Author: Martyn Green

Before Total Football, there was the Wunderteam

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In 1939, Matthias Sindelar was found dead in his Vienna apartment. Sindelar had embarrassed the Nazi authorities less than a year previous, celebrating his goal for an Austrian team against the German side a little too vigorously. He had refused to be a part of the Germany 1938 World Cup squad, which was eliminated in the first round. And he had been on a Gestapo watchlist. Question marks remain, but a blocked chimney was probably the culprit. It was a tragic, if less conspiratorial end to perhaps the greatest player of the 1930s, and his Wunderteam.

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When UFOs Stopped Play

Published on by Martyn Green

When fans filed into the Stadio Artemio Franchi in October 1954, the excitement was building for a thrilling derby between Tuscan giants Fiorentina and local rivals, and minnows, Pistoiese. Ten thousand people packed the concrete arena for the game, and the first half passed without any noteworthy incident. But just as the second half kicked off, an unusual hush fell over the stadium. Fans were distracted from their conversations, players turned away from the pitch, and the ball rolled, neglected, to a stop. More than ten thousand people, and all of them had their eyes trained on the skies above.

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Brazil’s Little Bird

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Manuel Francisco dos Santos is one of the greatest players to have ever put on the yellow shirt of Brazil, and yet he should never have been a footballer. He was born in 1933 with a deformed spine and one leg a full 6cm shorter than the other. He had crooked knees, with one bending inward and the other out. And, at a time when football was much more physical, he was small, leading his sister to give him the nickname that would stick for the rest of his life; Garrincha, or Little Bird. Despite his disadvantages, he showed immense talent at an early age, but worryingly for Brazilian football, little inclination to enter the sport professionally.

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The Curse of Bela Guttmann

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When you shoot for the king, you’d better not miss, or so the old saying goes. When that king literally has “Royal” in their name, and are undefeated in the European Cup – the pinnacle of continental competition – for five years, that saying goes double. So it was in the early history of the Europe’s premier tournament. Real Madrid, patronised by General Franco, won every iteration of the competition between its inception and 1960. And then, unthinkably, they didn’t.

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