The Rest Is History - 253. The World Cup: Post-war reconciliation, Brazilian dictatorship, and North Koreans in Middlesbrough

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Welcome to the second episode of The Rest Is History's definitive guide to the history of the FIFA World Cup. In this episode, Tom and Dominic discuss the 1953 Match of the Century, post-war reconciliation, Dutch naked pool parties, medicals at NASA, Pickles the dog, and more. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. This is the second episode of our monumental tour through the history of the Football World Cup, which of course is coinciding with the latest iteration of the tournament in Qatar. And Tom, yesterday we were talking about the origins of the World Cup, we were talking about its political significance, the way it had been co-opted by Mussolini in the 1930s,

but also the way it was wrapped up with nationalism and nation-building and political statements to the world. So we ended in 1950 with Brazil's defeat. We now find ourselves, we have a lot more Brazil to come, but we now find ourselves in 1954 and the entrance into our story of everybody's favorite world cup competitor, the Germans. Yes.

So, so we, we said, didn't we, Hitler didn't really, he wasn't a great fan of, of, of football and his focus for his propaganda was obviously the Olympics in 1936.

There was absolutely a German team. And there was one figure in particular, a man called Sepp Herberger, who had been involved with the infrastructure of the German national team from 1932. The year before, Tom, he joined another organization, the Nazi Party. Right. And so in 1954, when the World Cup is held in Switzerland, he is the German manager. And his diaries cover the entire period from 1932 to 1954. And you can read them and not once in all those diaries is there a single mention of the second world war crikey his focus is very very much on football that is i mean i'm sure he

joined the nazi party simply so that he could carry on being involved in the management of the german football team he's very kind of yeah laser visioned. He's from a Catholic family in rural Baden-Württemberg. And yeah, he joined the Nazis, and he's this incredibly kind of wily manager. I mean, actually, Germany had been kicked out of FIFA, Tom, at the end of the Second World War, as had Japan. With Japan, yeah. For poor behavior off the field.

And actually, interestingly, the English FA, who had bitterly resisted the admission of the old central powers after the First World War, they actually lead the campaign to have the Germans brought back in for 1954. And interestingly, I mean, the war casts a very long shadow. Actually, telling this whole podcast, the Second World War cast a much longer shadow than I had anticipated.

Yeah. So the Germans actually play. Do you know who they play to qualify for the World Cup? No. They play the Saarland. Oh, yes, I do. Yes, of course. So the Saarland, which is obviously part of Germany,

had been detached from Germany at the end of the Second World War and made into a French protectorate and was only allowed to rejoin West Germany after a referendum. So the Saarland actually participates separately in the World Cup in 1954. But also we've mentioned the manager, the captain, Fritz Wolter, had been a paratrooper on the Eastern Front, hadn't he? Yes. And he was about to be shipped off to Siberia when, what is it a hungarian it's an amazing guard kind of spots him and remembers him from a match

germany and hungary had played amazing story so he's one of these people who herberger manages to protect his players from serving on the front lines in the second world war so walter is a paratrooper but he's kept behind the lines but he's captured at the end of the war first by the americans and then he's handed over to the Russians. And it looks like he's going to go off to Siberia. Basically, if you go to Siberia, you either stay there forever or you die. And it's exactly that. So the guards and prisoners are having a kick around a football or something.

Walter gets kind of involved, and the Hungarian guard says to him, I know you. Didn't you play against us in Budapest? And the next day, his name is removed from the lists and he's allowed to go home. And he repays the Hungarians, Tom. Yes, by defeating them in the final. By stamping on their dreams.

So Hungary are by far the best, aren't they? They are the team that should have won the 1954 World Cup. They had been unbeaten for four years before the tournament. They had this rich tradition. I mean, Jonathan Wilson, who we talked about in the last podcast, his brilliant history of Argentina, he's also written a brilliant history of Hungary.

And he sort of has this theory that Hungarian football was incredibly innovative in mid-century because of coffeehouses, because people would spread out in coffee houses designing tactics and certainly the hungarians they are by far the best team in europe if not the world they had famously been the first team to beat england in england at wembley at the empire stadium victory for communism over imperialism 6-3 in 1953 they they get to the final in the wankdorf stadium in berg most amusingly yes i knew you'd enjoy that i knew you'd enjoy that i i wanted to get in before you uh they go 2-0 up and they've actually already played germany already in the tournament and beat them 8-3 so and it's the classic thing you know so often in the world cup they go 2-0 up and at that point

you know that you know, disaster beckons. Well, you let your foot off the accelerator, I guess. That's exactly what happens. The Germans come back. The Germans win 3-2. And Ferenc Puskas and these amazing Hungarian players never get the gold that they deserve. So the manager, the captain, both obviously have played their role in in the second world war is it also true this and this is a story again so in the first episode we talked about these

legends that grow up and they they're impossible to prove there is a story isn't there that all the germans were on amphetamines yeah i think that this is a legacy of the uh the Luftwaffe pilots using them to stay awake i think that's dubious i've seen that repeated a lot um but again as we said in the first podcast the trouble is there's allegations but there's no hard evidence and what always happens with the history of the world cup is the allegations or speculation soon turn into supposedly hard facts repeated endlessly recycled without anybody ever really checking whether the origins of the stories are true now you mentioned the reaction so first of all in hungary where the hungarian

team were absolute national heroes they become villains overnight there are demonstrations there are you know they can't go home at first the goalkeeper doesn't have to burn the gold paste no like the brazilian yeah i mean actually and the hungarian team it's only two years before the hungarian uprising and most of the the it's only two years before the Hungarian uprising, and most of the top, well, at least some of the top players end up fleeing to the West. So Pushkic, the captain, he ends up playing for Real Madrid. Ghibor and Kokcic, they end up playing for Barcelona and so on.

So that's kind of the end of Hungary. It's a tragic story, actually, because that's the end of Hungary as a force. The mighty Magyars. But actually, so I thought when we were preparing as a as a as a force the mighty magyars but actually so i thought when we were preparing this that this would be a story about hungary but what's much more interesting is germany so it's called it's called the miracle of burn because the germans were so unfancied and they came back to win three two their first world cup after the second world war and subsequently, people like Joachim Fest,

the great West German historian, said, this moment, this match was the true birth of the country. And there's this phrase... Well, it's the first time that the National Anthem has been played since the Second World War, I think, in public. Well, well. Is that right?

I don't know if it's the first time, but the National Anthem is a bit of a story, Tom. Because... Well, yes. So everybody sort of says... So traditionally, and this is the story that FIFA tell about the 1954 World Cup, it's a lovely story about reconciliation

after the Second World War and the Germans, you know, being rebuilt as a modern progressive nation. And the Germans associate it with the phrase via sint vida ver, we are somebody again. Lovely. Unfortunately, there is some evidence that the Germans had not perhaps

changed as much as one might hope. So I reviewed a book last year called Aftermath by a German writer, a German historian called Harald Jena. And the real shocking revelation of that book, the story of that book, is actually how little Germany changed in the 1950s. I mean, Jena's book is incredible, sort of revisionist, and he has all this stuff about surveys and polls showing that lots of Germans, long after Hitler's death, had not reneged on their kind of Nazi commitments or their ideological affiliations. So what happens at the final?

Some of the German fans do sing the national anthem but they refuse to sing the new words they sing Deutschland Deutschland

Uber Alice but the real shocking thing is the president of the German Football Association who's a man

called Pico Balvens he holds a celebration in a Munich beer cellar what could possibly go wrong

a beer hall and Tom not just any Munich beer hall so the original beer possibly go wrong? A beer hall. And Tom, not just any Munich beer hall. So the original beer hall where Hitler had had the beer hall putsch in the 1920s, where the Nazis always used to assemble for the anniversary every year, that had been blown up in a bomb in, I think, 1939. So they had moved their annual celebration

to a different beer hall nearby. This is the beer hall that the FA president decides he will have the meeting and celebrate victory and does he celebrate their furor princip he does he says basically he says to the players your victory is a victory for the furor princip the furor principal and you were inspired by the spirit of the god votan but i i mean to be be fair, the Führer is probably not Hitler, there is it. It's Herberger, the manager. Yeah, unfortunately, Bauwens had been a Nazi party member himself, had been a Nazi party member since 1933.

And Tom, you think that, but lots of Germans listening to that did not take such a charitable view, including the president of the West German Republic, who gives a speech a few days later reprimanding Bauwens for this incredibly inflammatory speech about the Führerprinzip and all this sort of stuff. And the German papers sort of go out of their way to try and distance themselves, but the damage has actually been done.

And this is, I didn't know any of this until I started researching it. In East Germany, the newspapers, the communist papers, seize on this and they say, I mean, amazing lines. When fascists start singing Deutschland über alles in a horse vessel song, that has nothing to do with sport. That has to do with death, says the East German papers. And they say of Fritz Walter, he once wore a Wehrmacht uniform. He could say that luckily for him, the war ended

with Soviet imprisonment, but other players were not so lucky and were killed. Why do we need to remember them now? Because the policies of Konrad Adenauer, that's the Christian Democrat Chancellor of West Germany, they are clearly steering the same course as Hitler. So you'd expect the East German papers to say that. See what the Daily Mirror said Tom in Britain did yes nothing can stop these unlovable people here comes swaggering Germany German businesses swarm all over Europe even in football not a noticeably German sport they wipe out the Hungarians but it's not just the British is it the Danes the Danes all that was all that was lacking at the final whistle was the Seagal and the most

striking one actually given that the Franco-German rapprochement with the birth of the European community is Le Monde

Pierre Faber their star columnist says the memory of these thousands of German fanatics who went to support their team

will be lasting sport certainly but not only sport fanaticism revenge Uber Alice, Herberger, Weimar, Adenauer, the European defence community. That is how it all begins again. I mean...

Okay, well, so I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I had always thought that it was a monument to European reconciliation. No. So the next two World Cups are held in Sweden and Chile, and Brazil wins them both. And we will come to Brazil. But let's just stick on the theme of Germany and England's attitudes to Germany,

because in 1966, as all English listeners will know, the World Cup comes to England, and England ended up winning. And I had always assumed, having grown up against a background of tabloids every time england played germany reaching for the second world war metaphors that the same had been true in 1966 yeah but apparently this is not the case there weren't too many uh it wasn't kind of wall-to-wall second world war not wall-to-wall jingoism there Not wall-to-wall. Jingoism. There's a bit, though. The Daily Mail, Tom.

I mean, great newspaper. Well, if the Germans beat us at Wembley this afternoon at our national sport, we could always point out to them that we've recently beaten them twice at theirs. Yes, fine. But that's kind of, I mean, that is the kind of knockabout. The stuff about goose steps and SIG Heil and all that kind of stuff that follows the 54. I mean, that's a different order of paranoia. Yes, I suppose so. I think you're right that there's, oh yeah, but I mean, perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh because it's only nine years after the end of the war. But it turns out to be paranoia.

Yes, it turns out to be paranoia. Yes, it turns out to be paranoia. Because Adonair is not a fascist. Yeah, agreed. West Germany becomes a kind of model liberal democracy. Yes, agreed. And by 1966, it's evident that German democracy is in very rude health. That's absolutely fair. Yes, and actually the British stuff in 1966 is pantomime. It's a joke.

It's not as a, yeah. And the whole story of the world cup in 1966 is very very carry on so we've up to now it's all been we've all had dictators and shadows and murders and deaths and all kind of stuff 1966 yes it's an ealing comedy it's a carry-on film whatever so we mentioned in the previous part that um the jewelry made trophy is like the statue of marduk in babylon people kept nicking it and it gets stolen doesn't it before the world cup begins yeah and then it gets found in very suspicious circumstances by a dog called pickles well i mean that and the story is that

pickles sniffs it out but you don't sniff out a trophy a trophy so quite what is going on there so it's always been slightly confusing. So it was stolen from a stamp exhibition. I mean, that tells you just the slightly dowdy image of the World Cup, that they had a stamp exhibition at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, that the thief ignored all these incredibly valuable stamps with a value of supposedly £3 million pounds to steal the trophy, which was worth much less.

There's a ransom demand for 15,000 pounds. What a fool. Where didn't he steal the stamps? 15,000 pounds. Why didn't he steal the stamps? Anyway, this bloke called David Corbett, who's a lighterman on the Thames.

David Corbett is a very 1960s sitcom name. It is. He's a bargeman. And his dog, Pickles, finds the trophy. Discovers it. Discovers it, wrapped in newspaper by a car in Upper Norwood, London. Corbett is given a reward of £5,000. So that actually, I mean, the £15,000, it's not nothing,

because £5,000 is the equivalent to about £100,000 today. He uses the money to buy himself a house in Surrey, Tom. Yeah. Pickles is given a medal. Pickles becomes a national hero. He's in a film. He's in a film. He's in a film, and he goes to the celebratory dinner

after England win, doesn't he? He does. He's a kind of honoured member of the team. I mean, he doesn't give a damn about the dinner, I imagine. He's a dog. But then he dies in tragic circumstances. Gosh, terrible circumstances. His lead gets tangled on a branch.

Yes. So he basically hangs himself, which is very sad. God almighty. So we had Getulio Vargas taking his own life, the Brazilian dictator in the last episode, and now Pickles. England is, I'm proud to say, is the first to feature a mascot, World Cup Willie.

Oh, yes, World Cup Willie, yeah. So that's great. And geopolitically, the most interesting story is the presence of North Korea. Oh, yeah, you love this story, Tom. Well, it's absolutely a hermit kingdom. I mean, it is as it is. By and large, it's not famous for its engagement in international sporting events.

No. But they qualify by beating Australia in a playoff. And they go to Middlesbrough. Yeah, Ayersin Park. And they play at Ayersin Park. And the people of Middlesbrough take the Koreans to their heart. And the North Koreans win. I guess after England losing to America 1-0 in the Brazilian World Cup in 1950, probably the biggest upset in World Cup history,

that Italy lose to North Korea 1-0. Pac Duik scored the goal very famously. So Pac Duik and Jonathan Wilson, we've been mentioning a lot in these programs, the great Diana football history. You've got to stop going for dinner with informants. Okay, so he told me this fabulous story about, so the mystery, so North Korea,

they get through to the next round and they go to Liverpool, where apparently they are freaked out by the religious iconography of Loyola House. Is that right? Loyola Hall, where they've been put up, you know, the kind of Baroque statues of the Virgin and Jesus bleeding to death and all kinds of things. And they're so freaked out by this that apparently it puts them off their stride

and they lose and go back. So there are all kinds of urban myths about what happened to them. Yeah. And the stories that they all got shot or they got sent off to chicken plucking factories or whatever for not but actually they seem to have been treated with great honor and jonathan said that that and i may be slightly garbling this and if i am and jonathan's listening apologies to him but airson park gets pulled down it does well that definitely did happen so they build a kind of housing estate where it had stood but they make sure to mark out particular places that kind of holy in the history of airson park and one of them is the spot where pak do it hit the winning strike that enabled north korea to beat italy yeah hit the winning strike that's great footballing terminology

tom well whatever what scored the goal how would, no, but it's not that. It's, it's, it's the spot where the ball is and he kicks it to go in. So that is what, that's what's marking it. It's the point where he's standing, where he kicks the ball. Yeah. And one day people are kind of, you know,

in their, in their homes and they hear this sound of singing and they go out. I think this is 2002 they go out and all the members of the north korean team who played in that match the surviving members are standing around the spot singing a song i don't know what they were singing but they were singing a song probably and so they come on a kind of they come on a pilgrimage to to to commemorate the uh i think that story is actually true, Tom. It is true, I think.

They were brought over for film. As part of a film. By a documentary maker, exactly. So very moving. Yeah. And apparently the relationship between Middlesbrough and North Korea is as good as with anywhere in Britain. I'm tempted to say, Tom,

that people who've been to Middlesbrough can't tell the difference. But that would be a terrible... You're not going to do that, are you? I wouldn't be so cheap. But teams from Middlesbrough can't tell the difference. But that would be a terrible, that would be a shocking thing to say. And I wouldn't be so cheap. But teams from Middlesbrough go and play in North Korea. And that's not something that most people do. No. So that's a very touching story.

The other, I guess, the big story is England against Argentina. So England meet Argentina in the quarterfinal. Yeah. And in the first part, we talked about how it's the English who bring football to Argentina. And for Argentina, England remains the home of football, and it's the home of what in Spanish they call el fair play. El fair play.

Well, also Britain, as we've talked about in our Falklands podcast, Britain has a very particular significance for Argentines because it was the model for much of the 19th century. It was the kind of informal colonial overlord, the sort of economic overlord. But also there's this whole tradition in Argentina of talking about English piracy. Yeah.

And what they see is the theft of Las Malvinas, the Falkland Islands. Yeah. So when England played Argentina, there was always an element of being a grudge match, even if at first the English didn't really notice. Yes. And in the quarterfinal, they do notice.

And the way it's reported by the British press is that the Argentines behaved disgracefully. And so Alf Ramsey, the manager who played in 1950, hadn't he, in Brazil? He had. He bans his players from swapping shirts with the Argentine players. He calls, yeah. He bans his players from swapping shirts with the Argentine players. He calls them animals. Alan Ball, England player, says that they were the dirtiest, filthiest team I ever played against in my career. And remember, I played against Revy's Leeds year in, year out. That's one for the Leeds fans. Damning condemnation there. And Hugh McIverney described it not so much a football match as an international incident. And so that set the seal on the English sense that the Argentines are dirty, that they're cheats, that they spit, that they're violent. The sense in Argentina is exactly the same, that the English behaved disgracefully, that they were hacking and very, very violent play. And the lightning rod moment is when the Argentine captain,

Antonio Rattin, gets sent off by a German referee who doesn't speak Spanish. Yeah, for swearing. For swearing. And how could the referee know that? He couldn't know that. And apparently Rattin was asking for a translator. You've been listening to all this Wilsonian Argentine propaganda.

I have. And Rattin goes off and apparently he walks past the – he gets sent off, disbelieving, not quite knowing what's happened. And he walks past one of the flags on which there are Union Jacks emblazoned, and he makes a gesture to it. And Jonathan suggests that this is a gesture expressing his doubt that the home of El Fair Play could have behaved so badly. How do you make a gesture expressing doubt?

Well, you'd have to ask Jonathan that. And he supposedly, he goes and sits on the red carpet, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. Also, I mean, Ratton is about 27 feet tall. I mean, Ratton is a colossal man. But I suppose, Tom, for people who don't like football, I mean, the thing is a colossal man. But I suppose, Tom, for people who don't like football, I mean, the thing about the 1966 World Cup that's

become part of the national imagination in Britain is that it's part of swinging London, the swinging 60s, lovely summer, the England captain, Bobby Moore, this sort of handsome, blonde defender accepts the trophy from the Queen and all is right with the world. That's, A, that's not

quite accurate because actually, if you look at all the press coverage, the British economy had run into trouble in the summer of 1966. So everybody actually reports this as saying, oh, this is a nice bit of escapism. But basically, the FA newsletter itself said, the victory is one of the few bright spots in the somber economic situation

which faces the country this summer. So there's a kind of national gloom actually surrounding the World Cup, but also abroad, everybody thinks it's a terrible World Cup. Yeah. And in Argentina, they show World Cup Willie dressed as a pirate. Dressed as a pirate. That's stuff about piracy. They can't get enough of that, can they? No, they can't. So it's World Cup Willie and Margaret Thatcher that they dressed as pirates. We're always dressing up as pirates. As pirates, exactly. But the 1966 World Cup is actually an anomaly, Tom,

because the 1966 World Cup is a break in a story that's otherwise won a Brazilian domination. So let's take a break now, and when we come back, we will talk Brazil, Pele, and all things beautiful game. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello welcome back to The Rest Is History we are whistling our way through the World Cup. And Dominic, we have reached 1970, which is held in Mexico. Many people say it's the best World Cup of the lot.

And it's the third World Cup in four to be won by Brazil. Yes. So people may be wondering why we skipped over 1958 and 1962, because we really wanted to do Brazil all in one go. And Brazil is a fascinating story. There's a brilliant book on this by, we mentioned Jonathan Wilson, to my mind, his only great rival as the greatest historian of football, a man called David Goldblatt, who's written a wonderful book called Football Nation about Brazil and football's importance

in the history of Brazil. And he points out at the beginning, Brazil is the fifth largest nation on earth. So it's by many measures a great power, but it has produced no real great art or science or literature to stand comparison with the very best of other countries. The one thing it is actually famous for, that's not to say it hasn't published good writers or good artists, but the one thing it's really famous for is its football. And football has become the unifying force and the way that Brazil presents itself to the world.

He has a really interesting theory that one of the things that has made Brazilian football unique is the inequality of Brazil. So he says, what the inequality gives you, it gives you a very poor underclass. So the kind of people who actually grow up

playing a lot of football in the streets and whatnot and are desperate to improve themselves through football. So that's the pool of talent, if you like, people who might otherwise go into other walks of life, but actually football is all they have. But the inequality also gives you immense centres of wealth who can mobilise that production line and get it running.

So in other words, the inequality actually, in a weird way, works in Brazil's favor. It becomes the thing that unites this very regionally, economically, and of course, racially disparate country. But the stereotype in England is that it's all natural flair, that it just flows off the streets, all that kind of stuff. But actually, in 1970, I mean, they've really, really trained hard for it, haven't they? They've gone on, they've got kind of, they send people off to NASA to study how astronauts are prepared for the moon landing. So that, Tom, to go back to backtrack to 1958, the first of their wins, that was true even then.

So in 1958, the entire squad are sent for medicals at the best hospitals in Rio. And they find, I mean, this thing about the inequality, they find that almost all the squad have intestinal parasites. Some of them have syphilis. They extract 300 teeth from the players mouths oh uh because they're rotted there how many intestinal worms do they hundreds absolutely hundreds coiling and rolling okay you don't need to really um so brazil is a country that in the late 1950s is really trying to sell itself as the acme of

modernity they have a president called ususelino Kubitschek. He has promised that in five years, they will have 50 years of progress. So this is when they're building Brasilia. This is when they are doing all this infrastructure. Great modernist capital. Great modernist. And the football team is seen as another emblem of modernism.

And of course, the player who becomes identified with that is Pelé, who we mentioned at the end of the last uh podcast so he is he's from a very very poor background as a boy he'd worked as a servant in a tea shop to make money uh he's of course black he plays for a team called Santos in the the town of Santos which is the port city of Sao Paulo, which is booming in the 1950s and 60s. The fact that he is black really matters because this is part of, Brazil is trying to sort of rebrand itself as a, not as a white nation that held slaves. It's a rainbow nation. Exactly.

It's a multiracial nation. So previously there had been black players. Back in the 1920s, there'd been a player called Friedenreich who they called the black pearl but in those days the black players had whitened their faces with flour and had straightened their hair before matches I mean extraordinary to think of them going to all this effort before the games well but then when you look at at the obloquy that gets visited on the the three black players that that lose to Uruguay yeah 1950. I mean, it's not surprising. Yeah. So Pelé, they embraced Pelé in the 1960s. Pelé had been, because he was only 17 when they won the World Cup in 1958. So Pelé is projected around the world as this sort of

tremendous celebrity and this symbol of how great Brazil is now. Unfortunately, there is a problem. And the problem is that before the 1970 World Cup, so in 1964, Kubitschek's successor, a man called João Goulart, had been toppled by an army coup with American support. Basically, all that spending on infrastructure and on Brazil had seen inflation run completely out of control. The currency had plummeted. The economy had started to fall apart. The army step in. And over time in the 1960s, that army dictatorship becomes ever more repressive.

And there's a guy called General Medici who becomes the third. I like to think of him as General Medici. I thought you would. I thought you would. Well, a great patron of beauty. He's not a terribly good guy, Tom, I think it's fair to say. No, I know you would. I thought you would. Well, a great patron of beauty. He's not a terribly good guy, Tom, I think it's fair to say. No, I know he is. I know.

So there's a lot. But he is absolutely, I mean, he is using the Brazil football team to brand his regime. He is, absolutely. So he's your classic South American guy, dark glasses, torture, repression, censorship. As you say, football, they really pump up this nationalism, and football is the emblem of that.

And what's really interesting about that is that has resonances that endure for decades. So anybody who's followed Brazil's presidential election this year very closely might have noticed that um ex-president bolsonaro and his supporters very often wore yellow brazilian team shirts and that that shirt which around the world is seen as the great symbol of brazil that is because become a symbol of bolsonaro and bolsonaro ism and a lot of the the brazilian football team are out and proud Bolsonaro fans. Absolutely.

So some of the best-known players, so the best-known player of all, Neymar, who plays for Paris Saint-Germain, one of the best-known players in the world, he is a very vocal Bolsonaro supporter. Thiago Silva, who is a former Brazilian captain, plays for Chelsea, also a Bolsonaro supporter. And that often makes people raise their eyebrows

because they say, these people are from very poor backgrounds. How is it they support Bolsonaro? They're also very rich. It's because they're very rich. They're very rich. Footballers often have been seen as conservative because they have made it, they are aspirational, they believe in talent and all this sort of stuff.

So you can sort of see why some of them might be drawn to a kind of right-wing ideology. And it's fascinating that Lula's supporters tend to wear the blue away shirt of Brazil and Bolsonaro's the yellow. So in 1970, the manager had been a communist, hadn't he? Charles Saldanha, yeah. So the kind of the infrastructure, the patronage is, well, I mean, call it right wing. I mean, it's verging on the fascists. Yes.

But the manager is communist. And that is expressive of the tensions in Brazil that we see in the recent election. But they boot him out, Tom. They boot him out before the tournament. So Saldanha. But also because he wouldn't buy, he wouldn't choose. The general's favourite players. The general's favourite players, would he?

That's right. So he had to be sacked well he he gets increasing criticism um which must have been fermented by the regime and eventually the manager saldania goes to meet a journalist but he takes a gun with him presumably to shoot the journalist at that point they sack him and they bring in an ex-player called mario zagalo who who basically will not rock the boat. Will do what? Exactly. And then the extraordinary thing. So in 1970, so Brazil have already won the World Cup twice. In 1970, the regime built a communications infrastructure for the first time so that everybody in the entire country can watch the matches on television. And this is, the World Cup is held in Mexico,

and this is the first World Cup to be televised in color. It's one reason why the team of Pelé is so embedded in the world. It's the kind of brightness, and the light is so vivid, isn't it? Exactly, it is. Because it has that kind of early colour TV, lurid kind of... Technicolour kind of quality to it. Exactly, and Brazil playing in these sort of bright yellow shirts. And they storm through the tournament.

They play a series of sort of legendary games. They beat England. They beat Uruguay, the old enemy, in the semifinals. And then they thrash Italy 4-1 in the final, scoring these beautiful goals. I mean, the Jornal do Brasil says after 1970, Brazil's victory with the ball compares with the conquest of the moon by the Americans.

So the Brazilians, I mean, we think we're bad in England at these. I mean, they compared their defeat to Hiroshima. To Hiroshima. Now they're comparing it to the moon landings. Medici, the dictator,

absolutely revels in this. He says, our players won because of their, it was a victory won in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship with the rise of faith in our fight for national development above all our players won because they know how to play for the collective good and the problem i suppose you have is that pele who is such a sentimental

favorite around the world he is undoubtedly complicit to some degree with the regime well or he just he's oblivious do you think i don't know i mean this is a hard one tom i mean do we how do you resolve that is he is he complicit or is he is there such a thing as being oblivious well he is a genius whose focus is football and he is so i guess so idolized that he comes to see the world through you know in pelle-ish terms yeah if such a word um but pelle is not a fool so pelle uh in the 1960s the the contrast had been with another player called garincha who was a another brilliantly talented player pelle had been the model professional and garincha had been the wayward one. So Pelé was aspirational. He was respectable. He had tried to make money. Garincha had just been sort of hanging around in pubs and- Being a lad.

Being a lad, exactly. And people had sort of held up, columnists had held up Pelé and said, this is the model of what Brazil should be. And I think Pelé is not entirely naive. I don't want to think that. Pelé does defend the dictatorship. So when he went to Uruguay in 1972, he said, I don't want to know this. I'm going to tell you, because you need to know.

He said there is no dictatorship in Brazil. Brazil is a liberal country, a land of happiness. Our leaders know what is best for us, and they govern us with tolerance and patriotism. Let's move on. Okay, you've made your point. But actually, Tom, you know what? I'm not going to stamp on Pele, because as people often say, what do you do in those circumstances? It's very easy to say, oh, you should join the resistance.

Oh, you should, you know, had he spoken, his life would have changed immeasurably had he spoken out against the regime. I mean, this is absolutely the key to the fascination of the World Cup and the moral ambivalences that surround it that we see in Qatar at the moment.

Yeah. That's so much, it's so compelling. It's so gripping. There's so much kind of, well, I mean, it's famously beautiful. It's the word that's associated with Palace football. The excitement of it is kind of so interfused with wealth, with oppression, with, you know, in the case of Argentina and Brazil in the 60s and 70s with incredibly oppressive dictatorships, that it becomes very difficult to separate them, don't they? So Brazil's triumph in 70, I guess, is also the triumph of the regime. Which lasts for another 15 years.

As will be the case in Argentina in 1978. Anyway, so I think that is a point well made. You just didn't want to hear it. No, I didn't really want to hear it. No, I don't really want to hear it. Well, come on, let's talk about the Dutch. You love the Dutch. Cleanse your mind by talking about You just didn't want to hear it. No, I didn't really want to hear it. No, I don't really want to hear it. Well, come on, let's talk about the Dutch. You love the Dutch. Cleanse your mind by talking about the Dutch. So 1974 in West Germany, which is another classic.

Yeah. So, yes, so total football, all that kind of thing. So total football for people who don't like football. So it's the Dutch who've never been a power before. They pitch up in 1974 with this very exciting brand of football where they're all swapping positions and playing a very fluid game and so the dutch is sort of the 60s in human form aren't they i think that's what people sort of say about the dutch they all have long hair they're very free love they all look very cool hanging out at saunas yeah and yeah with the

late with the ladies a brilliant writer about dutch football called david winner uh wrote a book called brilliant orange uh he says holland's 1974 team is somehow the summer of love sergeant pepper altamont and the death of john lennon all in one four-week period because of the trajectory of what happens to them yes because they're brilliant they're everyone's favorite to win uh and inevitably they lose to germany to west germany in the uh in the in the final yeah and we should say emphasize it is west germany of course because this is the world cup where west germany play east germany and actually lose they do but then come back to win the whole tournament and they're in their on their native soil exactly um and just before we come to the final um the other um kind of famous incident that happens in the 74 World Cup is the Zaire qualify.

Zaire, former Belgian Congo, then Congo, under another dictator, a far more flamboyant one than the than the south american variety uh mabutu and mabutu is very very keen that zaire um win glory for zaire and indeed for africa yes and they go there and they lose nine nil to yugoslavia they also lose to scotland i mean that takes some doing yeah okay but they lose nine nil to yugoslavia. And does Mobutu respond well to this? No, he doesn't. So he says, you have all brought shame on the country of Zaire. You are scum and sons of whores. Wow.

So again, people think that criticism of the England team is brutal. I mean, you can't imagine Rishi Sunak saying that when Harry Kane gets dumped out. There's a very famous incident. So in their final match, they are told by Mobutu's men, if they lose by four goals or more. Three goals, I think. No, if they lose by four goals, they will not be allowed to return to Zaire or their family. I thought they were going to be killed.

Or they will be killed, exactly. So they actually lose 3-0. But very late in the match, the Brazilians have a free kick, and they're about to take the free kick when one of the Zairean players, a man called Mwepu Olunga, he just suddenly races down the field and boots the ball wildly out of the stadium. And in the commentary, if you watch that, the BBC commentator says,

a bizarre moment of African innocence. So that's how people kind of perceive it. They don't even know the rules. But actually the truth is they're just desperate to waste time. Yeah. And sort of spoil the match. And they're 2-0 down at that point. They lose 3-0, but that's enough.

They don't die. Anyway, so that's, I mean, that's again a kind of reminder of kind of the brutal circumstances under which people play. So Haiti were playing as well in that. They were. That's their only World Cup participation. So when we talked about, what's his name? Guy Jans, the guy. Gaitans, yeah. Gaitans. So he had subsequently vanished in Haiti under Papadoc Duvalier. And the Duvalier's regime is still in place in 74 when Haiti goes. So some very unsavory figures. I mean, on that African thing, Dom, our producer,

was just saying it's actually quite sad. It put back the perception of African football decades. And he's right, actually, because even the 1990s. So I remember in the 1990s, a British TV program called Fantasy Football, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, they actually got this guy, what was his name? Elunga. Elunga, they got Elunga, they flew him over

to reproduce this moment of him booting the ball away ludicrously. And everyone thought it was hilarious and sort of laughed at him. And actually, the truth of the matter is, there's a pretty dark story behind it. Yeah, I mean, he was... and sort of laughed at him. And, you know, and actually the truth of the matter is there's a pretty dark story behind it. Yeah, I mean, he was... In fear of his life. Literally in fear of his life. And all his teammates.

Yeah. He was very much taking a bullet for the team. But to return... Or not. Or not. But to return to the Dutch. So the Dutch get to the final and they're going to play the Germans. The Dutch are outraged because the German newspaper, BILT,

has been reporting stories about their... What described that shenanigans they've been having naked pool parties with local girls behind their wife's back the germans report this and the dutch are absolutely furious now the dutch at least some of them it's very clear we talked at the right at the beginning about the shadow of the second world war that shadow has not gone away so afterwards a lot of people talked about the how they hated the germans they were determined to beat them i mean the interesting thing is that quite a lot of the players weren't even born at the time of the second world war but one of them definitely was and that's a man called vim van hannigan who was a great sort of he was

one of the great midfield generals of that dutch team um he'd been born in 1944 and he i mean this is what he said he said i didn't give a damn about the score one there was enough as long as we could humiliate them i hate them they murdered my family my father my sister two of my brothers each time i faced germany i was filled with angst so you dig into this story van Van Haneghan was born in February 1944 in a fishing village called Breskens, which is near the Belgian border. And Breskens was at the center of a battle in 1944 called the Battle of the Scheldt, when the Allies were trying to basically break through into the Netherlands. And on the 11th of September 1944, that town, Breskens, had been carpet bombed.

And Van Haneghan's father, his brothers, his sister, and his uncle had all been killed. 199 people, the fifth of the town's population had been killed. So you can see why he felt so strongly. But the only thing is, they'd actually been bombed by the Allies, not by the Germans. I did not know that. So he tells that story. You know, I hate the Germans I hate them because of the war

but the tragedy of it well I mean it's a tragic story anyway but the sort of the tragic irony is that the people who had bombed them were almost certainly

the Allies who had obviously been bombing to sort of lay the groundwork for their for their sort of ground troops

anyway what happens is this incredible final. So the referee, Tom, you'll be delighted to hear, is an Englishman. He's a butcher from Wolverhampton called Jack Taylor, often regarded as the greatest referee of all time, certainly by me.

After a minute, he gives the Dutch a penalty. The Germans haven't even touched the ball. And it gets slotted in. And the German captain, do you want to talk about him? Uh, Beckenbauer who comes to be given the name of Kaiser.

Kaiser. I mean, so is wearing the correct sportswear on his feet. Yeah. I assume for a World Cup final. Unlike Kaiser Wilhelm II before the First World War. Absolutely. Um,

and, and he says to the referee, doesn't he? Basically, that's very English behaviour. He says, Taylor. This is all about the war. Taylor, you are an Englishman. I mean, some people, I would take that as a tremendous compliment,

but clearly not. Well, yeah. Anyway, the Dutch then, partly because of this, who knows, because of this war stuff, because they cross about the stories about their misbehaviour and saunas. They don't press home their advantage. They just pass the ball around mocking the Germans. Yes, but isn't that the thing that they wanted to kind of show off, basically? And everybody, anyone who listens to the first half of this episode

knows what's going to happen. The Germans win 2-1. And the Dutch are bitter about that to this day. So years later, when they defeated the Germans in the European Championships, one of their players mimed wiping his bottom on a German player's shirt in front of all the Dutch fans. The fans flew banners comparing German players to Hitler. There were all kinds of bitterness and bad blood.

Right. So they lose that, but they have a shot at redemption four years later, where the World Cup is being held in Argentina. And this is the most extraordinary story, probably of all the stories, isn't it? The Argentine hunter in the World Cup. It really is. Yes. So all the World Cups that we've discussed with the backdrop of dictators using it to sports wash, to promote their regimes, Argentina in 1978 is the one that is most often compared to the Berlin Olympics. It's the most overt. So the World Cup had been awarded to Argentina in 1966 at a point when they've already had a military coup, but the regime

is not, it's authoritarian, but it's not utterly horrific. Then they got democracy back in 1973, and Juan Perón, the great populist of the- Who doesn't like football. Who doesn't like football, of the post-World War II era, he had come back at the age of 187 to become president of Argentina. So they created a logo based on Perón's salute. He had this salute where he put both hands above his head. And they made the logo for the World Cup in an emulation of Perón's salute. Perón, unfortunately, dies in July 1974. And he's succeeded by his wife isabelita who's she's a sort of nightclub performer or

something who's about 80 years younger than him perron he had a thing for night he did indeed and uh she presides over complete and utter chaos so there's hundreds and hundreds of bombings and murders there's inflation at a gazillion percent uh the currency collapses uh i mean there's a point at which jonathan wilson says in his history of argentina a bomb was going off in buenos aires on average every three hours and there was a political assassination every five hours so in march 1976 it's a coup the army kick out isabelita and the head of the army who's a man called j Rafael Videla he becomes president and this is not just your bog standard military authoritarian regime kind of chucking people out of helicopters poets being electrocuted this is absolutely with concrete on their feet being chucked into rivers exactly

yeah it's horrendous so maybe that I mean who knows how many people died or or are disappeared as the as the saying goes so we're probably the sort So the most common figure you see is 30,000 people of their own citizens. So the hunter, as they're called, are very, very keen on the World Cup. They invest about 10% of the national budget. So that's $700 million in building new stadiums, in new infrastructure. They also redevelop. I mean, this is an amazing thing. I mean, this is infrastructure. They also redeveloped. I mean, this is an amazing thing. I mean, this is actually not unheard of at all.

I mean, Brazil did this in 2014. Qatar, obviously, are no strangers to slightly dodgy infrastructure investments. In Buenos Aires, they build a massive concrete wall so that when you're driving into town, you won see you won't see the shanty towns yeah yeah you and they bus people out don't they from towns they play cities that are playing um the hosting world cup to cities that aren't it's i mean it's unbelievable the guy the guy who was organizing the tournament's killed in a car bomb because another he's a general another general fancies the corruption possibilities so general general number one is, is murdered.

And, and so, um, Amnesty International, very hostile to it. There's the, the, the, the kind of the rumbling in,

in world football and beyond is very analogous to what's been happening with Qatar. Yeah. Uh, as with Qatar, it doesn't actually, you know, footballers may speak out against it,

but it doesn't stop them from going. Yeah. Everybody goes. I think, well, apart from, footballers may speak out against it, but it doesn't stop them from going. Yeah, everybody goes. I think, well, apart from the West German defender, Paul Breitner. Who's a Maoist, Tom. Yes. I mean, so actually, you know that 1974 final, which is sort of Dutch kids of the 60s versus these grim, grinding Germans. That's a complete stereotype because

the guy who scores German is equaliser, Breitner, is an overt supporter of Mao's China. Okay, so he doesn't go, but everyone else does. And the West German World Cup had seen the real growth of commercialism, commercial sponsorship. And so Western companies have a massive, massive commercial investment in Argentina. And they're very, very, very keen that the World Cup go ahead.

And the other person who is very, very keen that it go ahead is Dr. Henry Kissinger. Yes, yeah. Kissinger loves football, to be fair to Kissinger. Kissinger had loved football since his days in Germany as a boy. But he also thinks that the World Cup will be great for...

Kissinger never saw a right-wing... South American dictator. That he didn't want to support. The opening game is actually West Germany against Poland. Terrible game. Kissinger's there. Kissinger's there and he's saying this is a World Cup for peace. All that kind of stuff. Kissinger's there and he, um, Kissinger's there and he's saying this is a world cup for peace. Oh, that's nice.

So, um, so, um, Argentina in, um, a very, very tricky group. So they're with France, they're with Italy, they're with Hungary. And after the Hungary match, Argentina just scraped through 2-1. Uh, one of the, uh, one of the Junta, um, warns one of the argentine team that you better get out of this or else it will literally be a group of death it's been told that yeah i mean this podcast has been full of people making threats to players or you know and this is also another one where so so all the rumors that we've been talking about throughout this series so very strong rumors that the argentine team in the match against fr France are on amphetamines.

And then they get through the group of death and they have to play Peru, don't they? And all kinds of stories around this. So it's one of these weird structures that you sometimes have in the World Cup where you get through the group and you have to then go into another group. They're in a group with Brazil and Peru.

And whoever, they and Brazil are kind of level. So Argentina will have to beat Peru by four goals to get through to the final. So interestingly, actually, you mentioned with Brazil that their original manager, João Saldanha, had been a communist. The manager of Argentina is a former communist, Cesar Luiz Menotti. Menotti is a very bohemian figure, kind of chain-oking intellectual very gaunt isn't very gaunt exactly now his so his team he's gotten through to this what's effectively i suppose you could say a semi-final against peru which they need to win by four goals and this is the single most controversial match

politically in the world cup's history because argent Argentina win that match 6-0. And ever since, there have been endless rumours, for quite good reasons, one of which is that shortly before the match, Fidelio, who's the head of the Argentine regime, is seen going into the Peruvian dressing room. It is said with Henry Kissinger. Yeah, well, there are three different, there are three separate, I mean, the trouble with the conspiracy theories, Tom,

is when they start to multiply, you think, I mean, there are too many. You could do, you could do, or you could say, well, the evidence is stacking up. So here we go. First of all, there's the claim that Videla and Kissinger visit the Peruvian dressing room. The Peruvian players tell their story or one or two of them claim that Kissinger was there.

Kissinger denies it, doesn't he? Kissinger denies it, but they say that there's no deal done. So they say, we don't know why he was there. He just wished us good luck and then left. We didn't know what that meant. That's number one. Number two, which was made by the Sunday Times some years later, the Sunday Times claimed that the Argentine

government had shipped 35,000 tons of grain to Peru and released $50 million in frozen Peruvian assets. So that's conspiracy theory number two. And conspiracy number three, which was made by a left-wing former Peruvian senator, he said it was actually part of the condor plan which was the south american kind of thing of murdering dissidents with sort of cia help he said that basically we in peru had sent the argentines 13 people to be tortured because the argentines were absolute specialists in this but the argentines said they would torture them only if we threw the match yeah now the problem you know you mentioned you've mentioned jonathan wil, the historian of Argentine football. Wilson says in his book,

the problem with all these allegations is, A, as so often, there is absolutely no evidence. And B, the fact is that Peru actually were quite unlucky to lose 6-0. They started playing very well. They hit the post, which you can't contrive. You know, it's not possible to contrive that. As Trough says in his book, it's fair to say that either not all the Peruvians were in on it or some of them must have been exceptionally good actors.

So he says the Peruvian goalie makes a series of improbably good saves, which you wouldn't do if you were trying to throw the match. Okay. Well, so that's one conspiracy theory but my favorite conspiracy theory of all about the 978 world cup is that at the the final against the dutch yeah which is argentina against the dutch uh the one of the people who attended the final was dr josef Mengele. Oh, God almighty. I haven't heard this. Yeah. What was he apparently...

What influence could he possibly have on the... No, he'd just been, you know, he'd been invited by the Junta. Right. Because they thought he might enjoy it. Well, he probably would have enjoyed it. I mean, obviously, he'd be rooting for Argentina. He would have been.

So the Dutch, actually, the one thing I will say, we said everyone went, but the Dutch, the best Dutch player from 1974, Johan Cruyff, did not go to that World Cup. But it's not because of politics.

It's actually because his family had been through a terrible ordeal in Barcelona. They had been almost kidnapped and sort of held ransom. So he didn't want to go for personal reasons. He just didn't fancy going to Argentina. Argentina win that final 3-1 an extra time. I mean, to be honest, they are still a good team. I mean, it's not like the Argentine team of 1978 is not a good team. And they beat the Dutch.

It's a very sort of bitter, dirty game, but they beat them fair and square. Videla, the head of the regime, hands over the trophy. The punches, the ticker tape. I mean, the ticker tape is incredible from the stands, these blizzards of sort of white and blue. But it's the stories about what happens next that are really kind of unpleasant. So the place where you were tortured if you were a dissident was the Navy Petty Officers School of Mechanics.

And that was close enough to the stadium, the Monumental in Buenos Aires, that you could hear the crowd roaring. And the guards would put on the commentary on their radio so the prisoners could hear it. But a lot of the prisoners found it very distressing because they realized that this was a great victory for the junta. And they realized...

They're cheering the Argentine team team but they're also cheering and they realized how little how little the public were thinking about them that they were all thinking about the football and the story goes that um at the end of the final the torturers are celebrating next to their their victims so there's a guy called el tigre captain acosta who's one of the most notorious who makes a point of listening to the match with his his victims but then in a really sort of sinister development some of the torturers get some of the prisoners and they take them out of the prison in a peugeot 504 they take them out to tour buenos Aires, to see the people celebrating, to sort of show them the support. The love for the region.

And they even take them for a pizza. And one of them, the prisoners, is a woman called Graciela D'Aleo. And she puts her head through the sunroof of the car, looks out of the roof at all the people. And she said later, I stood up on that seat and I looked at the multitude. It was a moment of terrible solitude i was crying and i was certain that if i began to shout that i was one of the disappeared that no one would even notice yeah and and that is i mean that is a a kind of preview of the emotions i guess that the families of the laborers who died building the stadia in Qatar will

be feeling when the ticker tape comes down at the final and all that. So, um, as we say, the story of the world cup is about so much more than sport. I mean, sport is incredibly important, but it's important not least because of the uses to which it can be

put and we'll be talking about this tomorrow won't we because so tomorrow tom um we will be welcoming onto the podcast uh somebody who's played at a world cup and not just played at a world cup got hat trick yeah well more than hat trick was the top scorer at the 1986 world cup and that is the former england captain gary lineker who's now the face of football in this country, in Britain, but he's also very closely involved with the World Cup. I mean, he presented the draw in the Kremlin in 2018, and he'll be talking about that with us. He'll be talking about his thoughts about having the World Cup in Qatar,

about what the World Cup says about history and politics in the last few decades. And then once we've talked to Gary, Tom, we'll be embarking on our 32-episode marathon. Yes, we will. About aspects of history from the competing countries, from the White Rose Movement in Germany to, what is it, prehistoric Serbia? Yes, possibly the invention of writing in Serbia in 5,500 BC.

And I have to say that doing podcasts on aspects of his 32 countries, lots of which, Dominic, I think we should put our hands up and say we're not particularly familiar with, that for us it's been an incredible it's been an incredible yeah brilliant process of discovery it has uh a cameroonian a cameroonian general who fought for peter the great um slavery in senegal uh the history of qatar uh the ashanti yeah uh the maid of holl. The Costa Rican Civil War, Tom. Oh, yes, yes, with Dr. Valverde and Don Pepe. Yes.

The Somerton Man, Australia's most intriguing murder mystery story. Essentially, when I look back, I mean, Tom and I have spent, you know, months. Years of our life. We started doing it in August. Did we start recording in August? I think we did, yeah, recording these podcasts. And we can't wait to release them to an unsuspecting world i know they'll just keep rolling forward like um dutch footballers in 1974 just hope that we uh we get a slightly better result than they did yes who are the germans in this analogy that's

a terrible let's not answer that question. There are no other podcasts, right? We will see you tomorrow when we will be joined by Gary Lineker. And until then, thank you very much. And goodbye. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to the rest is. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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