The Trouble With An Overpopulated Tournament

By BRIAN GLANVILLE

our years ago, Brazil beat Italy in a World Cup final decided on penalties. It was a squalid and irrelevant way to end the tournament. But once the number of teams taking part had risen from 16 to 24, such an anticlimax was inevitable. The number of games played in summer heat simply exhausted the players.

The original World Cup in Uruguay in 1930 attracted only 13 teams. The major European teams--Germany, Italy, Hungary and Austria--refused to make the journey. The four British countries, England Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, were ineligible because they had withdrawn from FIFA and would not return until after World War II. The World Cups of 1934 and 1938, held in Italy and France, attracted a full complement of 16. But early tournaments in South America suffered no-shows. As hard as the competition for places in the World Cup finals has now become, back then it seemed harder to get teams to participate at all. In 1950 only 13 teams took part in the Brazilian finals. Argentina snubbed the competition because it was being played on the soil of archrival Brazil; the Scots announced they would compete only if they won the British Championship which they then lost; Austria abstained, insisting their players were too young; the Czechs withdrew out of unexplained perversity; and the French stayed away, objecting to the distances.

And it was politics as usual in 1966 when the African and Asian teams boycotted the finals in England, incensed that they were lumped into a single qualifying zone with just one place on offer in the finals. The only country to ignore the boycott was North Korea, which sent its team to England and enchanted the people of Middlesbrough in industrial Northeast England, who referred to their adopted team of small, deft men as "us."

But the tournament was really doomed to elephantiasis once the controversial, authoritarian Brazilian Joao Havelange was elected president of FIFA in 1974. Havelange needed the votes of Third World countries, notably the Africans. To get these he had to make more room for them in the World Cup finals. By the time the finals were held in Spain in 1982 the number had grown to 24.

When Havelange left the Spanish games in a private plane belonging to Mexican TV mogul Emilio Azcarraga, the writing was clearly on the wall for Colombia's chances of hosting the Cup in '86. Despite misgivings about conditions that had plagued the 1970 finals held in Mexico, most teams coped, using slow sodium tablets and costly high altitude preparation. When the games were played in the noonday sun, as some were, the oxygen debt could become intolerable.

The heat seemed to affect the play at Italia '90 too. Goals were few and the tactics defensive. The tournament ended in a final of hideous ill temper between Germany and Argentina. The Germans won by a penalty kick which almost surely should not have been awarded, and two Argentine players were sent off.

Under pressure from developing nations, the list of qualifying teams in France has swollen this year to 32. It will be hot as usual, the traveling between venues onerous and the schedules cramped. Whoever wins the trophy on July 12 will have won a test of endurance and willpower. The World Cup has become a victim of its own success, a tournament where the world's best footballers play some of their worst games of football.

Brian Glanville is author of The Story of the World Cup