Taking part in the ’54 World Cup were eleven teams from Europe and three from the Americas, plus Turkey and South Korea. Brazil unveiled its yellow shirt with a green collar to replace the white uniform that had brought them bad luck at Maracanã. But that canary color was no help at first: Brazil fell to Hungary in a violent match and did not even make the semifinals. The Brazilian delegation complained to FIFA about the British referee, who had acted “at the service of international communism against Western Christian civilization.”
Hungary was the easy favorite to win this Cup. The steamroller combination of Puskás, Kocsis, and Hidegkuti had gone four years undefeated, and shortly before the World Cup they had crushed England 7–1. But it was no cakewalk. After the tough encounter with Brazil, the Hungarians threw everything they had at Uruguay. The two teams played to the death, neither giving any quarter, each wearing the other down, until at last two goals by Kocsis decided the match in extra time.
The final pitted Hungary against West Germany, whom the Hungarians had already walloped 8–3 at the beginning of the tournament when the captain Puskás was sidelined with an injury. In the final Puskás reappeared, barely scraping by on one leg, to lead a brilliant but exhausted team. Hungary was ahead 2–0 but ended up losing 3–2, and Germany won its first world title. Austria came in third, Uruguay fourth.
Kocsis the Hungarian was the leading scorer with eleven goals, followed by the German Morlock, the Austrian Probst, and the Swiss Hügi with six apiece. Of Kocsis’s eleven goals, the most incredible was against Brazil. Kocsis took off like an airplane, went flying through the air, and headed the ball into the corner of the goal.
Goal by Rahn
It was at the World Cup in 1954. Hungary, the favorite, was playing West Germany in the final.
With six minutes left in a match tied 2–2, the robust German forward Helmut Rahn trapped a rebound from the Hungarian defense in the semicircle. Rahn evaded Lantos and fired a blast with his left, just inside the right post of the goal defended by Grosics.
Heribert Zimmerman, Germany’s most popular broadcaster, announced that goal with a passion worthy of a South American: “Toooooooooorrrrrrrrrr!!!”
It was the first World Cup Germany had been allowed to play since the war, and the German people felt they again had the right to exist. Zimmerman’s cry became a symbol of national resurrection. Years later, that historic goal could be heard on the soundtrack of Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun, which recounts the misadventures of a woman who cannot find her way out of the ruins.
Walking Advertisements
In the mid-1950s, Peñarol signed the first contract for shirt ads. Ten players took the field with a company name displayed on their chests. Obdulio Varela, however, stuck with his old shirt. He explained: “They used to drag us blacks around by rings in our noses. Those days are gone.”
Today, every soccer player is an advertisement in motion.
In 1989 Carlos Menem played a friendly match wearing the shirt of the Argentine national team, along with Maradona and the rest. On television it was hard to tell if he was the president of Argentina or Renault, whose enormous logo was featured on his chest.
In the ’94 World Cup the logos of Adidas or Umbro were more visible on players’ shirts than any national symbol. The Mercedes-Benz star shines alongside the federal eagle on Germany’s training uniform. That same star lights up the clothing of the club VfB Stuttgart. Bayern Munich, by contrast, prefers Opel cars. The packaging firm Tetra Pak sponsors Eintracht Frankfurt. Borussia Dortmund’s players promote Continentale insurance, and Borussia Mönchengladbach’s flog Diebels beer. The teams named for Bayer in Leverkusen and Uerdingen advertise the company’s drugs talcid and larylin on their shirts.
The advertising on a player’s chest is more important than the number on his back. In 1993 the Argentine club Racing, having no sponsor, published a desperate ad in the daily Clarín: “Wanted: Sponsor…” Advertising also outweighs the clean living the sport is supposed to promote. That same year, 1993, while fights in the stands in Chile reached such alarming proportions that the sale of alcohol during matches was banned, most of Chile’s first-division teams were promoting beer or pisco on their shirts.
Speaking of clean living, a few years have gone by since the Pope performed a miracle and turned the Holy Spirit into a bank. Now the Italian club Lazio has it for a sponsor: “Banco di Santo Spirito,” proclaim their shirts, as if each player were one of God’s tellers.
At the end of the second quarter of 1992, the Italian company Motta took stock of its accounts. Its logo, worn proudly on the chests of Club Milan’s players, had been seen 2,250 times in newspaper photos and featured for six hours on television. Motta paid Milan $4.5 million, but its sales of cakes and other treats increased by $15 million over that period. Another Italian firm, Parmalat, which sells dairy products in forty countries, had a golden year in 1993. Its team, Parma, won the European Cup Winners’ Cup for the first time, and in South America three teams that sport its logo on their shirts, Palmeiras, Boca, and Peñarol, won championships. Clambering over eighteen competitors, Parmalat took the Brazilian market by storm and gained a foothold among consumers in Argentina and Uruguay—all with a helping hand from soccer. What’s more, along the way Parmalat bought several South American teams, thus acquiring not only shirts but legs. For ten million dollars, the company bought Edílson, Mazinho, Edmundo, Kléber, and Zinho, all of whom played or once played for the Brazilian national team, as well as the other seven players at the club Palmeiras. Anyone interested in acquiring them should write to the company’s head office in Parma, Italy.
Ever since television started showing players up close, the entire uniform, from head to toe, has turned into a billboard. When a star takes his time tying his shoes, it’s not slow fingers but pocketbook smarts: he is showing off the Adidas, Nike, or Reebok logo. Even back in the ’36 Olympics organized by Hitler, the winning athletes featured Adidas’s three stripes on their shoes. In the 1990 World Cup final between Germany and Argentina, Adidas’s stripes were everywhere, including the ball and every strip of clothing worn by the players, the referee, and the linesmen. Two English journalists, Simson and Jennings, reported that only the referee’s whistle didn’t belong to Adidas.
Goal by Di Stéfano
It was 1957. Spain was playing Belgium.
Miguel caught the Belgian defense sleeping, penetrated on the right and volleyed a cross kick to center. Di Stéfano leaped forward, diving full-length, and scored with a backheel from the air.
Alfredo Di Stéfano, the Argentine star who became a Spaniard, had a habit of scoring goals like that. Any open net was an unforgivable crime meriting immediate punishment, and he carried out the sentence by stabbing at it like a mischievous elf.
Di Stéfano
The entire playing field fit inside his shoes. From his feet it sprouted and grew. Alfredo Di Stéfano ran and re-ran the field from net to net. When he had the ball he would switch flanks and alter the pace, from a lazy trot to an unstoppable cyclone; when he didn’t, he would evade his marker to gain open space, seeking air to keep a play from getting choked off.
He never stood still. Holding his head high, he could see the entire playing field and cross it at a gallop to pry open the defense and launch the attack. He was there at the beginning, the during, and the end of every scoring play, and he scored goals of all colors:
Watch out, watch out,
here comes the arrow
faster than all get out.
The crowd would carry him off the field on their shoulders.
Di Stéfano was the engine behind three teams that amazed the world in the 1940s: River Plate, where he took Pedernera’s place; Millonarios from Bogotá, where he sparkled alongside Pedernera; and Real Madrid, where he was Spain’s leading scorer five years in a row. In 1991, years after he retired, the magazine France Football bestowed on this Buenos Aires boy the title of “best European player of all time.”
Goal by Garrincha
It was in Italy in 1958. Brazil’s national team was playing Club Fiorentina on the way to the World Cup in Sweden.
Garrincha invaded the penalty area, left one defender sitting on his bottom, shook off another, and then one more. He eluded the goalkeeper too, then discovered another defender on the goal line. Garrincha made like he was going to shoot, then like he wasn’t; he faked a kick at the near corner and the poor fellow crashed face first into the post. By then the goalkeeper was back. Garrincha put the ball between the keeper’s legs and flew into the net along with it.
Afterward, with the ball under his arm, he slowly returned to the field. He walked with his gaze lowered, Chaplin in slow motion, as if asking forgiveness for the goal that had all Florence on its feet.
The 1958 World Cup
The United States was launching a satellite into the high heavens, a new little moon to circle the earth. It crossed paths with Soviet Sputniks but never said hello. And while the great powers were competing in the Great Beyond, in the Here and Now civil war was breaking out in Lebanon, Algeria was burning, France was catching fire, and General de Gaulle was standing six feet tall above the flames and promising salvation. In Cuba Fidel Castro’s general strike against the Batista dictatorship was failing, but in Venezuela another general strike was dooming the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez. In Colombia, Conservatives and Liberals were at the polls to bless their deal to divvy up power after a decade of mutual extermination, while Richard Nixon was being welcomed with stones on his Latin American tour. Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas was being published, as were Carlos Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear and Idea Vilariño’s Poemas de amor.
In Hungary, Imre Nagy was being shot along with other rebels from ’56 who wanted democracy instead of bureaucracy, and dying too were the Haitian rebels who had launched an assault on the palace where Papa Doc Duvalier reigned amid sorcerers and executioners. John XXIII, John the Good, was the new Pope in Rome; Prince Charles was the future monarch of England; Barbie was the new queen of dolls. In Brazil João Havelange was conquering the throne in the industry of soccer, while in the art of soccer a seventeen-year-old kid named Pelé was being hailed king of the world.
The consecration of Pelé took place in Sweden during the sixth World Cup. Participating were twelve teams from Europe, four from the Americas, and none from other latitudes. Swedes could watch at the stadium or in their homes. This was the first Cup to be televised, although it was broadcast live only in Sweden. The rest of the world saw it later.
This was also the first time that a country playing outside its own continent won. At the beginning of the 1958 World Cup the Brazilians were nothing special, but after the players rebelled and convinced the coach to field the team they wanted, they were unstoppable. At that point five substitutes became starters, among them an unknown teenager named Pelé and Garrincha, who was already famous in Brazil and had sparkled in the qualifying matches, but had been left off the starting line because psychological testing showed him to have a weak mind. These black second-stringers to white starters blazed with their own light in the new star team, along with another astonishing black, Didi, who organized their magic from the back.
Games and flames: the London paper World Sports said you had to rub your eyes to believe that it was of this world. In the semifinal against the French team of Kopa and Fontaine, the Brazilians won 5–2, and they won again 5–2 in the final against the home team. The Swedish captain, Liedholm, one of the cleanest and most elegant players in the history of soccer, converted the first goal of the match, but then Vavá, Pelé, and Zagalo put the Swedes in their place under the astonished gaze of King Gustavus Adolphus. Brazil became champion without suffering a single defeat. When it was over, the victorious players gave the ball to their most devoted fan, the black masseur Américo.
France took third place and West Germany fourth. Fontaine of France led the list of scorers with a shower of thirteen goals, eight with the right leg, four with the left, and one with his head, followed by Pelé and Helmut Rahn of Germany, who scored six apiece.
Goal by Nílton
It was at the World Cup in 1958. Brazil was leading Austria 1–0.
At the beginning of the second half, the key to the Brazilian defense, Nílton Santos, who was called “The Encyclopedia” for his vast knowledge of soccer, abandoned the rear guard, passed the center line, eluded a pair of opposing players, and kept going. The Brazilian manager, Vicente Feola, was also running but on the other side of the touchline. Sweating buckets, he screamed, “Go back! Go back!”
Nílton, unflappable, continued his race toward the enemy area. A fat and desperate Feola clutched his head, but Nílton refused to pass the ball to any of the forwards. He made the play entirely on his own and it culminated in a tremendous goal.
Then a happy Feola said, “Did you see that? Didn’t I tell you? This one really knows!”
Garrincha
One of his many brothers baptized him Garrincha, the name of an ugly, useless little bird. When he started playing soccer, doctors made the sign of the cross. They predicted this misshapen survivor of hunger and polio, dumb and lame, with the brain of an infant, a spinal column like an S, and both legs bowed to the same side, would never be an athlete.
There never was another right winger like him. In the 1958 World Cup he was the best in his position, in ’62 the best player in the championship. But throughout his many years on the field, Garrincha was more: in the entire history of soccer no one made more people happy.
When he was playing, the field became a circus ring, the ball a tame beast, the game an invitation to a party. Like a child defending his pet, Garrincha would not let go of the ball, and together the ball and he would perform devilish tricks that had people in stitches. He would jump on her, she would hop on him, she would hide, he would escape, she would chase after him. In the process, the opposing players would crash into each other, their legs twisting around until they would fall, seasick, on their behinds. Garrincha did his rascal’s mischief at the edge of the field, along the right touchline, far from the center: raised in the shantytown suburbs, that’s where he preferred to play. His club was Botafogo, which means “firelighter,” and he was the botafogo who fired up the fans crazed by firewater and all things fiery. He was the one who would climb out of the training camp window because he heard from some far-off back alley the call of a ball asking to be played with, music demanding to be danced to, a woman wanting to be kissed.
A winner? A loser with incredible luck. And luck doesn’t last. As they say in Brazil, if shit was worth anything, the poor would be born without asses.
Garrincha died a predictable death: poor, drunk, and alone.
Didi
The press named him the best playmaker of the 1958 World Cup.
He was the hub of the Brazilian team. Lean body, long neck, poised statue of himself, Didi looked like an African icon standing at the center of the field, where he ruled. From there he would shoot his poison arrows.
He was a master of the deep pass, a near goal that would become a real goal on the feet of Pelé, Garrincha, or Vavá, but he also scored on his own. Shooting from afar, he used to fool goalkeepers with the “dry leaf”: by giving the ball his foot’s profile, she would leave the ground spinning and continue spinning on the fly, dancing about and changing direction like a dry leaf carried by the wind, until she flew between the posts precisely where the goalkeeper least expected.
Didi played unhurriedly. Pointing at the ball, he would say: “She’s the one who runs.”
He knew she was alive.
Didi and She
I always felt a lot of affection for her. Because if you don’t treat her with affection, she won’t obey. When she’d come, I’d take charge and she’d obey. Sometimes she’d go one way and I’d say, “Come here, child,” and I’d bring her along. I’d take care of her blisters and warts and she’d always sit there, obedient as can be. I’d treat her with as much affectio
n as I give my own wife. I had tremendous affection for her. Because she’s fire. If you treat her badly, she’ll break your leg. That’s why I say, “Boys, come on, have some respect. This is a girl that has to be treated with a lot of love…” Depending on the spot where you touch her, she’ll choose your fate.
From an interview by Roberto Moura
Kopa
They called him “the Napoleon of soccer” because he was short and he liked to conquer territory.
With the ball on his foot he grew taller and dominated the field. Raymond Kopa was a player of great mobility and florid moves, who would draw arabesques on the grass as he danced his way toward the goal. Coaches pulled their hair out watching him have so much fun with the ball, and French commentators often accused him of the crime of having a South American style. But at the ’58 World Cup, the press named Kopa to the “dream team” and that year he won the Ballon d’Or for being the best player in Europe.
Soccer had pulled him out of misery. He started out on a team of miners. The son of Polish immigrants, Kopa spent his childhood at his father’s side in the Noeux coal pits. He would go down every night and emerge the following afternoon.