Photography by Name Here | See stockists page for details88 Esquire — June 2018
on a clear afternoon on 1 June 1978 at
the revamped El Monumental stadium in
Buenos Aires’ Belgrano barrio, several hun-
dred children in white uniforms moved
into their prepared positions, on an uneven
pitch, newly turfed since the original grass
had withered after being irrigated with sea
water. From the blimp camera, the choreo-
graphed children first spelled out “Argentina
78” before the words “Mundial Fifa”. A flock
of what looked more like pigeons than
doves was released into the sky. The World
Cup was underway.
Minutes earlier, General Jorge Rafaél
Videla, the bird-like, moustachioed leader of
Argentina’s ruling military junta, announced
to the nearly 80,000-strong crowd that the
tournament would be played under a sign of
peace. he ITV commentator Gerald Sinstadt,
through crackling audio which added to the
atmosphere of this distant live broadcast,
fumbled for fillers as the somewhat ponder-
ous spectacle unfolded, remarking on how
the opening ceremony’s “emphasis is firmly on the
innocence of youth, free from any sugestion
of political involvement”.
Back in the ITV studio, against a beige
backdrop, guest pundit Kevin Keegan, in an
extravagantly lapelled check shirt even by
Seventies’ standards, bemoaned England’s fail-
ure to qualiy and declared his excitement at
the “soccer festival” ahead.
In earshot of the stadium drums, just
a few streets away, inside the tree-lined cam-
pus of the Navy Petty-Officers School of
Mechanics, the junta’s flagship torture cen-
tre continued to operate. he largest and most
notorious of several hundred such concen-
tration camps, this was one place where “Los
Desaparecidos” were taken. he Disappeared.
An evocative term more accurately describing
the victims of state-sponsored murder. The
junta wasn’t going to let the World Cup stop
its work. In fact, quite the opposite.
if sports and politics shouldn’t mix, no
one ever told Fifa. Where the football World
Cup is concerned, it’s harder to keep them
apart. The history of the tournament is lit-
tered with agendas, deals and power plays.
From the pety — as when Uruguay boycoted
the 1934 tournament in Italy in protest at how
few European teams bothered turning up for
the one it had hosted four years prior — to the
principled; take the Soviet Union’s refusal
to play away at Chile in a 1973 qualification
play-off in the same Estadio Nacional sta-
dium where Augusto Pinochet had let-wing
prisoners executed. Hosting, of course, raises
the stakes further. Football historian David
Goldblat described it as “a node in the global
networks of power”.
When Russia was announced as 2018
hosts back in December 2010, it’s not hard to
imagine that Vladimir Putin, no football fan
himself, might have had restored superpower
status fairly high on his list of reasons. But in
the years since, that likelihood has evaporated
in the wake of a lengthy charge sheet: military
intervention in the Ukraine and Syria, chem-
ical weapons attacks, links to plane bombs,
executions of journalists and political oppo-
nents, cyberwar and election meddling.
Of more direct relevance to the tour-
nament, you can also add the use of North
Korean forced labour in stadium-building,
the legacy of state-approved Olympic dop-
ing, and questions over the safey of foreign
fans in light of Russia’s “paramilitary” football
hooligans, gangs of whom were unleashed
at the 2016 Euros in France. “I don’t see any-
thing wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the
opposite, well done lads, keep it up!” tweeted
Russian politician Igor Lebedev, a member
of the executive committee of the Russian
Football Union. On his own patch, of course,
it’s highly unlikely Putin will allow any such
scenes this summer.
In the acrimonious fallout from the poi-
soning in Salisbury of former spy Sergei
Skripal back in March, a group of Labour MPs
called for a postponement or relocation of the
2018 World Cup. “I am very concerned that
Putin will use the World Cup in the same way
that Hitler used the 1936 Munich Olympics, as
a public relations exercise for a brutal dicta-
torship,” said MP Ian Austin. Foreign secre-
tary Boris Johnson made the same analogy.
This isn’t the first time such a compari-
son has been made. In the 40 years since, the
same has been said of Argentina 1978. And with
hindsight, that comparison is starkly obvious.
Never before or since has success on the pitch
been so intertwined with such brutaliy of it.if the boycotts against russia in 2018 felt
a litle half-hearted, in 1978 against Argentina
they came early, with conviction, and very
nearly worked.
he edition of the tournament now asso-
ciated with ticker tape-filled stadia, sily hair
and no shortage of sily goals — from Archie
Gemmill’s still-widely replayed shimmy
against Holland to Hans Krankl’s outrageous
two-touch volley for Austria against West
Germany — was close to being relocated to
Holland and Belgium. Brazil was also placed
on standby.
Amnesty International led the protests
under the slogan, “Yes to Football, No to
Torture!”, alongside a pressure group set up
in France. he West German government also
threatened to withdraw. Paul Breitner and
Johan Cruyff, then the world’s best player,
actually did. Although 30 years later, Cruyf
told Catalunya Ràdio that the real reason was