IIt’s a moment in time that lives forever in the national soul of Brazil, as indelible as half past noon, November 22 1963, is for Americans. At three o’clock in the afternoon local time on July 16 1950, a referee blew his whistle for the last time at the World Cup. A match then began between two teams, one needing only a draw to gain the prize, the other a win to go back home with anything round their necks. The team in yellow and blue scored first, and… hold on, this is not the Maracanaço, Brazil played in white back then.
Uniquely, instead of a final, the 1950 World Cup featured a round-robin group stage to decide the top four teams. By luck, the two sides vying for the title, Uruguay and Brazil, met in the last round in the newly built Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. But kicking off at the same time in the Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo was a match between the other two nations, Sweden and Spain. Thanks to a draw with Uruguay in the first round, Spain would win the bronze medal if they avoided defeat to Sweden.
But as in the much more famous game taking place simultaneously, they did not avoid defeat, and the opposition won it all. No one cares. People will probably tell the story of the Maracanaço until the last ball is kicked by the last foot, but no one remembers the other final round match at the 1950 World Cup. Because why would you?
It is a curiosity that the penultimate event of the most popular spectacle on Planet Earth is a match that nobody really cares about. Every soccer nerd can tell you not only who won each edition of the World Cup, but also most of the losing finalists. However, it is a rare breed who knows by heart the list of World Cup Bronze Medalists. Few even know that there was no third place match in 1930.
You and I do, of course, and we love and cherish teams like Leônidas’ Brazil, Just Fontaine’s France and Eusebio’s Portugal, not to mention Grzegorsz Lato’s glorious Polish side of the 1974, who really should’ve contested the final against the total football Netherlands instead of West Germany. What a game that would’ve been. In popular imagination, if the third place match has any function, it is as a reminder of what could’ve been. The teams that fell at the second-to-last hurdle. The great sides denied ultimate glory by fate or their own frailties. But we purists, we nerds, we sickos, we know and cherish the third place match. We know that it is the best thing about the World Cup, its only pure, unsullied facet.
Okay, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s admit that the bronze medal match is actually utter bullshit. Hogwash. Horsepiss. Pigpoo. Set aside all the historical stuff, even the sporting side of it, and consider the World Cup as a narrative structure.
It starts in chaos, with many characters vying to survive. Soon, they start departing the story in droves and eventually fewer and fewer remain, until you get down to a final four. Only two can meet in the final, but before that can happen, the two defeated teams get an epilogue. Such a bizarre notion. Before the climax of the story, there’s an epilogue. It lasts just as long as the climactic match. If there is a tie at the end of 90 minutes, it goes to extra time, just like the final. What a silly idea.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t get a whole scene together in the Tower of London after Gertrude has drunk from the poison chalice but before Hamlet and Laertes have their sword fight. Mayor Vaughn of Amity Island doesn’t sit down to eat the dead tiger shark before Hooper gets into the cage and goes in the water. The pristine bib and onesie still in its plastic wrapping don’t get tossed into a sack before the never worn baby shoes are put up for sale. Any editor worth their salt would get rid of the third place match, and they’d be right.
Which is why you shouldn’t always consult editors, because as its own thing, the bronze medal match is all about glory. First of all, many Golden Boot winners got their last goals in the third place playoff. Eusebio scored one in ’66. So did Grzegorz Lato in ’74. Leônidas bagged a brace in ’38. No one’s scored three in a third place playoff, but Just Fontaine plundered a ludicrous four in ’58, cementing his place in soccer legend by leaving the field for the final time having scored a frankly ridiculous 13 goals in one World Cup.
People will tell you that in a team sport individual awards don’t matter. Up to a point that’s true, not even Cristiano Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo’s biggest fan or Cristiano Ronaldo’s stats guy thinks that any one player’s personal feats compares to the World Cup. Nothing compares to a gold medal, but there’s one path to immortal glory for a player who’s denied that shiniest of disks: winning the Golden Boot.
The clearest example of that was in ’94, when Bulgaria spent the entire match trying to set their great striker Hristo Stoichkov up to score the goal that would take him one clear of Oleg Salenko. That this would mean that a Russian wouldn’t get the Golden Boot probably didn’t lessen their ardor. Sweden won 4-0 and it wasn’t to be.
Nevertheless, Fontaine would have happily given up his Golden Boot for a place in the final. Same goes for Lato, Eusebio, Leônidas, Stoichkov, and every other Golden Boot winner who played in the bronze medal match. That is the true narrative function of this weird game: it is a reminder of how important the final is, the one true path to immortality. The third place playoff is a parade of the dead, a troupe of dancing ghosts to remind you that they fell in search of ultimate glory.
That is why every one of these matches begins in the same way. At first both teams clearly hate the idea that they are there. Then some spark sets the easily lit tinder of competitiveness alight in the breasts of one of the teams. Usually, this triggers the pathological need to win in the opponents, and a weird, ragged spectacle occurs. The run of third place playoffs from 1990 to 2010 were much more entertaining than next day’s finals, with perhaps the exception of 1998, when Davor Šuker’s Golden Boot securing strike in the 36th minute was the last thing of note to happen, while the final was a wild, if one-sided, spectacle.
This is not to say, incidentally, that the 2014 World Cup Final was any good, but the bronze medal match was just sad that year. There’s a certain barrier to mustering up feelings of deep sympathy for a bunch of handsome millionaires, but it was tough to watch a clearly traumatized set of young men waltz around the pitch like specters summoned by a necromancer for the amusement of bereaved children.
It is the fate of the third place playoff to fade from memory if the final is good, so I couldn’t really tell you what happened in 2018 and 2022, beyond who won them. Every World Cup final passes into history and legend, but a bronze medal is but a keepsake of a game played in the past. Just another game.
In fact, it is this mundanity which makes the third place playoff so special. Every World Cup is about a narrative emerging from chaos, a heroic journey that ends in triumph or tragedy. The bronze medal match is just another game. It is that rare thing, a World Cup contest that means nothing. It is rare for something to be without meaning.
The eleven thousand and something spectators in the Pacaembu Stadium watching the team in blue and yellow win 3-1 on July 16 1950 were outside history. They watched a game of soccer. Not a single one of them has been interviewed for a documentary about the Pacaembuaço, if that is a correctly formed Portuguese word.
Meanwhile, something close to two hundred thousand people saw Moacir Barbosa dive to save a Alcides Ghiggia shot in the 79th minute, and watched the ball go back and to the left, back and to the left, back and to the left… sorry, watched the ball squirm under the Brazilian goalkeeper and into the goal.
Nothing about the third place playoff will haunt anyone’s memory, it won’t cause anyone nightmares, no losing goalkeeper will be ostracized by his nation for the rest of his life, because it is just a game. A meaningless match in the middle of the three most important games in the quadrennial soccer cycle. No sporting event that is so deeply unimportant is ever broadcast to the entire globe. This is a Saturday kickabout, except it’s the World Cup. The context strips it of its normalcy and it becomes hyperreal.
One lesson of the Kennedy Assassination and the Maracanaço is that if millions of people obsessively examine a single moment in time, a lot of odd details will crop up. To the conspiracy theorist, they are suspicious. How did Kennedy’s brain disappear? Why did the Brazilian newspaper O Mundo print a headline proclaiming that Brazil were the world champions? How come the Brazilian national team adopted the colors of the bronze medalists? And can it be a coincidence that they then met Sweden in the final four years later?
So sit down and watch the third place playoff. It will be the strangest, most normal match of soccer you will watch, until the next bronze medal decider, next year, in Brazil of all places. But it won’t matter, it will be just another Saturday kickabout you can watch everywhere on Planet Earth.