Soccer History | Estadio Monumental — Ten Blocks From the Final, a Detention Centre

Roughly ten blocks separate the Estadio Monumental from the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada. On 25 June 1978, while Argentina beat the Netherlands 3-1 after extra time in front of 71,483 people, the ESMA was in use as a clandestine detention centre. Prisoners were held and tortured inside it. No reporter, photographer or visiting player was let through the gates. That is the fact this entry exists to hold in place, and it does not need embellishing. The football, briefly. Mario Kempes scored in the first half and Dick Nanninga equalised on 82 minutes. Kempes scored again in extra time, Daniel Bertoni added a third near the end, and Sergio Gonella of Italy refereed. Daniel Passarella lifted the trophy. The Netherlands declined to attend the post-match ceremony. Then there is a correction that runs the opposite way to the one most people expect. Johan Cruyff did not play in this tournament, and his absence is routinely explained as a protest against the junta. Cruyff said otherwise, repeatedly and for the rest of his life. In 1977 armed men held him and his wife at gunpoint in their Barcelona home while their children were in the flat. Speaking to Radio Catalunya in 2008, he described being tied up with a rifle at his head, and said he was not willing to leave a family living under police protection in order to play a tournament. Other explanations circulated for years — injury, sponsorship money, a marital ultimatum after a 1974 tabloid story. The kidnapping attempt is the one he gave himself, and it is the one the record supports. Allegations that the tournament was steered in Argentina's favour, above all around the 6-0 win over Peru that put the hosts into the final, have never been resolved. They remain allegations, and this entry does not settle them. The ESMA buildings still stand on Avenida del Libertador, preserved as a site of memory. The Monumental is still River Plate's ground. The cover photograph shows Kempes in the final, with the ticker-tape that fell throughout the tournament lying across the pitch. Sources: Wikipedia; Goal; Al Jazeera; Tribune; Football Oranje. Cover photo: El Gráfico, public domain. Stadium photograph: Stefano Vigorelli, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.