Luciano Wernicke - Incredible World Cup Stories: Wildest Tales and Most Dramatic Moments from Uruguay 1930 to Qatar 2022

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Copyright 2022 by Luciano Wernicke

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First edition, October 2022

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Manufactured in China

Cover designed by Jordan Lunn

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Incredible World Cup stories : wildest tales and most dramatic
moments from Uruguay 1930 to Qatar 2022 / Luciano Wernicke.

Other titles: Historias inslitas de los Mundiales de Ftbol. English

Names: Wernicke, Luciano, 1969- author.

Description: Translation of: Historias inslitas de los Mundiales de Ftbol.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20220247129 | ISBN 9781989555958 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: World Cup (Soccer)Miscellanea.

Classification: LCC GV943.49 W4713 2022 |
DDC 796.334/668dc23

ISBN 978-1-989555-95-8

eBook ISBN 978-1-989555-96-5

To my children,
Facundo and Nicols

M uch has been written about the history of the World Cup. I wanted to tell the story a different way.

Not with a compendium of results and match recaps, but with stories of the people, the politics and the passionsspectacular and strangethat the worlds most popular sport inspires. Incredible World Cup Stories is a tour of the World Cup from its earliest days, a chronicle of unforgettable clashes and legendary heroes, but also of the entertaining and surprising moments youve not read about or seen before, and would not have imagined were possible.

Some stories are about what happened on the field of play, moments both dramatic and absurd. Some are stories about the fans, in all their devotion and insanity. Others are located a little further away from the stadiums, and will help you understand the historical context behind each tournament. These will explain that certain events, which at first glance seemed to come from the heart of the game, had been born somewhere else.

Politics and world events have influenced and been reflected in the World Cup as in few other sporting events. The tournament was cancelled between 1939 and 1950 because of the Second World Warand Germany was barred from returning in 1950but the ball kept rolling in the midst of other conflicts, including the Falklands War, when two nations embroiled in conflict in the South Atlantic nearly came to blows on a neutral pitch in Spain. Many historians question Italys triumph in 1934 at a World Cup it hosted under the despot Benito Mussolini, who had players and referees worried for their safety should the result not be to his liking. Others cast a suspicious eye at the World Cup in England in 1966, with its bizarre refereeing, and at Argentina in 1978, played under the watch of a brutal military junta (did that explain the bulging scores, including the host countrys 6-0 thrashing of Peru?). Of course, in fairness, in all three of these cases, the winners were truly excellent teams. Still, is it a coincidence that until live television covered the entire planet in the early 1980s, and fans everywhere could see the action for themselves, half of the championships were won by host countries?

But if soccer is a game of political intrigue and a billion dollar business, it is also very much a human game, one of passion, love and nobility. Astonishing World Cup Stories tells of players who have refused to leave the field despite having a broken bone. Of a striker who had the guts to face up to Germanys SS by refusing to wear a fascist emblem on his jersey. Another continued playing after suffering a heart attack in the middle of the game, and a defender was killed for preserving his honesty after having committed the sin of scoring an own-goal.

The permanent memory of all those heroes keeps alive the flame that fires the sport. Its a beautiful game, a game of hope, and of humor. These are its best stories.

T he roots of soccer, according to the Fdration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), first took hold in ancient China, during the Han Dynasty in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE. An activity called Tsuh Kuh, or Cuju, was practiced in the city of Zibo. It consisted of putting a leather ball stuffed with feathers and hair into a small net, of some 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter, placed on top of a bamboo stalk some ten meters (or 33 feet) high. Players could only push the ball with the lower extremities, and with the chest, back, and shoulders, but not with the hands or arms. It was the first game of foot-to-ball that we know of.

A study by a British anthropologist puts the invention of Cuju even earlier, perhaps as much as 2,000 or 2,500 years BCE. By 500 CE, it had been incoporated into military training. But Tsuh Kh is not the only game of its type in antiquity: the Japanese practiced Kemari; the Greeks, Epislcyros; the Romans, Harpastum; the Aztecs, Tlachtli. All combined the use of hands and other parts of the body to push the ball forward, and are considered grandfathers of modern soccer. (And reports of misadventure date back just as long. Marcus Tullius Cicero reported on Harpastum in one of his works, recounting the tragic death of a man who ended up with his throat slit after a ball entered the window of a barbershop and hit the knife which, in that fateful instant, was passing along his neck.

The Chinese game of Tsu-Chu or Cuju is considered an ancient form of soccer.

It was in England that games played with a ball became the soccer weve come to know. Some assert that the first ball to bounce over Great Britains ground was imported by a legionnaire who had arrived with Julius Caesar. Others, more romantic perhaps, believe the first ball struck was the head of a Roman soldier killed in combat. Whichever the case, it was there that its rules developed and the game matured.

(Other games involving balls did not evolve quite so much. For centuries, games known variously as mob football, mass football, or football of multitudes, were played in Great Britain. Almost all combined hands and feet, with teams of twenty, fifty, or even hundreds of participants, often residents of neighboring villages. Sometimes a team of married men would challenge a team of single men on improvised pitches in the streets, or in parks and fields. There were usually no goalposts, and not many rules to speak of, the objective being to carry the ball with the hands or kick it to a certain pointa tree, the bank of a stream, or the central square of the town. It was, in essence, an early form of rugby.)

Soccer won favor among the common people, though the ruling nobility disapproved. It was popular in the schools. In the sixteenth century, Saint Pauls school in London highlighted its positive educational value and its promotion of health and strength. Individual schools and universities often devised their own rules and regulations that differed from those of others. As the game flourished, it soon became time to homogenize the rules and, as FIFA suggests, definitively separate the paths of rugby-football (rugby) and association football.