The same tricks are common among the most well-known clubs of France. Several directors of Bordeaux were charged with embezzling funds for personal use, and the head honchos of Olympique de Marseille were taken to court for bribing their opponents. Olympique, the most powerful club in France, was knocked down to second division and lost the titles of champion of France and champion of Europe when its directors were caught bribing several players from Valenciennes just before a match in 1993. That episode put an end to the sporting career and political ambitions of the businessman Bernard Tapie, who got a year in prison and ended up bankrupt.
At the same time, the Polish champion Club Legia lost its title for having “arranged” two matches, and Tottenham Hotspur in England revealed that it had been asked to make payments under the table to obtain a player from Nottingham Forest. The English club Luton, meanwhile, was being investigated for tax evasion.
Several soccer scandals erupted simultaneously in Brazil. The president of Botafogo charged that the directors of Brazil’s professional league had manipulated seven matches in 1993, winning a small fortune in bets. In São Paulo other lawsuits revealed that a local soccer federation boss had grown rich overnight, and when certain phantom accounts were examined it became clear that his sudden fortune did not result from a life devoted to the noble calling of sport. As if that were not enough, the president of the Brazilian Soccer Confederation, Ricardo Teixeira, was sued by Pelé for taking bribes in the sale of television broadcast rights. In response to Pelé’s suit, Havelange named Teixeira, who is his son-in-law, to the FIFA board.
Nearly two thousand years before all this, the biblical patriarch who wrote the book of Acts told the story of two early Christians, Ananias and his wife Sapphira, who sold a piece of land and lied about the price. When God found out, he killed them on the spot.
If God had time for soccer, how many directors would remain alive?
The 1994 World Cup
The Mayas of Chiapas were up in arms, the real Mexico blowing up in the face of the official Mexico, and Subcomandante Marcos was astonishing the world with his words of humor and amour.
Onetti, the novelist of the dark side of the soul, lay dying. World car-racing champion Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian, was being decapitated on an unsafe European track. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were killing each other in the pieces that had been Yugoslavia. In Rwanda something similar was happening, but television spoke of tribes, not peoples, and implied that the violence was the sort of thing black people do.
Torrijos’s heirs were winning the Panamanian elections four years after the bloody invasion and useless occupation by the United States. U.S. troops were pulling out of Somalia, where they had fought hunger with bullets. South Africa was voting for Mandela. Communists, rebaptized as socialists, were winning the parliamentary elections in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, all countries which had discovered that capitalism also has certain inconvenient traits. But Moscow’s Progress Publishers, which used to publish the works of Marx and Lenin, was now publishing Reader’s Digest. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.
Corruption scandals were demolishing Italy’s political parties and filling the power vacuum was Berlusconi, the parvenu who ran the dictatorship of television in the name of democratic diversity. Berlusconi was crowning his campaign with a slogan stolen from the soccer stadiums, while the fifteenth World Cup got under way in the United States, the home of baseball.
The U.S. press gave the matter scant attention, saying more or less: “Here, soccer is the sport of the future and it always will be.” But the stadiums were packed despite a sun that melted stones. To please European television, the big matches were played at noon, as in Mexico at the ’86 Cup.
Thirteen teams from Europe, six from the Americas, and three from Africa took part, plus South Korea and Saudi Arabia. To discourage ties, three points were given for each win instead of two. And to discourage violence, the referees were much more rigorous than usual, handing out warnings and ejections throughout the tournament. For the first time the referees wore colorful uniforms and for the first time each team was allowed a third substitute to replace an injured goalkeeper.
Maradona played in his final World Cup and it was a party, until he was defeated in the laboratory that tested his urine after the second match. Without him and without the speed demon Caniggia, Argentina fell apart. Nigeria played the most entertaining soccer of the Cup. Bulgaria, Stoitchkov’s team, won fourth place after knocking the fearful German squad out of the running. Third place went to Sweden. Italy faced Brazil in the final. It was a boring, drawn-out affair that ended scoreless, but between yawns Romario and Baggio offered some lessons in good soccer. In the penalty shootout, Brazil won 3–2 and was crowned champion of the world. An amazing story: Brazil is the only country that qualified for every World Cup, the only country to win it four times, the country that has won the most matches, and the country that has scored the most goals.
Leading the list of scorers in the ’94 Cup were Stoitchkov of Bulgaria and Salenko of Russia with six goals, followed by Brazil’s Romario, Italy’s Baggio, Sweden’s Andersson, and Germany’s Klinsmann, with five apiece.
Romario
From who knows what part of the stratosphere, the tiger appears, mauls, and vanishes. The goalkeeper, trapped in his cage, does not even have time to blink. Romario fires off one goal after another: half-volley, bicycle, on the fly, banana shot, backheel, toe poke, side tap.
Romario was born poor in a favela called Jacarezinho, but even as a child he practiced writing his name to prepare for the many autographs he would sign in his life. He clambered up the ladder to fame without paying the toll of obligatory lies: this very poor man always enjoyed the luxury of doing whatever he wished, a barhopping lover of the night who always said what he thought without thinking about what he was saying.
Now he owns a collection of Mercedes-Benz cars and 250 pairs of shoes, but his best friends are still that bunch of unpresentable hustlers who, in his childhood, taught him how to make the kill.
Baggio
In recent years no one has given Italians better soccer or more to talk about. Roberto Baggio’s game is mysterious: his legs have a mind of their own, his foot shoots by itself, his eyes see the goals before they happen.
Baggio is a big horsetail that flicks away opponents as he flows forward in an elegant wave. Opponents harass him, they bite, they punch him hard. Baggio has Buddhist sayings written under his captain’s armband. Buddha does not ward off the blows, but he does help suffer them. From his infinite serenity, he also helps Baggio discover the silence that lies beyond the din of cheers and whistles.
A Few Numbers
Between 1930 and 1994 the Americas won eight World Cups and Europe won seven. Brazil won the trophy four times, Argentina twice, and Uruguay twice. Italy and Germany were world champions three times apiece; England only won the Cup played on its home turf.
However, since Europe’s teams formed the overwhelming majority, it had twice as many chances. In fifteen World Cups, European teams had 159 opportunities to win, compared with only seventy-seven opportunities for teams from the Americas. What’s more, the overwhelming majority of the referees have been European.
Unlike the World Cup, the Intercontinental Cup has offered the same number of opportunities to the teams of Europe and the Americas. In these tournaments, waged by clubs rather than national teams, squads from the Americas have won twenty times to the Europeans’ thirteen.
The case of Great Britain is the most astonishing in this matter of inequality of rights in world soccer championships. The way they explained it to me as a child, God is one but He’s three: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I never could understand it. And I still don’t understand why Great Britain is one but she’s four: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, while Spain and Switzerland, to take two examples, continue to be no more than one despite the diverse national
ities that make them up.
In any case, Europe’s traditional control is beginning to break down. Until the 1994 World Cup, FIFA accepted one or two token countries from the rest of the world, as if paying a tax to the mappa mundi. Starting with the ’98 Cup, the number of participating countries will go from twenty-four to thirty-two. Europe will maintain its unjust proportion in relation to the Americas, but it will have to contend with greater participation by the countries of black Africa, with their lightning and joyful soccer in full expansion, and also Arab and Asian countries, like the Chinese who pioneered the sport but until now have had to watch from the stands.
[Since this was written in 1995, Europe has won three more championships and the Americas one, giving Europe a 10–9 edge overall. Brazil has now won the trophy an astounding five times, Italy four. But geographical injustice persists: FIFA continues to allot three times as many berths to Europe as to the Americas. In 2014, the thirty-two contenders that meet in Brazil will feature thirteen from Europe, four or five from South America, five from Africa, four or five from Asia, three or four from North and Central America plus the Caribbean, and, if lucky, one will travel all the way from Oceania.]
The Duty of Losing
For Bolivia, qualifying for the ’94 World Cup was like reaching the moon. Penned in by geography and mistreated by history, it had attended other World Cups only by invitation and had lost all its matches, failing to score a single goal.
The work of manager Xabier Azkargorta was paying off, not only in La Paz, where you play above the clouds, but at sea level. Bolivia was proving that altitude was not its only great player; the team could overcome the hang-ups that obliged it to lose before the match even began. Bolivia sparkled in the qualifying rounds. Melgar and Baldivieso in the midfield and the forwards Sánchez and above all Etcheverry, known as “El Diablo,” were cheered by the most demanding of crowds.
As bad luck would have it, Bolivia had to open the World Cup against all-powerful Germany. A baby finger against Rambo. But no one could have foreseen the outcome: instead of shrinking back into the box, Bolivia went on the attack. They didn’t play equal against equal. No, they played as the big guys against the little. Germany, thrown off stride, was in flight and Bolivia was in ecstasy. And that’s how it continued, until the moment when Bolivia’s star Marco Antonio Etcheverry took the field only to kick Matthäus inexcusably and get sent off. Then the Bolivians collapsed, wishing they had never sinned against the secret spell cast from the depths of centuries that obliges them to lose.
The Sin of Losing
Soccer elevates its divinities and exposes them to the vengeance of believers. With the ball on his foot and the national colors on his chest, the player who embodies the nation marches off to win glory on far-off battlefields. If he returns in defeat, the warrior becomes a fallen angel. At Ezeiza airport in 1958, people threw coins at Argentina’s players returning from a poor performance at the World Cup in Sweden. At the ’82 Cup, Caszely missed a penalty kick and in Chile they made his life impossible. Ten years later, several Ethiopian players asked the United Nations for asylum after losing 6–1 to Egypt.
We are because we win. If we lose, we no longer exist. Without question, the national uniform has become the clearest symbol of collective identity, not only in poor or small countries whose place on the map depends on soccer. When England lost out in the qualifiers for the 1994 World Cup, the front page of London’s Daily Mirror featured a headline in a type size fit for a catastrophe: “THE END OF THE WORLD.”
In soccer, as in everything else, losing is not allowed. In these end of century days, failure is the only sin that cannot be redeemed. During the ’94 Cup a handful of fanatics burned down the home of Joseph Bell, the defeated Cameroon goalkeeper, and shortly after Colombian player Andrés Escobar was gunned down in Medellín. Escobar had had the bad luck of scoring an own goal, an unforgivable act of treason.
Should we blame soccer? Or should we blame the culture of success and the whole system of power that professional soccer reflects? Soccer is not by nature a violent sport, although at times it becomes a vehicle for letting off steam. It was no coincidence that the murder of Escobar took place in one of the most violent countries on the planet. Violence is not in the genes of these people who love to party and are wild about the joys of music and soccer. Colombians suffer from violence like a disease, but they do not wear it like a birthmark on their foreheads. The machinery of power, on the other hand, is indeed a cause of violence. As in all of Latin America, injustice and humiliation poison people’s souls under a tradition of impunity that rewards the unscrupulous, encourages crime, and helps to perpetuate it as a national trait.
A few months before the ’94 Cup began, Amnesty International published a report according to which hundreds of Colombians “were executed without due process by the armed forces and their paramilitary allies in 1993. Most of the victims of these extrajudicial executions were people without known political affiliation.”
The Amnesty report also exposed the role of the Colombian police in “social cleanup” operations, a euphemism for the systematic extermination of homosexuals, prostitutes, drug addicts, beggars, the mentally ill, and street children. Society calls them “disposables,” human garbage that ought to die.
In this world that punishes failure, they are the perennial losers.
Maradona
He played, he won; he peed, he lost. Ephedrine turned up in his urinalysis and Maradona was booted out of the 1994 World Cup. Ephedrine, though not considered a stimulant by professional sports in the United States or many other countries, is prohibited in international competitions.
There was stupefaction and scandal, a blast of moral condemnation that left the whole world deaf. But somehow a few voices of support for the fallen idol managed to squeak through, not only in his wounded and dumbfounded Argentina, but in places as far away as Bangladesh, where a sizable demonstration repudiating FIFA and demanding Maradona’s return shook the streets. After all, to judge and condemn was easy. It was not so easy to forget that for many years Maradona had committed the sin of being the best, the crime of speaking out about things the powerful wanted kept quiet, and the felony of playing left-handed, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary means not only “of or pertaining to the left hand” but also “sinister or questionable.”
Diego Armando Maradona never used stimulants before matches to stretch the limits of his body. It is true that he was into cocaine, but only at sad parties where he wanted to forget or be forgotten because he was cornered by glory and could not live without the fame that would not allow him to live in peace. He played better than anyone else in spite of the cocaine, not because of it.
He was overwhelmed by the weight of his own personality. Ever since that day long ago when fans first chanted his name, his spinal column caused him grief. Maradona carried a burden named Maradona that bent his back out of shape. The body as metaphor: his legs ached, he couldn’t sleep without pills. It did not take him long to realize it was impossible to live with the responsibility of being a god on the field, but from the beginning he knew that stopping was out of the question. “I need them to need me,” he confessed after many years of living under the tyrannical halo of superhuman performance, swollen with cortisone and analgesics and praise, harassed by the demands of his devotees and by the hatred of those he offended.
The pleasure of demolishing idols is directly proportional to the need to erect them. In Spain, when Goicoechea hit him from behind—even though he didn’t have the ball—and sidelined him for several months, some fanatics carried the author of this premeditated homicide on their shoulders. And all over the world plenty of people were ready to celebrate the fall of that arrogant interloper, that parvenu fugitive from hunger, that greaser who had the insolent audacity to swagger and boast.
Later on in Naples, Maradona was Santa Maradonna, and the patron saint San Gennaro became San Gennarmando. In the streets they sold pictures of this divin
ity in shorts illuminated by the halo of the Virgin or wrapped in the sacred mantle of the saint who bleeds every six months. And they even sold coffins for the clubs of northern Italy and tiny bottles filled with the tears of Silvio Berlusconi. Kids and dogs wore Maradona wigs. Somebody placed a ball under the foot of the statue of Dante, and in the famous fountain Triton wore the blue shirt of Napoli. It had been more than half a century since this city, condemned to suffer the furies of Vesuvius and eternal defeat on the soccer field, had last won a championship, and thanks to Maradona the dark south finally managed to humiliate the white north that scorned it. In the stadiums of Italy and all Europe, Napoli kept on winning, cup after cup, and each goal constituted a desecration of the established order and a revenge against history. In Milan they hated the man responsible for this affront by the uppity poor: they called him “ham with curls.” And not only in Milan: at the 1990 World Cup most of the spectators punished Maradona with furious whistles every time he touched the ball, and celebrated Argentina’s defeat by Germany as a victory for Italy.
When Maradona said he wanted to leave Napoli, some people tossed wax dolls stuck with pins through his window. Prisoner of the city that adored him, and of the Camorra, the Mafia that owns it, he was playing against his heart, against his feet. That’s when the cocaine scandal erupted, and Maradona suddenly became Maracoca, a delinquent who had fooled people into thinking he was a hero.
Later on in Buenos Aires the media gave a further twist to the knife: live coverage of his arrest, as if it were a match, to the delight of those who love the spectacle of a king disrobed and carted off by the police.