Features

World Cup controversies

Author: Lynda Collins
Date: 24/06/2010
Football betting

When, a long month ago, Lord Triesman resigned as chairman of the Football Association and the England 2018 World Cup bid, the tournament in South Africa seemed a distant event, muddied by a scandal that threatens to destroy England's chances of hosting a World Cup in the near future.

In fact, Triesman was just unfortunate to have put his proverbial foot in it while the football world was surprisingly quiet on the controversy front.

This, but for Triesman, was a rare moment of peace though, for the World Cup seems to bring out the worst in the beautiful game.

This time four years ago Italian football was going through one of its darkest periods as, in the run up to a World Cup they would go on and win, large parts of the football establishment were indicted in a massive match-fixing scandal.

Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi was recorded organising which referees would take charge of certain games in the Italian league and from there the whole Juve board resigned and a number of clubs were heavily punished.

Even within the World Cup itself scandals are far from uncommon. The worst match ever seen in a World Cup finals became the subject of a mighty uproar in 1982 when West Germany played out a chanceless 1-0 win over Austria, ensuring both teams went through from the group stage.

To add to the controversy, West Germany and Austria were politically close while the other country that could have progressed out of the group was Algeria, a former French colony.

The African side appealed but FIFA said there was nothing it could do and West Germany went on to play in the final where justice was finally done as they lost 3-1 to Italy.

Even the glamorous world of drug use has reared its ugly head over the course of World Cup history. Two incidents in particular stand out, even if the players involved were at quite different ends of the football spectrum.

First, in 1978, was Willie Johnston, a talented Scotland international. He failed a drug test after the opening match of the World Cup, when the Scots lost 3-0 to Chile. Unbeknown to him, Johnston tested positive for the stimulant fencamfamin, later revealed to be found in the over-the-counter medicine reactivan.

Angry and shocked at being the centre of such a controversy, Johnston even scoffed: "In any case, the Peru match was the worst of my international career, so you could hardly say reactivan was performance-enhancing."

If the Johnston controversy was, to some extent, unfair on the player involved, the 1994 revelation that Diego Maradona had tested positive for ephedrine shocked few in the football world.

What was more of a scandal was that the Argentine star went on to claim that FIFA had agreed to let him use the drug to help loose wait before the World Cup, so he could play and the tournament would have its most marketable player.

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