The Best Team in The Land & All The World, Part Eight: Where are Joop Van Daele's Glasses?
In the 1970 Intercontinental Cup, an incident occurred that would come to define a tournament that was started to seriously falter.
The fragmented and disparate nature of football means that there are scores of players who have a little footnote in the history of the game, and sometimes for the most unusual of reasons. The passing of Joop van Daele didn’t create too many headlines in this country, but this particular former player may just be the first person that anyone thinks of when we think of the Intercontinental Cup.
Van Daele played for Feyenoord, the Rotterdam club who’d come from nowhere to become one of the strongest in Europe in the late 1960s. In 1970 they arrived at the summit, beating Celtic 2-1 to become the first Dutch club to win a European competition. One of their “rewards”–and by this time the scare quotes were definitely required–was a place in that year’s Intercontinental Cup.
The 1970 Copa Libertadores, meanwhile, was again distorted by an absence of Brazilian clubs. Neither of the two spaces for them were taken up, with the national team preparing for what would turn out to be their defining tournament at that summer’s World Cup.
In their absence, club sides from Argentina, Uruguay and Chile dominated, with the final being played between Estudiantes de La Plata and Montevideo’s Peñarol, which Estudiantes won 1-0 on aggregate thanks to a goal scored towards the end of the first leg in La Plata.
By this time, of course, Estudiantes’ reputation for violence preceded them. The attacks on Milan players in the previous year’s Intercontinental Cup had been flashed around the world on news wires. There had already been concerns that European clubs would start to withdraw from playing in this tournament because of their thuggishness.
The violence of a year earlier had felt all the more dangerous the year before because it had been mirrored in the behaviour of the police, who;d arrested the Milan forward Néstor Combin–an Argentinian player who’d left the country at 18 to play in Europe–as the Milan players left the stadium after the match on spurious charges of draft-dodging. It had taken the intervention of the country’s President to intervene and get the player released from the military prison in which he was being held and prevent what might have become a diplomatic incident.
This was the third year in a row that Estudiantes had won the Copa Libertadores, so it was the third time that they would get to play in the Intercontinental Cup, too. But it doesn’t take much imagination to visualise the eyeball-rolling response of the tournament’s organisers upon finding out that they’d be in the competition again.
The previous year’s tournament had been described as "The ninety-minute man-hunt" by the Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy while in Argentina, a press which had previously had taken quite an active role in stoking the sort of anger which eventually manifested in the attacks on Milan players, took an equally hostile tone. "The English were right"–a reference to Alf Ramsey's famous description of the Argentina national side as "animals" during the 1966 World Cup—was the headline in one newspaper the day after that match.
This time around the tournament was brought forward to August and September. The growing sense of unease about violence at matches was one thing, but playing matches in October and November was also proving a huge distraction and inconvenience to European clubs.
The Intercontinental Cup clearly meant much more to South American clubs than to European clubs, but such had been the behaviour of Rioplatense clubs in it over the previous few seasons that there was a real risk that it could cease to exist altogether if the Europeans simply refused to take part in it any more. After all, why take time out of your schedule and disrupt your domestic season in order to face safety-endangering violence in the pursuit of a piece of silverware that no-one at home even really cared about?
Part of the issue was the jurisdiction of the tournament. The Intercontinental Cup might have been endorsed by UEFA and its South American equivalent CONMEBOL, but it was neither endorsed nor organised by FIFA. René Courte, FIFA's General Sub-Secretary, had written an article shortly after the 1967 final stating that FIFA viewed the competition as a “European-South American friendly match”, a view endorsed by President Stanley Rous, who stated that FIFA saw the Intercontinental Cup as a friendly match.
But by 1970, FIFA were starting to take a greater interest. CONCACAF (Central and North America) and the AFC (Asian Football Confederation) had requested to participate in the Intercontinental Cup in 1967 which was rejected by UEFA and CONMEBOL. FIFA had been asked to oversee the tournament after the brutality of the 1967 edition of the tournament but had refused because they didn’t organise it in the first place.
With AFC and CONCACAF by this time having competitions of their own in place, FIFA opened up to the idea of supervising the Intercontinental Cup if it included those confederations, but this also was met with a negative response from both UEFA and CONMEBOL. In June 1970, at the congress held in Mexico during the World Cup, the FIFA Executive Committee put forward a proposal for the expansion of the Intercontinental Cup into a Club World Cup with representative clubs of every existing continental confederation under their guidance, but this was rejected.
For all the reservations, the first leg was scheduled for the 26th August 1970 at La Bombonera. The atmosphere was again febrile, though perhaps having the first leg in Argentina helped to calm the worst of the violence. It also helped that Feyenoord started the game atrociously.
Within the first quarter of an hour, Estudiantes were 2-0 up. After six minutes goalkeeper Eddy Treijtel let a fairly routine free-kick from the right taken by Carlos Pachamé slip through his hands for Juan Echecopar to head in from close range. Six minutes later, a corner from the left was flicked on at the near post by Juan Ramón Verón and squeezed under Treijtel to double their lead.
But, as unknown to everybody as this Feyenoord team had been an unknown quantity to everybody just a couple of years earlier, they were made of stronger stuff than many recognised. After 21 minutes they broke, and a diagonal cross from the left was headed in by Wim van Hanegem to bring them back into the match. Just after the hour, a deep free-kick from the halfway line was headed back across goal for Ove Kindvall to head in and bring the scores level. The match finished 2-2.
While the match allowed for two substitutes per team, Feyenoord had only taken one to Argentina for the first leg, but at home in Rotterdam for the second leg they added Joop van Daele to their bench. A crowd of over 63,000 turned out at De Kuip for the second leg on the 9th September. The match was goalless at half-time, and on the hour Feyenoord made a change, withdrawing Coen Moulijn to bring van Daele on, wearing the number 13 shirt.
His impact was almost immediate. Van Daele had only been on the pitch for two minutes when the ball was pulled back from the left for him on the edge of the penalty area, and his low shot fizzed past the Estudiantes goalkeeper Oscar Pezzano and in to give the home side the lead.
But it was what came after this that would come to define Joop van Daele. Details of the incident have, of course, been hotly disputed over the years. In the melee that came during the goal celebration, van Daele had his spectacles snatched from his face and broken. Although accounts have been hotly disputed over the years, it is now generally accepted that it was defender and captain Oscar Malbernat who snatched van Daele’s spectacles from his face and handed them to his teammate, Carlos Pachamé, who threw them to the ground and stamped on them.
In an echo of their disdain for the contact lens-wearing Nobby Stiles two years earlier, in 2005 Pachamé later told the Dutch football magazine, Hard Gras: “That guy was wearing glasses when they were attacking and defending. It was clearly against the rules, so one of us took his glasses off and that stuff just happened.” Another teammate, Juan Ramón Verón, was rather more circumspect about the affair: “His glasses fell off. Perhaps one of us stepped on them by mistake.”
Estudiantes claimed that he shouldn’t have been wearing them in the first place, but Van Daele, of course, did have dispensation to wear them, although in the rules of the game jewellery is banned. And regardless, if the Estudiantes players had such an issue with this, in what way was ripping them from his face and trampling them into the ground an appropriate way to make their complaint? The short answer was that they weren’t. It was a cartoonish piece of bullying that was playground-esque in the way it played out.
And although this match wasn’t as plagued by violence as previous editions had been, this incident turned out to be its defining moment. Feyenoord held on to win the game 1-0 and lift the trophy, but that wasn’t the most significant lasting effect of that evening in Rotterdam. The following year, Ajax became the champions of Europe after beating Panathinaikos 2-0 in front of 83,000 people at Wembley Stadium in London. But it would not be Ajax who would play in the 1971 Intercontinental Cup.
That year’s Copa Libertadores winners, Nacional of Montevideo, who’d beaten Estudiantes 1-0 in a play-off match to lift the title, had no better a reputation for violence than their opponents, so Ajax became the first European side to refuse—or, to use somewhat more diplomatic official language, “decline”—to take part in the Intercontinental Cup. In their place went Panathinaikos instead, and they were beaten 3-2 on aggregate, a 1-1 draw in Athens and a 2-1 win for Nacional in the second leg. All three of their goals were scored by one player, forward Luis Artime.
But a tipping point which had been coming for years had finally been reached. A European club simply refusing to take part had been the dread scenario for the organisers of the competition. Regardless of the terrible reputation it had earned over the previous few years, its entire raison d'etre had now been fundamentally compromised. How could South American clubs claim to be the ‘world club champions’ for winning the Intercontinental Cup if they hadn’t even beaten the champions of Europe? It was the beginning of a decline that would almost see it wiped from existence altogether.
As for Joop van Daele, well, what happened to him in this match became an important cultural moment in the Netherlands. The incident prompted the Dutch comedian, singer and writer Toon Hermans to write a song about it, but it was recorded by actor Luc Lutz after van Daele declined to sing it himself. A singer, Johnny Hoes, also released a single with Van Daele de klusjesman (Van Daele the handyman) on the one side and Waar is de bril van Joop van Daele (Where are Joop van Daele's glasses?) on the other. Incredibly, this song has only 1,100 listens on Spotify.
The glasses themselves ended up in the Feyenoord club museum. Van Daele made 144 appearances for the club between 1967 and 1977 before going on to play for Fortuna Sittard until his retirement in 1981. He had two years as the manager of Excelsior between 1988 and 1990, and went on to re-join Feyenoord as a scout in 2006. He died on the 7th May 2025 at the age of 77, his role in the history of both one of Dutch football’s great clubs and one of its most infamous tournaments appropriately remembered.