The Best Team in the Land & All The World, Part Ten: Tokyo Drift
Something had to give, and in 1979 it did. It would take the intervention of a Japanese corporation to rescue the Intercontinental Cup.
It wasn’t the fact that it was a team from Sweden against a team from Paraguay. That’s just the way the ball rolls, sometimes. It was… just about everything else about it. The 1979 Intercontinental Cup allowed scales to fall from a lot of eyes.
Malmo weren’t the European champions; they were there because the actual European champions refused to take part. The attendance of just under 5,000 was proof in itself that people really weren’t interested. Malmo’s average home crowd for the 1979 season was 8,168.
Something had to change, and in 1979 it did. Toyota was one of Japan’s biggest companies. In 1959, the city of Koromo had changed its name to Toyota City to mark the importance of its biggest employer. Its population had more than doubled in the intervening twenty years.
They wanted to step in and rescue the Intercontinental Cup, but they had conditions. But after meetings with FIFA, Conmebol and UEFA, it was agreed. The match would now be a one-off, played at the National Olympic Stadium in Tokyo in the middle of the winter.
And crucially, clubs would have no choice over this any more. In order to protect Toyota from further withdrawals, it would be written into the rules of the Copa Libertadores and - more importantly, since it had been European clubs refusing to take part in it - the European Cup that the winners would take part in the Intercontinental Cup, and they would have to send their first teams. The price of refusing to take part would now be a ban from taking part in that. The match would be a contractual obligation, from now on.
In return for this, Toyota would sponsor the match. The winners would receive the Toyota Cup as well as the original trophy. The Man of the Match Award would be a car, presented to the winning player in the form of a giant car key, a tradition which ended up enduring for a surprisingly long time.
Things could have been more different still. According to the Mexican newspapers, after winning the 1977 and 1980 Interamerican Cup tournaments, Mexican clubs América and PUMAS Unam, and the Mexican Football Association, demanded, unsuccessfully, to participate in the Intercontinental Cup, either by representing the American continent against the European champions or by creating a UEFA-CONMEBOL-CONCACAF tournament.
This wasn’t perfect. The Olympic Stadium was a far from perfect venue. It had been built for the 1964 Olympic Games but had barely been updated since, and it had a terrible pitch. And arguably more importantly, you couldn’t force Europeans to be interested in it. The Intercontinental Cup would continue to matter more to South Amercians than to Europeans, and there wasn’t a huge amount that could be done about that.
The first iteration of this revamped match took place at the Olympic Stadium on the 11th February 1981 between Nottingham Forest, who’d won the European Cup for a second successive year the previous May against Hamburger SV, and Nacional of Montevideo, who’d beaten the Brazilian club Internacional 1-0 over two legs to win the 1980 Copa Libertadores.
It was… a partial success. 62,000 people turned out to watch it and it passed off without anybody having their faces punched clean off or scalding hot coffee poured all over them. But it wasn’t a very entertaining game, with Nacional winning 1-0 thanks to an early goal from Waldemar Victorino, who picked up the giant key as Man of the Match afterwards.
And it didn’t move any needles in terms of creating much more interest in Europe. No highlights were even shown on the television in Britain. But this did change the following season. One further tweak was made, bringing it forward from February to December, a position that it would continue to hold in the calendar for years ahead.
The 1981 Intercontinental Cup did at least get to be played in 1981, then. Flamengo were representing South America, having beaten the Chilean side Cobreloa in a play-off to win the Copa Libertadores, while Liverpool’s 1-0 win against Real Madrid in Paris the previous may sent the club who’d declined to appear in the 1977 and 1978 competitions to Japan as Europe’s representatives.
On this occasion, providence shone on the competition in terms of raising its profile in Europe. The winter of 1981/82 was a terrible one in the UK. The snow started falling at the start of December and… didn’t stop. Vast swathes of matches were being called off and broadcasters were scrambling for something to show on their weekly football highlights shows.
The upshot of all this was that ITV were happy to show the highlights, at least in the north-west of England, with the somewhat unusual choice of Jim Rosenthal as commentator. And the experience of watching it was very strange indeed. The pitch was as bad as it had been the year before, and the cold Japanese winter made it bone hard as well. Flamengo turned out in their change kit of white with red and navy halved sleeves. There was a constant ringing drone throughout.
And Flamengo absolutely brushed Liverpool aside. At that time, their manager Bob Paisley had other things to worry about. Liverpool had finished the 1980/81 season in 6th place in the First Division and things hadn’t improved much since then. They arrived in Tokyo in 10th place in the table.
Flamengo were 3-0 up by half-time thanks to a goal from Nunes and two from Adilio, and that was how it stayed. But perhaps the trip didn’t do Liverpool much harm, in the overall scheme of things. They only lost another three League games all season and ended up winning the First Division title by four points from Ipswich Town.
The one thing that Liverpool didn’t do was successfully defend the European Cup. They were beaten in the quarter-finals by CSKA Sofia. And the result was interpreted very much as a sign of the strength of Brazilian football ahead of the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain. There’d been talk that this was by far the strongest Brazil team since 1970, and the ease with which their best club team brushed aside the best in Europe seemed to confirm this.
But another English side did represent Europe in the 1982 Intercontinental Cup. The surprise Football League champions of 1981 had been Aston Villa, and the following year they battled their way through to win the European Cup by beating Bayern Munich 1-0 in the final in Rotterdam. They would play Penarol of Uruguay, who’d won their fourth Copa Libertadores by beating Cobreloa 1-0 on aggregate.
Again, the result was a comfortable win for the South Americans, a 2-0 win with a goal scored in each half. But this time the match wasn’t shown on the television in the UK and passed by without too much comment. The same thing happened two years later when Liverpool were beaten again, this time 1-0 by Independiente. Between this, Hamburger SV had at least taken Gremio to extra-time before losing 2-1.
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed something of a trend, by now. No European team had won the competition since 1976, but why would this be? It wasn’t the distance. South American clubs had to travel just as far. It was really a combination of two things. Firstly, it remained the case that the Intercontinental Cup mattered more in South America than in Europe.
But it was also the case that throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, European football was going through something of a trough. UEFA had expanded their European Championships for national teams to eight teams in 1980, but the tournament, held in Italy, had been a bit of a disaster, badly scheduled, largely played in front of small crowds, pock-marked by English violence, and without even much entertaining football to take the edge of things.
The European Cup had largely become the domain of dull, 1-0 English wins. Over the nine finals played from 1978 to 1986, only one match featured more than one goal, with seven 1-0 wins and a 0-0 draw. Defensive, attritional football seemed to have taken over everywhere, and it was a major surprise when the 1982 World Cup final ended up as an all-European affair after Brazil and Argentina both imploded during the second group stage.
The 1985 Intercontinental Cup was tainted, with the European representatives Juventus having been scarred by the tragedy of Heysel earlier in the year. Juve became the first winners of the Intercontinental Cup that year, beating Argentinos Juniors on penalty kicks after a 2-2 draw. The following year, the established order seemed to be restored when River Plate beat the surprise European champions Steaua Bucharest 1-0 to claim the title.
A tide was turning, but it wouldn’t become obvious for some years. In 1992, UEFA changed the format of the European Cup to mini-groups. Sponsorship money poured into this new “Champions League”, and from 1994 on European clubs would start to dominate this competition that they didn’t seem to care about very much.
In 1994, Velez Sarsfield beat Milan 2-0, but they would be the last South American winners of the competition until 2000, by which time the intervention of FIFA would mean that it could only become questionable, whether the Intercontinental Cup winners could be considered the world champions any more, even for those who’d held that view over previous decades.