Translated by Russell Scott Valentino
I was born in a country that competed in eight World Cups, but not in the one played in England during the spring and summer of the year I was born. That country was called Yugoslavia, and it was one of four that once competed in World Cups but today no longer exist. The other three are Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic. There is one more, which in the meantime radically changed its name: the second-largest country in Africa by area, officially known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sometimes referred to as Congo-Kinshasa after its capital. At the 1974 World Cup in Germany, this country competed under the name Zaire, as it was called between 1971 and 1997. Four other teams have played in World Cups that are not states at all: Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. Each of these territories of the United Kingdom has its own football association with the right to independent competition in world and European championships. Although autonomous, dependent, or overseas territories (like Curaçao, a Dutch territory, which will feature in the 2026 World Cup) can field national teams, no other region of the world—such as Catalonia, Corsica, Chechnya, or Kurdistan—that is not itself independent but is instead part of another state, is afforded the same right. The reason for this insular exception lies in the myth that it was the British who invented football, which gives them a special status among all the rest.
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia each competed in eight World Cups. The name Yugoslavia would appear for a ninth time at the World Cup in 1998, in France, but by then it referred to a different country, comprising only two of the previous six Yugoslav republics (Serbia and Montenegro), while the other four (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Macedonia—since renamed North Macedonia) were independent. During that year’s competition, one of them—Croatia—went on to finish third, while the country called Yugoslavia, which wasn’t really Yugoslavia anymore, was eliminated in the round of sixteen.
Does this sound complicated and indecipherable? That’s the first thing that every World Cup fan must get used to: the geopolitics of football are more complex today than they were in Henry Kissinger’s day. Incidentally, that Secretary of State and National Security Advisor during the presidencies of Nixon and Ford was one of the most influential political leaders in the world after 1945, having arrived in the U.S. as a fifteen year-old Jewish immigrant after fleeing with his family in 1938 from Germany, more precisely and was a football fan and a devotee of a certain Bavarian second-division team in particular. There is a myth—and football is largely built on myths—that Secretary Kissinger would ask his assistant every week how Spielvereinigung Greuther Fürth(the name of his team in Fürth, his hometown) had done on Sunday. It is not a myth but a fact from his biography that, as a fourteen-year-old, Kissinger, whose name at the time was Heinz Alfred, went to the stadium to watch Greuther Fürth play and cheer on his club, although Jews were forbidden from doing this at the time and, had he been discovered, he could have ended up in a concentration camp…
But let’s return to the no-longer existing countries. The Soviet Union competed in six World Cups, and it so happened that at the last competition before its disappearance, the 1990 World Cup in Italy , Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR all took part. The Soviets made a very poor final appearance, ending up last in their group; the Czechoslovak team lost in the quarterfinals to the Germans, while Yugoslavia had never been stronger or more powerful, finding itself in that quarterfinal before the Argentines with Diego Armando Maradona. Even after the extra time, the final score sat at 0-0. Although Yugoslavia fielded one fewer player from the seventy-seven minute mark on, it played better than Argentina and had more missed chances to score. So the match was decided on penalty kicks, and as sometimes happens in football, the goal seemed cursed for both sides. The Yugoslavs missed, the Argentines missed, but the Yugoslavs missed just a bit more, even though the Yugoslav goalkeeper Tomislav Ivković blocked Maradona’s shot. And thus ended—with a loss to Argentina on penalty kicks—the history of a country, one that would soon descend into a bloody war and, by the next World Cup, held in the U.S. in 1994, would exist no longer.
There are quite a few people from the country where I was born who even today live in the belief that war could have been avoided and the country would not have fallen apart, or that the countries that comprised it could have separated in peace, had Yugoslavia won the penalty shoootout against Argentina on that June 30 of 1990. Anyone who has ever—even if only through a television screen—taken part in the game of football, and watched a penalty shootout decide the winner of a match, knows that it stops being football and becomes a game of nerves, collective and individual alike, a matter of the human relation to life and death, to the certainty of one’s own disappearance, and to eternity. With penalties taken after 120 minutes of play in a match where no one has managed to be victorious, football ceases to be a sport and becomes a human metaphysical trial. And almost as a rule, the victor is the one who’s less aware that it is, in fact, a trial.
Indeed, Yugoslavia came close to beating Argentina on penalties that day. It’s incredible, after all, that Faruk Hadžibegić, a reliable, steady, and very experienced defender, could miss his penalty just after goalkeeper Ivković caught Maradona’s effort. If Hadžibegić had taken ten penalties in that situation, he might have missed only once. But let’s say he happened to score. Is it really possible there would have been no war in Yugoslavia as a result? Why do some people believe such a thing? Because football, at least for those who take part in the game, is a metaphor for life. And so what happens on the field, according to their belief, must have some impact on life itself. And in fact sometimes it does. And if Yugoslavia had beaten Argentina in the 1990 World Cup, it’s very likely that, on the wings of such a victory, it would have overcome the weak Italian team in the semifinals and faced Germany in the final match. And if it had triumphed over the great Argentina, then why not against Germany too? And if Yugoslavia had become world champions—so think the unhappy people who lived through the Yugoslav wars of the beginning of the 1990s—there would have been no war. Because who’s ever seen a war in the country of the world champions?
Do I believe this myself? No. For while I watched that penalty shootout on July 30, 1990, I didn’t believe that Yugoslavia would beat Argentina. I thought that, just as in life, the strong would defeat the weak. But, even if the opposite had come to pass, if Faruk Hadžibegić had not missed the final penalty shot and Yugoslavia had come out on top and become world champions, still everything would have been the same. The metaphor of life would have given way before geostrategy. But for many of my former compatriots, football is a parallel religious system. Poor and unhappy peoples seek solace and hope in football. Sometimes they put their faith in football after they’ve stopped believing in God, and if they haven’t stopped believing, then they have faith that the dear Lord takes an active role in the victory of their team at the World Cup. Why in 1990, such people ask themselves, did God care about Argentina’s beating Yugoslavia? The logical response comes to their minds: because Yugoslavia was an avowed atheistic country, where few believed in God, while the Argentines were appropriately Godfearing. Things would change radically during the war, of course, as the former Yugoslavs became great believers—Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim—and murdered one another quite passionately in the name of their newfound God. Has God kept tabs on their respective national teams since? In some cases, yes. Croatia, one of the countries that emerged from the collapse of Yugoslavia, has had great successes in World Cup competitions. After finishing third in the 1998 World Cup in France, it took second in the Russian World Cup twenty years later.
The year 1990 was a pivotal World Cup for what is perhaps the most interesting of the no longer existing countries to compete in the World Cup: The German Democratic Republic. It, too, was on its way out in 1990—the Berlin Wall had come down less than a year earlier. East Germany, which history remembers for its vast secret police apparatus, the fearsome Stasi, was not a football powerhouse. It competed only once in the World Cup, in 1974, held in the country of its neighbor and rival, the capitalist and official enemy, West Germany, which, after the 1954 “miracle of Bern,” became and would long remain the strongest football powerhouse in Europe. That 1974 West German team seemed the most powerful of all the German teams ever, and was led by some of the most colorful immortals of the game of football—goalkeeper Sepp Maier, the lethal center-forward Gerd Müller, the prodigious midfielder Paul Breitner, and probably the most charismatic European footballer in history, the “emperor,” Franz Beckenbauer.
That year’s draw, which was both politically and culturally unfortunate, placed the two German national teams into Group A, along with Chile and Australia. This was the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets were financing Marxist-inspired anti-colonial movements throughout the Third World, bringing supporters of global revolution to power, while Henry Kissinger and the CIA were responding by jointly organizing coups d’etat, in which largely conservative, right-wing types, including Nazi-fascists like the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, took over. At the same time, Europe served as a staging ground for a lighter, more refined, and, in a marketing sense, more attractive aspect of the Cold War. Here the battle was being waged between civil rights, luxury consumer goods, and rock ‘n roll, which were offered by the capitalist West, and the social equality, worker solidarity, equality of opportunity, and solidarity among peoples offered by the communist East.
In Germany, moreover, especially the western part, memories of the crimes of the Hitler era, were still alive, with every now and then another SS member or concentration camp guard being revealed in some high government position, while the situation had become even more sensitive after the terrible massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games just two years earlier. If there was one thing the West Germans didn’t need, it was that horribly sensitive, politically dangerous match with East Germany. But maybe this is the wrong way to think. Maybe they in fact wanted an opportunity to show the world, especially their communist enemies on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in a football match—that is, through the most striking realization of football as a metaphor for life—exactly who was stronger, better, more successful: those of the West, or those of the East. Rarely if ever before had the response to such a question been clearer and more predictable than before the match that took place in Hamburg that June 22, 1974, when Beckenbauer and his comrades were set to play against the rather unknown East German football amateurs.
West Germany played in their traditional black and white jerseys, which the Germans still wear to this day. The East Germans played in blue and white jerseys, with an awkwardly designed, slightly oversized crest and the letters “GDR” on the left side of the chest. And at the very start, everything appeared as people had imagined it would. But football differs from all other games precisely in the fact that even the weakest and most diminutive David has a chance of overcoming Goliath and that there has never in the history of football been a team so strong that some outsider could not defeat it and everything in that historic match unfolded in an unusual way from the very start. Big Germany was mostly attacking, while little Germany mostly defended. But it was as if in their attacks Beckenbauer and his teammates assumed that victory was theirs and for that very reason suddenly no longer knew how to achieve it when they failed to score. The East Germans, by contrast, assumed nothing. They played as if they were predestined losers—nothing worse could happen than what was already fated.
The East German goal was defended by Jürgen Croy, and on that day he would play the match of his life. He performed like a miracle worker, hypnotizing the opposing strikers, including the greatest of the great, Gerd Müller. Croy was a complete unknown to all of them. A native of Zwickau, he played for a small club, then called BSG Sachsenring Zwickau and today called FSV Zwickau, which, unlike a few of the large East German clubs sponsored by the army, police, or secret services, had never played in European club competitions. Today, Croy’s FSV Zwickau plays in a regional league, the fourth tier of German club competition. That day, the East German goalkeeper was greater than the whole West German national team.
Jürgen Croy disrupted the inner balance and self-confidence of his opponents, who were not psychologically ready to resolve a match that they’d been sure they would win. The rest of the East German team, playing free of all fear, free of the idea of defeat, had several serious chances to score, and then, in the seventy-seventh minute, Jürgen Sparwasser scored the goal that would defeat West Germany. There have been bigger surprises in the history of World Cups (perhaps the biggest was in 1950, when the United States defeated England in Belo Horizonte, at the World Cup in Brazil), but this match would go down in the political and cultural history of Europe as one of the strangest reference points of the Cold War. In a political and historical sense, it meant nothing: the German Democratic Republic would disappear just as would the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, but this match showed like few others why, in fact, we love football and why this game, like no other, touches our lives to such an extent that we’re sometimes inclined to believe that God, too, is involved in it, and that something in our little lives can be fixed by it. But there is another thing in all this that speaks magnificently of football: the World Cup champions in 1974 were the West Germans. They won every match they played except for the one they lost to the GDR. In football, as in life, there are heroes and anti-heroes, winners and losers. If the others weren’t there, life would not be worth anything at all.