Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The 1994 World Cup

The Mayas of Chiapas were up in arms, the real Mexico blowing up in the face of the official Mexico, and Subcomandante Marcos was astonishing the world with his words of humor and amour.

Onetti, the novelist of the dark side of the soul, lay dying. World car-racing champion Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian, was being decapitated on an unsafe European track. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were killing each other in the pieces that had been Yugoslavia. In Rwanda something similar was happening, but television spoke of tribes, not peoples, and implied that the violence was the sort of thing black people do.

Torrijos’s heirs were winning the Panamanian elections four years after the bloody invasion and useless occupation by the United States. U.S. troops were pulling out of Somalia, where they had fought hunger with bullets. South Africa was voting for Mandela. Communists, rebaptized as socialists, were winning the parliamentary elections in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, all countries which had discovered that capitalism also has certain inconvenient traits. But Moscow’s Progress Publishers, which used to publish the works of Marx and Lenin, was now publishing Reader’s Digest. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.

Corruption scandals were demolishing Italy’s political parties and filling the power vacuum was Berlusconi, the parvenu who ran the dictatorship of television in the name of democratic diversity. Berlusconi was crowning his campaign with a slogan stolen from the soccer stadiums, while the fifteenth World Cup got under way in the United States, the home of baseball.

The U.S. press gave the matter scant attention, saying more or less: “Here, soccer is the sport of the future and it always will be.” But the stadiums were packed despite a sun that melted stones. To please European television, the big matches were played at noon, as in Mexico at the ’86 Cup.

Thirteen teams from Europe, six from the Americas, and three from Africa took part, plus South Korea and Saudi Arabia. To discourage ties, three points were given for each win instead of two. And to discourage violence, the referees were much more rigorous than usual, handing out warnings and ejections throughout the tournament. For the first time the referees wore colorful uniforms and for the first time each team was allowed a third substitute to replace an injured goalkeeper.

Maradona played in his final World Cup and it was a party, until he was defeated in the laboratory that tested his urine after the second match. Without him and without the speed demon Caniggia, Argentina fell apart. Nigeria played the most entertaining soccer of the Cup. Bulgaria, Stoitchkov’s team, won fourth place after knocking the fearful German squad out of the running. Third place went to Sweden. Italy faced Brazil in the final. It was a boring, drawn-out affair that ended scoreless, but between yawns Romario and Baggio offered some lessons in good soccer. In the penalty shootout, Brazil won 3–2 and was crowned champion of the world. An amazing story: Brazil is the only country that qualified for every World Cup, the only country to win it four times, the country that has won the most matches, and the country that has scored the most goals.

Leading the list of scorers in the ’94 Cup were Stoitchkov of Bulgaria and Salenko of Russia with six goals, followed by Brazil’s Romario, Italy’s Baggio, Sweden’s Andersson, and Germany’s Klinsmann, with five apiece.