In this episode, we'll learn about the dramatic story behind the controversial 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.
From political corruption to unexplained favours, we'll explore what has come to be called the "Dirtiest World Cup in History".
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:27] It’s a story about football, of course, but we are going to talk more about what happened off the pitch than on it.
[00:00:35] It will involve global politics, a military dictatorship, murder, prisons, corruption, and has led to some people calling this “the dirtiest world cup in history”.
[00:00:47] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:55] The winters in Buenos Aires are generally mild, temperatures dropping to 9 degrees or so at night, and rising to 16 in the afternoon. And the afternoon of the 25th of June 1978 was, in many ways, a typical day in the capital of Argentina.
[00:01:16] A light breeze blew across the city, the people of Buenos Aires went about their daily business, but the atmosphere was buzzing.
[00:01:26] To the north of the city, in the barrio of Belgrano, 71,483 fans had packed into the Estadio Monumental to watch the final of the world cup between Argentina, the hosts of the tournament, and the Netherlands.
[00:01:43] The Netherlands were many people’s favourites.
[00:01:46] They were the pioneers of total football, and had got to the finals of the last world cup, only to lose to the hosts, West Germany.
[00:01:57] They were up against the hosts again, and this time the Europeans were desperate to lift their first world cup trophy.
[00:02:06] Their opponents, Argentina were in many people’s estimations a weaker team, but they had been playing very well, only losing one match on their way to the final, and they had the advantage of phenomenally passionate home fans, full of energy, love and support for their country.
[00:02:27] These were the days when fans weren’t really able to travel to support their teams, so there were few orange shirts, supporters of the Netherlands, in the stadium.
[00:02:38] Even before the referee blew his whistle to kick off the game, there had been some inconsistencies, shall we say, directly leading up to the match.
[00:02:48] The scheduled referee for the final was an Israeli named Abraham Klein, but the Argentine Football Association had complained, saying that Israel had strong political links to the Netherlands, and therefore an Israeli couldn’t be trusted to be impartial.
[00:03:06] In other words, Klein couldn’t be trusted to officiate the game fairly.
[00:03:11] The Israeli referee was removed, and replaced by Sergio Gonella, an official from Italy, a country with a strong history of links with Argentina.
[00:03:22] And this wasn’t it.
[00:03:25] The bus that took the Dutch team to the stadium went on an unusual scenic route through Buenos Aires, instead of going directly.
[00:03:35] To state the obvious, a tour of the city is the last thing a player wants when they are on the way to play in a world cup final.
[00:03:43] And then after the Dutch players got onto the pitch, ready for the 3pm kick-off, they were made to wait, as the Argentine team was 5 minutes late.
[00:03:54] We’ll get to what happened next, in the match, in due course, but let me further set the scene by saying that these were far from the only controversies leading up to the final.
[00:04:05] In fact, the very decision to hold the FIFA world cup in Argentina was a subject of wide controversy.
[00:04:12] The decision to award the tournament to Argentina was not controversial, but that happened in July of 1966.
[00:04:22] At that point, or to be precise, until 1 week before that point, Argentina had been run by a democratically elected government.
[00:04:31] But on June the 28th of 1966, the government was overthrown by a military junta. The military would rule the country until 1973, when democracy returned for a brief period before another military coup in 1976, which would last until 1983.
[00:04:54] And this second period of military rule, from 1976 to 1983, was particularly brutal.
[00:05:04] Almost immediately after seizing power, the generals proceeded to crack down on anyone who was deemed to have dangerous political views or be a threat to the government.
[00:05:15] And this wasn’t just political opponents, people in politics.
[00:05:20] Anyone who was thought to have leftist views or communist sympathies, from journalists to lawyers, writers to artists, they would find themselves abducted by the police, sent to prison for torture and beating, and more often than not, murdered.
[00:05:38] The scale of this is quite astounding, with estimates putting the figure at around 30,000 people abducted and murdered by the regime during its seven year stint in power.
[00:05:51] And while the true scale of this state-enabled murder has only come to light with the downfall of the regime, of course there were plenty of people in Argentina who knew exactly what was going on.
[00:06:04] Or rather, they didn’t know exactly what was going on, but they knew that their friends and loved ones were being abducted in broad daylight, and they were never heard of or seen ever again.
[00:06:17] Clearly, the objective of this visible brutality was to squash all opposition, to stop people from protesting or complaining.
[00:06:27] But some citizens continued to protest.
[00:06:32] In 1977, the year before the tournament was scheduled to take place, and a year after the junta had seized power, a collection of brave Argentine women founded a group called “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, or “The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in English.
[00:06:50] These mothers were women whose children had disappeared, or to be more precise, whose children had been disappeared by the authorities.
[00:07:00] Every Thursday they would march to the presidential palace holding up pictures of their children, and wearing white headscarves.
[00:07:09] As they grew in number, they started to draw more international attention. And in December of 1977, on Human Rights Day, the group paid for a full-page newspaper advertisement where they published the names of their missing children.
[00:07:27] Where were they, the mothers asked?
[00:07:29] What happened to them?
[00:07:32] It would later transpire that a common fate for people captured by the regime was to be first imprisoned and tortured, and when the military officials had extracted as much useful information as they could from them, they would be stripped naked, given a sedative, put on an aeroplane, flown out over the Atlantic or over the River Plate, and thrown out from the plane to their death.
[00:08:00] In one chilling description, a former army operative recalled how the sedated prisoners would fall out of the planes “like little ants”.
[00:08:11] In fact, one of the founding mothers of “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, Azucena Villaflor, a woman who had publicly asked “what happened to my son”, she would later meet his same fate.
[00:08:25] The very same evening that the newspaper advertisement was published, she found herself kidnapped by a group of armed men and taken to a secret detention centre.
[00:08:37] In fact, nobody knows for sure what happened to her, and she wasn’t seen or heard of for 30 years. She would only be formally identified in 2005, when body parts that had washed up on a beach back in 1977 were identified, and they were found to belong to Villaflor and other activists.
[00:09:02] In all probability, like the children she was protesting about, Villaflor was thrown from an aeroplane to her death.
[00:09:11] Now, this was the backdrop to the World Cup finals in Argentina.
[00:09:16] A brutally repressive regime that would crack down on its opponents in the most terrible of ways.
[00:09:23] And much of this was known, or at least supposed, by the international community.
[00:09:30] There were protests outside Argentina, encouraging countries to boycott the tournament. Amnesty International led a series of protests, with a slogan, “Yes to Football, No to Torture!”
[00:09:45] Johan Cruyff, one of the best and most famous football players in the world, refused to travel to the world cup, which was interpreted as a criticism of the regime, but he would later say that it was out of fear for his family’s safety rather than a grand political statement.
[00:10:03] In the end, no countries boycotted it.
[00:10:07] The world cup would go on, and the president of Argentina, General Videla, was determined to make it a huge success.
[00:10:16] No expense would be spared; it was Argentina’s time to shine on the world stage.
[00:10:24] In fact, the costs were spiralling out of control so much that a general who was overseeing the World Cup, a man called Omar Actis, raised public concerns about the cost.
[00:10:37] But in August of 1976, as he was on his way to a press conference where he was expected to criticise the excessive spending, he was assassinated, shot in broad daylight.
[00:10:51] The regime would blame his death on a far-left paramilitary organisation called Montoneros, but the group denied it, and the timing of his death certainly looked suspicious.
[00:11:05] In the end, Argentina would spend 520 million dollars on the world cup, which was twice what Spain would spend on its world cup preparations for hosting the next tournament in 1982.
[00:11:18] Now, let’s talk about some football.
[00:11:21] The tournament kicked off on the 1st of June, 1978, with an uneventful 0-0 draw between West Germany and Poland.
[00:11:30] Back then the hosts didn’t automatically play the first match.
[00:11:35] Argentina would play the following day, beating Hungary 2-1.
[00:11:41] And a few days later, Argentina would face France.
[00:11:45] Now, France had lost their first game against Italy, so they had to win to stay in the tournament.
[00:11:52] The game against Argentina would be marred by accusations of favourable treatment of Argentina by the referee, with a penalty being given for Argentina and one denied for France.
[00:12:05] In the end, Argentina won the game 2-1, progressing to the next round.
[00:12:11] Now, the way in which the world cup worked in 1978 was slightly different to how it works now.
[00:12:18] Instead of quarter finals and semi finals, there was a second “group stage”, and the winners of each group played each other in the final.
[00:12:29] Argentina was in a group with Brazil, Poland and Peru. And it won its first match against Poland, then drew against Brazil.
[00:12:38] It would all come down to the last set of matches.
[00:12:42] Brazil against Poland, and Argentina against fellow South Americans Peru.
[00:12:49] Brazil had played earlier in the day, beating Poland 3-1, so Argentina knew exactly what it needed to do to get to the final: beat Peru 4-0.
[00:13:03] Now, in case you don’t know much about football, if perhaps you are more familiar with basketball or sports with high scores, 4-0 is a lot, especially in a world cup match.
[00:13:16] It would be no mean feat, but there was a lot riding on Argentina making it to the final.
[00:13:23] 10% of the country’s national budget had been spent on new stadiums, the phone lines of 6,000 Argentinians had been disconnected so that global media outlets could cover the competition.
[00:13:36] And it was a matter of huge pride for the country, and for the military regime that ruled it.
[00:13:44] Peru, on the other hand, had no hope of qualifying for the final. They had lost both their games, so they would be playing only for honour.
[00:13:55] The game started off relatively equal, but the tide soon turned in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:03] By the 50th minute, Argentina were 4-0 up, and the game ended 6-0, propelling Argentina into the final.
[00:14:13] Now, was this simply excellent football on Argentina’s part, or were there other factors at play?
[00:14:21] According to a 2018 film, called Pele, Argentina and the Dictators, it was not just a case of Argentina playing better football.
[00:14:32] This film tells the story of an Argentine civil servant who alleges that Argentina had offered Peru $50 million and 35,000 tonnes of grain if Peru threw the match in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:49] Now, these are the allegations of one person, but there are other suspicious events as well.
[00:14:56] There was an allegation of a secret emergency meeting 48 hours before the game at the Buenos Aires Sheraton hotel, involving officials from both countries.
[00:15:08] There's even an allegation that the president of Argentina, General Videla, visited the Peruvian dressing room to speak to the players.
[00:15:17] And what’s more, that the Argentine president was accompanied by Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, who had done a lot of interfering in South America in support of right wing governments.
[00:15:30] Now, Kissinger was a private citizen at that point in time, and a thorn in the side of the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, so if he was there, he wasn’t acting on the orders of the US government.
[00:15:44] Kissinger would later say that he had no recollection of visiting the Peruvian dressing room, but even this denial, saying “I can’t remember” rather than “I did not” is somewhat suspicious.
[00:15:58] Now, as a quick side note, if you'd like to learn more about the life of Henry Kissiner, we have a member-only episode on that, it’s number 393.
[00:16:08] Anyway, back to our story, Argentina won 6-0, and they would face the Netherlands in the final.
[00:16:16] And this brings us back to the start of the episode.
[00:16:19] The crowd was roaring, the tens of thousands of Argentine fans in the stadium and the hundreds of thousands of fans outside screaming at the top of their lungs in support of the team.
[00:16:33] Even in the notorious detention centre just a stone’s throw away from the stadium, the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or the Navy Petty-Officers School, a TV had been brought in for the battered and bruised political prisoners to watch the game on.
[00:16:51] You might already know the result.
[00:16:54] Argentina scored first, in the 38th minute.
[00:16:58] Moving towards the final minutes, the atmosphere in the stadium grew even more tense, as Argentina was minutes away from lifting the first world cup in its history.
[00:17:10] But then in the 82nd minute, the Netherlands equalised, taking it to 1:1.
[00:17:17] The atmosphere ratcheted up a notch when the Dutch hit the post with minutes to go.
[00:17:23] Normal time ended 1:1, meaning it went to extra time.
[00:17:29] In the 105th minute, the scorer of the first goal for Argentina, Mario Kempes, scored again, and then his teammate Daniel Bertoni scored, taking it to 3:1 and sealing victory for the home nation.
[00:17:44] The crowd went wild, the city electric. For the first time in its history, Argentina had won the world cup.
[00:17:55] But this victory wasn’t just a footballing victory; it was a victory on the world stage for the murderous regime that had presided over it.
[00:18:05] It was, unfortunately, marred by controversy, giving Argentina’s rivals, both political and footballing, a reason to question the legitimacy of the victory.
[00:18:18] It's unquestionable that the Argentine team played some great football, and very possibly they did win fair and square, but the actions of the regime cast a black cloud over the tournament, with some calling it “The Dirtiest World Cup In History”.
[00:18:37] As always, it is a reminder that the full story of the world cup is often more nuanced than what happens on the pitch.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:18:53] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:56] We've got loads of listeners from Argentina, and Latin America more widely, so what do you think?
[00:19:03] Do you remember this world cup? Do you think it was all fair play, or were there other factors?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:12] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:27] It’s a story about football, of course, but we are going to talk more about what happened off the pitch than on it.
[00:00:35] It will involve global politics, a military dictatorship, murder, prisons, corruption, and has led to some people calling this “the dirtiest world cup in history”.
[00:00:47] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:55] The winters in Buenos Aires are generally mild, temperatures dropping to 9 degrees or so at night, and rising to 16 in the afternoon. And the afternoon of the 25th of June 1978 was, in many ways, a typical day in the capital of Argentina.
[00:01:16] A light breeze blew across the city, the people of Buenos Aires went about their daily business, but the atmosphere was buzzing.
[00:01:26] To the north of the city, in the barrio of Belgrano, 71,483 fans had packed into the Estadio Monumental to watch the final of the world cup between Argentina, the hosts of the tournament, and the Netherlands.
[00:01:43] The Netherlands were many people’s favourites.
[00:01:46] They were the pioneers of total football, and had got to the finals of the last world cup, only to lose to the hosts, West Germany.
[00:01:57] They were up against the hosts again, and this time the Europeans were desperate to lift their first world cup trophy.
[00:02:06] Their opponents, Argentina were in many people’s estimations a weaker team, but they had been playing very well, only losing one match on their way to the final, and they had the advantage of phenomenally passionate home fans, full of energy, love and support for their country.
[00:02:27] These were the days when fans weren’t really able to travel to support their teams, so there were few orange shirts, supporters of the Netherlands, in the stadium.
[00:02:38] Even before the referee blew his whistle to kick off the game, there had been some inconsistencies, shall we say, directly leading up to the match.
[00:02:48] The scheduled referee for the final was an Israeli named Abraham Klein, but the Argentine Football Association had complained, saying that Israel had strong political links to the Netherlands, and therefore an Israeli couldn’t be trusted to be impartial.
[00:03:06] In other words, Klein couldn’t be trusted to officiate the game fairly.
[00:03:11] The Israeli referee was removed, and replaced by Sergio Gonella, an official from Italy, a country with a strong history of links with Argentina.
[00:03:22] And this wasn’t it.
[00:03:25] The bus that took the Dutch team to the stadium went on an unusual scenic route through Buenos Aires, instead of going directly.
[00:03:35] To state the obvious, a tour of the city is the last thing a player wants when they are on the way to play in a world cup final.
[00:03:43] And then after the Dutch players got onto the pitch, ready for the 3pm kick-off, they were made to wait, as the Argentine team was 5 minutes late.
[00:03:54] We’ll get to what happened next, in the match, in due course, but let me further set the scene by saying that these were far from the only controversies leading up to the final.
[00:04:05] In fact, the very decision to hold the FIFA world cup in Argentina was a subject of wide controversy.
[00:04:12] The decision to award the tournament to Argentina was not controversial, but that happened in July of 1966.
[00:04:22] At that point, or to be precise, until 1 week before that point, Argentina had been run by a democratically elected government.
[00:04:31] But on June the 28th of 1966, the government was overthrown by a military junta. The military would rule the country until 1973, when democracy returned for a brief period before another military coup in 1976, which would last until 1983.
[00:04:54] And this second period of military rule, from 1976 to 1983, was particularly brutal.
[00:05:04] Almost immediately after seizing power, the generals proceeded to crack down on anyone who was deemed to have dangerous political views or be a threat to the government.
[00:05:15] And this wasn’t just political opponents, people in politics.
[00:05:20] Anyone who was thought to have leftist views or communist sympathies, from journalists to lawyers, writers to artists, they would find themselves abducted by the police, sent to prison for torture and beating, and more often than not, murdered.
[00:05:38] The scale of this is quite astounding, with estimates putting the figure at around 30,000 people abducted and murdered by the regime during its seven year stint in power.
[00:05:51] And while the true scale of this state-enabled murder has only come to light with the downfall of the regime, of course there were plenty of people in Argentina who knew exactly what was going on.
[00:06:04] Or rather, they didn’t know exactly what was going on, but they knew that their friends and loved ones were being abducted in broad daylight, and they were never heard of or seen ever again.
[00:06:17] Clearly, the objective of this visible brutality was to squash all opposition, to stop people from protesting or complaining.
[00:06:27] But some citizens continued to protest.
[00:06:32] In 1977, the year before the tournament was scheduled to take place, and a year after the junta had seized power, a collection of brave Argentine women founded a group called “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, or “The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in English.
[00:06:50] These mothers were women whose children had disappeared, or to be more precise, whose children had been disappeared by the authorities.
[00:07:00] Every Thursday they would march to the presidential palace holding up pictures of their children, and wearing white headscarves.
[00:07:09] As they grew in number, they started to draw more international attention. And in December of 1977, on Human Rights Day, the group paid for a full-page newspaper advertisement where they published the names of their missing children.
[00:07:27] Where were they, the mothers asked?
[00:07:29] What happened to them?
[00:07:32] It would later transpire that a common fate for people captured by the regime was to be first imprisoned and tortured, and when the military officials had extracted as much useful information as they could from them, they would be stripped naked, given a sedative, put on an aeroplane, flown out over the Atlantic or over the River Plate, and thrown out from the plane to their death.
[00:08:00] In one chilling description, a former army operative recalled how the sedated prisoners would fall out of the planes “like little ants”.
[00:08:11] In fact, one of the founding mothers of “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, Azucena Villaflor, a woman who had publicly asked “what happened to my son”, she would later meet his same fate.
[00:08:25] The very same evening that the newspaper advertisement was published, she found herself kidnapped by a group of armed men and taken to a secret detention centre.
[00:08:37] In fact, nobody knows for sure what happened to her, and she wasn’t seen or heard of for 30 years. She would only be formally identified in 2005, when body parts that had washed up on a beach back in 1977 were identified, and they were found to belong to Villaflor and other activists.
[00:09:02] In all probability, like the children she was protesting about, Villaflor was thrown from an aeroplane to her death.
[00:09:11] Now, this was the backdrop to the World Cup finals in Argentina.
[00:09:16] A brutally repressive regime that would crack down on its opponents in the most terrible of ways.
[00:09:23] And much of this was known, or at least supposed, by the international community.
[00:09:30] There were protests outside Argentina, encouraging countries to boycott the tournament. Amnesty International led a series of protests, with a slogan, “Yes to Football, No to Torture!”
[00:09:45] Johan Cruyff, one of the best and most famous football players in the world, refused to travel to the world cup, which was interpreted as a criticism of the regime, but he would later say that it was out of fear for his family’s safety rather than a grand political statement.
[00:10:03] In the end, no countries boycotted it.
[00:10:07] The world cup would go on, and the president of Argentina, General Videla, was determined to make it a huge success.
[00:10:16] No expense would be spared; it was Argentina’s time to shine on the world stage.
[00:10:24] In fact, the costs were spiralling out of control so much that a general who was overseeing the World Cup, a man called Omar Actis, raised public concerns about the cost.
[00:10:37] But in August of 1976, as he was on his way to a press conference where he was expected to criticise the excessive spending, he was assassinated, shot in broad daylight.
[00:10:51] The regime would blame his death on a far-left paramilitary organisation called Montoneros, but the group denied it, and the timing of his death certainly looked suspicious.
[00:11:05] In the end, Argentina would spend 520 million dollars on the world cup, which was twice what Spain would spend on its world cup preparations for hosting the next tournament in 1982.
[00:11:18] Now, let’s talk about some football.
[00:11:21] The tournament kicked off on the 1st of June, 1978, with an uneventful 0-0 draw between West Germany and Poland.
[00:11:30] Back then the hosts didn’t automatically play the first match.
[00:11:35] Argentina would play the following day, beating Hungary 2-1.
[00:11:41] And a few days later, Argentina would face France.
[00:11:45] Now, France had lost their first game against Italy, so they had to win to stay in the tournament.
[00:11:52] The game against Argentina would be marred by accusations of favourable treatment of Argentina by the referee, with a penalty being given for Argentina and one denied for France.
[00:12:05] In the end, Argentina won the game 2-1, progressing to the next round.
[00:12:11] Now, the way in which the world cup worked in 1978 was slightly different to how it works now.
[00:12:18] Instead of quarter finals and semi finals, there was a second “group stage”, and the winners of each group played each other in the final.
[00:12:29] Argentina was in a group with Brazil, Poland and Peru. And it won its first match against Poland, then drew against Brazil.
[00:12:38] It would all come down to the last set of matches.
[00:12:42] Brazil against Poland, and Argentina against fellow South Americans Peru.
[00:12:49] Brazil had played earlier in the day, beating Poland 3-1, so Argentina knew exactly what it needed to do to get to the final: beat Peru 4-0.
[00:13:03] Now, in case you don’t know much about football, if perhaps you are more familiar with basketball or sports with high scores, 4-0 is a lot, especially in a world cup match.
[00:13:16] It would be no mean feat, but there was a lot riding on Argentina making it to the final.
[00:13:23] 10% of the country’s national budget had been spent on new stadiums, the phone lines of 6,000 Argentinians had been disconnected so that global media outlets could cover the competition.
[00:13:36] And it was a matter of huge pride for the country, and for the military regime that ruled it.
[00:13:44] Peru, on the other hand, had no hope of qualifying for the final. They had lost both their games, so they would be playing only for honour.
[00:13:55] The game started off relatively equal, but the tide soon turned in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:03] By the 50th minute, Argentina were 4-0 up, and the game ended 6-0, propelling Argentina into the final.
[00:14:13] Now, was this simply excellent football on Argentina’s part, or were there other factors at play?
[00:14:21] According to a 2018 film, called Pele, Argentina and the Dictators, it was not just a case of Argentina playing better football.
[00:14:32] This film tells the story of an Argentine civil servant who alleges that Argentina had offered Peru $50 million and 35,000 tonnes of grain if Peru threw the match in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:49] Now, these are the allegations of one person, but there are other suspicious events as well.
[00:14:56] There was an allegation of a secret emergency meeting 48 hours before the game at the Buenos Aires Sheraton hotel, involving officials from both countries.
[00:15:08] There's even an allegation that the president of Argentina, General Videla, visited the Peruvian dressing room to speak to the players.
[00:15:17] And what’s more, that the Argentine president was accompanied by Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, who had done a lot of interfering in South America in support of right wing governments.
[00:15:30] Now, Kissinger was a private citizen at that point in time, and a thorn in the side of the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, so if he was there, he wasn’t acting on the orders of the US government.
[00:15:44] Kissinger would later say that he had no recollection of visiting the Peruvian dressing room, but even this denial, saying “I can’t remember” rather than “I did not” is somewhat suspicious.
[00:15:58] Now, as a quick side note, if you'd like to learn more about the life of Henry Kissiner, we have a member-only episode on that, it’s number 393.
[00:16:08] Anyway, back to our story, Argentina won 6-0, and they would face the Netherlands in the final.
[00:16:16] And this brings us back to the start of the episode.
[00:16:19] The crowd was roaring, the tens of thousands of Argentine fans in the stadium and the hundreds of thousands of fans outside screaming at the top of their lungs in support of the team.
[00:16:33] Even in the notorious detention centre just a stone’s throw away from the stadium, the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or the Navy Petty-Officers School, a TV had been brought in for the battered and bruised political prisoners to watch the game on.
[00:16:51] You might already know the result.
[00:16:54] Argentina scored first, in the 38th minute.
[00:16:58] Moving towards the final minutes, the atmosphere in the stadium grew even more tense, as Argentina was minutes away from lifting the first world cup in its history.
[00:17:10] But then in the 82nd minute, the Netherlands equalised, taking it to 1:1.
[00:17:17] The atmosphere ratcheted up a notch when the Dutch hit the post with minutes to go.
[00:17:23] Normal time ended 1:1, meaning it went to extra time.
[00:17:29] In the 105th minute, the scorer of the first goal for Argentina, Mario Kempes, scored again, and then his teammate Daniel Bertoni scored, taking it to 3:1 and sealing victory for the home nation.
[00:17:44] The crowd went wild, the city electric. For the first time in its history, Argentina had won the world cup.
[00:17:55] But this victory wasn’t just a footballing victory; it was a victory on the world stage for the murderous regime that had presided over it.
[00:18:05] It was, unfortunately, marred by controversy, giving Argentina’s rivals, both political and footballing, a reason to question the legitimacy of the victory.
[00:18:18] It's unquestionable that the Argentine team played some great football, and very possibly they did win fair and square, but the actions of the regime cast a black cloud over the tournament, with some calling it “The Dirtiest World Cup In History”.
[00:18:37] As always, it is a reminder that the full story of the world cup is often more nuanced than what happens on the pitch.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:18:53] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:56] We've got loads of listeners from Argentina, and Latin America more widely, so what do you think?
[00:19:03] Do you remember this world cup? Do you think it was all fair play, or were there other factors?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:12] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:27] It’s a story about football, of course, but we are going to talk more about what happened off the pitch than on it.
[00:00:35] It will involve global politics, a military dictatorship, murder, prisons, corruption, and has led to some people calling this “the dirtiest world cup in history”.
[00:00:47] OK then, let’s get right into it and talk about The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:00:55] The winters in Buenos Aires are generally mild, temperatures dropping to 9 degrees or so at night, and rising to 16 in the afternoon. And the afternoon of the 25th of June 1978 was, in many ways, a typical day in the capital of Argentina.
[00:01:16] A light breeze blew across the city, the people of Buenos Aires went about their daily business, but the atmosphere was buzzing.
[00:01:26] To the north of the city, in the barrio of Belgrano, 71,483 fans had packed into the Estadio Monumental to watch the final of the world cup between Argentina, the hosts of the tournament, and the Netherlands.
[00:01:43] The Netherlands were many people’s favourites.
[00:01:46] They were the pioneers of total football, and had got to the finals of the last world cup, only to lose to the hosts, West Germany.
[00:01:57] They were up against the hosts again, and this time the Europeans were desperate to lift their first world cup trophy.
[00:02:06] Their opponents, Argentina were in many people’s estimations a weaker team, but they had been playing very well, only losing one match on their way to the final, and they had the advantage of phenomenally passionate home fans, full of energy, love and support for their country.
[00:02:27] These were the days when fans weren’t really able to travel to support their teams, so there were few orange shirts, supporters of the Netherlands, in the stadium.
[00:02:38] Even before the referee blew his whistle to kick off the game, there had been some inconsistencies, shall we say, directly leading up to the match.
[00:02:48] The scheduled referee for the final was an Israeli named Abraham Klein, but the Argentine Football Association had complained, saying that Israel had strong political links to the Netherlands, and therefore an Israeli couldn’t be trusted to be impartial.
[00:03:06] In other words, Klein couldn’t be trusted to officiate the game fairly.
[00:03:11] The Israeli referee was removed, and replaced by Sergio Gonella, an official from Italy, a country with a strong history of links with Argentina.
[00:03:22] And this wasn’t it.
[00:03:25] The bus that took the Dutch team to the stadium went on an unusual scenic route through Buenos Aires, instead of going directly.
[00:03:35] To state the obvious, a tour of the city is the last thing a player wants when they are on the way to play in a world cup final.
[00:03:43] And then after the Dutch players got onto the pitch, ready for the 3pm kick-off, they were made to wait, as the Argentine team was 5 minutes late.
[00:03:54] We’ll get to what happened next, in the match, in due course, but let me further set the scene by saying that these were far from the only controversies leading up to the final.
[00:04:05] In fact, the very decision to hold the FIFA world cup in Argentina was a subject of wide controversy.
[00:04:12] The decision to award the tournament to Argentina was not controversial, but that happened in July of 1966.
[00:04:22] At that point, or to be precise, until 1 week before that point, Argentina had been run by a democratically elected government.
[00:04:31] But on June the 28th of 1966, the government was overthrown by a military junta. The military would rule the country until 1973, when democracy returned for a brief period before another military coup in 1976, which would last until 1983.
[00:04:54] And this second period of military rule, from 1976 to 1983, was particularly brutal.
[00:05:04] Almost immediately after seizing power, the generals proceeded to crack down on anyone who was deemed to have dangerous political views or be a threat to the government.
[00:05:15] And this wasn’t just political opponents, people in politics.
[00:05:20] Anyone who was thought to have leftist views or communist sympathies, from journalists to lawyers, writers to artists, they would find themselves abducted by the police, sent to prison for torture and beating, and more often than not, murdered.
[00:05:38] The scale of this is quite astounding, with estimates putting the figure at around 30,000 people abducted and murdered by the regime during its seven year stint in power.
[00:05:51] And while the true scale of this state-enabled murder has only come to light with the downfall of the regime, of course there were plenty of people in Argentina who knew exactly what was going on.
[00:06:04] Or rather, they didn’t know exactly what was going on, but they knew that their friends and loved ones were being abducted in broad daylight, and they were never heard of or seen ever again.
[00:06:17] Clearly, the objective of this visible brutality was to squash all opposition, to stop people from protesting or complaining.
[00:06:27] But some citizens continued to protest.
[00:06:32] In 1977, the year before the tournament was scheduled to take place, and a year after the junta had seized power, a collection of brave Argentine women founded a group called “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, or “The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in English.
[00:06:50] These mothers were women whose children had disappeared, or to be more precise, whose children had been disappeared by the authorities.
[00:07:00] Every Thursday they would march to the presidential palace holding up pictures of their children, and wearing white headscarves.
[00:07:09] As they grew in number, they started to draw more international attention. And in December of 1977, on Human Rights Day, the group paid for a full-page newspaper advertisement where they published the names of their missing children.
[00:07:27] Where were they, the mothers asked?
[00:07:29] What happened to them?
[00:07:32] It would later transpire that a common fate for people captured by the regime was to be first imprisoned and tortured, and when the military officials had extracted as much useful information as they could from them, they would be stripped naked, given a sedative, put on an aeroplane, flown out over the Atlantic or over the River Plate, and thrown out from the plane to their death.
[00:08:00] In one chilling description, a former army operative recalled how the sedated prisoners would fall out of the planes “like little ants”.
[00:08:11] In fact, one of the founding mothers of “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo”, Azucena Villaflor, a woman who had publicly asked “what happened to my son”, she would later meet his same fate.
[00:08:25] The very same evening that the newspaper advertisement was published, she found herself kidnapped by a group of armed men and taken to a secret detention centre.
[00:08:37] In fact, nobody knows for sure what happened to her, and she wasn’t seen or heard of for 30 years. She would only be formally identified in 2005, when body parts that had washed up on a beach back in 1977 were identified, and they were found to belong to Villaflor and other activists.
[00:09:02] In all probability, like the children she was protesting about, Villaflor was thrown from an aeroplane to her death.
[00:09:11] Now, this was the backdrop to the World Cup finals in Argentina.
[00:09:16] A brutally repressive regime that would crack down on its opponents in the most terrible of ways.
[00:09:23] And much of this was known, or at least supposed, by the international community.
[00:09:30] There were protests outside Argentina, encouraging countries to boycott the tournament. Amnesty International led a series of protests, with a slogan, “Yes to Football, No to Torture!”
[00:09:45] Johan Cruyff, one of the best and most famous football players in the world, refused to travel to the world cup, which was interpreted as a criticism of the regime, but he would later say that it was out of fear for his family’s safety rather than a grand political statement.
[00:10:03] In the end, no countries boycotted it.
[00:10:07] The world cup would go on, and the president of Argentina, General Videla, was determined to make it a huge success.
[00:10:16] No expense would be spared; it was Argentina’s time to shine on the world stage.
[00:10:24] In fact, the costs were spiralling out of control so much that a general who was overseeing the World Cup, a man called Omar Actis, raised public concerns about the cost.
[00:10:37] But in August of 1976, as he was on his way to a press conference where he was expected to criticise the excessive spending, he was assassinated, shot in broad daylight.
[00:10:51] The regime would blame his death on a far-left paramilitary organisation called Montoneros, but the group denied it, and the timing of his death certainly looked suspicious.
[00:11:05] In the end, Argentina would spend 520 million dollars on the world cup, which was twice what Spain would spend on its world cup preparations for hosting the next tournament in 1982.
[00:11:18] Now, let’s talk about some football.
[00:11:21] The tournament kicked off on the 1st of June, 1978, with an uneventful 0-0 draw between West Germany and Poland.
[00:11:30] Back then the hosts didn’t automatically play the first match.
[00:11:35] Argentina would play the following day, beating Hungary 2-1.
[00:11:41] And a few days later, Argentina would face France.
[00:11:45] Now, France had lost their first game against Italy, so they had to win to stay in the tournament.
[00:11:52] The game against Argentina would be marred by accusations of favourable treatment of Argentina by the referee, with a penalty being given for Argentina and one denied for France.
[00:12:05] In the end, Argentina won the game 2-1, progressing to the next round.
[00:12:11] Now, the way in which the world cup worked in 1978 was slightly different to how it works now.
[00:12:18] Instead of quarter finals and semi finals, there was a second “group stage”, and the winners of each group played each other in the final.
[00:12:29] Argentina was in a group with Brazil, Poland and Peru. And it won its first match against Poland, then drew against Brazil.
[00:12:38] It would all come down to the last set of matches.
[00:12:42] Brazil against Poland, and Argentina against fellow South Americans Peru.
[00:12:49] Brazil had played earlier in the day, beating Poland 3-1, so Argentina knew exactly what it needed to do to get to the final: beat Peru 4-0.
[00:13:03] Now, in case you don’t know much about football, if perhaps you are more familiar with basketball or sports with high scores, 4-0 is a lot, especially in a world cup match.
[00:13:16] It would be no mean feat, but there was a lot riding on Argentina making it to the final.
[00:13:23] 10% of the country’s national budget had been spent on new stadiums, the phone lines of 6,000 Argentinians had been disconnected so that global media outlets could cover the competition.
[00:13:36] And it was a matter of huge pride for the country, and for the military regime that ruled it.
[00:13:44] Peru, on the other hand, had no hope of qualifying for the final. They had lost both their games, so they would be playing only for honour.
[00:13:55] The game started off relatively equal, but the tide soon turned in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:03] By the 50th minute, Argentina were 4-0 up, and the game ended 6-0, propelling Argentina into the final.
[00:14:13] Now, was this simply excellent football on Argentina’s part, or were there other factors at play?
[00:14:21] According to a 2018 film, called Pele, Argentina and the Dictators, it was not just a case of Argentina playing better football.
[00:14:32] This film tells the story of an Argentine civil servant who alleges that Argentina had offered Peru $50 million and 35,000 tonnes of grain if Peru threw the match in Argentina’s favour.
[00:14:49] Now, these are the allegations of one person, but there are other suspicious events as well.
[00:14:56] There was an allegation of a secret emergency meeting 48 hours before the game at the Buenos Aires Sheraton hotel, involving officials from both countries.
[00:15:08] There's even an allegation that the president of Argentina, General Videla, visited the Peruvian dressing room to speak to the players.
[00:15:17] And what’s more, that the Argentine president was accompanied by Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, who had done a lot of interfering in South America in support of right wing governments.
[00:15:30] Now, Kissinger was a private citizen at that point in time, and a thorn in the side of the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, so if he was there, he wasn’t acting on the orders of the US government.
[00:15:44] Kissinger would later say that he had no recollection of visiting the Peruvian dressing room, but even this denial, saying “I can’t remember” rather than “I did not” is somewhat suspicious.
[00:15:58] Now, as a quick side note, if you'd like to learn more about the life of Henry Kissiner, we have a member-only episode on that, it’s number 393.
[00:16:08] Anyway, back to our story, Argentina won 6-0, and they would face the Netherlands in the final.
[00:16:16] And this brings us back to the start of the episode.
[00:16:19] The crowd was roaring, the tens of thousands of Argentine fans in the stadium and the hundreds of thousands of fans outside screaming at the top of their lungs in support of the team.
[00:16:33] Even in the notorious detention centre just a stone’s throw away from the stadium, the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or the Navy Petty-Officers School, a TV had been brought in for the battered and bruised political prisoners to watch the game on.
[00:16:51] You might already know the result.
[00:16:54] Argentina scored first, in the 38th minute.
[00:16:58] Moving towards the final minutes, the atmosphere in the stadium grew even more tense, as Argentina was minutes away from lifting the first world cup in its history.
[00:17:10] But then in the 82nd minute, the Netherlands equalised, taking it to 1:1.
[00:17:17] The atmosphere ratcheted up a notch when the Dutch hit the post with minutes to go.
[00:17:23] Normal time ended 1:1, meaning it went to extra time.
[00:17:29] In the 105th minute, the scorer of the first goal for Argentina, Mario Kempes, scored again, and then his teammate Daniel Bertoni scored, taking it to 3:1 and sealing victory for the home nation.
[00:17:44] The crowd went wild, the city electric. For the first time in its history, Argentina had won the world cup.
[00:17:55] But this victory wasn’t just a footballing victory; it was a victory on the world stage for the murderous regime that had presided over it.
[00:18:05] It was, unfortunately, marred by controversy, giving Argentina’s rivals, both political and footballing, a reason to question the legitimacy of the victory.
[00:18:18] It's unquestionable that the Argentine team played some great football, and very possibly they did win fair and square, but the actions of the regime cast a black cloud over the tournament, with some calling it “The Dirtiest World Cup In History”.
[00:18:37] As always, it is a reminder that the full story of the world cup is often more nuanced than what happens on the pitch.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
[00:18:53] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:56] We've got loads of listeners from Argentina, and Latin America more widely, so what do you think?
[00:19:03] Do you remember this world cup? Do you think it was all fair play, or were there other factors?
[00:19:08] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:12] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:20] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:25] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
