The Best Team in the Land & All The World, Part Nine: A Dog Without an Owner
As the 1970s wore on, European clubs grew tired of playing in the Intercontinental Cup, even though the violence that surrounded the matches started to subside.
Ajax declining to play in the Intercontinental Cup in 1971 was a clear sign of what was to come but, having won the European Cup again in 1972, they were again invited to take part in the competition and this time they agreed, a decision that they almost immediately came to regret.
Ajax’s invitation came about as a result of a 2-0 win against Internazionale in Rotterdam, a city in which an Ajax match could hardly be described as a ‘home’ match. Johann Cruyff scored both of their goals, and this year’s Intercontinental Cup would, on account of his decision not to play in the 1978 World Cup, be the only time that he would play in Argentina.
He received death threats for his troubles, and the inertia of the local police persuaded Ajax to hire private security or their players. The death threats had been sent by fans of Independiente, the Avellaneda-based club who they were playing. They’d won that year’s Copa Libertadores by beating Universitario of Lima 2-1 in aggregate.
The first leg was played in Avellaneda on the 6th September 1972. Again, there were supporters outside the Ajax hotel overnight on the night before the match. Again, the local police did nothing. At least there wasn’t anything quite as appalling waiting for them at the stadium as had awaited other clubs who’d turned out for matches in this part of the world.
Cruyff gave Ajax the lead on five minutes in the first leg, but had to leave the pitch a few minutes later following another brutal tackle by Dante Mírcoli. By half-time they still led 1-0, but coach Stefan Kovacs had to implore the players to go back out onto the pitch after they initially refused to. Francisco Sa levelled the score for Independiente nine minutes from time.
The Ajax reaction was furious. Stefan Kovacs said: “This was not football but war.... In Amsterdam, Independiente will have serious troubles. Our pitch is magificent and they are not used to playing on surfaces like this. The pitch [at La Doble Visera] is not suitable for football.” Forward Sjaak Swart called Independiente defender Ricardo Pavoni a “gangster”, also stating “he believes he is [the Argentine boxer] Carlos Monzón”.
Kovacs turned out to be right. In the second leg at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam two weeks later, Ajax blew Independiente away. Johann Neeskens gave them an early lead, a one-two with Cruyff and a dink over the goalkeeper, and two second half goals from Johnny Rep finished them off. It was, perhaps, the only way to answer what had happened to the players in Avellaneda a couple of weeks earlier.
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The following year, 1973, Ajax won the European Cup for a third year in a row, beating Juventus 1-0 in Belgrade and, considering that they’d already declined to take part in the competition in 1971, this was no surprise. After all, why should they? Their trip to Argentina in 1972 had vindicated their decision of a year, if anything, even if they had ended up winning the trophy with room to spare. And their opponents would the same as the year before; Independiente had won the Copa Libertadores again, this time beating the Chilean side Colo-Colo
Instead, the organisers turned to the runners-up, Juventus, who did agree to take part in the competition, but with conditions. They agreed to play, but they refused to travel to Argentina and stated that they would only play a one-off match, to be played in Rome. Indepentiente agreed. They won the match 1-0, thanks to a late goal scored by Francesco Borini. With only 22,489 people turning out at the Stadio Olimpico to watch it, it couldn’t have been much different to the bearpits of the Rioplatense.
By this point, there seemed to be a demarcation line opening up between northern and southern Europe. In 1974, Bayern Munich won the competition and simply flat refused to take part in it. Why put yourself through it?
The team they'd beaten would. The ascent of Atletico Madrid had been a surprise regardless, first to the top of LA Liga, and then to a European Cup final. Their coach declared, “We've got almost as many Argentinian players as they have”. Atletico had felt robbed by the 1974 European Cup final, taking the lead six minutes from the end of extra-time in Brussels before being pegged back and forced to a replay by a last-minute equaliser, which they lost 4-0 tow days later.
The result of this was that Atletico Madrid became the first Intercontinental champions who hadn't been their continental champions that year. They lost the first leg 1-0 thanks to a first half goal from Agustin Balbuena, but back in Madrid for the second leg a couple of weeks ago, goals from Javier Irureta and Ruben Ayala gave them a 2-0 win and the trophy. It remains the opinion in that particular corner of Madrid that Atleti won “A bigger prize.”
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The following year, the damn broke. Bayern Munich beat Leeds United in Paris to become the Champions of Europe, although Leeds may disagree with this, on account of the refereeing performance, into which there was a subsequent UEFA investigation, the result of which was the referee being banned from football for life but without any reasons being given.
Bayern weren’t interested in the Intercontinental Cup, and neither were Leeds. By this time, football was starting to become a business. The best players were assets. Why risk them? And so it was that, for the first time since its first iteration in 1960, there would be no Intercontinental Cup.
But the following year, there would, even though the Bayern Munich had become the European champions for a third year in a row by beating Saint-Etienne 1-0 at Hampden Park. We might have expected Bayern to withdraw from the competition, but this time around they agreed. By this time, Brazilian clubs were back in the competition.
In an interview with Jornal do Brasil, Bayern's manager Dettmar Cramer denied that Bayern's refusal to dispute the 1974 and 1975 Intercontinental Cups were a result of the rivals’ nationality. He claimed it was a scheduling impossibility, rather, which kept the Germans from participating. He also stated that the competition was not economically rewarding due to the team's fan base's disinterest in the Cup, as had been since in the 1973 match in rome
To cover the costs of playing the first leg in the Olympiastadion, the organisers needed to have a minimum of 25,000 spectators. However, due to heavy snow and cold weather, only 22,000 showed up. Because of this deficit, Cramer stated that if Bayern were to win the European Cup again, they would decline to participate as it held no assurances of income, and that other friendlies, would have been more financially rewarding to them. It was, ultimately, a business decision. Bayern did win it 2-0. 124,000 turned out for the second leg in Rio de Janeiro where, despite jet-lag and a lack of sleep, Bayern held on for a goalless draw.
The following year, the champions of Europe again decided that they didn’t want anything to do with it. Liverpool declined two years in a row, as things turned out. But this time around, the real sign of the decline of the Intercontinental Cup came in its scheduling. It had moved about a little in previous years, but had always been played in the first three or four months of the European domestic season.
On this occasion, it almost didn’t happen at all. Runners-up Borussia Moenchengladbach did accept the invitation to play, against Boca Juniors, but scheduling issues meant that the first leg didn’t take place until March 1978, the two sides playing out a 2-2 draw.
With a World Cup being held in Argentina in the meantime, the second leg didn’t get played until the end of August, and in the meantime the Boca Juniors manager, Juan Carlos Lorenzo, sent a friend of his who spoke fluent German to Borussia's training camp under the pretence of being a local journalist to watch the team in action. Lorenzo was then sent a detailed report about Borussia's players, their technical characteristics and skills on the field. Boca won 3-0 to lift the trophy.
But with Liverpool having already declined to take part, the team they’d beaten also refusing to take part, and the 1977 competition having overrun to the extent that by the time its second leg was played Borussia Moenchengladbach couldn’t even call themselves the second best team in Europe any more. No-one from Europe seemed to want to play in, and there wasn’t anywhere it could be scheduled anyway. The 1978 Intercontinental Cup, like the 1975 iteration, would not be played.
As English clubs continued their stranglehold over the European Cup, so their refusal to play in the Intercontinental Cup continued. The levels of violence were nothing like they had been a decade earlier, by this point, it simply wasn’t a priority for English clubs, who already played a longer season than other European leagues with a 22-team First Division necessitating 42 league matches a season as well as two domestic cups, both of which were taken seriously.
Forest had beaten the Sweidsh club Malmo in the 1979 European Cup, and they turned down the opportunity to try and become the champions of the world. Malmo accepted the offer, and they would play… Olimpia of Ascuncion in Paraguay. The first leg was played at the Malmo Stadium in November 1978 and ended with a 1-0 win for Olimpia.
But the main talking point of the evening was the crowd. Just 4,811 turned out for the match, leading to one Spanish journalist at the newspaper Mundo Deportivo describing the competition as “a dog without an owner”. Ascuncion made the best of it by fitting in a friendly against Sunderland while they were in Europe, and then won the second leg 3-1 in March 1980.
The truth is that the Intercontinental Cup is an adventitious competition without foundation. It has no known owner, it depends on a strange consensus and the interested clubs are not tempted to risk much for so little money, as evidenced by the attendance at the game in Malmö, played, of course, in absence of this year's champion, Nottingham Forest, by the Swedish team, finalist in one of the most boring and worst games played to cap off the European Cup since 1956.
The dog without an owner, then, needed a new home. And when it was at its lowest ebb, it found one. It would change the nature of the competition for the next two decades and it would ensure that it would complete a journey to being a tournament that no-one in Europe really gave a damn about, but it kept it going, and it would also demonstrate that, in a neutral venue in a one-off match, the South Americans really did care about it more than the Europeans.
An era of domination in this competition was about to begin. For ten years from 1977, European teams would only win it once. But the problem for the organisers would be that the European audience, for better or worse still the most lucrative of all television audiences, really didn’t care about it any more, and that would end in FIFA stepping in with their greatest follies.