The Best Team In The Land & All The World, Part Four: A descent towards violence

Os Santasticos of 1962, it turned out, were about as good as things would get for the Intercontinental Cup for quite a long time.

Welcome to the fourth part of this series charting the troubled history of football’s attempts to determine a club world champion. The Santos Intercontinental Cup win of October 1962 had been widely hailed as one of the greatest of all-time, but by this time seeds had already been sewn which would lead to the decline of this competition to such a point that some clubs would end up refusing to even take part in it.

As ever, this is a split piece, with paying subscribers also receiving an extra section on the role that the 1966 World Cup finals would play in this decline. You can subscribe or upgrade your subscription to Unexpected Delirium for just a fiver a month here.

Good evening. The game you are about to see is the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football in the history of the game. This is the first time these countries have met; we hope it will be the last. The national motto of Chile reads, ‘By Reason or By Force’. Today, the Chileans weren’t prepared to be reasonable, the Italians only used force, and the result was a disaster for the World Cup.

If the World Cup is going to survive in its present form something has got to be done about teams that play like this. Indeed, after seeing the film tonight, you at home may well think that teams that play in this manner ought to be expelled immediately from the competition.

There may well have been something inherently amusing about the way in which the BBC’s David Coleman led into the 1962 World Cup match between Chile and Italy, but in a sense he had a point. The opening week of the tournament was described in one report from the Daily Express as a “violent bloodbath”, and things would reach a nadir with the host nation’s second group match.

That the Chileans should have been fuelled by a sense of grievance was hardly surprising. Their country was hosting the World Cup despite the capital city having had its infrastructure devastated by the 1960 Valvadia earthquake, which killed up to 6,000 people. This had been a major tragedy in a country that was not especially wealthy.

But the response to this in Italy was, to put it mildly, unsympathetic. A series of articles written in the Italian newspapers La Nazione and Corriere della Sera written shortly before the tournament began described it being hosted in Chile as “pure madness”, while deeply crude and unfair depictions of the city of Santiago in the Italian press earlier in the tournament only further fanned the flames of resentment that were already growing:

The phones don't work, taxis are as rare as faithful husbands, a cable to Europe costs an arm and a leg and a letter takes five days to turn up … the people are prone to malnutrition, illiteracy, alcoholism and poverty. Chile is a small, proud and poor country: it has agreed to organise this World Cup in the same way as Mussolini agreed to send our air force to bomb London (they didn't arrive). The capital city has 700 hotel beds. Entire neighbourhoods are given over to open prostitution. This country and its people are proudly miserable and backwards.

The two journalists involved in these reports, Antonio Ghirelli and Corrado Pizzinelli, were forced to flee the country, while the Chilean press responded by describing Italians as “fascists”, “mafiosos”, “oversexed” and, on account of Internazionale players having recently been involved in a doping scandal, “drug addicts”.

Within a minute of kick off, the game’s first foul had been committed. Eight minutes later Italy’s Giorgio Ferrini was sent off, only for an incensed Ferrini to spend the next eight minutes refusing to leave the pitch as boos echoed around the stadium, before he was essentially dragged off by a group of police officers.

Not long afterwards, the English referee Ken Aston—whose appointment for this game had been sanctioned despite Italian complaints over how the way in which he’d handled their opening match against West Germany—missed a left hook thrown by Chile’s Leonel Sanchez assault at Mario David, which left the Italian captain with a broken nose.

When David responded by kicking Sanchez in the neck he was sent off, and the game essentially collapsed into a farce. Italy finished the match with nine players on the pitch, Chile won 2-0, and unsurprisingly the Italian media were outraged by it all, accusing the Chilean team of behaving like animals and South Americans in a more general sense of “lacking any moral decency”.

The 1962 Intercontinental Cup was played the following October without incident between Santos and Benfica, but the following year’s match was a different matter. Santos were back, as the champions of South America, but this time around Europe’s representatives were Milan, and this time things would be very different indeed, in no small part because the perception of Italian and South American clubs had mutually deteriorated to such a great extent over the previous year and a half.

The first leg was played at the San Siro, and Milan were two goals up in 15 minutes, a lead which they still held by half-time. Pele pulled a goal back for Santos ten minutes into second half, but goals from Amarildo and Bruno Mora extended the home side’s lead to 4-1 before a late Pele penalty—which came about as the result of a handball by, ironically enough, Mario David, whose involvement in the Battle of Santiago a year earlier had been so instrumental in stoking these flames—brought the score back to 4-2.

Pele had a third goal from a bicycle kick chalked off for an earlier handball in the last minute. Os Santasticos had been tamed, and there was some degree of relief that the match had passed off relatively without incident, though the reaction of the Santos players at the full-time whistle was something of a hint of the trouble to come.

The second leg was played in front of a crowd of 132,000 at the Maracana, the first half saw two early goals from Jose Alfatini and Mora which put Milan into an unassailable looking 6-2 aggregate lead by half-time and with Santos having been restricted to half-chances only, but the second half brought a complete turnaround. Despite the absence of an injured Pele for the second leg, four goals in eighteen minutes, two from Pepe and one each from Almir and Lima, turned the tie on its head and forced a play-off match to be played two days later, again at the Maracana.

But this only tells part of the story of that particular evening, with the suggestion that the Argentinian referee Juan Regis Brozzi had been bribed at half-time by Santos officials. Two of their second half goals came from free-kicks, and the Italians claimed that the Santos players were allowed to get away with anything they pleased during the second half, leading to injuries to with goalkeeper Giorgio Ghezzi and striker Gianni Rivera, with Rivera saying afterwards that, “Each time we touched the ball, the referee stopped us. Inconceivable. Unchained spectators, people on the pitch, everything happened”.

The playoff match was also played at the Maracana, this time with 121,000 in attendance, and by half-time the atmosphere had soured again with three sendings off—two for Milan and one for Santos—and the home side leading 1-0 thanks to a disputed penalty which was converted by Dalmo; Cesare Maldini was the first of the three players to be sent off, dismissed for protesting the award of the penalty in the first place.

There were Italian claims that the Santos players had been allowed by the referee to get away with whatever they wanted without sanction. Again the referee was Juan Regis Brozzi, with Milanese complaints at him being selected for the third match having been waved away. Brozzi was suspended by the Argentine Football Association after the match, and didn’t referee again. Indeed, this playoff match almost didn’t take place at all. Milan initially refused to take part in it, only to be told that if they didn’t the trophy would be awarded to Santos by default.

There were Italian representatives in the 1964 and 1965 Intercontinental Cups too, but these passed off relatively without incident. In 1964, the Argentinian side Independiente won the first leg against Internazionale 2-0, but without goal difference being taken into account a 1-0 win for Inter in the second leg was enough to force another playoff, which was this time played at the Bernabeu in Madrid and which was won 1-0 by Inter thanks to a goal scored Mario Corso with ten minutes of extra-time to play. The following year these two sides met again, with Inter winning the first leg 3-0 before wrapping up the title with a goalless draw in the return match in Buenos Aires.

But tensions were still building, and within a couple of years the lawlessness that would almost destroy the Intercontinental Cup altogether would push the reputation of this tournament into the gutter, in Europe at least. The 1966 World Cup finals would only serve to push tensions up another level, with the brutal treatment of the Brazil team at the hands of European teams—Hungary, Portugal and Bulgaria—leading to their early elimination from the competition, while Argentina would exit in the quarter-finals under circumstances that would come to have ramifications for sporting relations between them and the host nation for decades to come. And as for the Intercontinental Cup… well, the Intercontinental Cup was about to turn brutal.