The Interview: Andrew Downie on the 1970 World Cup
Downie's New Oral History Book Is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Inside Story of the Legendary 1970 World Cup
Andrew Downie is one of my favorite writers, and it was an absolute blast to catch up with him for an interview about his new oral history book on the 1970 World Cup. I wasn’t alive yet when it happened, but there’s a mystique about Mexico 1970 that continues to this day. Read our interview below and you’ll understand why.
Grant Wahl:
Hey there, welcome to Fútbol with Grant Wahl. Thanks so much for joining me. Our guest now is a terrific writer and a friend of mine. Andrew Downie is a Scottish journalist who splits his time between São Paulo and London. He's the author of the phenomenal new oral history book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Inside Story of the Legendary 1970 World Cup. Andrew, it's great to see you, congratulations on the book. Thanks for coming on the show.
Andrew Downie:
Thanks for inviting me, it's good to see you. It's been a long time.
Grant Wahl:
It has been a long time. You may not remember this, but I do, the first time we met was December 2, 2013, in São Paulo. And, you welcomed me to a dinner at your apartment with some wonderful people not knowing that it was my 40th birthday. Everyone was so awesome and I think sang me happy birthday in Portuguese at one point. That was a really fun night and just have a lot of good memories.
Andrew Downie:
Yeah, I probably made risotto because it's one of the few things that I'm really good at making. So you can always get a bunch of people round to the house, make a risotto and just throw it out there, a few bottles of wine, a few drinks, few beers. So it was a good night. I do remember it. It was a great time. It was just after the Confederations Cup when Brazil was gearing up for the World Cup. I know you'd been down and were planning on coming down a lot more before the World Cup and during the World Cup, so it was nice to finally meet up and put a face to the name.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah, really good time with you there. Congratulations on the book, it's a terrific read. It's just come out in the United States. There were a couple specific reasons I really enjoyed the book. One, I honestly didn't know that much about the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. And two, you were able to do interviews with players in that tournament in some cases who might not be with us much longer, just due to age and how much time has passed. What led to you pursuing this as a book idea?
“The 1970 World Cup was a World Cup of superlatives. For example, it was the first to be held outside Europe or South America, the first to feature substitutes, the first to threaten players with yellow and red cards, the first to have its own ball with the Adidas Telstar that everybody remembers growing up with, with the black and white panels. And, most importantly of all I think, it was the first to be broadcast live and in color around the world.” — Andrew Downie
Andrew Downie:
Well, I was quite lucky because it was a publisher that came to me with the idea. I think they realized that the 1970 World Cup was always going to be primarily about Brazil, and so they wanted somebody who knew Brazilian football history and asked me if I would be willing to take it on. It's actually a Scottish publisher, just coincidentally, so they also knew that there would be a big interest in England because this was really the last time England went to a tournament expecting to win. They were world champions. And that whole English factor, that was also important. So somebody who had a foot in both worlds I think was important to them.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah. Just the accounts of the England-Brazil game in this book are fascinating, but also the other Brazil games and just such an amazing Brazil team. The 1970 World Cup was transformational in a lot of ways, and I was wondering if you could explain to our listeners what some of those things were?
Andrew Downie:
As I said in the foreword to the book, the 1970 World Cup was a World Cup of superlatives. It was both the World Cup of firsts and the World Cup of lasts. For example, it was the first to be held outside Europe or South America, the first to feature substitutes, the first to threaten players with yellow and red cards, the first to have its own ball with the Adidas Telstar that everybody remembers growing up with, with the black and white panels. And, most importantly of all I think, it was the first to be broadcast live and in color around the world. So that really made it completely memorable, because of all these firsts.
I think it's also the World Cup of lasts in a sense, because it took place right on the cusp of change in football. In the ‘70s, football started to become more of a business. That really still wasn't the case in 1970. Sponsorship was not a huge thing yet. Some players had sponsors, but most of the shirts didn't have sponsors. Brazil, funnily enough, even wore shirts by two different sponsors in one game. One half they wore a shirt from Umbro, and the other half they wore a shirt from Athleta, which was a Brazilian shirt manufacturer. So there was all this stuff that was happening in football, and football was just about to change. Looking back at it, it's really clear to see that in the 1970 World Cup, that shift from football as being kind of amateur, all about the game, to becoming a real big business that's about money.
Grant Wahl:
You know what's interesting? A friend of mine several years ago sent me a video of the 1970 World Cup final between Brazil and Italy. This was actually long enough ago that he sent me a VHS videotape. But I remember watching it, maybe it was before YouTube got really big, but the sport itself, watching the game itself, it was a different sport in some ways back then. It was still beautiful, and obviously this Brazil team is sort of the apotheosis of that. But in what ways was the actual sport different to watch back then?
Andrew Downie:
I think, primarily, it's the speed. The game today is just so much faster. It's so much faster. The players cover so much more ground. You need to have so much more stamina. You need to have so much more power. You need to have so much more muscle mass. All these things are really apparent. You look at it now, the players, they're still skillful, the players of 1970 will argue that they were more skillful than most players today. But, I think the big thing is the speed.
I always have this discussion, to extend this out a little bit. I always have this debate with people who rate [Lionel] Messi and [Diego] Maradona, particularly Messi, as better than Pelé. And, without getting into that discussion, because that could be a whole series of podcasts, but without getting into that discussion, I think people forget that in Pelé's time, in the 1960s and 1970s, the ball was heavier, the shots were heavier, the pitches weren't as flat, the boots were heavier. Believe it or not, the ball is even rounder today. People forget that when they're talking about how superior Messi is. People forget that when they say that, "Messi was superior to Brazil." I think the conditions today are much better for footballers than they were back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
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Grant Wahl:
Yeah, that makes sense to me in an argument perspective. How did you go about tracking down all these players from different countries for interviews in this oral history?
Andrew Downie:
Well, I started off mostly with Brazil, because Brazil was what I know. I knew where there was a lot of good archive stuff about Brazil. Quite a few of the players are no longer with us, Carlos Alberto, Felix, Everaldo, off the top of my head. They're no longer with us. So I had to go after some of the big guys. The big guys are Rivellino, Jairzinho, Pelé, Gérson. These guys are world champions. This is probably the greatest team of all time, or one of the greatest teams of all time. They don't give away their time for free, so it was very difficult to find a lot of the Brazilian players firsthand. I think I got to speak to three or four of them for the book. I also was working on a documentary at the time that I got to speak to a lot more of them. We got to speak to Jairzinho, and Rivellino, and Gérson, and a few others. So, I got to meet them firsthand.
So the Brazil part was quite easy because that team is so important, there's a lot written about Brazil. Pelé wrote his own... It came out as a book, but it was eventually as a series in a Brazilian magazine, all about the 1970 World Cup. [Coach Mario] Zagallo wrote a book all about the 1970 World Cup. And, the same thing went for England. Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, they wrote books just about the 1970 World Cup. I'm actually surprised that more players don't do it now. There may be sponsorship or commercial reasons for it, but I'm surprised that they don't take advantage and actually just write a book on the day-to-day goings on of big tournaments. Because the books from Zagallo and from Bobby Moore and Martin Peters, are sensational because they talk you through every game, they talk you through the preparations, they talk you through the training, they talk you through what was going on, their personalities. It's fantastic.
So Brazil and England was quite straightforward. There's not a lot of England players that are still alive, unfortunately, so that was hard. I spoke to three or four England players. And then, it was a case of talking to players from other countries. And, what I'd really wanted to do with this, it was really important to me that this was not a book just about Brazil or just about England. I really thought this had to be a book about all 16 countries.
This was the first time when an African country had qualified automatically for the World Cup, Morocco were there. Israel were there at their one and only World Cup. El Salvador were there, just after the famous Soccer War, which was a big issue in the qualifying process. So I wanted to get a lot of these stories in as well.
What I did was I got in touch with a lot of journalists around the world in a lot of these countries, and I basically hired them as researchers and said to them, "Listen, can you find me one or two players from your country? Here's a bunch of questions, please interview them for me. I'll pay you, and then we'll put it in the book." People who helped me were fantastic. A guy in Mexico, a guy in Bulgaria, a guy in the Soviet Union or Russia now. So they were great. That gave it various different layers, and that was really important to me, to get all this other stuff in.
Grant Wahl:
I was excited to see Mordechai Spiegler, the former New York Cosmos player from Israel, who played in that World Cup, quoted in this. Very nice man. Interviewed him a few years ago when I was in Israel for a story.
Andrew Downie:
Spiegler played for the Cosmos with Pelé, in large part because he was quite good at that World Cup. He went to Racing in Paris, I think, or was it PSG? He went to France and then he was a success there, and he moved to the Cosmos with Pelé.
Grant Wahl:
Yep. It's interesting, when you hear some of these players from these other teams talk about their experiences, I was struck by how many teams in that World Cup stayed in Mexico for several weeks before the tournament started. And also how many of them teams had travel misadventures along the way. I was wondering, what were some of the teams that stood out to you the most in terms of the travel misadventure front?
Andrew Downie:
The big reason they were all in Mexico for a long time was because of the altitude. They all wanted to spend, or needed to spend, time there to acclimatize to the altitude of playing in Mexico City. Brazil famously went there, I think they were in Mexico for five or six weeks beforehand. They went to Guanajuato and Irapuato, and they trained at high altitude. And then they came down, and they knew that by the time they had to go to Mexico City the acclimatization process was still going to be in full effect, even though they were playing at Guadalajara, which was a lower altitude. So, that was really important to Brazil.
And I think in many ways that changed football. I think that 1970 World Cup changed football because Brazil were so good physically, they had prepared so well physically. They used some NASA expertise in their preparations even, which was completely unheard of in Brazil. They prepared so well that I think 12 of their 19 goals were scored in the second half, which showed you how fit they were. Because Brazil always thought that, and they still do, "We have the best players in the world technically. So, if we can match everyone else for speed and stamina, then we'll win." That was the way they thought back then. And, I think the fact that Brazil managed to do that, because they were so fit physically, I think it really forced other companies to up their game physically in the World Cups to come. And as we saw in 1974 and 1978, these were quite physical World Cups. I think that was a consequence of what had happened in Mexico in 1970.
Grant Wahl:
It's also a reminder to me, or just a contrast with today's game, where the players are being asked to play so many games in a year, it's impossible to imagine getting your national team together for five or six weeks before a World Cup and going to the host country and spending time there. So, it's just a huge contrast there. In terms of the Brazil team in particular, which of the '70 Brazil players were you able to speak to in the end?
Andrew Downie:
Well, I think I did interviews for the book with... Let me think. Ado, who was a reserve goalkeeper. Zé Maria, who was a reserve left-back. With Rivellino, who I'd spoken to a few times before. Let me think, let me go through them. Everaldo and Carlos Alberto the fullbacks. Brito and Piazza. Midfield, Gérson. Rivelino and Clodoaldo. Up front, Tostão, spoke to Tostão. Pelé, of course, is very hard to get. And, who else was up front? Jairzinho. So, I spoke to Jairzinho, Rivellino, Gérson, Brito, Clodoaldo for the documentary. Also met with Ado, who played in one game I think, played in all the qualifiers. And Paulo Cézar Lima, Caju, who played in two of the games. He took over from Gérson when he was injured. So all told I spoke to probably half the squad. Not all of them for the book. But when I was speaking to them for the documentary it helped me get a handle on what was right and what was wrong, and gave me all that background.
Grant Wahl:
And this was 51 years ago, so what kind of memories did they have? Were you ever surprised by, in some cases, maybe how specific their memories were of certain things?
Andrew Downie:
What I've found, not just for this book but for other reporting that I've done, is that footballers, and probably all of us really, we have a set number of stories that we know and remember and will tell whenever we meet new people. I think that's the same with footballers. A lot of these Brazil players, they would tell the same stories that they've been telling in interviews for the last 50 years. Which was fine, because the stories tend to be good ones and important ones, and that's the reason they're still telling them today. But it is a problem. A lot of these players, they're old, they're in their 70s. It's not always easy to remember a lot of what happened.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah. It's interesting, I went to Guadalajara in Mexico for the first time, I think it was 1999, Confederations Cup was there and games were played in Estadio Jalisco, which is still there. That's where Brazil played so many of their games in this World Cup. But even in 1999, I remember some things sticking out to me. I think there was a statue of Pelé outside the Estadio Jalisco, as I recall. And I was told what a close relationship the people of Guadalajara had with that Brazil team from 1970. I thought it was interesting because Mexico had obviously hosted a subsequent World Cup in 1986, which had all of its own stories and Maradona and all that, but it seemed like this connection with 1970 and Brazil and that team was even stronger than anything with the Mexican people in '86. How did that happen? And was that also partly a result of the players from Brazil being able to interact a little more with the fans and people in Mexico than they would today?
Andrew Downie:
Well, I think the first thing was that in the 1960s Brazilian clubs would often tour the world. It started in the 1950s, teams like Botafogo of Garrincha, and Santos of Pelé, they would spend two months a year going around the world doing tours. That was the way they made money. So a lot of the Brazilian clubs would go to Mexico every year and play a few games. So that was, I think, the start of it. Once the Brazilian team went to Guadalajara, they were welcomed with open arms. I think the whole Latin thing is part of it, yes. There was also the whole Sir Alf Ramsey factor after 1966. Sir Alf Ramsey had called Argentina, "Animals," after England knocked out Argentina, [Antonio] Rattín was sent off. And there was a lot of lingering ill will in Latin America towards England, and England are in the same group as Brazil. So the Mexicans supported the Latin American team wholeheartedly against England. So I think those were the main factors. You're right about the whole connection.
Immediately after the World Cup, I think it was in November, Pelé returned to Mexico. He was named Brazilian Ambassador for the occasion, and he went as a diplomat to Guadalajara. They inaugurated the Plaza Brasil in Guadalajara. And then, that was it. Some of the players that I spoke to in some of the interviews, they said, "Whenever we played, half of the stadium would be Mexicans, and they were all supporting Brazil. It was like we were playing at home and they couldn't believe it." The players still feel this real kinship with the Mexicans. It's lovely.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah, it really is. Brazil has that with a couple of places. Haiti is another place with a lot of Brazilian national team fans, to the point where they even staged a game in Haiti several years ago for, I think it was Earthquake relief, right?
Andrew Downie:
I lived in Haiti in 1994. I spent two years there. The 1994 World Cup was on, and Haiti was in the middle of a military dictatorship and people were not allowed to gather. They were not allowed to get together. But two stories I'll never forget about the 1994 World Cup. In Haiti, electricity was rationed, there just wasn't enough power and enough money to pay for it. The big reservoir was always clogged up and the turbines were never working. In Haiti at that point, we would normally get about eight hours of electricity a day, which would happen from about midnight to 8 in the morning, and then you charged all your batteries and then you got through the rest of the day. But from about February, March, April in 1994, we were starting to get two, three, four, five, six hours of electricity a week-
Grant Wahl:
Oh wow.
Andrew Downie:
... because they were saving up the electricity. They were rationing power in order to have enough electricity 24 hours a day to broadcast the World Cup, because there were some things that you just couldn't mess with, and not broadcasting the World Cup on Haitian TV was one of them. And that was really incredible to me.
And then, when the final happened, obviously Brazil beating Italy in the final, there was massive demonstrations all over Port-au-Prince. I just remember people being out on the streets, massive celebrations, because the Haitians supported Brazil, and they supported Argentina. They supported the two Latin countries, and they also supported Brazil because it was a Black country as well, same as Haiti. So, they felt a real support from them because Haiti had never really had a team. So those are the two things that I really remember about that Brazilian kinship with other countries across Latin America, particularly Haiti.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah. That's really cool. You do get into this a little bit in your book, in the sense of in 1970 Brazil was run by a military dictatorship. And as you tell it in the book, when Brazil wins the World Cup and comes to Brasília to celebrate, the fans were actually allowed to congregate, right? Which, wasn't typical under the dictatorship.
Andrew Downie:
Yeah. It was a similar situation. The worst of the Brazilian dictatorship started in December 1968 with a particularly harsh law that they introduced, that closed down congress, shut down newspapers. The repression was really ramped up. So that whole 1969, the year of the qualifiers, through 1970, things were really bad. They were called the Lead Years. But when Brazil won... The other thing is, you'd often hear... You hear it still today, there was even a film made about it. You would often hear left-wing Brazilians saying, "When the 1970 World Cup came around, I was going to support Czechoslovakia because it was communist."
So that was the first Brazil game. And Brazilians would say, I heard this from lots of people, "Yeah, we sat down to watch it, and Czechoslovakia scored and we were like, 'yeah, great," and then Brazil equalized and we went wild because even though in our heads we wanted the dictatorship to lose, in our hearts we wanted Brazil to win." You saw that with the outpouring of joy when Brazil actually won. There was tens of thousands of people on the streets and it was a real incredible occasion.
Grant Wahl:
Where do you put this 1970 Brazil team in historical perspective? Do you think it's the greatest team of all time?
Andrew Downie:
Yeah, we could have these debates until the cows come home, couldn't we? I think it's definitely up there. I think it's definitely one of the two or three best teams of all time. International teams. Let's just say international teams. The recent Spain team that won three tournaments in a row, you have to give them a shout. But Brazil won three out of four World Cups. And that 1970 team, I think there's a little bit romance to it because of Pelé. Coming back after 1966, coming back and playing at his absolute best along with a bunch of players who were all at their absolute best, and many of whom never really played in another World Cup. Clodoaldo never played in another World Cup, Gérson never played in another World Cup, Carlos Alberto never played in another World Cup. So I think you had all these players at their peak. And again, I think a lot of it is down to also the romance as well, the fact that it was the first to be broadcast live, the first in color. I think we see it through that sort of prism. But there's definitely a strong shout for it to be one of the greatest teams of all time.
Grant Wahl:
Now you've also written a book on Sócrates, the famous Brazilian player who was a doctor and lived a truly fascinating life. How was this experience for you doing this book compared to the process for that book?
Andrew Downie:
It was very different. First of all because, as an oral history it's really all about the research. It's all about the interviews. You don't have to spend so much time thinking about the narrative or crafting sentences as much as you do with a book like Sócrates. So that was the main thing. The other thing was that I don't really remember the 1970 World Cup, I had just been born. So I didn't feel that same personal connection as I did to Sócrates. So these were the two main differences for me. I grew up in the 1970s, and even though I never saw the 1970 World Cup, even though I was too young, I was aware of how people viewed it. I was aware that there was this aura about it. And so I kind of felt that responsibility in a way.
Grant Wahl:
I know Pelé just got out of the hospital in Brazil, he also just turned 81. Maybe for me it's because we lost Maradona last year at age 60, but I find myself really rooting for Pelé to continue doing his thing and be with us for obviously as long as possible. But what's your sense of Pelé at this point? Does he do much publicly in Brazil? How's that going?
Andrew Downie:
Pelé, it's been a few years now, since probably just before the pandemic he's been sheltering. He is getting on. He's been in pain with his hip for a good few years. Before, you could always rely on Pelé to appear regularly, he would give press conferences. He would be a sponsor for certain companies, and he would appear and you could always ask him questions. That kind of stopped being the case a few years ago. Pelé comes from a family that are famous for living a long time. His mother's still alive, believe it or not.
Grant Wahl:
Really?
Andrew Downie:
Yeah. It was his uncle or his grandfather lived to be over 100 as well.
Grant Wahl:
Wow.
Andrew Downie:
There's a thing about Pelé that if he lived to be 100 nobody would be really that surprised. Let's hope that he does, that he remains as healthy and as lucid and as happy as long as possible. Definitely you don't see as much as Pelé as we used to.
Grant Wahl:
Are there any other projects, book projects in Brazilian soccer that you're interested in doing potentially in the future? You've clearly done several now in English.
Andrew Downie:
I have a few ideas, none of which I can really say too much about. But I do have ideas. It really has gotten unbelievably hard to talk to footballers now, even over the last few years. It's just really, really hard to meet with footballers and to get them to talk to you. I'm not sure if it's about the money. I don't think it's about the money because they have plenty of money. I think it's about image, and I think it's about other concerns. I think players in the past maybe grew up in a different area where they kind of felt that responsibility of talking to the press was part of the job. And I don't think that's really the case any longer. So it's very difficult.
I was speaking to a Brazilian journalist about this last week, Flamengo haven't, he tells me, let any of their players be interviewed for five months. All their interviews are now done on their own television channel.
Grant Wahl:
Wow.
Andrew Downie:
But it's the same thing in England. I thought I would go to London and I would be able to get interviews with Latin American players in England, and it's impossible. Unless you're a broadcaster, it's almost impossible to get an interview. So it's a struggle. I think that's maybe why I like doing historical books because a lot of the old-timers are much happier to talk than the current crop in the ones that have just retired.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah, that makes sense. And it coincides with my experience a little bit too. It depends on certain countries especially. I think in England it's tougher sometimes. And sometimes I think you have to be an official rights holder to be able to get an interview with certain players or coaches or what have you.
The book is terrific. I really enjoyed reading it. I think our listeners will as well. If you ever have any curiosity about the 1970 World Cup, one of the greatest World Cups of all time, the book is called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Inside Story of the Legendary 1970 World Cup. The author is Andrew Downie. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Andrew Downie:
Thanks for having me, that was great fun.