The 1970 and 1978 World Cups, both staged in Latin America, were set against the backdrop of huge political turmoil across the continent – not least in Brazil and Argentina, whose football teams became the respective champions of those two tournaments. Sport was only part of it. For the brutal military juntas of both countries, football was manipulated as a crucial patriotic unifier. Victory was
essential... something to be achieved by any means necessary.
I found the BBC's new documentary,
Pele, Argentina and the Dictators, very interesting, though a game of two halves – the real meat coming in the latter section, which focused on the Argentinian dictatorship and its relationship with the 1978 national team. Because that World Cup was a "home" tournament (Brazil won theirs away in Mexico), the pressure, the fear, seemed amplified – games being played, broadcast gleefully around the world, sometimes mere yards from the torture chambers. Indeed, the Argentina segment was probably worth a programme in its own right.
I was 15 at the time of that World Cup. Maybe just youthful naivety, but despite some vague mutterings about the Argentinian regime, I seem to recall that, once the football started, it was all swept under the carpet (much like Russia in 2018) – no doubt helped by England's convenient non-qualification. Yep, we were honorary Scots for the second World Cup running. (England had been utterly brutalised by Argentina on the intended "warm-up" tour of 1977, a foretaste of the ugliness that was to follow.)
My criticism is that the doc only told part of the story (as outlined in my own book,
Back Home) and could have put football/fascsim in a wider Latin American context. It missed out the Mexico Olympic student massacre of 1968, for e.g., the Soccer War of 1969, fought between Honduras and El Salvador over World Cup qualification. It also skipped the strange arrest of Bobby Moore in Bogotá on the eve of the 1970 tournament, the UK's diplomatic stand-off with the generals of Colombia, the alleged poisoning of Gordon Banks and all the associated conspiracy theories, including the very real suggestion of CIA involvement. And let's not forget the football stadiums-as-concentration camps in Pinochet's Chile throughout this period.
That said, I understand perfectly the time restraints and the need for a sexier "sell" (which is why Pele is in the title, one assumes, even though it wasn't about him at all, really), and the need to show things from a South American perspective – so hats off to the makers, especially for their enlistment of some star to-camera witnesses. I remember, some years ago, when a producer friend of mine pitched the BBC on a drama about the Bobby Moore incident, based on my own book. A 12-year-old producer looked up from his skinny latte and asked, "Who's Bobby Moore?"
