World of Cups

"Brazil’s 1970 triumph, summed up by their captain’s brilliant strike in the final, was the game’s Woodstock, a glorious moment offering an implausible future.

1970: The popular conception of Woodstock – great crowds high on the prospect of peace and love, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Joan Baez – stems largely from the over-idealised Michael Wadleigh documentary, released three months before the 1970 World Cup. The reality was chaos: several acts performed hours late; a fence was broken down by anarchists leading to potentially dangerous overcrowding; two people were killed, one of them run over by a tractor; and a worn electric cable combined with persistent rain raised the possibility of mass electrocution.

The 1970 World Cup, similarly, once you peer beyond the brilliance of Brazil’s football, becomes a much more sinister event. Mexico’s governing PRI was repressive and capable of extreme violence. And in Brazil, along with short-term economic growth, victory in Mexico, and its associated modernity, was presented as part of President Emílio Garrastazu Médici’s “Brazilian miracle”.

The result is that the 1970 World Cup stands amid the darkness as a fragile vision of perfection and possibility, of what football can be, what it could have been. It is, in effect, the equivalent of that epiphanic pause before Pelé lays the ball right in the 86th minute of the final. But where that pass was followed by the explosive fulfilment of Carlos Alberto’s shot, football itself went awry. That World Cup is the scene in Easy Rider, another cultural touchstone of 1969, in which Wyatt (Peter Fonda) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper): “We blew it.”

Like Wyatt and Billy, Fifa took the money and, while much was gained, much also was lost."

These are not my words, it is an edited extract from The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup by Jonathan Wilson. I quite liked the somewhat curious connections it makes, and whilst I lived through these events and know what this all means I also don't know what any of it really means.

Mexico 70 was the first World Cup I properly tuned into, aged 15. '66 meant nothing in Scotland. The matches were late at night, still mostly in grainy black and white and I saw football pundits for the first time, arguing and joking before and after the games. It was an entertaining and golden few weeks. Those Brazilian players were the temporary Kings of Football.

World of contradictions: Never give up on art and expression ... sometimes interference improves the work.