Six historic matches that changed the game forever
Here are not the best six games of all time, but six that help to explain the sport as we know it now, as we love it now, as we miss it now.
ENGLAND 3-6 HUNGARY (Friendly, London, Nov 25, 1953)
The end of football’s first era and the start of its second can be pinpointed precisely: The game that was billed as the Match of the Century, between the country that represented the sport’s past, and the team that heralded its future.
England had never really believed they needed to beat foreigners to prove their superiority at a sport it had, if not quite invented, then certainly codified. Until 1950, they did not even deign to enter World Cups. Even their first experience that year — defeat to the United States, and early elimination — did not dent their self-esteem.
What happened three years later at Wembley had more impact. Hungary’s Aranycsapat, their golden squad, exposed the myth of English supremacy. Billy Wright, England’s captain, was powerless to stop Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Nandor Hidegkuti from running riot; he looked, in the words of one reporter, “like a fire engine rushing to the wrong fire”.
Hungary’s emphatic win — the first time England had been beaten by a nation from outside the British Isles on home soil — not only proved that England were no longer the game’s gold standard, but signposted the game’s future: Hungary had not only outplayed England, but out-thought them. Football would no longer be a mere physical contest. It was an intellectual one, too.
REAL MADRID 7-3 EINTRACHT FRANKFURT
(European Cup final, Glasgow, Scotland, May 18, 1960)
Among the 127,000 or so crammed into Hampden Park was a young Alex
Ferguson, witness to what is regarded as the finest team performance in any European Cup final. Led by Puskas and Alfredo Di Stefano, Real Madrid swatted aside a more than competent Eintracht team, leading Real to a fifth consecutive continental title.
It would prove not only the high point of that team, but their last hurrah: A year later, Benfica finally dislodged Real Madrid as European champions.
Hampden Park, though, cemented the legacy of not only Di Stefano and Puskas, but the club that had built the first ever squad of Galacticos.
From that point on, there would be a glamour attached to that bright white shirt. The European Cup would forever be associated with Real Madrid, and the tournament — then a relative newcomer, only five years old — would become a barometer for greatness first to rival, and then surpass, the World Cup.
BRAZIL 4-1 ITALY
(World Cup final, Mexico City, June 21, 1970)
The best game of the 1970 World Cup was the semi-final — another match of the century, this one between Italy and West Germany — but nothing, really, can match the final for impact. In vivid Technicolor — bright yellow jerseys, verdant green field, sapphire blue sky — the world fell in love with Brazil.
By that stage, of course, Brazil were already a powerhouse: They had won the World Cup in 1958 and 1962 and Pele was already recognised as a global superstar. But 1970 was his, and his team’s, apotheosis, their moment of transcendence into something like an aesthetic ideal for how football should be played, how it should look, how it should feel. It was the point at which, if England was the home of football’s body, Brazil became the land of its soul.
AJAX 2-0 INTER MILAN (European Cup final, Rotterdam, Netherlands, May 31, 1972)
The Netherlands team that revolutionised football in the 1970s — laying down many of the ideas and precepts about style that continue to shape the sport, at elite level, today — are remembered for what they did not win. In 1974 and 1978, they were the best team in the world. In both years, they reached the World Cup final. On both occasions, they lost.
But many of the players in those teams were winners, had been winners. Ajax, the club where the doctrine of Total Football had been born, lifted the European Cup three times in a row between 1971 and 1973, the first team since Real Madrid to do so. The second title, claimed on enemy territory in Rotterdam, was the finest, sweetest of them all.
Inter Milan — a team constructed, in the traditional Italian fashion, around grizzled defending — was cut apart by Johan Cruyff. He scored both Ajax goals, and in doing so, he confirmed that beauty could triumph over cynicism. It is a battle of ideas that football has been wrestling with ever since.
ARGENTINA 0-1 CAMEROON (World Cup group stage, Milan, June 8, 1990)
Until a sunny day at the San Siro, football had twin poles: one in Europe and one in South America. Everywhere else — from North America to Asia to Africa — was an afterthought. At World Cups, with a couple of notable exceptions, the role of those continents’ teams was somewhere between novelty act and cannon fodder.
Cameroon’s victory over Argentina, the reigning world champions, was the start of a seismic shift, one that continues today.
Though their win was characterised at the time as rooted in good fortune and bad tackling — two players were sent off; the second, Benjamin Massing, really couldn’t have any complaints — much of that, looking back, says more about football’s lingering colonial complex than it does Cameroon’s performance.
The victory’s meaning is clearer now. It was the moment that proved African teams — followed in short order by football’s other developing continents — were no longer the pushovers they were supposed to be. It was the moment football became a truly global game.
UNITED STATES 0-0 CHINA; US WIN ON PENALTIES 5-4
(Women’s World Cup final, Pasadena, California, July 10, 1999)
Well, it was the moment football became a game for truly half the globe. The other half would have to wait nine more years, for Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick, to feel entirely included in the world’s sport.
For most of the 20th century, women’s football was suppressed, in one way or another: through lack of funding, lack of exposure or outright banning. Chastain and the US team ended all of that.
The 21st century has seen sustained, remarkable growth in women’s football across the globe, led by the US.
The match has also played a role in popularising the men’s game in the US. The journey is not yet complete, of course, but the progress that has been made can be traced back to the Rose Bowl, and the Pasadena sunshine, and the kick that shook the world.