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    Sport magazine's World Cup Stories
    Sport magazine's World Cup Stories
    Sport magazine's World Cup Stories
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Sport magazine's World Cup Stories

    By Amit Katwala

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    About this ebook

    World Cup Stories tells a shocking or surprising tale from every World Cup. It features stunning true stories, including:

    - The France captain executed as a Nazi
    - Osama Bin Laden’s plot to blow up the England team
    - The 100-hour Football War between El Salvador and Honduras

    Find out why Roger Milla locked 120 pygmies in the basement of Cameroon’s national stadium, and the key role played by Scotland in Argentina’s 1986 World Cup win. Learn why winning the World Cup at home means so much to Brazil, and why one of Poland’s best ever strikers was virtually erased from history. There are 19 stories in all, collected from articles in Sport magazine, and each is beautifully illustrated. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the World Cup in Brazil.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmit Katwala
    Release dateJun 9, 2014
    ISBN9781310657047
    Sport magazine's World Cup Stories

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      Book preview

      Sport magazine's World Cup Stories - Amit Katwala

      What follows is a collection of articles that first appeared in Sport magazine in the months leading up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The football agenda in the run-up to the tournament has been dominated by the chaos and protests as Brazil rushed to get its stadiums ready for the tournament, and the allegations of corruption and bribery surrounding the awarding of the 2022 tournament to Qatar.

      But the World Cup has always been dirty and chaotic, despite the best intentions of its founder Jules Rimet. It has been manipulated by countries trying to use it as a political tool, and targeted by terrorists seeking the same. It attracts unique characters: good, bad, or merely flawed, like Garrincha – Brazil’s angel with bent legs. But it can also inspire people – such as Raymond Kopa of France, who pulled himself out of the mines to represent his country, or the people of Middlesbrough, who threw their support behind an unknown North Korean team in 1966.

      The 19 stories that follow are shocking, surprising, heart-warming and harrowing – just like the World Cup itself.

      1930, Uruguay

      The France captain turned Nazi collaborator

      As he stood and faced the firing squad in 1944, Alexandre Villaplane might have looked back on the afternoon when he captained France in the first ever World Cup match. On July 13 1930, the 24-year-old led out his country for a 4-1 win against Mexico, in front of 4,444 fans at Penarol’s Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo. The course of his life is scarcely credible.

      Born in Algeria, Villaplane moved to France with his parents as a youngster, and by the age of 17 he was playing for FC Sete on the south coast. He was a fine player, by all accounts: a strong yet cultured centre-half, good both in the air and with his feet. His skills made him attractive, and even in the days before professionalism, Villaplane moved clubs with almost modern frequency – able to command good wages in the fictitious positions created for him, as was common practice in the ‘shamateur’ era.

      He was called up to the national team in 1926, becoming the first player of North African origin to represent France. A key member of the team, he was capped 26 times, including a spell of 20 consecutive games that included all World Cup group fixtures in 1930. He said leading his country out against the Mexicans was the happiest day of my life.

      Away from football, though, his life was already starting to unravel. In 1929 he had been the star signing for Racing Club Paris, a curiously prescient attempt to build a super-club in the capital. Almost immediately Villaplane fell in with the wrong crowd, flaunting wages that he shouldn’t technically have been getting as an amateur, and burning through cash faster than Mario Balotelli at John Lewis. He spent money on cabaret, in casinos and restaurants – and, most damaging of all, at racecourses, where he fell into the criminal underworld.

      The French Football Federation did not take kindly to their captain’s indiscretions – he never played for his country again after the World Cup, marking the end of his international career at the age of 24. Two years later, he was embroiled in a match-fixing scandal while playing for Antibes. Three years after that, following shambolic, disinterested spells at OGC Nice and Hispano-Bastidienne in Bordeaux, he was imprisoned for fixing horse races. His football career was over.

      He took to his next life with zeal. When the Second World War broke out, the former centre-half revealed himself as a a born crook according to his prosecutor at a subsequent trial, who also noted: He would attempt and succeed in staging the most abject of blackmails – the blackmail of hope.

      In one of his spells in prison, for handling stolen goods, Villaplane met Henri Lafonte, who would go on to become a notorious Nazi collaborator and leader of the French Gestapo. Through this connection, Villaplane was eventually put in charge of the Brigade Nord-Africaine [BNA], a group of mercenaries tasked with stamping out resistance in the south.

      They did this violently, under Villaplane’s captaincy. He would extract cash from desperate Jews and members of the resistance by offering them salvation, and then send them to the death camps anyway. They’re going to kill you – but I’ll save you, risking my life, went his speech. "I’ve saved fifty-four. You’ll be the fifty-fifth.

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