of the Olympic movement, as well as the expansion of the activities of the USFSA into the organisation of the rugby championship, a sport of the middle and upper strata, in France, left football at the turn of the century on the margins, which was indeed part of the Olympic programme, but in an amateur form, which had no relation to the mass British sport. It is characteristic that the first gold medal was won by the crew of a Danish ship that had run aground in Piraeus, facing the Athens Cycling Club in a match that was more a parody, since it ended either 9-0 or 15-0 for the Danes, under the direction of Prince George, who assumed refereeing duties in the encounter.

At the time, then, when sport was being constituted at an international level only within an aristocratic framework, mass football remained outside this process and under British control. After the organisation of two Olympic Games, which for obvious reasons were held in Athens and Paris, the Dutch football federation called on the Football Association to take an initiative for the autonomous international organisation of football. But the British had no reason to create an international institution where they could have absolute control through their own national federation. For this reason, they answered negatively, while they also showed corresponding indifference towards the possibility of establishing an international institution when the President of the USFSA, the journalist Robert Guérin, made the same proposal.

Guérin, of course, did not have only pure aims. In an era when the entire athletic edifice was essentially under construction, he wanted to ensure that the USFSA would have the competence for administering the most mass sport that was slowly developing also in France. The best way to achieve this was the participation of the USFSA — instead of other French associations with the same aspirations — in an international confederation. This practice of attaching oneself to international confederations in order to secure domestic power in a sport would become a permanent scene in every developing sport, in every country. The truth is, however, that the Football Association would very difficultly accept becoming an equal interlocutor with Guérin, since the French aristocrat represented a sect of sporting officials in France who wanted to administer football too at national level, without any previous work in its development, at the moment when the FA had for decades been organising a professional championship and cup, with enormous attendance of supporters, as well as participating in international competitions with the states of the United Kingdom that had a much greater footballing tradition than France.

Yet, however logical the stance of the Football Association may have seemed within the specific framework, it was just as short-sighted, since it did not calculate that the French aristocracy could find allies from continental Europe in order to achieve its aim. Thus Guérin, ignoring any tradition and seeing the great opportunity opening before him, in the absence of any international institution, invited the already founded federations of Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the club of Madrid FC, in order to found in Paris the international football institution. On 21 May 1904, at number 229 of rue St Honoré, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, the founding declaration of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association was signed, which because of its French inspiration and place of birth took its name in the French language, so that the famous acronym FIFA would be created.

The 28-year-old Guérin thus achieved his basic aim, making the USFSA, as a founding member of FIFA, responsible for the development of football in France, while by assuming the presidency of the new football organisation he could bring France into a central position as regards the global development of the sport, exploiting the gap left by England, indifferent to this role. Yet History quickly showed that the English were not so short-sighted. The mighty FIFA of today could not play its role internationally if it did not manage to include England in its ranks. Given that Guérin’s motive, as well as that of other actors from the national confederations (including Madrid FC, which was later named Réal, coming from a country without a football federation), was to acquire international recognition and not to compete with the mother of the sport, all FIFA’s moves concerned the terms under which the English would become part of it.

This finally happened in 1905, when England became a member of the international organisation through a process that was completed in 1906, when at the Berne congress Daniel Woolfall, an official of working-class Blackburn, assumed the duties of president at FIFA, remaining in that position until the outbreak of the First World War. Woolfall’s leadership was decisive so that England would hold a central position in football development, as football was gradually leaving the hands of the English in the national federations, which were passing under the control of the natives. Yet Woolfall has other reasons to be remembered as well, chiefly the organisation of the first truly international football tournament. His placement at the head of the World Confederation, indeed, was perhaps motivated by this historical conjuncture.

London was the host city of the 4th Olympic Games, held in 1908, and Great Britain wanted more than anything to advertise its national sport, the one which, unlike other Olympic sports, had been codified within the centres of its own education system, reflected its own society and spread together with its own cultural influence. Thus, 12 years after the parody match of the Athens Olympics, in London a tournament was held with the participation of 8 teams initially, although finally, because of internal issues that prevented the teams of Austria-Hungary, Bohemia and Hungary from taking part. Denmark beat the two French teams in succession 9-0 and 17-1, while Great Britain prevailed 12-1 over Sweden and 4-0 over Holland. In the final the hosts and organisers prevailed 2-0 over the Danes to win this first truly international football medal.

The place of football, however, was not at all given in the programme of the Olympic Games and despite its later success, the football tournament of Stockholm was not at all certain to be organised in 1912. There, the final once again had the same opponents, in the last international football meeting before the outbreak of the First World War. The real development of World Football would come immediately afterwards…

The War of the Trenches dissolved the infrastructures and almost erased a generation of the countries of Europe, dealing a decisive blow also to football and its institutions. After its end, under the new international political balances, FIFA was at the threshold, between life and death. The Olympic Games continued to be held, beginning with the Antwerp Games in 1920, but the football institutions, perhaps also paying the price of the greater contribution of the working class to the war, took slower steps of reconstruction as regards Europe, because in South America football was going through its first golden age.

The first post-war FIFA congress was held in Geneva in 1923. There, a Frenchman was elected President of the Confederation for the second time, a lawyer, the son of a greengrocer from eastern France, deeply Catholic, the most emblematic president in its History, Jules Rimet. Rimet was perhaps the most suitable person to lead football into this new era and to its real globalisation. His religious convictions were aligned with the papal encyclical Rerum novarum, of Pope Leo XIII, according to which particular weight had to be given by the Church as regards the living conditions of the working class. Of course, the papal Church as an institution did not feel any great pain for the wretched of the Earth, but rather saw the danger that they might express their anger at their poverty in revolutionary ways, animated by the great ideas that were developing during the 19th century and led even to the workers’ seizure of power in the Paris of the Commune of 1871. Under these conditions the Church had an interest in functioning as the carrier that would be able to manage this popular anger in a way more painless for the ruling class: the initiatives for the improvement of the living conditions and of the content of the life of workers helped in this direction. Given the ideological pressure, that is, this stance of the Catholic Church can be read as a conquest of the working class, even in conditions in which it did not organisedly claim the overthrow of the power hostile to it. Besides, we do not know how easy it is for one to claim that a mighty institution, such as the Pope, decided without deeper reasons to proclaim such an apparently radical political line.

Animated by these ideas, Rimet had founded in 1897, that is, 6 years after the proclamation of Rerum novarum, the workers’ club Red Star in Paris, which to this day constitutes a symbol of pride for the poorer strata that live on the margins of the dazzling French capital. Historical recording has classified Rimet as an inspired man who believed in understanding and peaceful coexistence between nations, something that was naturally necessary for post-war (or interwar) reconstruction. As is natural, the reading of this characteristic cannot be naïve: Rimet either consciously believed in this road, in harmony with the deeper ideological stance of the Church, knowing the effects of the war in Tsarist Russia that led to the Bolshevik Revolution, or as an idealist he believed that international understanding was the best path of progress within a political system that he considered either natural or the only possible path. In any case, while the Catholic Church had officially rejected, as was natural, the socialist revolutions, we do not know anything specific about Rimet’s stance, despite the fact that the newly established Soviet Union was not admitted to FIFA throughout the interwar period.

The examination of Jules Rimet’s political ideology may constitute a dissertation topic in itself, since the whole modern edifice of world football rests upon it, but in the historical inquiry into the existence and evolution of the World Cup perhaps what matters to be used as a given is his pure internationalist conception, in contrast with the conservatism of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes which in other countries, mainly those that were under British influence, kept football trapped on a much smaller scale than that which was its real dynamic. For whatever reason Rimet believed what he believed, what is recorded is the fact that his own conception was needed in order for the forces that would make football the social phenomenon we know today to be liberated.

One more element that cannot be bypassed when examining Rimet’s contribution is the fact that he thought outside the frameworks that had existed until then, thus also charting a strategic line that characterised the course of FIFA over time. When football appeared in the eyes of Europeans to be an English product that concerned a series of countries of Western Europe, Rimet saw very immediately that his greatest ally — and mainly the ally of his vision — was on the other side of the ocean. The football of the Río de la Plata, without having been crushed by the war, having disengaged itself from English influence, acquiring its own distinct aesthetic and social temperament, acquiring indeed also a very high level as regards athletic performances themselves, could become the carrier on which the new form of the global football network would rest.

One year after his election to the Presidency of FIFA, Rimet saw the great opportunity in the Olympic Games being organised in the city where he lived, Paris. There he invited the national teams of Uruguay and Argentina, which were already competing in their own South American institutions, creating a legendary tradition and very rapidly massifying the sport. Of the two teams Uruguay was the one that accepted the invitation, in order to write golden pages on and off the playing fields in Paris in 1924, transforming the football tournament from a peripheral event into the central subject of the Games, with the demand for tickets exceeding the capacity of the Olympic Stadium of Colombes and football showing that it cannot enter into comparisons, as regards mass appeal, with any other sport that human beings have invented.

The success of the football tournament in Paris in 1924 was not accidental — the football officials managed essentially to violate a basic regulation of the Olympic Ideal as it had been defined until then, despite indeed the reactions of the various Federations. Uruguay’s great difference in quality was not only the result of the absence of the War from South America; it was also a consequence of the professionalism that had already begun to exist on the other side of the Atlantic. At the same time, the road of professionalism was also opening in Central Europe, which had its own distinct institutions, such as the Mitropa Cup and the Central European International Cup. It was clearly visible in practice, that is, that the professionalism which had made football gigantic in Britain from 1885, opening the doors to the mass arrival of the working masses, had the same results in other regions of the world as well. The shape of professional football, which is blood-fed by the working class and in this way becomes an element that can constitute a symbol and an identity for the masses, was now repeated and opposed to the framework of the Olympic Games. This showed that the time for the schism had come.

Already from 1926 the General Secretary of FIFA, Henry Delaunay, was overbidding both in favour of professionalism and in favour of the existence of football networks on a larger, European level, not only regional, such as that of Central Europe, but also the need for the existence of a global institution. Naturally, Rimet too was moving along the same line; by elevating Uruguay into the model of a country whose national substance and recognition change quality through football, he saw in the small country of South America the suitable ground for his vision to be realised. At the FIFA congress held in Amsterdam in 1928 this line was essentially confirmed, that is, the autonomous course of the world football edifice, outside the framework of the Olympic Games, with the creation of the FIFA World Cup. There was no country more suitable to take on this competition than Uruguay, which beyond the fact that it had won the Olympic gold medal in Paris in 1924 and Amsterdam in 1928, prevailing indeed in an epic series of matches over Argentina in the final, was a country in full economic development, following the tendencies of modernism, a current which characterised the very birth of the World Cup and is reflected to this day in every side of its aesthetic identity.

Although the final decision on the place of staging was written at the FIFA congress one year later, in 1929 in Barcelona, Uruguay’s will to take on this competition was evident from the moment the necessary agreement for its launch was secured. The only thing that was added — and contributes to different historical narratives — was the addition of the argument that Uruguay was in 1929 a double Olympic champion, in contrast with the congress of 1928, which took place before the start of the Olympic Tournament. Many historians mention that the fact that Uruguay beat Argentina in the Amsterdam final was the reason why the first World Cup took place on its soil, but a series of elements, many of which have been mentioned above, show that even if the result had been different, the reasons for it to be held in Uruguay were already many; perhaps this footballing result simply removed arguments from a potential Argentine claim to the organisation of the competition.

This evolution of football, at an administrative and political level, after the end of the First World War, created a new cultural identity in the game itself. France, as well as other countries of Western Europe, came to the foreground, replacing British primacy with an international system of administration and organisation. The British, whose aim was to maintain their undisputed position as guardians of the sport, did not give weight to their involvement in an international institution that would naturally force them to become involved in conflicts, but instead gave weight to the confirmation of their superiority on the playing fields. The England national team became the tool of this policy — instead of naturally participating in competitions of international institutions foreign to Britain, it played friendly matches against whichever team seemed to be the best of all the others. Each victory ensured the perpetuation of this myth. The first defeat by a non-British team, however, came in 1929, in Madrid, from Spain, which prevailed at the Metropolitano by 4-3. Nevertheless, the result was narrow, away from home, and was followed by two emphatic victories, 1-4 in Paris and 1-5 in Brussels — thus the era in which this British dominance would be challenged still seemed to be delayed.

Beyond the national team, however, the Football Association also showed its fist at another level, which certainly constitutes a criterion for who truly had in his hands the fortunes of the sport in those years. Nowadays it is almost impossible for one to think of a change in the laws of the game without this being a decision of FIFA. The truth, of course, which fewer know, is that the laws of football are not defined by FIFA — at least not directly. The competent body for the laws of football is the International Football Association Board, in which today FIFA participates with a 50% right of participation in any decision and in practice exercises its control over it. But this was not the case in that interwar and pre-World Cup era. The IFAB, which was founded by the Home Countries, that is, the Federations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (today’s Federation of Northern Ireland) in 1886, had in those years very different correlations of power. In 1912 FIFA requested to become an equal member of the laws board and one year later managed to be represented with 2 seats, at the moment when the other 4 belonged to the Federations of the United Kingdom. Thus, decisions on the laws were a British decision.

Perhaps the most important decision for the transition of football from its protohistory to the modern era was the change of the offside law in 1925. Until then a player had to be covered by 3 opponents when he became the recipient of the ball moving forwards, in order not to be offside. The fact that through the development of tactics this left fewer margins for scoring led the IFAB to adopt the change of these players from 3 to 2. This change in turn had as a consequence the reshuffling of the deck as regards the positioning of players and opened the road to the development of tactics, with the first innovation being the adoption of the WM system by Herbert Chapman at Arsenal. The passage from 2-3-5 to a system with a central defender and the fullbacks (who to this day are called that) moving to the flanks was the proof that the substantive evolution of the game was still controlled by England and that whoever wanted to be at the cutting edge of football development had to follow the trend of the English game. This was a reality that FIFA had to face — if not on the grass, then at the administrative level.

The First Era

Jules Rimet was not a footballer, nor a football technician; he was a lawyer and official, an ideological Catholic and certainly a chauvinist Frenchman who was in harmony with the interests and the line of international cooperation of his republican country. The difference between this conception and the British one was that it could give much more space to every distinct identity that could emerge from the game. Football was in any case not French and Rimet had no reason to want to impose French dominance on its culture; he cared mainly that France be at the centre of the decisions. For this reason South America was also the best laboratory for the execution of his experiment.

In England the change of tactical approach concerned mechanical manipulations that led to successful results, while this footballing rationalism also dominated in other schools, where Anglophile officials and technicians tried to set up each national football school according to British models. The only place in which the exact opposite was happening was the two countries of the Río de la Plata. Argentina and Uruguay, on the one hand, had no reason to search for this Britishness, given that their problem was exactly the opposite, the excessive contribution of the British to the foundation of their national football and therefore to the national footballing conception; on the other hand, they had every reason to ideologise their game deeply, in order to find this different road of a truly autonomous football development, independent from Britain.

If one looks at the composition of the countries that took part in the first World Cup held in Uruguay, one can easily understand that it was ideal for the apparent success of this road. Beyond the 7 South American countries, that is, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, 2 from North America participated, Mexico and the United States, while from Europe Belgium, France, Romania and Yugoslavia travelled. The interest lies in this European participation. The only country with clear ties to Britain is Belgium, to which football had been transferred by Englishmen in the ports of Flanders and indeed the famous superstar referee of the era, Jean Langenus, came from a deeply Anglophile family of Antwerp, with his first name in reality being John and not Jean, as due to his nationality he is presented in the various archives. France was at every step the counterweight to the British approach to the sport, even if the first inspirers of the national athletic conception had studied the corresponding English one in order to apply their ideas in their homeland. Romania and Yugoslavia were two countries very far from the sphere of influence of British interests, outside the formal and informal Empire, with Romania in particular maintaining over time very close cultural ties with France, because of its Latin background.

The countries to which the leading English football thought had been transferred, that is, the countries of Central Europe, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Italy, even others that were lagging behind, such as Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries, did not participate in this competition. Thus, in Uruguay the WM would not face the 2-3-5, the teams that had professional championships on their territories would not play against each other, leaving the field free for the national conceptions of aesthetic performance to be glorified, such as the Argentine Nuestra and the more combative Uruguayan garra charrúa. The emphasis is not placed on the tactical evolution of the game, but on the way of playing, on individual technique, on the game with short passes and on the ability to improvise.

The history of football results has written that the centre of footballing completeness in that era was in the Río de la Plata. Yet an inquiry into the comparative elements that could support such a thing is subject to criticism. For example, the great teams of Uruguay never faced England, some other British national team with professional footballers or some national team of Europe made up of professionals. The same is true of the national team of Argentina. The Argentines and the Uruguayans managed to beat the British who were on their soil, detaching football in order to make it national capital. Therefore the conclusion that can be drawn from these historical data is that on a purely athletic level it is difficult to determine the position of rioplatense football in the global framework of that era; the indisputable contribution, however, of the Argentine and Uruguayan school was that a particular national football school can be created with enormous ideological depth, far from the metropolis of the sport. This was something that Rimet and the FIFA organisation as a whole had much greater need of in those years than technical evolution.

Perhaps the first World Cup in which the modern football thought of the era was expressed was that of 1934. This comment may seem biased against the football of South America, yet the objective inquiry into the footballing level of the two continents and the comparative gaze strengthens this conviction. In 1934, 12 European teams participated in the World Cup of Italy, among them all the countries of Central Europe, together with Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, while Belgium and France returned to the institution. A glance at the beginnings of football in these countries, with emphasis on the football development of the so-called Danubian school, is enough to bring out the difference of approach that existed in relation to South America. In Austria Jimmy Hogan became the messenger of football, Hugo Meisl was a British-bred official who developed his own thoughts on the football of his homeland, of another empire, in the same ideological framework in which the British sport was developing, while the “patriarch” of Italian football was one of the most fanatical Anglophile and English-bred Italians who have existed in History, Vittorio Pozzo.

From South America, Brazil and Argentina participated in the competition. Both were eliminated in the first round by Spain and Sweden respectively, that is, by countries that were not even among the protagonists of European football of the era. The creation of two different football networks, one in Europe and one in South America, was perhaps necessary so that football could acquire deep roots in two geographical regions which are considered to this day its traditional pillars. Perhaps if all these countries had played on the same terms, in the same competitions from the beginning, the world football map of our days would have been different. The different conceptions, together with the British one which remained cut off, perhaps had to develop separately up to a point, so that they could, without setbacks, create the deep social extensions that were necessary in order to take root in the very mental constitution of the peoples of these countries.

If one thinks that the countries of Europe which did not find themselves among those first protagonists of the football firmament never managed to create a particular football tradition and a distinct recognisable football school, the way History evolved was perhaps the only one that could lead to what we understand today as the football edifice worldwide. At the same time, the absence of a distinct football network in Africa did not help the countries of the continent to develop the corresponding depth in their football culture. Egypt may have participated in the World Cup of 1934 (after the ship it missed because of a storm in the Mediterranean in 1930), yet despite also its presence in the Olympic Games it remained a small peripheral power within the great and rapid football evolution, part of a European course of the sport that needed many decades to find its rhythm in Africa, for many reasons that are historically explained later.

The development of the two football networks, that of Central Europe and that of the Río de la Plata, however, does not have as its only contrast the relation with English football and the different emphasis on football tactics or aesthetics. Their ideological basis is the proof that what happens in football is a reflection of human History, of a truly material basis and not of an accidental idealist inspiration. The apparently “romantic” South American football, with its rich bibliography, vocabulary, identities and obsession with its aesthetic superiority, was the result of societies that saw the world with an objective progressive optimism, coming from great empires with the aim of existing as independent states out of a jumble of arrivals who were searching to find a common national consciousness. On the other hand, football in Central Europe, despite the fact that it kept pace geographically and spiritually with the most pioneering intellectual inquiries of the era, was the expression of Empires whose national identity rested on a world that belonged to the past.

The political targeting of the organisers of these first two World Cups, who were ultimately also the teams that won them, shows this contrast. On the one hand Uruguay was creating a new modern capital, based on the principles of architectural modernism, with Le Corbusier recognising it as a brilliant field of application for the cutting edge of the intellectual approach to urban planning, while the central newly built stadium, which celebrated the 100 years of independence, was a direct depiction of this conception. In Italy, the 1934 World Cup was the first (it did not take long either) that was so closely tied to the conceptions of an authoritarian power whose aim was not the radiance of a small country that creates culture on virgin ground, but of the one that has been charged with the burden of carrying the human civilisation of millennia that had existed on its soil. The stadium of the final, which bore the name of the fascist party and had been built on the site where the Stadio Flaminio later stood, had a D shape to symbolise the form of address of the leader of the fascist formation and all the newly built grounds had the aim of symbolising a futuristic conception of ancient Roman greatness. It is not accidental that in the historical narrative, including through historical distance, the contribution of the South American experiment seems much more important for what football symbolises for billions of people nowadays, even if it did not have the most developed tactical approach.

This was certainly expressed at that time by Vittorio Pozzo’s Italian metodo, which was not very far from Herbert Chapman’s WM. Their difference was that while the WM placed a trio in defence, the Italian version of tactical evolution kept the fullbacks as a defensive duo with the central centre-half starting his efforts from greater depth, creating a 2-3-2-3 formation, with the two inside forwards also retreating, leaving space to the centre-forward and the wingers at the top of the attacking line. The militarist Pozzo had been inspired for this system by military mechanisms that keep depth in the axis and allow the flanks to charge in order to create breaches in the opponent. If one pays attention to the substantive function of the quartet created by the two fullbacks with the wide midfielders, then one can identify the first elements of the deep function of catenaccio, which essentially needed the tying together of the withdrawn centre-half in order to acquire the form it took a few decades later.

As regards the competition schedule, the 1934 World Cup was also much more interesting than that of 1930. In the first competition, in Uruguay, we had to reach the final for the first truly great match of the tournament to take place, since the great favourites, Argentina and the hosts Uruguay, did not face any particularly difficult opponent on their way there. It is characteristic that both won their semi-finals by a score of 6-1. Yet in 1934 Italy needed a replay in order to beat Spain after their first draw in the quarter-finals, in a match in which the legendary goalkeeper Zamora did not play, stating that he was ill, although he was seen in the stands of the Tuscan stadium watching the match a few metres away from the place where Mussolini himself was sitting. In the same round Austria beat Hungary 2-1, while Czechoslovakia prevailed 3-2 over Switzerland, in 2 matches that gathered all the Central European teams. Of these, Italy’s opponent in the semi-final in Milan was the Austrian Wunderteam, a team of bottomless talent, perhaps the alter ego of the Argentine school in Europe, which had to find before it a playing field heavy and almost destroyed by a storm so that it would not be able to perform the wondrous football it played and would be eliminated by Italy 1-0. In the final Italy prevailed in Rome, in extra time, over Czechoslovakia by 2-1, thus sealing the superiority of the teams of the Central European football network in the competition.

Italy’s superiority, however, was not only footballing. A specific transfusion was needed in order to ensure that the metodo would be sealed with the world success necessary for Mussolini. Understanding the significance that the instrumentalisation of football had at an ideological and political level, the Italian dictator defined Italianness in a new way, so that all those who had an Italian in their family up to 7 generations earlier would be defined as returning Italians. In practice this meant that the majority of the inhabitants of the countries of the Río de la Plata had the right to Italian citizenship and naturally the same applied to the footballers who played for the national teams. In the final, 3 Argentines played in the colours of the squadra azzurra, Enrique Guaita from Bahía Blanca, Raimundo Orsi from Avellaneda, as well as the captain of the Argentina national team in the 1930 final, Luis Monti, from Buenos Aires. All three had in the past played in the colours of the albiceleste, but now they were considered ripatriati, oriundi, who gave the necessary strength, as regards human resources, to the Italian footballing vision.

However much one struggles to distance Italy’s footballing victory from the fascist regime, this is something very difficult to happen. The eleven that represented the country was the result of the moves and policy of that regime, the way the victories against Spain and Austria came had to do with the fact that Italy was playing at home and above all, Vittorio Pozzo, this militarist English-bred football man, who may have loved England a little more than Italy, was not ideologically distant, in his footballing approach, from the ideology of the regime, either as regards the inspiration of the tactic, or as regards the psychological part of preparation, in which he included war marches and visits to charnel grounds of battles of the First World War. It is not obligatory that the team of a regime that wins should deeply represent that regime, but that Italy is difficult to disconnect from the aims of the fascist formation.

A certain care is therefore needed when one examines the victory of a team that came within a dark environment, with the support of the corresponding regime. The analysis of such cases in world, international and club football can be the subject of another dissertation and the conclusions for each separate example are not the same. That Italy of Pozzo, however, was a team that probably also objectively represented — for a series of reasons that have been mentioned — the best football of the era. If this cannot be said without asterisks for the 1934 World Cup, then certainly the 1938 World Cup gives a clear answer.

The third World Cup was organised in a republican country, in the homeland of Jules Rimet, which was given to be hostile to Italy’s political aims at that time and no one in France wanted to see another triumph of the Squadra Azzurra. The great help that this team needed was finally given by a third country, Nazi Germany, since with the Anschluss it dissolved the football superpower, Austria, which no longer had its own national team to participate in the World Cup, while disorganisation had also begun in the other countries of the Central European football network, where many prominent football figures were under persecution. Italy beat the hosts France 3-1 in the quarter-finals, dressed in all-black kits, with full reference to the fascist regime, while in the semi-final it found opposite it Leônidas’s Brazil, which despite the Italian triumph was the great star of the competition. In the final, once again two teams of Central Europe contested the trophy, with Italy winning this time much more clearly, 4-2 against Hungary.

Pozzo himself used to say that the Italian team of 1938 was much better than that of 1934 — and this was probably true, with several objective causes helping in this footballing evolution and improvement. On the other hand, it is also true that it did not have the same strong opponents as in 1934, and its victory seemed much more emphatic and clear. This, besides, would also be the last before Europe changed dramatically through yet another destructive World War.

Examining the World Cups of the 1930s, it is worth dwelling on Rimet’s ideological approach, how it was expressed in 1928 in order for the institution to begin and what had happened by 1938, that is, 10 years later. The criticism made earlier of Rimet’s view and its Christian Catholic basis seems to find very solid ground in what took place in 1934. If Rimet and FIFA believed so guilelessly in peace and the understanding of peoples, then how did they give the organisation to the country that had been for about a decade under a harsh dictatorship, which introduced authoritarian practices that the world had not known until then? If the basis of the papal encyclical had as its aim the improvement of the living conditions of the working class within a free environment and was not simply direct anti-socialism and anti-communism on the part of the conservative parts of the Old Continent, then how did the same papal Church align itself with the development of the fascist formation in Italy? These two courses, that of FIFA and that of the papal Church, beside fascism, have a common basis and course — and football was being instrumentalised from that first era of the World Cup, even if some today want to present it (for reasons of their own) as an “era of innocence”.

This first era would essentially close after the Second World War, with the 1950 World Cup, which thus completed a quartet of competitions characterised by recurring patterns. The World Cups of South America were organised in countries that needed, through football, to create and bring out a new national identity; those that took place in Europe had the participation of all the football-developed countries of the Old Continent. The South American competitions took place with problems of participation, since the teams, from 16 for various reasons, were ultimately 13 when the competition began, while the structure with a group stage (and ultimately without a final as regards 1950) had very few clashes of footballing giants. In the European World Cups of 1934 and 1938 the simple knock-out phase created very many important games, encounters between great football schools, in every phase of them.

All four of these competitions took place in countries that had their own reason to invest in football and support FIFA’s project. If this is clear for Uruguay, Italy and Brazil, the organisation on the part of France was yet another event in a series of moves whose aim was that the cultural background of world football would not be British. This is an aim that Rimet certainly achieved: world football would be forever Latin and so it remains to this day. Even if the schools of Anglo-Saxon and Protestant conception, which gave birth to the game, have a great contribution to its course and several successes, never until today have they had the upper hand as regards its projection and its social impact. Speaking of the World Cup, one usually does not think of rainy afternoons and the racial characteristics of those who gave birth to the sport, but of a very different, multi-racial content of Latin temperament.

The 1950 World Cup was the one that essentially closed an era of Latin American football that was based on fairy tales. This era may not have contained political innocence, since political forces looked to the sport as an excellent tool of connection with the masses, as well as the possibility of creating identities and therefore consciousnesses, but it contained a fair dose of footballing innocence, which led to dramatic defeats, the failure of Argentina and La Nuestra in 1930 and of course the tragic Maracanaço in 1950. The closing of this era would also mark the beginning of a new rational effort to reconstruct South American football, which would ultimately bring it into a truly equal position — and many times into a position of superiority — against European football.

The 1950 World Cup would also close the intense period of footballing symbolisms through football architecture. The construction of the Maracanã had many elements in common with that of the Centenario and of the ancestor of the Flaminio, which had also visually to reflect the ideology of a regime and to be able to bear the weight of its ideological intervention. The fact that footballing fate allotted to the Maracanã the role of becoming more the tomb of such a regime fairy tale perhaps helped so that the corresponding metaphysical approach and the elevation of the construction of a stadium into a national objective and a cause of national pride would not exist again. As regards the protagonists of that era, Uruguay and Italy paid heavily the price of their premature success, the first being considered from those years a “sleeping giant” and the second needing to go through a great adventure until it could find its international rhythm again. The great winner of this whole process was certainly FIFA, which had taken the reins of world football into its hands, was universally recognised as the institution that defines the fortunes of the sport internationally, while with the change of its headquarters to Zurich, in 1932, it was transformed from the organisation connected with the political aims of one state into an organisation with the characteristics of an international diplomatic organisation. The great loser was certainly England, which lost its most precious cultural export product — football no longer needed the English ships and trains in order to be carried to new territories, while the national team left the grounds of Brazil humiliated, having lost to Spain but also to its football-indifferent colony, the United States of America.

The Era of the Football Explosion

The first World Cup that symbolised the new post-war era was the one organised in Switzerland in 1954. At the World Cup of Brazil, many European countries were still gathering their pieces, amid the ruins of the war, and a football tournament had much less significance for peoples who were trying to get back on their feet and rediscover their old habits or discover their new ones in a very different world, which despite its fragile balances concealed an optimism of age-long peace. The socialist camp that was created after the end of the Second World War and the victory of the Soviets over the Nazis led to a new international understanding at footballing level too, with the Football Federation of the Soviet Union becoming a member of FIFA from 1946. This was not a small or peripheral event for the course of post-war football. An entire football school was integrated into the same global network, while countries that were now in the socialist camp brought a different conception of tactical development.

Things were, however, considerably more complicated at the political level and specifically as regards the future of the great defeated power of the Second World War, Nazi Germany. The German state was dismembered so that it would not be able to develop again the same aims it had created during the interwar period, after its previous military defeat. The Allied powers, that is, the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union, each took control of a part of the German territories, while the old capital Berlin was also divided separately, into four sectors, although it was located entirely within the territories under the control of the Soviets. The Cold War antagonisms, however, and the new hegemonic position of the United States in the capitalist camp led to a rupture also as regards the observance of what had been agreed at Yalta and Potsdam, with the result that the three capitalist powers founded on 23 May 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany, through the union of all the territories under their control, while in response the Soviets proceeded to the foundation of the German Democratic Republic, a few months later, on 7 October of the same year. The capital of so-called West Germany was transferred to Bonn, a small town that is essentially a suburb of Cologne, while the eastern sector of Berlin remained the capital of the East German socialist state.

In the qualifiers of the 1954 World Cup, which began in June 1953, only West Germany participated of the two new German states, playing against the national team of the Saar, a small statelet which in 1956 was absorbed by Federal Germany, and Norway. With 3 defeats and one draw the West Germans qualified for the World Cup in order to represent for the first time their new homeland, naturally carrying the great historical burden of the continuity of a criminal state — as it had been characterised by the UN but also by the Allied powers — and the need to show that their national identity could be transformed after the monstrosity of the great war of the previous decade.

In another corner of the world, on the Korean peninsula, less than a year before the start of the World Cup in Switzerland, the war ended between two regions that were under American and Soviet influence. In that case the countries that were created were the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea, which are known to this day by the names North and South Korea. South Korea, playing in a qualifying group held entirely in Tokyo, a few months before the start of the World Cup, became the second Asian team that would play in a World Cup, after the Dutch East Indies, that is, Indonesia, which had played in the 1934 competition.

Of the old European powers, three teams now represented a new political camp in the world political arena. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, as well as Hungary, were now part of another and opposing political ideology and part of a distinct football network, which together with the Soviet Union was autonomously developing football tactics. The result of the pre-existing experience at the highest footballing level, as part of the Central European network and of the new socialist tactical conception, was expressed mainly in the evolution of the Hungarian team. The initiators of the footballing transformation of the old great Hungarian school were communist football people, who were seeing a very rapid evolution in the tactics and methods of analysis of Soviet football, which the rest of the world perhaps ignored or simply underestimated. The first of these was the coach Márton Bukovi, who experimented with the centre-forward Palotás at MTK, creating a false-nine position that filled the space in front of midfield and left greater freedom in the movements of the other forwards, acquiring a more creative and not only an executing role. But as regards the national team, the great figure who wrote the history of the football tactics of socialist Hungary was a former trade unionist in the French automobile industry, Gusztáv Sebes, who had been inspired by the book “Tactics in Football” written in 1946 by the Soviet Boris Arkadiev, coach of Dinamo Moscow, a team that managed to leave unbeaten, taking a 3-3 draw from Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 1949.

Arkadiev, in this book, which essentially constituted the bible of football tactics for the countries of Eastern Europe in the first post-war years, studied the evolution of the 2-3-5 into the W-M that took place during the interwar period in England, attempting to find the points at which the new general standard of football tactics was vulnerable and rigid, in order to propose an even more developed system that could surpass it and beat it. Arkadiev’s ideas concerned mutual coverage and the changing of positions of players on the pitch, ideas that clearly also had an ideological basis, since they came from a conception of the non-limited role in the production process, but of its more overall conception by each of its members, whether this concerned the production of material goods, or the production of …goals, as happened in the object of his interest. They were, that is, ideas whose development led to the change of the physiognomy of football a few decades later.

If Soviet football, inexperienced in international encounters, could so quickly have wondrous results, such as that tour of Dinamo Moscow in England, Sebes understood that the prospects of adopting these ideas in a football school with much greater international experience could create footballing miracles. No one can say that he did not achieve it, writing indeed in golden letters the history of footballing Hungary, when on 25 November 1953, about half a year before the World Cup in Switzerland, the Magyars brought the England national team to its knees with a score of 6-3 in front of more than 100 thousand spectators who had come to Wembley to watch what was called “The Match of the Century”. Sebes’s notes clearly show the mutual coverages and the changing of positions of the Hungarian eleven, which completely blocked the English, who had remained in a mechanistic conception of football tactics that counted many decades of sterile reproduction. Hungary, indeed, repeated its triumph against the English, this time at home, on 23 May 1954, in the last game before the World Cup, winning 7-1 and once and for all dissolving whatever illusion existed about English superiority in a sport that was now global.

Hungary was drawn in Switzerland to play in the 2nd group, with the strange system of the competition bringing it up against West Germany and South Korea in matches. There could not have been a draw more fitting to the political climate of the era, since socialist Hungary, of the communist Sebes, which played a football inspired by the Soviet school, faced the two countries that the capitalist camp had created through the conflicts with the socialist one. The results were more than deafening, 9-0 against South Korea and 8-3 against Germany; the Golden Magyars, the Olympic champions of 1952, were charging through the greatest footballing arena, in a World Cup that FIFA, in the climate of the era, had brought to its new home.

The team that troubled Hungary the most was the one that proceeded to a tactical readjustment, with enormous impact on world football. The system that Hungary played, although theoretically it was a 3-2-5 or even 2-3-5, through the way the players moved could be described entirely differently. The wide defenders, the old full backs, who had left their place to the withdrawn centre-halves, although they went up from the sides, had clearly defensive duties, while with the retreat of the centre-forward the other half could also go even deeper, playing in front of the defensive line. Thus, Hungary’s system looked more like a 4-2-4, with the 2 midfield players functioning as the connecting link between attack and defence. The same system, but with a clear back four, Brazil too had begun to play after the Maracanaço — and if it had not found before it the terrible team of the descendants of Kürschner and Guttmann, who had acted upon its own footballing history, perhaps its course on the grounds of Switzerland would have been more successful. Yet on 27 June 1954, in Berne, the Hungarians had scored two goals in the first ten minutes, in order to win the quarter-final by a score of 4-2, in a game held under torrential rain and, because of its violence, which led to 3 sendings-off, went down in history as “The Battle of Berne”. In the semi-final, the overexertion and intensity of that match led to an even more difficult victory over the World Champion Uruguay, but the Hungarians managed to win in extra time by a score of 4-2, in order to return to Berne in a Final that would constitute the crowning of a triumphant course of years, of one of the best teams that have existed in the history of world football.

The final, which has remained in History as “the miracle of Berne”, is one of the most discussed games in football History. On a heavy playing field, the Hungarians could not perform the same exceptional football they had played at Wembley or in the group stage, while the tactical readjustment of the German coach Herberger, who put Horst Eckel to become the shadow of the most neuralgic Hungarian player, Nándor Hidegkuti, brought things to an extremely unexpected balance, a Gordian knot that was cut in the 84th minute with Helmut Rahn’s goal, which gave the first world title to West Germany. The golden generation of Hungary was essentially dissolved after this match, with the exit of its great stars to the countries of the West that offered large professional contracts, led by Ferenc Puskás’s so-called “galloping major”, who became a legend of the golden era of Réal Madrid.

The World Cup, however, did not cease to be absolutely tied to the narrative of the political History of the world. First it was the emergence of the new world and the existence of the South American Promised Land, then it was Italian fascism, afterwards the lost dream of the reformulation of Brazil’s multi-racial history and finally, in 1954, the triumph of the country born from the remnants of Nazism in order now to be considered an equal member of a peaceful and developing international community. The lawyer from Paris, the supporter of Rerum novarum, the Catholic visionary Jules Rimet had achieved all his aims: football was truly global, political powers understood its international arena as the best field for reflecting their prestige, the English had been marginalised and defeated footballistically, and a sport that had become a vehicle for the creation of collective identities now functioned also at national level, globally, as a central stage for reading social History. On 21 June 1954, at the Congress of Berne, Jules Rimet stepped down from the presidency of FIFA, with the Belgian Rodolphe Seeldrayers being elected to its leadership.

Four years later, at the World Cup in Sweden, football could finally be played, far from the tight binding of the competition to the aims of each political power. The period between the leadership of Jules Rimet and the rise of another official who completely changed how we understand football within the level of the economy constituted a frenzied development of footballing thought which in essence also gave birth to what we understand today as modern football. The timing was not accidental. From the middle of the 1950s onwards, the leap in economic development throughout the world, on its capitalist and socialist side, led to a rapid development of every field that required intellectual creation — the paradox would have been for football to remain outside this more general evolution that affected the sciences, the arts, letters and political thought and expression. The old interwar world had left football together with Jules Rimet and what had now remained to recall him was the trophy that bore his name, the same winners’ trophy that was presented in Montevideo, Rome, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Berne.

Among the 16 teams that would take part in the World Cup in Sweden were many that would compete for the first time in the top football competition. Northern Ireland, despite its long course in international encounters, as part of the British network, made its presence on the world stage; exactly the same also applied to Wales, while as organiser one of the first countries that participated in football competitions, Sweden, competed. Together with them, the Olympic champion of the Melbourne Games, the national team of the Soviet Union, also made its first appearance at the World Cup, having in its composition, among other things, a goalkeeper dressed in black who would change the entire conception of the function of the most particular footballing position, Lev Yashin.

Knowing naturally today the result of this competition, the interest should turn to the participation of the two South American teams in it, as well as the course they followed before its staging. As regards Argentina, the analysis of the political developments during the Peronist period is an undertaking that cannot in any case be presented to a satisfactory degree within the framework of the examination of another phenomenon, such as the World Cup, but requires the examination of all the particular and unique parameters that defined the History of the country. Perhaps, however, the most important element is the attachment of Argentine football to the innocence of La Nuestra, of the arrogant aesthetic approach, of the old school of dexterity, of the elements that made national football take a divorce from its British past. This approach, which had been strengthened through the course of the great Argentine clubs, such as River Plate’s La Máquina in the 1940s, continued to give results, with Argentina winning the Campeonato Sudamericano in 1955 and 1957, in its new form that consisted of double matches between all the competitors. However, Argentina for many years measured itself only against the football of the other South American countries, none of which, except Brazil, had a stable presence in the global competitions. On the other hand, the encounters against Brazil were never only a matter of pure footballing superiority, since many factors, even emotional and extra-football ones, judged the results of their encounters. Thus Argentina, with this approach, travelled to Sweden to measure again the stature of its football 24 years after its previous participation.

With a diametrically opposite approach, Brazil travelled to Sweden with enough raw and indeed still unknown talent, but with an extremely technocratic organisation, whose roots lay in a foundational reorganisation of its football after the Maracanaço. The representative team was administered by a technical committee that had competences for every issue concerning the life and function of the team, had specialists for the psychological preparation of the players and the analysis of their mental health, organised travel instructions that contributed to ensuring maximum athletic performance, strict discipline and a meticulousness at every level of organisation that seemed on many issues excessive. This rationalism and technocratic organisation did not at all resemble what has remained as myth for South American teams and especially that Brazil, about which everyone today knows the talent of Pelé and Garrincha, perhaps considering that its expression at the World Cup was simply the result of fate, of the metaphysical force that gave this divine gift to the Brazilian footballers.

Argentina’s course in the 1958 World Cup showed that the old football myths had ended together with the era of Rimet’s ideologisation and, in a world that created modern science, modern art, innovation in every activity, mythical stories were not enough for one to win on the pitch. The first match against Germany and the 1-3 defeat was a resounding but not catastrophic slap, which perhaps was balanced by the victory by the same score against a team with great footballing history, but little participation in World Cups, Northern Ireland. The crucial game that dissolved all myths was the match that decided qualification to the knock-outs, against Czechoslovakia. The 6-1 of Helsingborg is for Argentina perhaps the equivalent of the Maracanaço and the moment when Argentine football began a long effort to rediscover its identity — a process which fortunately for all of us who love what happens around the sport had conflicts, internal and external, and naturally an enormous ideological depth!

The most interesting group of the competition, the one that would be called metaphorically — as usually happens — the “group of death”, was the 4th, in which Brazil, the Soviet Union, England and Austria participated, three traditional powers, representatives of the three basic footballing networks that created international football and a fourth team, of a new footballing world meeting the old. If one looks from a distance at the more general history of football up to its complete homogenisation, one can say with some daring that this group had the teams that created the four basic ingredients of its global and now homogenised philosophy, even if the Austria of 1958 was no longer the Wunderteam that wrote its own golden History in the 1930s.

On the first matchday Brazil prevailed over Austria 3-0, while the Soviet Union gave a demonstration of the tactical evolution that characterised its football, almost unknown to Westerners, drawing with England, having led the game 2-0 until the 56th minute. The match between Brazil and England also ended in a draw, a goalless draw, while the Soviet Union beat Austria 2-0 on the second matchday. This meant that Brazil’s game with the Soviet Union was extremely crucial, since it could put out of continuation whoever left it defeated. At the Ullevi stadium of Göteborg it was time for one of the boldest decisions in the history of football, a decision for which the whole planet, however, can be grateful. Two players who had not appeared again in a World Cup, the 25-year-old Manuel Francisco dos Santos and the 18-year-old Edson Arantes do Nascimento, appeared with the numbers 11 and 10 on their yellow shirts. The technical committee, in all its rationalism, had judged that the two players were not ready to take on the burden of national representation in the international arena and would not be able to adapt so well to the innovation of the clear 4-2-4 played by Feola’s team. But fortunately rationalism, when based on limited parameters, can be an entirely wrong assessment, with the result that those known to the football world as Garrincha and Pelé began a legendary course on the central footballing stage of the planet. With two goals from Vavá, Brazil beat the Soviets and, given the draw between England and Austria, the Soviet Union needed to beat the English with a goal from Anatoli Ilyin in order to pass to the next round.

In the knock-outs Brazil beat Wales 1-0 with Pelé’s first World Cup goal, while in the semi-final against France the 18-year-old superstar scored his first hat-trick in a World Cup, drawing the eyes of the whole world, even if this came against a team of 10 players, since the French captain Robert Jonquet left injured in the 9th minute, shortly after the goal of the top scorer of the competition, Just Fontaine, who to this day holds the record for top scorer in a single competition with the 13 goals he scored on the Swedish grounds. Pelé again left history in the final at Råsunda Park in Stockholm, against the hosts, and with 5-2 Brazil had exorcised, through the organisation and rationalism of its football, the tragedy of the metaphysical Maracanaço. It took only 8 years for it to pass from hell to paradise and the proper utilisation of the spontaneous talent of a country which, although it lacks the basic infrastructures, compared with the European national teams, does not stop creating footballers who offer beauty to football through devotion to its organisation. The theories of mestiçagem of 1950, which had nothing to do with football, had in less than a decade given way to the most beautiful and material footballing myth: jogo bonito, which would make people dream with open eyes until football found an entirely new identity, in an ever-changing world.

In the same period, humanity was discovering that what is constantly changing is not only the social edifice, but also the very material basis of the existence of our species, the planet that hosts us. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, technological development helped the collection of bathymetric data as well as the installation of seismographic networks that confirmed the validity of Alfred Wegener’s theory about the existence of lithospheric plates and the mechanism of their movement. The inhabitants of Chile would live the application of this physical theory with deadly consequences on 22 May 1960, when the largest earthquake recorded in history, with magnitude 9.5, would occur with its epicentre near the city of Valdivia. The country that would host the 1962 World Cup, before being shaken by the pulse of a World Cup, was shaken for several minutes in order to find itself counting incalculable material destructions before the organisation of the 7th edition of the great footballing institution.

Chile had claimed the organisation of the World Cup against Argentina, which considered that it was finally entitled to organise an institution on its soil. In an extremely opportunistic campaign, the president of the organising committee Carlos Dittborn managed to convince the members of FIFA of the significance of the article that provided for the priority that countries with underdeveloped football had for the staging of the World Cup. Dittborn of course had not foreseen — as no one ever foresaw — the deadly earthquake that destroyed the cities of Valdivia, Concepción, Talca and Talcahuano, which although they were to host matches, were ultimately left outside the planning of the competition. After the earthquake, Dittborn proposed to the president of the country, Jorge Alessandri, release from the obligation of the organisation, so that the resources intended for the World Cup could be used for the reconstruction of the regions that had been struck; however, Alessandri, like so many other political officials in History, saw in the organisation of the World Cup a much greater political opportunity than the legacy of the rational handling of the destructive consequences of a natural phenomenon.

Carlos Dittborn died of cardiac arrest in April 1962, a few months before the start of the competition, while on 25 March 1961 the English President of FIFA Arthur Drewry also died, with the result that at the London Congress, in September of the same year, the last official of World Football before its transformation into one of the most important business fields was elected as his successor. Stanley Rous, former referee, formed through the base of the footballing organism, led the World Confederation in an era in which football found its new identity, since he was the first who managed to remain for a long time in the position of head of FIFA after its historic President, Jules Rimet.

The world perhaps expected a competition that would constitute the continuation of the footballing prosperity presented 4 years earlier on the grounds of Sweden. Yet the information coming from Chile did not show that such a thing was possible to happen. Sometimes, indeed, this information perhaps exceeded the limits of criticism, with the reports of the Italian journalists Antonio Ghirelli and Corrado Pizzinelli constituting texts contemptuous of the country, describing, beyond the absence of infrastructures, Santiago as “the sad symbol of an underdeveloped country”, directly attacking FIFA’s decision to give the responsibility of the organisation to the country of South America, “13000 kilometres away”, expressing a Eurocentric and therefore racist conception of the world. These reports did not help the national team of Italy, since when on 2 June the Squadra Azzurra faced the hosts Chile at the Estadio Nacional of Santiago, the climate was particularly hostile, with the hosts treating the “battle of Santiago” as a matter of national honour and ultimately winning 2-0, essentially eliminating the Italians from the continuation.

Yet the World Cup of Chile was not characterised only by the heavy climate and the harshness of this game. The violence of football made a triumphal entrance, knocking out the great star of Brazil, Pelé, in the second game of the group, the goalless draw with Czechoslovakia. Pelé could not continue in the competition, leaving the role of protagonist to Garrincha, while the Soviet footballer Eduard Dubinski suffered a terrible injury in the first match, from an action by the Yugoslav Muhamed Mujić that was not even noted as a foul, but led to serious health problems and ultimately to the premature death of the Soviet defender 7 years later. Within all the heavy climate of destroyed infrastructures, violent football and injured players, one more tragic event came to make the competition seem cursed. The eight-year-old Chilean Manuel Molina González, who followed the national team of Uruguay, supporting it fervently, died of cardiac arrest after the defeat of the Celeste by Yugoslavia in the third game of the group, which meant its elimination from the continuation.

England managed for the first time to pass from the group stage, where it faced Brazil, losing 3-1 in Viña del Mar, while Chile managed to beat the Soviet Union in Arica. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia completed the quartet of the semi-finals, which meant that this was the first competition since 1930 in which no Western European country managed to reach the last four. Brazil found Czechoslovakia again in the final, in a game with much more spectacle than that of the group and under the direction of the Soviet referee Nikolay Latyshev, who thus completed the Western European absence from the culmination of the competition; with goals by Amarildo, Zito and Vavá, it won the second consecutive World Cup, repeating after 24 years the achievement of Vittorio Pozzo’s Italy. The great difference was that this Brazilian team still had much future ahead of it for more successes and the whole world did not stand on the threshold of a destructive war, but in an era of rapid social progress and development.

The World Cup of Chile took place at a crossroads of football history where different directions would rise for the evolution of the football of many countries. The Western European countries may have been outside the last four, but they had already well begun the functioning of their own footballing network, since in 1954 UEFA was founded, in the 1955-56 season the so-called European Cup began, that which was known as the Champion Clubs’ Cup and evolved into the Champions League, while in 1960 the first final phase of the UEFA European Nations’ Cup was also held in France. The absence of a broader footballing network in Europe had earlier allowed only national teams from specific regions to distinguish themselves in the World Cup, while the advantage of the South American teams, which had their own corresponding competition from 1916, was great. Gradually Europe would recover dominance in the evolution of the sport and the teams of South America would have to reformulate the foundations of their footballing conception, as Brazil had done from those years, because of the Maracanaço. This evolution would be more visible in the course of Argentina.

The 1966 World Cup was held in the homeland of the FIFA President, Stanley Rous, and the homeland of football itself. As happens with all football competitions that have taken place in England, the slogan was that “football was coming home”. The United Kingdom, however, no longer had any relation to the great Empire that spread the sport across the whole planet. In a decade dominated by the independence of many states that belonged to the old Empire, something that in the football firmament would become visible later, England, as the central state of Great Britain, also changes the profile through which the rest of the world sees it. It modernises above all culturally; London, from the seat of an aristocratic and colonial class that dominates the whole planet, becomes the laboratory of a new cultural explosion, with the rock of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, the film productions of James Bond, the new trends of British fashion, within a framework that escapes from aristocratic protocols and touches the thought of the protagonists of the industrial revolution, of the popular and middle strata, which among other things were also the protagonists of British football.

Perhaps there could not have been a more suitable moment for the World Cup to be organised in England — this cultural base was much closer to football than the outdated conception of imperial Britain trying to impose itself, with excessive superiority complex, on the rest of the planet. What England also did not lack was football culture, stadiums, enormous crowds living for football. In contrast with the examples of Uruguay and Brazil, for instance, in England there was no need for a new stadium to be built to host the final, nor for others to be constructed to host the matches of the great competition — the grounds where the English clubs played were already among the most legendary footballing temples of the world. What might have seemed decline for an Empire was the modernisation of a country that no longer had anything else with which to create its national identity than the production of cultural and intellectual innovation. Correspondingly innovative, too, its football had to be in order for this competition to help the host country put its own stamp, as culture, on its place in the world.

England, with Alf Ramsey at the head of its technical staff, the offspring of a family from the non-privileged classes of the English countryside and a veteran of the Second World War, was footballistically harmonised with the development of its popular culture. Football was no longer an ideological framework for the development of physical force, nor, however, a cultural product of the display of superiority, since the deafening defeat by Hungary at Wembley in 1953 and the failures in the World Cups that followed had created the necessary humility and the need for the organisation of national football in such a way that it could once again find itself in a position of protagonist, if not inspirer then at least dominant in the world football firmament. Thus, the mechanistic evolution of tactics, which in the past created a stagnation, now meant that the footballing ideas born in other countries and by representatives of other schools were not rejected, but examined, used for the formation of the physiognomy of English football. In a few words, since world football could no longer be English, then perhaps it would be a good solution for English football to become global. Having as a base for these experiments an always very strong league, with clubs that had enormous, stable and loyal supporter bases, with many categories of competitive teams, England could present a new way of organising and developing football to the rest of the world, claiming the lion’s share in its modern reformulation.

In the World Cup, of course, the aim was victory and the conquest of the institution, and so the first match against Uruguay, in the opening game of 11 July, which ended in a goalless draw, was not considered an ideal start. Against Mexico and France, however, the English managed to achieve two victories by the same score (2-0) and to qualify relatively easily for the knock-out phase. There they would meet Argentina, which seemed to be recovering from the shock of Helsingborg, beating Spain and Switzerland in its own group and drawing goalless with West Germany, to progress as the second team of the 2nd group. Yet Argentina was not the one that appeared in the interwar years. A great change had taken place after the World Cup of Sweden.

The coaching triumvirate that took charge of the national team immediately after the Swedish shock consisted of Victorio Spinetto, José Barreiro and José Della Torre. Of these, surely the most influential personality in the evolution of Argentine football was Spinetto, a footballer who had essentially grown up within the club of Vélez, which as an outsider in the football of Argentina and Buenos Aires had to find alternative ways to manage a distinction. Spinetto, who had taken charge of Vélez as coach from 1942 to 1956, managed to bring the club back to the first division and to win the 1953 championship. Later he passed through Atlanta, before taking charge of the national team in two different spells, from 1959 to 1961. Spinetto was essentially an enemy of the ideological aestheticism of Argentine football, of La Nuestra. In contrast with his predecessor, Guillermo Stábile, the great protagonist of the 1930 World Cup, he believed that this naive approach belonged completely to the past, trying to transform football of spectacle into football of purpose. Certainly, winning the Campeonato Sudamericano in 1959 was a result that convinced many of his approach — people sought results more than performance. Spinetto, however, among other things, was also the mentor of Osvaldo Zubeldía, who played at Vélez from 1949 to 1955 and found Spinetto again as coach at Atlanta in the 1958-1959 season. In 1965 Zubeldía took over as coach of the national team, continuing the work of his mentor.

But what was the football that Spinetto envisioned and Zubeldía developed to a notorious degree? Football of purpose was that which gave no importance to characteristics such as the aesthetic of the game, the beauty of cooperation, the conception of the development of any competitive plan; it was instead the conception that football is the sport where, within the 4 lines of the playing field, for 90 minutes one must do whatever is possible to win. Instead of tactical boards, referees were hired by his teams to explain the loopholes of the regulations; instead of scouting the way the opposing players played, a hunt for information about their personal life was conducted, in order to find the ways and means that would crush their psychology during the game. It was what was called in Argentina anti-fútbol and representatives of this school defend its principles to this day, with the main representative being Cholo Simeone, the coach of Atlético Madrid.

The turn of Argentina from La Nuestra, aesthetic naivety, to anti-fútbol, the extreme expression of football for the result, is however only the reading of the events. The basic ideological question around this evolution is how such a conception was able to develop so quickly in Argentine football. If one studies carefully the History of Argentine football and keeps as the most important element of La Nuestra its ideological basis of secession of national football from its English characteristics, then the transition to anti-fútbol can be read as the return to the roots, that is, to the game that was based on physical force, the one that the British bourgeoisie carried with it to every corner of the world, the one it first developed at home, until the combination game of the English workers, the clubs of the North and the national team of Scotland dominated.

The quarter-final held on 23 June 1966 at Wembley, between England and Argentina, did not only bring face to face two teams that shared common roots in their footballing History; it was held at a moment when Argentina was approaching the British roots of its game, in order through this to beat the English. The Argentines, however, were already notorious for this approach and the West German referee Rudolf Kreitlein was ready not to let the game become an arena. Thus he began to whistle every suspicion of an Argentine foul, before the eyes of 90,584 spectators at Wembley, among whom naturally was the president of FIFA, who had every interest in seeing the team of his country leave the encounter victorious. Knowing also Zubeldía’s “tricks” regarding the way the players gather around the referee in order to complain about every slightest decision, thus exerting their own pressure on the ruler of the encounter, he did not hesitate in the 35th minute to send off the captain of the albiceleste, Antonio Rattín, giving a very significant advantage to the hosts. Rattín of course did not leave the pitch, since there was no red card and there was also a problem of communication with the West German referee, in the absence of a translator. This led to chaos, with the tens of thousands of English in the stands seeing the Argentine captain as a red rag. Finally, when he left, the touch of the British flag that stood at the corner point did not need much to be interpreted in various ways and to give deeper explanations to a conflict that on that day began as purely footballing. It is characteristic that there are stories from that time saying that English mothers told their children that if they did not eat their food, Rattín would come. Within 90 minutes, Argentina and England became perhaps the two most hated opponents in the history of the World Cups, and the cherry on the cake was put by Alf Ramsey himself, who in the tension of the whole encounter, which was decided by a Hurst goal in the 78th minute, declared that his team’s opponents behaved as animals, in a statement that has over time been considered by Argentines a direct racist attack.

With Uruguay also being eliminated in the quarter-finals by West Germany and World Champion Brazil seeing Pelé injured in the first game with Bulgaria, without managing to qualify from the 3rd group against Portugal and Hungary, South American football had failed completely in England in 1966 and the Western European teams that had been absent from the quartet of semi-finalists 4 years earlier took the first 3 places, with the final ticket from the quarter-finals being won by the Soviet Union against Hungary. The final between England and West Germany was decided by a goal by Hurst which the Germans still maintain to this day never existed (and they are probably right), and another in the dying moments, at the time of whose achievement, within a general pandemonium, supporters had already entered the playing field.

The English had found themselves at the top of the world, Bobby Moore wiped the mud from his hands on the velvet covering that surrounded the officials’ stand in order to receive the trophy from the Queen, while at the head of the World Confederation stood an Englishman. Yet these conditions, which perhaps half a century earlier could have meant the full domination of the English, as the inspirers of the game, as regards its global evolution, now meant exactly the opposite: the great success of the England national team in winning in the competition of the others. The reformulated aim had been achieved: instead of the global game becoming English, the English game managed to become global.

The world of the 1960s, however, was under the influence of other forces, far from Great Britain, and the conquest of new seas and oceans that built the Empire of the previous centuries had now given way to the conquest of interplanetary space, of near space, in a mad race between the United States and the Soviet Union. On 10 July 1962, the satellite Telstar 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, an experimental prototype device that found itself travelling in geostationary orbit for 63 years, 10 months and 27 days. It was the American answer to Sputnik, the great success of the beginning of the United States satellite programme for the establishment of space telecommunications technology. Those first Telstar satellites were spherical, mainly white in colour, while the solar radiation collectors placed on them seemed to create dark-coloured planes. Perhaps there was no other scientific development in History that influenced football more, on a symbolic but also material level.

The existence of telecommunications satellites meant that an image from any point on the planet could be transmitted very quickly to any other. This technique was what essentially transformed football from a mass phenomenon into a global phenomenon. If the evolution of industrial typography, the existence of newspapers and the evolution of the British educational system created the first great football clubs, whose reach extended as far as the news of their competitive activity travelled, printed on paper, the football of every country in the world could enter every home, with sound and image, through a television receiver. The first World Cup that sealed this revolution was the one held in Mexico in 1970.

Perhaps the greatest symbol from that era is that which has remained as the model of the football. When someone asks us to imagine a football, the first image formed in our mind is the well-known ball with the 32 stitched pieces, the white hexagons that surround the black pentagons. This ball is placed everywhere, in every symbol, as an emblem of the football game. For the younger generations it is very difficult to imagine that it did not exist before 1970. This black-and-white ball was created for the needs of television transmission, since it had to stand out on the green grass on receivers that obviously did not have the clarity of today’s televisions. What, then, would be its name? In one of the most inspired acts of naming in the History of world commerce, this ball took the name of the telecommunications satellite that was opening new paths for information, propaganda, global planning, as well as football: this ball was the Telstar. Initially constructed by a Danish goalkeeper, Eigil Nielsen, for the company Select, it was adopted as a design by the company of a German manufacturer of athletic shoes, with a shadowy past during the period of Nazism, Adolf “Adi” Dassler, from whose full name Adidas took its name. The ball that was first used in the 1968 European Nations’ Cup became the official ball of the 1970 World Cup and from that year began one of FIFA’s most historic collaborations with a sports goods company, opening paths for the extensive commodification of every side of the sport and its competitions.

Although most television receivers, in many countries, may still have been black and white, the image from the World Cup grounds was recorded and processed so that it would be spread in colour and archived in the same colour in the audiovisual material of football History. Technological evolution was not enough; football itself also had to be beautiful, so that a symbol would remain in perpetuity for this transition, from the football of highlights, printed matter and stories, to the football of image, of moving memories. Perhaps no other colour could have fit more than that of the Brazilian shirt, which from white became yellow after the Maracanaço, contrasting with the colour of the grass, the deep blue shorts and the white socks, which all together created an archetypal footballing colour palette.

Brazil, after the first appearance of jogo bonito in Sweden, which broke the historical curse, and after the violence in Chile and in England, was ready in Mexico to perform a monumental footballing spectacle. The situation on its bench, however, in the years of the 1960s seemed more chaotic than ever; coaches changed constantly and until April 1969, a year and a little before the start of the World Cup, no stable plan for the development of the national team’s game existed. Then the fate of the Seleção was taken over by João Saldanha, a communist, naturally an enemy of the regime, who saw the change coming in European football, with the handing over of the sceptres of romantic football to a tactic that was adapted to the disappearance of mistakes, sacrificing together with them creation too. Saldanha managed, in the 17 games in which he guided the Seleção, to win all 17, but he exaggerated in his plans, causing tremors in the cohesion of the team, reaching the point of expressing views also on the exclusion of Pelé from the squad for the coming World Cup. These internal conflicts cost him his position and he was succeeded by one of the most emblematic coaches in the History of the national team, Mário Zagallo, world champion in Sweden in 1958 and in Chile in 1962, that is, a team-mate of the great stars, who was closely connected with Pelé. Zagallo was able to balance this team, to impose the necessary discipline in the preparation for a World Cup that would be held at high altitude, but also to choose an innovative system that did not remain fixed on formation, but allowed creation, relying on the characteristics of the composition he had at his disposal.

Because there is no great victory without a great opponent, a team that seemed to come from the past, a great footballing school, made its appearance again on the world stage. Italy’s return was not accidental — the founding of UEFA and the staging of the European Cup allowed a country that has an extremely analytical approach to football to create new ideas, on top of those that had remained incomplete from the old School of the Danube. Some of the words that were then added to the vocabulary of football, such as libero, catenaccio, trequartista, reflect a way of playing with devotion to defensive function, elimination of mistakes and opportunistic use of counter-attacks in order for each goal and victory to be achieved. The teams of Milan, Inter and Milan, developed their own approach to a style of play that gave increased responsibilities to the libero and the regista, who created the game in the axis from the depth of the pitch, leaving freedom of choices to the quick forwards. Players such as Cesare Maldini and Gianni Rivera embodied these roles at Milan, while Sandro Mazzola emerged from the Inter of the inspirer of catenaccio, Helenio Herrera. With this approach the teams of Milan won a total of 3 European Cups during the 1960s.

The federal coach, Ferruccio Valcareggi, could not escape very far from the spirit of Italian football of the era, at a moment when he in fact had a series of players, such as Pierluigi Cera and the great scorer Gigi Riva from Cagliari, who could be integrated into the same logic. Italy got the results it needed in every phase, passing first from the group with only one victory and two draws, against Sweden, Uruguay and Israel, respectively, while in the quarter-finals it triumphed 4-1 against Mexico, which was playing at home. On 17 June at the Estadio Azteca of Mexico City, Italy needed, however, an unreal performance, in a game that is considered to this day the best in the history of the World Cups, in order to beat West Germany 4-3, in extra time, in an encounter with successive reversals and a constantly increasing rhythm and intensity, which, if there had been no final whistle, seemed ready to lead to explosion.

In a World Cup whose physiognomy had begun to reflect the new post-colonial world, since Morocco participated, representing Africa for the first time after 46 years, and the newly founded Israel from the Asian Confederation, colour abounded in every manifestation. It is this colour that the team of Brazilian artists, Pelé, Tostão, Rivelino, Gérson, Jairzinho, bound together on a footballing canvas, taking as much freedom as they needed from Zagallo’s instructions in order to create moving images of works of art. That Brazil was unstoppable, 4-1 in the opening game against Czechoslovakia, 1-0 against World Champion England and 3-2 against Romania in the 3rd group, 4-2 against Peru and 3-1 against Uruguay in the knock-outs, in order to find in the Final, opposite it, that dangerous Italy, a team that, like the Brazilians, had conquered the World Cup twice. Catenaccio was capable of giving titles on European grounds, but at the altitude of Mexico, there where time is measured differently and creation finds the necessary space to unfold in a less suffocating framework, contrary to the absence of oxygen, it could have no answer to Brazilian superiority in armament. Although the score of the first half was 1-1 with goals by Pelé and Boninsegna, in the second half Gérson, Jairzinho and Carlos Alberto, arriving from a position outside the television screen, wrote the final 4-1 that created dreams of a football combining beauty and result! This conclusion would fade quickly, but the Brazilian dream game had been recorded forever in the consciousnesses of humanity and on the films with technicolor processing, so that for decades it would constitute the definition of ideal football and place Brazil in an informal position connected with the stereotypically given global footballing summit. From 1970 onwards Brazil, whether it lost or won, was and remains the greatest footballing power on the planet.

Thus began the History of modern football, from the apotheosis of its old era…

Modern Football

At the FIFA congress held in London in 1966, under the leadership of Stanley Rous, the countries that would organise the World Cups of 1974, 1978 and 1982 were elected and announced, thus creating the conditions for the long-term planning of the competition and of the course of the sport globally. Yet, before the 1974 World Cup was organised on the grounds of West Germany, football would change radically, in a way that seems permanent to our days. As usually happens, a few days before the start of the great competition, the FIFA Congress was organised, which that year took place in Frankfurt and, like every Congress in a World Cup year, also had on the agenda the election of the president of the World Confederation. Never before, however, had the campaign of a candidate been a political campaign of global dimensions, as it was that year.

A former swimming athlete from Brazil, who had participated in the 1936 Olympic Games and had been the president of the Brazilian Sports Confederation from 1958 to 1973, was setting course for the — perhaps — most powerful position of sporting official in the world. João Havelange, the son of a Belgian immigrant from Liège, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1916, was destined to change world football administratively, commercially, politically and finally in the consciousnesses of all peoples in a way even more influential than the great inspirer of the global dimension of the sport, Jules Rimet.

In order to achieve the aim of overturning Stanley Rous, Havelange used countless FIFA resources to make his intercontinental journeys, to win the favour of the national federations that voted at the Congress, literally spending the last dollar he could for this purpose. Stanley Rous, unaccustomed to this technocratic globalised world, despite his connections, did not manage to remain at the head of FIFA and thus Havelange began his first term, part of a long course, on his birthday, 8 May 1974. His first move for the financing of his programme, given that nothing had been left in the coffers after his global political campaign, was the conclusion of cooperation contracts with the companies Adidas and Coca-Cola, which from then on became permanent sponsors of the World Cup.

Beyond the aesthetic of the sponsors that imprinted the political hue of the World Cup held in West Germany, a further series of aesthetic elements marked the new era. The old-style trophy, the Jules Rimet Cup, was replaced by the FIFA Cup, a statuette 36.5 centimetres high, weighing 5 kilos and made of 18-carat gold, designed by Silvio Gazzaniga, depicting two athletes holding on their backs and raised hands the entire globe, which would become the new “holy grail” of the footballing planet. As regards the grounds that hosted the competition, their modernist architecture, with the leading example being the Olympiastadion of Munich, which two years earlier had hosted the Olympic Games, symbolised the reconstruction of a country built upon the ruins of a nightmarish military defeat and on the past of a criminal state. What had happened symbolically in the 1954 World Cup with West Germany’s victory, 20 years later appeared on the television receivers of the entire planet as material proof. A discordance, deliberate or accidental, was the inclusion of the Olympiastadion of West Berlin, the stadium that had hosted the Hitleriad of 1936, among the grounds that would host the matches of the competition, among them the hosts’ opening game against Chile, a country where another stadium was writing corresponding black pages in the History of the state of the South Pacific.

The draw brought things in such a way that in the group stage West Germany had the chance to achieve yet another great symbolic victory, facing East Germany in the last match of the first phase. In the game in Hamburg, however, which did not claim laurels of footballing quality, the team of the People’s Republic left victorious thanks to the goal scored by Jürgen Sparwasser, a footballer of Magdeburg, in the 77th minute.

The second group stage directly determined the pair of the final. In this phase the world truly saw one of the most terrible national teams that have ever existed. On the north-western borders of West Germany, a country that had always constituted a cutting edge of intellectual innovation followed, in the post-war period, the same modernist steps, inspired by the De Stijl of Piet Mondrian and those around him, reshaping its cities, creating new ground for the life of its working class. This innovation broke the limits of Protestantism and of absolute, moralising discipline, which hindered the development of a sport in which creation is a basic component. Through the concrete buildings sprang a new consciousness of youthful insolence, which became the raw material with which an entire footballing philosophy was built. The generation of the post-war boom could not fit within the moral limits of the generation of the war, and neither could the footballers, poor devils, who appeared from the modern working-class neighbourhoods around De Meer, the historic home of Ajax in the southern suburbs of Amsterdam. This talent was taken on, to be put in order, first by Vic Buckingham and then by Rinus Michels, who in order to manage it broke all the rules known until then in football — or almost all.

The last great school that had won Europe’s admiration was the terrible team of the Hungarians. The approaches of the teams that won the European Cup in the 1960s were excessively realistic and conservative — and although they secured the desired result, they could not successfully cope with the difficult tasks set by the creativity of South American and at that time more specifically Brazilian football. In two places in Europe, however, pioneers of football tactics worked with the aim of developing, instead of a system, a set of ideas that would create a new game, with greater flexibility and fluidity, which could cope with any situation. These principles came from different schools, such as, for example, pressing when the ball is lost, from Soviet football, the artificial offside (offside trap) from the 4-2-4 of Eastern Europe, the exchanges of positions and the covering of space by team-mates from Hungarian football of the 1950s, quick circulation from the combination game, the compression of the opponent when he has possession and the opening of spaces when you have the ball. It is not at all accidental that these ideas appeared, through different routes, at the same time in two footballing schools, from two different coaches: Valeriy Lobanovskiy in the Soviet Union and Dinamo Kyiv, and Rinus Michels in the Netherlands and Ajax.

The entry of television into football, which allowed the more direct exchange of experiences and footballing thought, the greater number of games at global and regional level, the international club competitions that had begun both in Europe and in South America, as well as the establishment of a fully professional framework for the sport, were the factors that created the foundations for a new universal footballing approach. For this reason it did not appear only in one place. And if the Soviet Union did not participate in the 1974 World Cup, refusing to play a qualifying match with Chile at the Estadio Nacional, which was a place of martyrdom for the political prisoners of the Pinochet regime, the Netherlands was the team that brought this innovation to the grounds of West Germany. Before the World Cup, of course, the world had admired the same elements in Rinus Michels’s Ajax, which won 3 consecutive European Cups, the last 2 under the guidance of the Romanian Ştefan Kovács, from 1971 to 1973.

Apart from the goalless draw with Sweden in the first group stage, Michels’s Netherlands, with superstar Johan Cruyff, who was the epitome of the embodiment of the insolent and innovative totaalvoetbal, Neeskens, who constituted Cruyff’s alter ego in the triumvirate of total football, as well as a series of hyper-talented players who emerged within this new way of suffocating expression of footballing creation, seemed unstoppable. 2-0 against Uruguay, 4-1 against Bulgaria, 4-0 against Argentina, which was still searching for its ideological step, balancing between aesthetic naivety and anti-footballing discipline, 2-0 against East Germany and 2-0 against World Champion Brazil, in order to find itself in the Final of Munich, on 7 July.

There things seemed almost predetermined, with the Dutch changing 14 passes from the kick-off of the match until they won the penalty that Neeskens converted into a goal to give his team the lead in the 2nd minute. Yet if there was something one should have learned from the finals of Montevideo, the Maracanã and Berne, it is that no such great match allows complacency, devotion to the aesthetic and not to the result. The West Germans, who were coming from a very difficult tournament, with internal disputes that intensified after the defeat by East Germany, found the way to spoil the Dutch footballing party and finally, as they had done 20 years earlier, to leave with the trophy from a match in which opposite them they had the greatest footballing school of their era. Through this paradoxical victory, which now seemed repetitive, also came the phrase that football is a game in which 22 players play for 90 minutes and in the end the Germans win.

West Germany was winning yet another Cup that symbolised its post-war History, the course after Nazi brutality, the victory of the camp of the capitalists who founded the state of the Federal Republic, and thus it seemed almost condemned every time it wins to attach to its victory this identity. Would it ever win while leaving the world to speak only about the football it played? Given the teams it had faced in finals until then, this was becoming even more difficult.

More difficult, however, for the entire planet, was the future created by the end of the period of post-war development that had seemed endless for about 30 years. New antagonisms, wars, authoritarian regimes, would spring up at every edge of the Earth, most often with the support of the great imperialist power, the United States, which especially as regards the western hemisphere considered every interventionist move part of the Monroe Doctrine, a foundation that theoretically secures the existence of its federal state. Not at all difficult, on the other hand, was it for Havelange to assist in the organisation of a World Cup which, as History brought things, would be the first that would directly contribute to the whitewashing and radiance of an authoritarian regime, 44 years after the World Cup of Italy.

Argentina had managed in 1966 at the Congress of London, at last, to take on the organisation of a World Cup, in 1978, but political developments would give it an entirely different historical hue. They would create, however, at the same time, a huge and deep discussion about the role of football within conditions of state violence and repression, reopening a subject that had been put in drawers after that competition of 1934. Can a footballing victory of a national team not express the dictator that governs it?

In 1974 the Argentine leader and for many years President of the country, Juan Perón, died. Within a climate of permanent conflicts between his supporters, leftist armed groups that defended bourgeois democracy and the army that wanted to rid itself of populist Peronist power, his widow Isabel took over the leadership of the country for two years during which the far-right para-state organisations began to run riot, until the coup of 1976 that brought power into the hands of the military junta and was marked by 5,000 killed and missing communists, 5,000 killed and imprisoned fighters of the People’s Democratic Army, 22 to 30 thousand disappeared and 12 thousand prisoners in 340 concentration camps. The regime, which was supported ideologically and materially, with 50 million dollars of military aid, by the United States, could use the World Cup for its positive international projection. FIFA once again was an assistant in this criminal work, refusing even to receive Amnesty International’s report on the regime’s crimes.

And if within the years of propaganda many Argentines did not know what was truth and what was lie, so much so that they often needed emigrant relatives to bring them news of the truth of the homeland they lived in, this ignorance was not something that characterised the federal coach, a coach who had served at Huracán, presenting beautiful football within the years of anti-fútbol, believing that the principles of the Argentine game should not be abandoned for the sake of the result, but should evolve. Luis César Menotti, who with these ideas won the Metropolitano championship of 1973, said: “There is football of the right and football of the left. Football of the right proposes that life is a battle. It asks for sacrifices. We must become steely and win by every means… to obey and function, that is what those who have power want from the players. Thus they create backward people, useful idiots who go along with the system.”

In contrast, that is, with the militarist Pozzo, who carried the Italy national team to the battlefields of the First World War, who played military marches with a gramophone in the dressing rooms, who designed football tactics as if he were at war, Menotti was the opposing ideological pole of the system of the criminal Argentine junta. In Pozzo’s case there was no dilemma about what was at stake in the footballing victory, even if he was not officially a supporter of the fascist party; his ideas about the homeland and football did not clash with those of the dictator. Menotti, however, essentially had to win with a team in a competition that was being instrumentalised by his ideological opponent. If Argentina is the country that ideologises its football more than any other, as Jonathan Wilson writes, that was perhaps the moment when this ideologisation reached the level of philosophy, not of an abstract and perhaps indifferent philosophical search, but of entirely material philosophy, of ethics, of the stance towards the History of human beings.

In the dressing room, there where football has no room for hypocrisy, Menotti finally told his players: “We are the people. We come from the oppressed classes and represent the only thing that is legitimate in this country — football. We do not play for the expensive seats that are filled with military men. We represent freedom, not dictatorship.” It is not certain that this position would have satisfied the mothers of the tens of thousands of disappeared who were desperately seeking international visibility and finally justice; however, it is certainly a page that writes a different chapter in the history of the relationship of football with power, diametrically opposite to the one written by Pozzo.

Menotti’s Argentina had talent, it had naturally the support of a bloodthirsty system, it played at home, it had an entirely new footballing philosophy and could after decades claim something it had not even approached in the post-war World Cups in which it participated, although there had always been a great “if” about the 1966 competition. In the opening game it beat Hungary, in the second match France and in the last match of the first group stage it almost handed first place to Italy, losing 1-0. In the second group stage it beat Poland 2-0, drew goalless with Brazil and in order to find itself in the final it had to beat Peru by more than 4 goals. The final score at the Gigante de Arroyito in Rosario, 6-0, caused intense discussions while the arrows were gathered by the Argentine-born Peruvian goalkeeper Ramón Quiroga. The truth is that Quiroga was not bad in that game, making a series of difficult saves — even if that result was fixed, surely those responsible had fixed it in a much better way than exposing Peru’s goalkeeper. Indeed, it is characteristic that in the first minutes of the match Peru had a shot on the post with Muñante and one great chance from a shot by Juan Carlos Oblitas.

The truth is that the only historical source that spoke clearly of a fixed result in that match was the English Sunday Times, which published an article stating that Argentina bought 35,000 tonnes of grain from Peru and released 50 million dollars of frozen Peruvian assets. Of course, this article was published on the day of England’s match with Argentina in the 1986 World Cup, while the relevant proof was never found, nor ever presented.

With this result Argentina passed to the Final of 25 June, where it faced the Netherlands, which was guided by a legendary figure of European football, Ernst Happel, but did not have Johan Cruyff in its composition. Although in many narratives it has remained implied that this refusal of Cruyff to travel had to do with his opposition to playing in the World Cup that was being held under Videla’s regime, a careful reading of his biography leads to the conclusion that other reasons, having to do with his personal life and fears for the safety of his family, led him to the decision not to distance himself from it in the summer of ’78. Cruyff himself had given various interpretations from time to time in interviews regarding this stance, but it seems that the causes of his absence were not ideological.

The Netherlands was, however, the team that continued to play the wondrous totaalvoetbal that moved the planet; however, even if it was more suspicious at the Monumental, it did not manage to beat Argentina in normal time and the albiceleste, with goals by Kempes and Bertoni in extra time, brought the World trophy for the first time into the hands of a country that had contributed as few others had to the global dissemination and widening of the sport. The regime obviously made due use of this success, leaving a black stain on the achievement of Menotti’s footballers.

And if Menotti’s modernised La Nuestra won the title on Argentine grounds, four years later, on the grounds of Spain, el flaco would have to face yet another ghost from the past of Argentine footballing mythology. A short footballer, raised in the potreros of Villa Fiorito, in the middle of the 1970s began to enchant the minds of Argentines, appearing as the direct personification of that mythical figure, the Pibe, which the columnist of El Gráfico, Borrocotó, described 50 years earlier as the mythical embodiment of the Argentine footballer. Diego Maradona, having first won domestic football, although he had missed the chance to play in the ’78 World Cup, would make his first appearance in 1982 as the greatest footballer in the world. The football of Argentina had one more adventure before it, which would last decades.

Far, however, from such romantic mythical approaches, the absolutely realist and technocrat Havelange envisioned a different tournament from the one he had received from Stanley Rous. Television contracts were now a central competence of FIFA, the sponsors tied to the chariot of the competition were becoming even more numerous and football had to conquer new markets, even where the game of this ball was something exotic and unknown. The creation of a series of new states during the years of decolonisation gave the opportunity for footballing national identities to be created everywhere in the world, identities that would be expressed and would have the chance to radiate in FIFA’s dazzling competition. The first step in this direction was the increase of the number of participating teams to 24 — more teams, more direct participation of millions of people, more matches, more money from television contracts and sponsors. The commodified World Cup began on the grounds of a country that, even when no innovation could exist on its soil, was a pioneer in the field of development of the sport that was at the same time the favourite of the romantics and the tool of cynical technocrats everywhere on Earth.

Although the World Cup of ’82 had been decided to take place in Spain 16 years earlier, in 1966, the timing was ideal for this country too, since the fall of the Francoist dictatorship allowed one more narrative to be created, that of the country that leaves behind its past of isolation and authoritarianism and also becomes part of a great peaceful and liberal international community. Footballistically, however, the 1982 World Cup signified the beginning of an era in which footballing discipline would dominate over creation, in other words the birth and death of a game.

The manner in which the competition was held brought face to face in the 3rd group of the second group stage the World Champion Argentina, with Maradona in its composition, Brazil and Italy. In the first two games the Argentines suffered an equal number of defeats and the finalists of 1970 would clash on 5 July at the Estadio Sarriá of Barcelona, in a game of life and death for qualification to the semi-finals. The difference between the two teams was similar to that of the final in Mexico, 12 years earlier. Italy was a team devoted to the evolution of the system, being faithful to the so-called zona mista (inside Italy) or gioco all’italiana internationally. This tactic, which began with Gigi Radice and Giovanni Trapattoni, was in essence an asymmetrical 4-4-2, with one fullback playing more advanced on an open wing, as an addition to 2 central defenders and a libero who was the stable line of defence, while a similar role further forward on the pitch was also held by the opposite midfielder who, playing next to the number ten, the regista, framed the actions on the sides of the opposing area. The tactical approach of Italian football in the era of totaalvoetbal has always faced the aversion of lovers of attacking and creative play, perhaps for some inexplicable and paradoxical reason. The truth is that zona mista is based on the same principles of covering spaces, perhaps without such intense interchange of positions, since the way each player covers the pitch is different; however, it was the reason for generations of wonderful number tens to exist in Italian football.

Brazil, for its part, had talent in abundance in its ranks, since in that game Sócrates, Éder, Falcão, Zico and Serginho appeared on the grass of the Catalan ground. In a few words, there was an attacking-midfield five, within the 4-3-3 system, which covered all the prerequisites for a victory of aesthetic superiority, as in that final of 1970. It is true that this did not happen, since Brazil could in no way crush that Italy in the same manner, but neither did the opposite happen — the encounter was balanced, with the Italians taking the lead twice and the Brazilians equalising. It is very interesting to make an abstraction and think how that game would be interpreted today if Brazil had won; however, thanks to the hat-trick of a possessed Paolo Rossi, this did not happen and thus that encounter remained in the History of football as the end of innocent creativity and the beginning of the era of cynical tactics. This reading is certainly somewhat exaggerated, as exaggerated are all the myths built within the History of football, but it is a fact that Saldanha’s perception was not entirely wrong before the 1970 World Cup. The conditions in which the matches were held, the altitude, the temperature, favoured one side in 1970 and the other in 1982, with several other parameters obviously not being the same through time.

Italy passed much more easily from the semi-final, against Poland, as Rossi scored twice more, but the other semi-final, between West Germany and France, was the one that marked History. The hard foul by goalkeeper Harald Schumacher on Patrick Battiston broke two teeth, three ribs and damaged the spinal column of the French right-back. The harshness of the incident remained in History for the turn the sport was taking in an era in which the emphasis on creative covering of spaces coexisted with the parallel intensification of the harshness of anti-football. In the 1980s it seemed that the physical game had made a triumphant reappearance, almost a century after its historic defeat by Blackburn Olympic in the 1883 FA Cup final. West Germany, playing with an extra player for about 30 minutes in normal time and throughout extra time, managed not to lose and finally, in an exhausting penalty procedure, took qualification for the great final. In the final, however, the Italians were unstoppable and after 44 years, representing a country within which very different political ideas prevailed, even if they clashed unceasingly with those of old Italy in the years of lead, won a World Cup that did not have the stamp of a dictator, nor military marches and corresponding militaristic formations on the playing field.

The World Cup now counted more than half a century of life and most competitions had been held in countries that wanted to prove something through its staging, either at the moment when the organisation was awarded to them, or at the moment of its staging. With the exception of Sweden in 1958 and Mexico in 1970, the World Cup had passed through Uruguay, which wanted to shine in the world, Mussolini’s Italy, Rimet’s France, Vargas’s Brazil, FIFA’s Switzerland, Alessandri’s Chile, which preferred to confront the destruction after the greatest earthquake in History with a World Cup, Stanley Rous’s England, West Germany re-entering the international community, Videla’s Argentina, Spain opening its doors to the world after the Franco era. This history would continue in 1986 too, since one of Havelange’s first moves, when he was elected FIFA president, was to give the responsibility of organising the competition to Colombia. However, the increase of teams announced 4 years later and the great economic difficulties of the South American state led to withdrawal from this obligation. Thus, in a process of finding a new host country, where few countries had the right, on the basis of specific criteria, to claim the competition, the United States, Canada and Mexico appeared as candidates. For various unclear and perhaps incomprehensible reasons — even open irregularities — Mexico was chosen, so as to become the first country to organise a second World Cup on its soil. The legacy of 1970 certainly did not make any football fan sad, who perhaps — if at some point a referendum were held to choose a country that would permanently organise the World Cup — would easily all choose Mexico! There where the most radiant team in the History of the competition had shone, some divine fate had written that its most mythical figure would leave his stamp forever.

In 1986 in Argentina the political situation had changed, the military junta had been overthrown from the end of 1983 and Raúl Alfonsín, historic figure of the Unión Cívica Radical, had been elected to the presidency. The last time the Unión Cívica had taken over government, the World Cup was an experimental competition and Borrocotó was writing in El Gráfico about that mythical creature, the pibe, who symbolised the mythology of Argentine football of the potreros, the child “with a dirty face, with a mane that rebels against the comb … whose stance is characteristic, as if he were dribbling with a ragged ball”. When Argentina was certain that in its ranks it had the best footballer on the planet, fate brought it about that he resembled so closely a description that had been written 32 years before his birth. On the grounds of Mexico the mystery had to be performed.

At the technical leadership of the national team stood Carlos Bilardo, disciple of Osvaldo Zubeldía and great figure of anti-fútbol, succeeding Menotti after the failure of 1982. He himself perhaps aspired to become the coach who would prove in practice that one can win the World Cup by playing bad football, with the result as the only purpose. Yet Bilardo’s plans were spoiled by the presence of Maradona, who could not stop producing spectacle even if he decided only to walk inside the pitch. Thus, the Argentine coach reconciled himself with the idea of setting up a team around the diamond of the albiceleste. Tactically, how this experiment with this peculiar 3-5-2, with Maradona playing deeper as a second forward, reflecting the role of the Italian fantasista, worked out for him is worthy of wonder. The truth is that Maradona was in many more than one positions, essentially applying, as a one-man orchestra, a particular version of total football, that of Maradona’s football. Among the various legacies that Maradona left to football culture, this is perhaps one of the most important, since there are no corresponding examples of players who play on the line of attack and essentially constitute at the same time both playmaker and also cover spaces very “foreign” to their position. The fact that this is not discussed as much as the social reach of his footballing presence has more to do with the fact that on the one hand it requires a more specialised knowledge and corresponding observation of the game and on the other that his overall brilliance was capable of covering the separate unique details of his talent.

Passing from the group stage with victories against South Korea and Bulgaria and a draw with World Champion Italy, Argentina met Uruguay in the second round, for the first time in a World Cup since 1930. With a goal by Pasculli it took the ticket for the match that took place on the day God came down to Earth.

On 22 June 1986 the sun burned over Mexico City, with the forecast giving chances of afternoon rain. The temperature was 22 degrees Celsius and the Azteca stadium was packed with 114,580 spectators. Argentina would face England, for the first time after another World Cup quarter-final, that of 1966, which had been stigmatised by a mysterious appointment of referee, the reasonless sending-off of Rattín, the very hard play that both teams played and the aggressive behaviour of the English spectators and more generally of the European delegations towards that Argentine team. It was also, however, the first match that found the two teams opposed after the War in the Malvinas, which ended in triumphant fashion for Margaret Thatcher’s Government, while it proved a fiasco for the Argentine military junta.

The two countries, however, did not begin to have footballing differences in 1966. The rivalry goes much further back and constitutes a matter of national identity for Argentines. The English were obviously those who introduced the game to Argentina. The British element was what developed the institutions of football and a Scotsman, Alexander Watson Hutton, is considered the “father of football” in Argentina. Yet the creolisation of football that occurred during the 20th century was also combined with a need to show that in Argentina they knew how to play better football than the English, because although the sport may have been codified in Britain, the people of the South American colony were those who knew, more than anyone, according to the ideological development of this position, how to evolve it. For this reason, even within narrow footballing frameworks, this clash was always particular.

Of course, since the era of that football, of la nuestra and el pibe, Argentine football itself had made a 180-degree turn, now having at the head of its national mission, as coach, Carlos Bilardo, continuator of the hard football and anti-fútbol of Spinetto and Zubeldía. Before that game, however, how the sport had evolved in the country had little significance; England had to be defeated at all costs, on the one hand because it was obviously an obstacle towards conquering the summit, and on the other because there had to be a moral revenge for the war, for Rattín and for whatever else one could imagine, as we all imagine when we watch football matches.

Because of their colours, the two teams play each time with one of them wearing its alternative kit. In that game Argentina was due to play in the blue shirts, which were cotton and Bilardo considered that this would be a great disadvantage under the scorching midday Mexican sun. For this reason Le Coq Sportif, which was then the clothing sponsor of the national team, was asked to manufacture new blue shirts, especially for this match. The company, having only 3 days to solve the problem, answered negatively. Thus, Ruben Moschella, who was then a member of the technical staff, went out for a walk in the market of Mexico City in order to find blue shirts. Moschella found 2 different shirts, presented them to the team and Maradona chose one of them, saying that “with this one we will beat England”. Then Moschella went and bought 38 shirts, went to a tailor to make the federation badge, using an older and more simplistic design, to stick on the shirts, while the numbers, which came from designs for American Football teams (gridiron football), were also put on with a medium-quality decal. Who could possibly have imagined that perhaps the most emblematic shirt in the history of the sport was being designed and manufactured at that moment under those conditions?

In the 51st minute of the encounter Maradona had the ball in the centre and towards the left, as Argentina was manifesting its attacks. He played a bad pass to Valdano, who was at the right corner of the penalty area, with the Argentine centre-forward unable to control the ball, but only to throw it behind his back towards the centre of the English area. Maradona, continuing his run, was on a crossing course with the ball, which was drawing a curve in Shilton’s area. From the opposite side to the ball’s path, however, the English goalkeeper was also running. At the intersection point of the course of the three, of the falling ball and of Shilton and Maradona approaching it, Maradona came into contact with the ball first! A few fractions of a second later the ball was in Shilton’s net! Maradona had managed to beat in the air the English goalkeeper who was 20 centimetres taller. With the extension of his left fist he found the ball and sent it into the net. The Tunisian referee Ali Bin Nasser was pointing to the centre, the linesman agreed with him, Maradona was running towards the stand, raising the left fist that had scored! It was the apotheosis of football of purpose, of the ideology of Zubeldía, which had become the national school of Argentine football. Argentina was ahead in the score and held the lead for a historic qualification.

The English protested in vain to the referee, Maradona continued to raise his left fist. In his autobiography he said that at that moment he felt “like putting his hand into England’s treasury”. When asked after the match whether it had been handball, he answered that it was “the hand of God”, leaving a phrase that would accompany him forever, “La Mano De Dios”, as well as a nickname that without great hesitation was bestowed on him by the everywhere faithful of football. Maradona entered the pitch that day as a mortal and left as a god. And if the hand alone was not enough for him to acquire this right, his next achievement was the passport to the Elysian Fields.

4 minutes later, however, Maradona left another mark on History, leaving no one any margin to dispute that victory and his own superiority and Argentina’s in that game. The description by the Uruguayan commentator Víctor Hugo Morales has remained in history and that goal, “the goal of the century” as it was characterised, cannot and perhaps must never be described in other words: “He will pass it to Diego, there Maradona has it, two are marking him, Maradona keeps the ball, the genius of world football starts from the right, he leaves the opponents behind and he will be able to pass to Burruchaga… Always Maradona! Genius! Genius! Genius! Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta… Goooooooal… Gooooooal… I want to cry! My God, long live football! What a great goal! Diegooooal! Maradona! It is to cry, forgive me… Maradona, in an unforgettable run, in the play of all time… Cosmic kite… From which planet did you come to leave so many English behind you, so that the whole country shouts with a fist for Argentina? Argentina 2 – England 0. Diegoooal, Diegoooal, Diego Armando Maradona… Thank you, God, for football, for Maradona, for these tears, for this Argentina 2 – England 0.”

Maradona had done the incredible! He had taken the ball from the centre of the pitch and left behind him every Englishman he found, in order to step into the area, eat an epic kick and at the same time place the ball past Shilton, writing 2-0. It was the goal of the century, as it was voted many years later, without any doubt. Yet it was also much more for Argentina. If the first goal was the apotheosis of anti-fútbol and football of purpose, that second goal was the absolute embodiment of the beauty of la nuestra, of the dexterous Argentine who passes the English as if they were standing still, whose physical condition is not enough to contend with this footballing genius. It was the embodiment of that child, the pibe, who exactly as Borocotó had described him in 1928, was 58 years later on the grass of the Azteca. How could the editor-in-chief of El Gráfico know that what he was describing then was the faithful representation of a moment from the future? Maradona was not only God, he was something much more for Argentina, he was el pibe de oro, the golden boy, the pibe made of gold. He was the reward of History for an entire footballing ideology. There could not have been a greater victory for Argentine football than this goal. The fact that it came against England is perhaps only the necessary complement that a perfect story needed.

In the semi-final Maradona repeated his achievements, scoring 2 goals against Belgium and in the final, where West Germany found itself for the 3rd time in 4 competitions, things seemed easy for Argentina until the last quarter of the match, when Rummenigge and Völler managed to equalise. In a match that could very much recall the 2022 final, Maradona did not allow the same development to occur: with an inconceivably inspired pass to Burruchaga, who was descending towards Schumacher’s goal together with Valdano, he gave an almost ready goal so that a few minutes later he would receive from Miguel de la Madrid the FIFA Cup to lift it under the scorching Mexican sun of the Azteca, composing the holiest hagiography of footballing History.

Today, 40 years after that epic of the Mexico World Cup, historical distance proves that no footballer ever came close to Maradona’s feat, to make a World Cup competition his own affair, to have it referred to only together with his signature, as if he were the director and protagonist of the global game. Many can claim that there have been better footballers, either before or after Maradona. On the basis of strict measurable data, in fact, this argument has a basis. But no one was ever, ever able to surpass his aura — for this reason no one will ever be able to surpass his mythical size, which as History passes grows and constantly finds occasions to renew itself, especially after his death. It is difficult to say what Maradona would have been without the 1986 World Cup, but material history is given and, as it was shaped, could only constitute the source for the deepest metaphysical relationship in the History of the sport, that of a footballer with his homeland, the supporters and the societies of the whole world, where he remains for all eternity the figure of the popular hero.

Even the next World Cup, held in 1990 on the grounds of Italy, could have borne his signature. It would certainly have been a different conquest, in a counter-role, in a different scenario. In the World Cup in which perhaps the worst football in the History of the institution was played, with most of the crucial games, among them the final, being decided by penalties, Maradona had to reach that legendary match against host Italy, inside the temple where he was worshipped, Napoli’s San Paolo, which today bears his name. In a process that began many days before the encounter between the two teams for the semi-finals of the competition and awakened the deep wounds of the mezzogiorno question, in simple words the contradiction in the development of Northern and Southern Italy and the racist treatment of poor southern Italians, who by no coincidence at all are the biological ancestors of most Argentines, Maradona again played the role of protagonist in a historical drama, much more than that of the best footballer in the world. The boos in the final in Rome, where the Italian capital’s supporters supported West Germany, in an extremely problematic historical framework, also remained in History, next to his own personal presence, as one of the most symbolic events of the World Cups.

Politics, which so much loves to instrumentalise football, had one more reason to make its emphatic entrance into the 1990 World Cup. On 8 July 1990, the day on which the final of the competition was held at the Olimpico, not even a year had passed since the day when, within a more general climate of counter-revolution and capitalist restorations, the Berlin Wall, that which had been built in the centre of the capital of East Germany after the proclamation of the sectors controlled by the USA, the United Kingdom and France as a single state, had begun to be torn down and the German Democratic Republic was slowly being absorbed by the western state of the Federal Republic. One week before the final game, monetary union had taken place; everything indicated that that final was the last game of so-called West Germany, since very soon the Bundesrepublik would be the only one bearing the country’s name. The dissolution of the state of the People’s Republic was euphemistically called unification, in perhaps the most reckless ideological propagandistic terminology, which ignored the terms under which the deadliest war in human History had ended. The team of West Germany, which otherwise constituted an exquisite footballing school with players who left a mark on history, not by chance, but as the result of a long post-war industrial development, would do well to win that match so that this narrative too could be completed with football as vehicle. The disputed penalty blown by Edgardo Codesal and taken by Andreas Brehme in the 85th minute was enough to create this History. It is not accidental, however, that no little kid in the world fell in love with football after that game.

If there was a team that, within the pessimism about the future of football, gave birth to hope for the global sport, it came from where until then no one had learned to calculate. From the end of the 1950s and much more massively within the 1960s, sub-Saharan Africa began to acquire its independence. The first country to open the road, the Gold Coast, which was renamed Ghana, guided by its historic President and national leader Kwame Nkrumah, who had won the elections of 1956, was followed by Guinea, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, the People’s Republic of the Congo of the hero Patrice Lumumba, Somalia, the territories of Dahomey, and many more countries. The first country of sub-Saharan Africa to participate in a World Cup was the former Belgian Congo, which had been renamed Zaire, in 1974. In a presence that could not be characterised as successful, Zaire lost all three matches in its group, indeed succumbing 9-0 to Yugoslavia, in a game in which Dušan Bajević scored a hat-trick. The next sub-Saharan country that would find itself in the great competition was Cameroon, which made its debut on the grounds of Spain in 1982, when there was now also a second African ticket because of the increase of participants. That year Cameroon managed to leave undefeated, drawing three matches, one of them against the later champion Italy.

In 1990 Cameroon returned to the World Cup and indeed played in the opening game against World Champion Argentina. In a game that many would remember for the hardness of the Cameroonians’ play, François Omam-Biyik and the team of the Soviet Valery Nepomnyashchy wrote History differently. The 24-year-old forward sent the ball to meet Nery Pumpido’s net in the 67th minute and “the indomitable lions” achieved one of the greatest surprises in the History of the World Cup. But this was only the beginning of their epic. In the next match they beat Romania 2-1 and although they were defeated 4-0 in the Soviet Union’s last game in a World Cup, they qualified from first place in their group to the knock-out phase. There they met Colombia and after a goalless draw in normal time, two goals by the 38-year-old Roger Milla were enough to give them qualification to the quarter-finals. Milla’s dance after those goals remained as one of the photographs that mark the game of people at its greatest moment — it was the reason for kids in every sub-Saharan wasteland to want to kick a ball. With this approach, certainly far more important than Brehme’s goal in the final. Cameroon came very close to eliminating the mother of the sport, in a victory that would have exceeded the magnitudes of historical success that can be perceived. Until the 83rd minute they were leading in the quarter-final against England, but two penalties taken by Lineker led to the equaliser and finally to England’s victory in extra time, putting an end to this mythical, epic, fairy-tale, inspired course. Cameroon in 1990 set the bar for African teams that wanted to surpass this success. Some repeated it and perhaps came very close to surpassing it for 32 years. Senegal in 2002, Ghana in 2010, until Morocco finally managed it in 2022.

Football under Havelange could not fail to become an assistant of great political symbolisms. Although the 1986 competition was not given to the United States also because of the tremors that existed over the treatment of football at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, FIFA decided on the venue of the 1994 World Cup in 1988 in Zurich, with the United States, Brazil and Morocco having put forward candidacies. Quite by chance, that vote was held on 4 July. From the first round the American candidacy gathered the necessary votes for the World Cup to travel, for the first time, to a country where football was not the most popular sport, while at the moment of the vote there was not even a professional championship, essentially ignoring the very foundations of FIFA’s founding and existence.

The United States, despite its distance from football culture, wanted and always wants to organise football competitions, since, independently of the reach of the sport on a national television index, its influence on the masses and chiefly on the immigrants who constitute a huge part of the population of the Superpower is indisputable. For this reason it is characteristic that at the head of the first attempt to take on the organisation, for the 1986 World Cup, was the Secretary of the State Department himself, Henry Kissinger. But 1994 was an even better moment for the USA. The so-called “Cold War” had ended, socialist power in the countries of Eastern Europe had been overthrown and the Soviet Union no longer existed. The promise of a new world of perpetual and peaceful capitalist development passed through the organisation of the greatest footballing celebration. From this footballing celebration, however, Yugoslavia had been excluded, as it was being dismembered in the Balkans with the contribution of the tanks of its organisers.

In one of the most anti-football opening ceremonies in Chicago, with Diana Ross emphatically missing a penalty kick that would break a goal in two, the symbolisms of the distance of the United States from the footballing game were being made in a natural and spontaneous way. In the game that followed, the world champion had been renamed Germany and faced Bolivia. The perhaps most important player on the pitch, not on the basis of footballing criteria, was Matthias Sammer, the 27-year-old East German who, playing for Dynamo Dresden until 1990, won the last double of East Germany before transferring to VfB Stuttgart in order officially to become a professional footballer, since until then he had been an employee of the Volkspolizei. In the purely competitive part, Jürgen Klinsmann was the one who in the 61st minute scored the only goal of an encounter that dehydrated the footballers, as had happened 8 years earlier in Mexico, so that their achievements could be watched by the public in Europe.

The drama of 1994 is certainly divided into two parts. The first unfolded during the group stage and was a tragic story. The second occurred in the final phase and was another chapter of the great footballing historical narrative. The first part concerned Argentina and Colombia, the second Brazil and Italy.

On 21 June, the national team of Argentina, under the technical leadership of Alfio Basile, returned to the World Cup. In its ranks was Diego Maradona, reborn after the 15-month ban imposed on him because of drug use. Maradona had worked terribly hard, however, for his return to the top competition and seemed in excellent form. The first opponent was a team that went to the American grounds with the definition of anti-football organisation, yet glorifying more than anything else the spirit of the political reach of the World Cup: Greece. The great protagonist in scoring was the young bomber of the nets, Gabriel Omar Batistuta, but Maradona in this game scored his last goal in a World Cup. In the 60th minute he found the ball laid on for him just outside the penalty area, approximately at the edge of the semicircle and towards the left. From there with a thunderous shot he sent the ball into Minou’s top corner in order to celebrate wildly. Running towards the camera that was next to the left touchline of the pitch, he struck his head against it, throwing out a spit that many (or all) understood was directed towards FIFA and an entire system that in the previous years had been against him.

In the second game, against Nigeria, Caniggia scored twice to take the 2-1 victory. At the end of the encounter a nurse came to take Maradona from the playing field for the anti-doping control. Perhaps happier than ever, Diego took the nurse by the hand and walked with her towards the exit, greeting the crowd with a smile. A few days later it became known that that test had come out positive for 5 banned substances on the basis of ephedrine. Maradona was out of the World Cup, excluded once again because of the use of banned substances, this time not for drugs, but for doping. Diego stated countless times in the years that followed that he had never taken any substance, that the test was set up, that it was one more part of the attack made against him by the establishment itself. Maradona may never have taken those substances, at least willingly; however, what exactly happened will perhaps remain a mystery in history. If his historical rehabilitation with evidence on this specific issue ever takes place, then it will perhaps be the greatest scandal in the history of football, globally. And the bar for first place is quite high in this category.

Argentina after this event collapsed, with two defeats in an equal number of games by the astonishing representatives of the Balkans in the competition, Bulgaria in the Group and Romania in the second round; it bade farewell ingloriously to the competition, beginning a long course of regrouping and the attempt to find the successor to the embodiment of the pibe.

The day after Argentina’s first match, Carlos Valderrama’s Colombia played in the second game of its group against the United States. Having already been defeated in the opening game by Romania, in a game in which Hagi scored one of the most beautiful goals in the History of the competition, the cafeteros absolutely had not to lose, so that they could have hopes of qualification, even as third from the group. However, in the 35th minute of the encounter Andrés Escobar saw fortune turn its back on him and scored an own goal, giving the Americans a lead that they managed to extend and finally maintain until the end of the encounter. In combination with the result of Romania’s match with Switzerland, this meant that Colombia was out of the competition.

Colombia’s delegation returned home, to a country that harboured hopes for a great distinction, even for the world title, a place where countless sums of money had been played in illegal betting and great deals of the business underworld were connected with the course of the national team in the World Cup. On 2 July, in a restaurant in Medellín, some accused Escobar of the elimination, on the occasion of this own goal. The misunderstanding became a fight and a few moments later Humberto Muñoz, bodyguard and driver of the Gallón Henao brothers, cattle breeders and drug traffickers, shot the Colombian central defender six times with a revolver.

Within the extreme commodification of football, which had brought Havelange’s dream to a peak, there were nevertheless not few teams that produced beautiful football and made historic runs. The astonishing Romania of Hagi, of Petrescu, of Răducioiu, of Lupescu and of Belodedici, players with enormous experience on European grounds, reached the quarter-finals, where it suffered elimination on penalties by another astonishing generation, Sweden of Brolin, of Larsson, of Nilsson, of Andersson and of the unforgettable goalkeeper Ravelli. Bulgaria, with emblematic captain Hristo Stoichkov and his supporters Letchkov, Emil Kostadinov as well as the cult figure of Trifon Ivanov, eliminated in the quarter-finals the World Champion Germany. Nigeria of Yekini narrowly did not manage to repeat Cameroon’s epic, while Saudi Arabia in its first participation qualified from a group in which the Netherlands, Belgium and Morocco also played, losing 2-1 to the Dutch and winning the other two games, with Saeed Al-Owairan scoring the most beautiful goal of the competition in the game against Belgium.

But the great footballing battle was that between the two finalists, Brazil and Italy. Both, after all, arrived on the American grounds with three conquests of the World Cup in their History and whichever won would become de facto the historically great power of the sport. Italy was guided by one of the greatest footballing minds of the 20th century, a true ideologue of football who, within an era in which everything was the result, supported that many can win a title, but the world will always remember the teams that won by playing beautiful football. Arrigo Sacchi was the epitome of this view of his. The titles he won with Milan are comparatively fewer in relation to other legendary coaches, but the team he built and with which he won the European Cup in 1989 and 1990 entered History as one of those that played the best football through time. At Milan he may have relied on a hyper-talented Dutch trio, Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit, bringing the ideas of Dutch football into contact with an evolution of the zona mista, but in Italy’s national team of 1994 too he had other protagonists with whom to lay out his plans. The foremost among them was the epitome of the attacking fantasista, a true legend of the Italian grounds, who could certainly have offered more also to the national team. Roberto Baggio, who had made his first appearance in a World Cup in 1990, was the necessary number ten that Italy needed in order to claim a great competition, continuing a great Italian tradition in this specific position.

On the other side, Brazil, after years of low flights and the difficulty of managing the identity crisis brought by the result of 1982, had indeed a hyper-talented team — as almost always — but a much more effective and realistic one, with a sufficient dose of inspiration and of course a footballer who symbolised the old malandragem, who refused to fit into the new professional frameworks, the orchestrator of its attack, Romário. Neither team reached the Final easily, in perhaps one of the most uncertain competitions of History, without clear favourites.

Italy began with defeat against Ireland, beat Norway 1-0 and drew with a beautiful Mexican team in order to pass literally by a thread to the next phase, literally last and drenched in sweat, as the 4th best team that finished 3rd in its group. In the second round it was losing in the encounter with Nigeria, thanks to a goal by Amunike, until the 88th minute, when Roberto Baggio took action and with two goals, one in extra time, gave it qualification. In the quarter-finals, in one of the most interesting games of the competition, it managed to bend Spain’s resistance again in the 88th minute, with two goals scored by Dino and Roberto Baggio, while in the semi-finals Roberto Baggio was again the man who saved the situation, scoring 2 goals against Bulgaria.

Brazil, in a relatively easy group, had losses only in the game with the wonderful Sweden, beating Russia and Cameroon; in the 2nd round it passed the American hosts by the thin 1-0, while in the quarter-finals it eliminated the Netherlands in a truly beautiful game, leaving in History also one of the most memorable celebrations in Bebeto’s goal, dedicated to his pregnant wife. In the semi-final it needed 80 minutes to find the way to goal against Sweden, which came with a header by Romário, in order to find itself in the great final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Although the two teams carried inexhaustible talent, the final was a depiction of the new commodified football, which had forgotten its identity and the reasons it moves the planet somewhere along the way. Two teams that appeared with an approach of zonal defence, suffocating pressing, collective movement of the lines and compression of space, in a 4-4-2 formation, in order to cover every possibility of open channels on the pitch. It was the epitome of the football that generations of people came to know, in order later to rediscover meaning in the footballing revolution that would happen afterwards. The score reflected the spectacle: a goalless draw in normal time and extra time, with perhaps the most historic moment being Cafú’s entry in the 21st minute, replacing Jorginho and playing in the first of his three consecutive finals. After the taking of the first two penalties the score remained 0-0, while ultimately Italy’s attacking duo judged its fate, with Massaro failing to beat Taffarel and, in the most crucial penalty, Roberto Baggio sending the ball over the crossbar, in order to give the World Cup to Brazil and write the script for a whisky advertisement.

In the stands of the Rose Bowl Pelé celebrated, Vice President Al Gore gave the FIFA trophy to Dunga, Romário was the great protagonist of that Brazilian generation and somewhere in the celebrations there participated, with the number 20 on his shirt, a 17-year-old player of Cruzeiro who until then counted 3 appearances with the Seleção, Ronaldo Luís Nazario de Lima. Almost no one could have bet that the young footballer who that summer would cross an ocean would raise to an unprecedented height the bar for the achievements of the modern footballer, giving birth to the era of the modern superstars.

The 1994 World Cup was organised by the United States to symbolise the beginning of a new world. However, its consideration today, 32 years later, gives it rather exactly the opposite identity: it was the end of another world. Football then would begin to become a truly organised global enterprise, not simply as the product sold to the planet by a few circles, such as those of Havelange and Dassler, but as the field in which those who seek political influence everywhere on Earth have reason to become active, with a fully professional organisation of the great clubs and championships, which transformed it from product into industry. Beyond the technocratic reading, however, the 1994 World Cup was the last of the era of spontaneous experiments in tactics and perception, the last of a course that began in 1974, when the romanticism of the beautiful game was left behind and the sport was seeking a new identity by apotheosising the result. It was also the last of a series of competitions in which football did not necessarily hold the central position. After this the true era of football would begin. Among other things, it was the last World Cup that Havelange watched as FIFA president.

The Era of Football

On 2 July 1992, at the FIFA congress held in Zurich, it was decided that the organisation of the 1998 World Cup would be assigned to France. Thus, the homeland of Jules Rimet would become the second country to organise a World Cup for a second time, after the now distant 1938. In France, football was for the first time truly celebrated as part of human culture. On 12 December 1995, the draw for the qualifiers took place at the Louvre; the ball of the competition, named tricolore, was the first coloured one, emblematic by now as it kept the tango pattern of 20 years, perhaps the second most common for a football after the stereotypically classic telstar, while even more teams from all the Confederations would take part, with the increase of participants to 32.

A few months before the draw that took place at the Louvre, however, at the Cannes film festival, on 27 May 1995, the film La Haine (Hatred) was screened, a 98-minute black-and-white masterpiece by Mathieu Kassovitz, which was received with a standing ovation in the festival hall and caused shock, as it presented with true colours French society in a realistic way that no one had until then dared. La Haine writes its own history in French cinema and in contemporary French history because it breaks the stereotypical narrative of the Western European country, presents the heart of Europe after the centuries of colonialism, of the bleeding of countries on other continents and the creation of a new multi-collective culture that exists, lives, develops but for official History is still on the margins. When FIFA chose France as host country for the 1998 World Cup, Kassovitz’s masterpiece perhaps did not even exist as an idea, while certainly its content would under no circumstances constitute one of the chosen symbolisms for its precious competition. Football, however, would defeat FIFA and its political symbolisms, placing in their stead its own unfeigned truth.

France of the 1990s, a state at the centre of European integration, had begun to give birth in its society to the contradictions of the following decades. But it had also seen itself in the mirror — it was no longer a country only of white intellectuals and workers, devoted either to the old republican principles or to a liberal Gaullist discipline. Paris had a population of two million in its centre and around five times that population in its suburbs. There beat the heart of real France; from there its heart beat also in the World Cup, on and off the pitch. It was the France of Blacks, Whites and Arabs, the “black-blanc-beur” country and as such it appeared in the World Cup that took place in its home, with its “black-blanc-beur” team. The new great edifice of the World Cup was also located in the heart of this multiracial French working class. In the harshest suburb of the capital, Saint-Denis, rose the 80-thousand-seat Stade de France, whose design, with its almost suspended roof, still seems innovative today.

France, which had been absent from the competitions of 1990 and 1994, having suffered a traumatic elimination by Emil Kostadinov’s goal, was returning after 12 years to the World Cup, not simply as host, but as protagonist. From that first game at Marseille’s Vélodrome it showed that this World Cup had been made to tell its own footballing and social fairy tale. A participant in this effort was also the organising committee, which took care — according to a later statement by Platini — to meet World Champion Brazil only in the final.

Footballistically, the France team seems over-complete. In goal, an idiosyncratic goalkeeper, quite short for the modern standards of the position, with an intact south-western accent, Fabien Barthez, shows that there are no stereotypes for any position even at the highest level. The defence resembles a factory: Thuram, Blanc, Desailly and Lizarazu, provincials and descendants of immigrants, compose a steel line that concedes only 2 goals in the whole competition. In front of them Didier Deschamps is the neuralgic player who connects the defensive function with creation, having more advanced on either side Karembeu and Petit. At the top of the diamond, with countless space around him and enormous freedoms on the pitch, stands the embodiment of a different pibe — the son of Algerian immigrants who settled in the cités of Marseille, who played football in the quarries behind the concrete workers’ housing, who even as a professional at Torino took to the streets at night with Edgar Davids in order to find the joy of the game in the spontaneous night-time games of immigrants, one of the greatest figures world football has ever produced, Zinedine Zidane, with a name that recalls the great legend of the Algerian national team who had played 12 years earlier in Mexico. Up front, the attacking pair was Djorkaeff and one of Henry, Guivarc’h or Dugarry.

Beyond individual talent, however, the team directed by Aimé Jacquet has perhaps quietly taken one of the most symbolic steps in the history of football tactics. Since Djorkaeff usually plays a little behind the central centre-forward, essentially surrounding Zidane, France’s real system is a 4-3-2-1. Football, which from the 1870s began with the so-called “pyramid”, the 2-3-5 system, shortly before the first era of British professionalism, had turned the system upside down, thus inspiring Jonathan Wilson to name in this way his opus magnum, the bible of football tactics. With all these elements gathered together, the reflection of social composition in the era of its official reformulation, the natural footballing talent, the inspired tactics and the fact that it was playing at home, France did not seem only a great favourite to win the competition, but also to realise a historical epic.

Opposite it, the strongest opponent seems to be the World Champion, Brazil, which in its ranks has a footballer whose achievements did not resemble anything the world had seen until then. With nature as an ally, which offered him a body that seemed bionic, capable of flying even on the heaviest playing surface, with an astonishing speed in his legs and in his mind, Ronaldo was not called fenômeno by chance. The season he had in 1996-97 with Barcelona and which ended in the conquest of the European Cup Winners’ Cup was inconceivable, only to be repeated by another great season at Inter, performing miracles in the UEFA Cup final against Lazio. Among other things, Ronaldo had his own boots with the signature of the American Nike, which had entered strongly into the football market claiming a share from Adidas, which had a permanent contract with Havelange, while he was also the face of an unforgettable advertising campaign by Pirelli. He was the first truly modern superstar, the footballer who is simultaneously a commercial face and a commercial product. What was certain was that many kids wanted to play football because Ronaldo existed.

Brazil had bottomless attacking talent, still having in its composition Rivaldo, Bebeto, Leonardo, while its leader was the captain of 1994, Dunga. Its two full-backs, Roberto Carlos and Cafú, also contributed to its attacking function. However, its overall defensive function did not in any case seem as steely as the corresponding French one. Brazil won with difficulty in the opening game against Scotland, 2-1, had an easy task against Morocco, which it beat 3-0, while in the last game of the group it was defeated by Norway. In the round of 16, in an attacking recital, it beat Chile 4-1, while in the quarter-finals it struggled greatly to overturn the 0-2 against it and beat Denmark 3-2. In the semi-finals, finally, it needed to reach penalties in order to eliminate the Netherlands, an astonishing generation, the last compact team produced by the great school of Ajax.

France, on the contrary, scattered newly arrived South Africa 3-0 in the opening game, which was participating for the first time in the World Cup as the Apartheid regime had ended, while by an even bigger score, 4-0, it beat Saudi Arabia, which had caused a positive impression on the grounds of the United States. The first great test against the golden generation of Denmark was also victorious, 2-1. In the round of 16 it needed a “golden goal” by Djorkaeff in extra time to bend Paraguay’s resistance, while in the quarter-finals it continued to be the Italians’ evil demon, eliminating them on penalties after a goalless draw. In the semi-final, however, the opponent was a new footballing school, which no one expected — probably wrongly — because all the conditions existed that allowed it to hope for distinction.

The dissolution of united Yugoslavia in the Balkans meant, in the middle of the 1990s, also the dissolution of a huge footballing school, connected with the ideas that developed in Eastern Europe and part, even if peripheral, of the great footballing networks from the beginning of the century. And if the sporting tradition of the great federal country of the Slavs was inherited in many sports by later Yugoslavia and Serbia, in 1998 Croatia showed that it was the heir of the footballing tradition. The first appearance of the national team at Euro 1996, on English grounds, was nothing special, but at the World Cup in France, 2 years later, it made the best appearance by a debutant team, if we exclude the interwar tournaments, where many great teams were appearing in the competition for the first time anyway. Croatia of Ćiro Blažević had a great composition, consisting of superstars such as Davor Šuker, Zvonimir Boban, Goran Vlaović, Alen Bokšić, Robert Prosinečki and Aljoša Asanović, who were already making careers in great European clubs. For this experience of theirs, however, neither Yugoslavia nor the war was responsible, but a Belgian footballer, Jean-Marc Bosman, who, by making use of European Community law, opened the way for the participation of footballers of many nationalities in the teams of European championships. The Croats may not necessarily have played as “Community” players, but the ease with which more foreigners could play opened the road also for the other countries. Thus, national teams that did not have competitive championships could from 1995 onwards become particularly dangerous for every opponent, exporting their footballing talent. The first World Cup that happened after this development was the one organised in 1998 in France and although many teams showed that they were reducing the distance from the giants of world football, Croatia was the one that symbolised this great change in the most deafening way. The Croats, after demolishing Germany 3-0 in the quarter-finals, went so far as to take the lead with a goal by Šuker in the semi-final against France, before Thuram with two goals overturned the score at the Stade de France.

France, having passed also through the great surprise of the institution, had before it only Ronaldo’s Brazil, in a final that had perhaps been designed many months earlier, when the draw of the groups and crossings of that World Cup was taking place. The world was waiting for the great moment of the Brazilian, who had won the Ballon d’Or of 1997 and seemed unstoppable; however, the body — which has limits — does not obey the imperatives of the sponsors and in that final of 12 July a ghost appeared in the place of the phenomenon. The worn-out Ronaldo was forced to play, beyond his own ambition, in order also to satisfy the needs of Nike, which had designed his much-desired silver boots, but the defensive line of France, which had made so many forwards disappear in that competition, would not change its tactics for a commercial contract. Instead of Ronaldo, the great protagonist of that final was that descendant of Algerian immigrants from Marseille, Zinedine Zidane, who was already writing his own epic with the shirt of Juventus at international level and would very soon become one of the greatest players ever to set foot on a football pitch. With two personal goals by Zidane and one by Émmanuel Petit before the final whistle, France triumphed 3-0 and the national celebration for the storming of the Bastille, which is commemorated on 14 July, that year began 2 days earlier!

This time, however, France was not celebrating only its past, but also the reconciliation with the reality of its present; the chants Zidane Président dominated on the Champs-Élysées, expressing a hidden longing for the correct application of that Égalité which would be an empty word as long as its “black-blanc-beur” identity was not expressed at every level of politics, beyond the social life of France.

Football had defeated the political narratives on the grounds of France, but European football was entering a new era, which had begun from the early 1990s in order to be ratified in the following season of club competitions. The old European Cup, the Cup of European Champion Clubs, had now changed name, identity, but also content, from the 1992-93 season, when it was renamed the Champions League. In the first years of the new competition the champion teams, instead of the traditional knock-out system, found themselves in 2 groups of 4 teams, with 8 clubs competing for the first time in this institution that Marseille had won. Two years later the group phase had 16 teams, while from 1997-98 the entry of the runners-up from the first 8 countries of the UEFA ranking gave the possibility for these teams to become 24. The great change came, however, in the 1999-2000 season, when the teams increased to 32 and 4 teams participated from the biggest championships, 3 from the immediately following ones, 2 from a series of countries reaching as far as 15th position, creating a completely different field for European club football. Now, the clubs of the traditional powers of football could participate steadily in its greatest competition, irrespective of who won the championship, provided they were in the first positions of the table. This change created an elite that is increasingly becoming a closed club at the top of European football, gathering footballing talent from all the other countries and having the resources to create faster evolution in footballing thought even than the World Cup.

From the beginning of the existence of the European Cup, many tactical innovations appeared first in this club institution and then passed through the national teams into the World Cups. Yet it was always the World Cup that was the space in which different footballing schools and approaches clashed, since in the pre-Bosman era clubs usually consisted to a large degree of native players who carried the corresponding approach into the national team, either autonomously or through the hiring of each successful technician to the position of national coach. With the full internationalisation of football contracts, however, as well as the very rapid commodification of the game, the many more matches within the season at the highest level of the Old Continent, tactical evolution passed overall into these competitions and the institutions in which national teams participate are usually an echo of this evolution, since the boundaries of national schools have almost disappeared, players from every country become part of different footballing approaches, depending on the club in which they play, and it is much harder to find homogeneity in a whole that meets only a few weeks before a competition of enormous prestige, of only a few matches.

The direct consequence of this from the 2000s onwards was that the distance of the weak countries from the traditional footballing superpowers did indeed shrink, as their players played steadily at the top level of the world and acquired the corresponding experiences, but at the same time a ceiling was created for all the countries outside Western Europe, whose footballers are more scattered across clubs that exist within the frameworks of a different national footballing culture, and therefore can more difficultly find the necessary homogeneity. In the World Cup of France, 2 of the 4 teams came from Western Europe; from the middle of the 2000s onwards this number never fell below 3.

Football, the one Havelange commodified, was changing once again, with a new commodified form of it acquiring the characterisation of “modern football”, with the previous commodified football becoming the fairy tale of the romantics. The same had happened to another generation, when Havelange was beginning his long course; the same had also happened earlier, before professionalism entered each country; the same pattern can be found all the way back to the first founding of the first football institution, the Football Association. The problem of football, however, is not its modernisation. As a mass phenomenon, its parallel evolution with that of the capitalist societies within which it exists and develops is law-governed. Even the expression of the opposite ideological position, of the footballing Gallic villages, is part of the same process, within the same great capitalist empire. Football will become truly popular through a process of perpetual modernisation that will follow and reflect human societies — and it will become the game controlled by the masses that love it when power too passes into their hands and the society that will serve their own purposes is created. That will be the most beautiful footballing modernism — the most romantic one the world will ever have known.

However, the developments in FIFA on the margins of the 1998 World Cup expressed exactly the opposite tendency. João Havelange was succeeded by one of his close collaborators, the Swiss Sepp Blatter, a man who had never been a footballer, technician, or even someone who had been in dressing rooms, but for more than 20 years had been a technocratic employee of FIFA, gradually acquiring more competences and power, being the General Secretary of the World Confederation from 1981. Blatter continued the work of Havelange, which had the purpose of transferring football to every corner of the Earth, even if the sport had no radiance, seeing the countries on the world map not as footballing schools, but as markets. In this direction also moved the decision that the 2022 World Cup would be organised on the grounds of South Korea and Japan, in two countries of which only one had even a stable relationship with the sport, while in the second no one was concerned with the strange British game of those who run around a ball, as the masses were moved by the even stranger American game in which some hit a ball with a bat and run on something like little pillows. In view of the World Cup of the Far East, Blatter even “invented” the Asian origin of the game, tracing cuju, a Chinese ball game from the years of the Han dynasty, as a direct ancestor of the modern footballing game. The reality concerning this perspective we have analysed in the article on the prehistory of football.

The first World Cup organised in Asia was even more commodified than the previous ones, indeed abandoning many traditional elements of it, with perhaps the most characteristic being the reformulation of the aesthetic design of the football. On the pitch, the world expected France to defend its title, while also a great favourite was an over-complete Argentine team, under the instructions of the philosopher of football, Marcelo Bielsa, which seemed to be overcoming the shock of the absence of the pibe de oro from its ranks. Instead, no one shone in that competition apart from Brazil, the astonishing trio of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Roberto Carlos and Cafú, with the latter lifting the precious trophy on 30 June in Yokohama at the moment when he became the only footballer in history so far to have played in 3 consecutive World Cup finals.

What remained engraved in the memory from that World Cup, however, beyond the emphatic advance of the Brazilian superstars who raised even higher the height of the global calibre of their footballing country, with the conquest of the 5th World Cup, was the refereeing massacres so that the team of South Korea would go as far as possible in the competition. The game in the Round of 16 against Italy, in which the referee was the Ecuadorian Byron Moreno, remained in History as the most scandalous game in refereeing terms in the History of the World Cups, while corresponding favour existed also in the quarter-final, against Spain. Was it, then, the first time that something like this had happened? The truth is that there are many stories from the pre-television World Cups, as well as from Olympic Games, in the years when the normal national teams still competed in them, concerning outrageous refereeing decisions. However, that match of South Korea with Italy was broadcast in colour and in relatively high resolution live to the whole planet — for this reason the impact of the decisions of a referee who later was sentenced to prison for participation in a drug trafficking ring was such that the events of the day remained engraved in the collective consciousness of those who watched that encounter. More than a decade later FIFA adopted one of the most radical changes in the history of the evolution of the regulations, incorporating video into the tools for taking the most crucial decisions in a match, in an effort to protect its now very expensive product.

The 2006 World Cup was organised in Germany. Continuing the post-war pattern of decades, every time Germany appeared in the central shot of the footballing staging, the narrative concerned the course of the country that regrouped after the Second World War, was divided, reunited, became a great industrial power and part of the international community. Germany was now not only a part of the great alliance of the so-called Western World, but also the locomotive of Europe, having a dominant position within the European Union and acting diplomatically in many cases as an independent pole among the great imperialist powers, even autonomously in relation to the United States. To what extent this perspective was short-sighted would be judged by History in a process that in our days is in full development, but because collective memory is created in moments, at that moment Germany seemed the greatest and absolutely mighty power of the European edifice.

The football played on the German grounds was also the result of another European edifice, which was created neither by the European Union nor by NATO, but by UEFA. The 2006 World Cup was perhaps the first in which the effects of the evolution of European club competitions appeared so strongly. In the round of 16, 10 teams were European, in the quarter-finals 6, while the semi-finals were a small Euro, with all the teams coming from the “hard core” of footballing Western Europe. There had been a World Cup before with 4 teams from the Old Continent in the semi-finals, in 1934 and 1966, but then there had also been the presence of teams from the eastern side of the continent. Now, the countries competing in the top four were not only geographically defined, but were the countries that were in the top positions (together with England and Spain) of the club ranking of the European confederation.

Three events marked the History of that World Cup: Italy’s victory after the revelation of the greatest football scandal in its History, which would lead to a slowing down of its club football, the downgrading of its championship and later — as now happens with a phase difference — very negative consequences in the course of its national team; the end of Zinedine Zidane’s career, marked by an extremely footballing act of defence of the honour of his culture, against the Italian defender Marco Materazzi; and the first appearance in a World Cup of a footballer who could worthily wear again that metaphysically heavy “10” of the albiceleste, Lionel Messi, who scored his first goal against the national team of Serbia and Montenegro, which on that day, 16 June 2006, represented a country that no longer existed, or under another reading was the first national team to represent two countries in a World Cup.

A great moment for football, however, would come in 2010. In contrast to 2002, when the World Cup travelled to a place where football is not part of the culture of the masses, the great football competition had never taken place on a continent where millions of people live, breathe, play football and have the sport at a central point of their consciousness and activities — with the development of historic clubs, countless historic events, not always with a positive sign, and an approach to football ideology very exotic to the eyes of Europeans and South Americans. Africa, the continent that suffered more than any other part of the world the savagery of colonialism, seemed a place of the margin, not only in the global political and diplomatic arena, but also in football.

In a paradoxical way, the country that would organise the 2010 World Cup was one of the few in which football cannot be considered a national sport, with the existence, however, of a great dichotomy of love for the sport, which has a clear racial sign. South Africa, excluded during the years of Apartheid from international sporting competitions, hosted the first World Cup, for rugby, on its soil after the end of the racist regime and the rise of the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela to power. That Rugby World Cup, whose story was mythologised also in the film Invictus, by Clint Eastwood, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, was one of the sporting events with the greatest social influence, as it was used by the country’s new power and personally by Nelson Mandela so that it could stand on its feet after the decades of racial conflicts. It would be too good to be truly true, but that Rugby World Cup constituted one of the rare stories of the instrumentalisation of sport that have a positive sign.

A corresponding positive sign was preached also by the FIFA officials when they gave the responsibility for the organisation to South Africa and the trophy itself into Mandela’s hands on 15 May 2004. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of football lovers everywhere for the first World Cup of the African continent was quickly covered by the news of the savage exploitation of workers in the rebuilding of the stadiums, the enormous mobilisations over the unjust distribution of resources in football in a country sinking into poverty, and the prolonged, unstoppable sound of the vuvuzela.

Ambitioning to write yet another fairy tale in that competition, Argentina appeared with Maradona as national coach guiding a team in which Messi wore the captain’s armband, but the experiment of playing football without a left-back did not have a good result, collapsing against Germany, in a quarter-final that ended 4-0. As for the other beautiful stories, the world was waiting for the African team that would perhaps surpass Cameroon’s success from 1990. Eventually, this time Ghana found itself in the quarter-finals, losing, however, a marginal match, thanks to an intelligent but illegal action by Luis Suárez, who at the very end saved his goal from the goal that would have meant elimination. And if Uruguay managed to reach the semi-finals, breaking the monopoly of Western Europe that began in 2006, this happened also thanks to the crossings, since in that part of the bracket there was a team from Asia, one from North America, one from Africa and one from South America.

Western Europe again triumphed in a final that, as far as the History of football tactics is concerned, had particular interest, because it constituted a great exchange of roles. The Netherlands and Spain are two countries that are footballistically connected as few others are, without even bordering each other. Of course, the truth is that they have historical ties that are reflected in the national anthem of the Netherlands, the only one that mentions in its lyrics the Spanish monarch (since the Spanish anthem has no words). But as far as the footballing hierarchy is concerned, Spain was the country that became the melting pot of Dutch innovation and totaalvoetbal from the 1970s. First Rinus Michels, then Johan Cruyff, Neeskens, Van Gaal, later Guus Hiddink, were personalities who brought Dutch thought to Spanish clubs with a steady flow that became a tradition, especially at Barcelona, which through them defined its footballing physiognomy. The passage into the 2010s meant the rebirth of that club, which, based on the work of Frank Rijkaard first and then of Cruyff’s most emblematic pupil, Pep Guardiola, created the football that would be played for many years to come, reformulating its principles, abandoning stereotypical patterns and apotheosising creativity for the game in space, opening a new era for the aesthetics of the sport.

All these elements were missing from the Dutch team that appeared in the Final of Johannesburg on the evening of 11 July, the third in the History of the oranje. Bert van Marwijk’s team was a hard-bitten whole, which, if someone had disappeared from the earth for a few decades, they could have considered an authentic descendant of that old Spanish Furia Roja. On the other side, Spain was the one developing totaalvoetbal at the highest and most professional level, with its midfield, made up of Iniesta, Busquets, Xavi, Alonso and Pedro, being in a perpetual alternation of spaces and circulating the ball with indescribable ease, in a way of playing that was named tiki taka and whose purpose was to wear down the opponent who contested possession. The differences between the two teams were judged by the goal scored by Iniesta in the 116th minute, 4 minutes before the end of extra time, while a huge share in the success belonged to Iker Casillas, who prevented an Arjen Robben tête-à-tête. Spain, two years after conquering the Euro, was at the top and showed that it could remain there with great ease, as it also showed in the European Championship two years later. It would take a Dutch correction to destabilise a World Champion that deserved its title as few in History did.

64 years after the last World Cup game that had taken place in Brazil, the great competition was returning to the country that in the meantime had won the title 5 times, more than any other. That last game, of course, had passed into collective memory as one of the greatest national tragedies, and in a country plagued by poverty, crime, the generalised destitution that concerns the great majority of its inhabitants, the fact that a football match is considered a national tragedy shows the magnitude it has for the peoples of the whole world. However, in contrast to the national exaltation of 1950 and the ideological propaganda of mestiçagem, of multiraciality with the preservation of class barriers preached by Getulio Vargas’s power, the path towards the organisation of 2014 had very different political content. Enormous masses of Brazilians poured into the streets demonstrating, like the South Africans 4 years earlier, against the reckless use of resources for the organisation of the World Cup at the moment when they were living in misery. The country’s social-democratic government, which had passed from the hands of Lula da Silva to Dilma Rousseff, was not deterred, since the interests of its bourgeoisie related to that World Cup could not be overlooked.

The truth is that South American football as a whole was re-entering the foreground in that competition, since beyond the fact that it was being organised in Brazil, the best footballer in the world, part of that Barcelona which gave birth to the World Champions of 2010, wore the shirt of Argentina. The dominance of Western Europe had reasons to break and the arena set up for this purpose seemed entirely suitable. Besides everything else, the draw of the groups allowed the possibility of a final between Argentina and Brazil, to the delight of football lovers across the whole planet.

The two teams started comfortably in the groups, with Argentina making it perfect and Brazil drawing goalless with Mexico. In the round of 16 they came through with difficulty, in extra time, Brazil against Chile and Argentina against Switzerland, while in the quarter-finals with a thin lead they bent the resistance of Colombia and Belgium respectively. On 8 July 2014, Brazil would face Germany in Belo Horizonte with the aim of finding itself again in a final at the Maracanã, so as to unite the History of that stadium with a different national history. In the 11th minute, however, Thomas Müller scored the first German goal, which showed that this would not be an easy matter — but no one could imagine what would follow. Klose in the 23rd, Kroos in the 24th and in the 26th, Khedira in the 29th scored the fastest 4 goals any team has ever scored in a World Cup, raising the half-time score to 5-0. Brazil was before yet another tragedy, which grew with Schürrle’s goals in the second half. 7 goals inside its home, with a performance that showed at no point that the two teams competing in that game belonged to the same footballing level. Belo Horizonte was added to the Maracanã as one of the sites of the great national humiliations, even if Júlio César was not condemned by society in the same way Barbosa was condemned.

The Germans, who by common admission had presented the most stable performance throughout the competition, achieving some very difficult victories but within games of great intensity, such as against Algeria and France, managed to make Messi and Argentina bend in the 113th minute of the encounter with Mario Götze’s goal. On the one hand, in Germany they spoke of the multinational origin of their team, which constituted the corresponding reflection of contemporary Western Europe; on the other, in Argentina they spoke of Neuer’s foul on Higuaín, which recalled Schumacher. A refereeing decision seemed again, after the final of 1990, to have judged the holder of the trophy. This would be changed by FIFA once and for all from the next competition, as the result of a long process of reflection from the beginning of the 21st century.

The Era of Oligarchy

Before the next World Cup began, a scandal of enormous proportions concerning the leadership of FIFA became known, when the Swiss police arrested on 27 May 2015 7 FIFA officials who were preparing to attend the Confederation’s 65th Congress at the Baur au Lac in Zurich. In a huge case, which contained evidence from the American authorities of bribery, fraud and money laundering, a series of FIFA executives found themselves accused over the way the Confederation functioned. Within the same year, more and more stories were coming to light involving leaders of countries, monarchs from the great European kingdoms, dictators and sheikhs, as well as a multitude of football officials. The question that arises today, knowing FIFA’s History as it developed — and its relationship with the United States — is naturally whether the phenomena of corruption were struck down or replaced by others. Without evidence, any answer to this question has little value, but with the specific historical data it is of great importance that the question be posed.

The result of these developments was that the former General Secretary of UEFA, the Swiss-Italian Gianni Infantino, was elected to the position of FIFA President. One of Infantino’s first tasks was to organise the World Cups in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022, as well as to lead the Confederation ahead of the choice of the host country for the 2026 competition. In 2018, FIFA would travel to Russia for the 21st World Cup and its 68th Congress. Russia, after the capitalist restorations at the end of the 20th century, had by now evolved from a country that was on the margins into a great imperialist power. Inside it, the old enemies of Soviet power, who had been supported ideologically and materially by Western capitalism, were evolving into oligarch competitors of American-centred global dominance. Thus, the friends of the past had become sworn enemies in the second decade of the 21st century, with the first conflict manifesting itself in Ukraine in 2014. Nevertheless, the relations of Western and Eastern imperialism were still existent and all the Western leaders rushed to give their own diplomatic presence at the World Cup organised by the permanently elected Russian president.

With an aesthetic that used the glorious Soviet footballing past, stripped of its ideological content, only as a sign of national continuity of a great powerful state, Russia did not hesitate to wink ironically at the West by presenting as the World Cup ball a new telstar, recalling the era of the space race, claiming a share also of that glory of the Soviet Union. At the FIFA Congress held in Moscow, the competition was assigned to the United States, which together with Canada and Mexico would host the World Cup in 2026. At that period Donald Trump had been elected to the White House, and he maintained, after all, excellent relations with the regime of the Russian oligarchs.

On the Russian grounds, where an astonishing footballing spectacle appeared, the national team of Russia seemed capable of a great distinction, but did not manage to surpass the achievements of the Soviet Union, in an appearance that would be its last before the world changed into an even greater dystopia. Otherwise, Western Europe, together with Croatia, which returned, even better 20 years later, from that great success of 1998, dominated by again having 3 teams in the semi-finals, with a magnificent generation of the national team of the reborn Belgium eliminating Brazil and France eliminating in turn Argentina and Uruguay. Among the statistical paradoxes was that the national team of England managed to qualify on penalties against Colombia in the round of 16.

The final, between France and Croatia, ultimately resembled a one-horse race, but if one image remained indelible, also within the political developments of the following years, it was that of the French President Emmanuel Macron wildly celebrating in the stands of the Luzhniki the success of his national team. The rain that followed the final suited the world that was being shaped for the worse, recalled the metaphorical black interwar clouds of that World Cup in France 80 years earlier and much less the victory of the “black-blanc-beur” in the dazzling Stade de France 20 years before that new day of triumph.

Football, which had undergone a long process of appropriation by the wealthy classes, which slowly drove the supporter masses away from the stands with expensive tickets and dazzling competitions, was now a game in the hands of oligarchs, who did not even need the people in the stands of their celebrations. This course would of course continue also in the World Cup organised in Qatar, 4 years later, after the outbreak of a war that for the first time in the post-war History of the world divided the planet into two non-communicating camps. A World Cup that was not accompanied by protests and demonstrations, but only by the brutal exploitation of foreign workers who worked under conditions of slavery, without any human, let alone labour, right, so that the great footballing celebration could be set up in the countries where oil is usually extracted and goals are not usually scored.

The World Cup of Qatar would certainly have been a great disappointment for humanity, if there had not again been the intervention of football’s metaphysics, that divine intervention which seems to spoil the plans of those preparing their own narrative upon the body of the sport beloved by the peoples. On 25 November 2020 a piece of news shook the world: Maradona died! Diego, betrayed by his heart, was found dead in his home, under circumstances that are still being examined today. The pandemic that had removed everyone from every social activity made the event seem even heavier, as if the whole planet wanted to fall silent for the loss of the author of our footballing dreams. The president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, declared three days of national mourning. But the History of Argentina’s national team could not but be affected by this event. The albiceleste, which since 1994 had been searching for how to continue its course without the most influential player in the History of the sport, had won no title since Diego wore its shirt for the last time. A lost World Cup final, many humiliating defeats and eliminations, two Copa América finals lost on penalties, another lost against Brazil — the game of fate seemed to have no end.

And yet, the next competition after that day of Diego’s death was the Copa América, which would be organised on the grounds of Brazil. On 10 July 2021, the national team of Argentina beat Brazil 1-0 at the seemingly haunted Maracanã to win its first title after 28 years. The next summer, with an emphatic victory at Wembley against European Champion Italy, it won the finalissima and, in a competition that seemed to be Lionel Messi’s last, went to Qatar with a hidden hope for what no one could have expected 4 years earlier.

The start, however, looked not at all hopeful. A 1-2 defeat by Saudi Arabia and the ghosts of other eras seemed to appear again on the path of the albiceleste. But a team that perhaps became the most beloved by Argentines in the History of their much-loved national team showed match by match that it had a star to go far. 2-0 against Mexico, 2-0 against Poland, with Messi, at 35 years old, reaching a performance that placed him in the absolute footballing pantheon. With difficulty, 2-1 against Australia in the “16”; qualification on penalties against the Netherlands after an eventful game that foolishly came close to being lost; and a lordly performance by Messi in the semi-final with 2018 finalist Croatia, with the score stopping at 3-0. In the final, the opponent was World Champion France. The description of that game would need hours to analyse each significant separate element and event, in a game that was perhaps the most epic, if not by every footballing judgement the best, in the History of the World Cup. Dibu Martínez’s save in the last minute of extra time, from Kolo Muani’s shot, seemed to come from the sky, as did Messi’s words before Montiel took the decisive penalty: “from the Earth to the sky, to the end Diego”… Argentina was world champion again! Football managed on penalties to defeat its political instrumentalisation. One could say that this was the aim of its organisers — yes, perhaps that is always the aim, because they know that since they cannot defeat football, let football defeat them so that in the meantime they can set up their own celebration. But football will continue to win forever — and this is the History of the entire World Cup, whoever organised it, however many black stains tried to soil its body, what remained was the game of the peoples, the only thing alive through wars, because in the end — even through death — life triumphs.

A Story for the Future

A few hours before the beginning of the 23rd FIFA World Cup, on the grounds of the United States, Canada and Mexico, few can know what the footballing spectacle that will unfold in the first competition of the even greater expansion of the institution, with the participation of 48 teams, will be like. What is established, however, is FIFA’s strategy for the evolution of the institution and the sport itself. Now, in the World Cup, not only the best teams in the world will play, not only the evolution of footballing thought, one school against the other, will be measured, but the national teams of countries that can create their own footballing narrative will enter it — more as extras than as real competitors — so that the influence of football as a product may grow in every corner of the world, because as a sport it no longer needs FIFA’s political strategy.

At the same time that small Curaçao participates in the greatest football competition on the planet, however, FIFA leaves no room for illusions. Its ties with power and imperialist pursuits, which were never hidden, reached the point of creating its own “Peace Prize”, which it handed to President Trump, surpassing the limits of ridiculousness that in older times someone could perhaps have defined. But if only the concern over the 2026 World Cup stopped there. Football itself begins the competition defeated, through exclusions: exclusions of supporters who could not secure the necessary travel visa, the near exclusion of the team of Iran, which is in a state of war with the United States, and ultimately the change of the location of the team’s base with its transfer to Mexico, the exclusion of the Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, who after 11 hours of interrogation and detention was deported on a return flight to Istanbul, humiliating body searches of the players of Senegal outside the plane upon their arrival on American soil. A World Cup made to symbolise the closing of the door to the peoples of the world, what the American political leadership wants to symbolise. A World Cup with its doors literally closed to the masses that adore the sport, because of the dizzying ticket prices that have ended up in a black market operating under FIFA’s aegis.

How, one wonders, would even that Jules Rimet, who envisioned a new policy for world football, motivated by the line of the Catholic Church, see today the evolution of his vision? How would Stanley Rous react to this closing of football stadiums to the working class? How would even João Havelange face the ridiculousness of the embrace with the American political leadership? It matters little — because what matters today and has always mattered was what the peoples perceived through the World Cup. The peoples who supported the Austrian interwar star Matthias Sindelar, who never played with the team of the Nazis; the peoples who knew what was happening in Videla’s Argentina and stood beside the Mothers of May, aligning their thought with Menotti, later Maradona, against the American tragedies of the sport, together with “black-blanc-beur” France, against the Germany that was never united by a penalty, but by its multicultural working class that can win in every match, even with more than 7 goals.

As long as reality allows it, as long as people can think about football, the most important unimportant thing in life, the World Cup will offer us images so that we can find our own stories, our own narratives, our own way in which through football, which is the mirror of our societies, we see their future and our own. A future that, among its most beautiful images, has a little boy, or a little girl, kicking a ball either on dry earth, or on sand, or on green grass, even on snow. This is the narrative we want for the football we love. This is the narrative we want for the World Cup. This is the story we want for the world!