Making the game beautiful: Swastikas at White Hart Lane and other footballing tales of the unexpected

#12 THE IMPROBABLE

Football transcends every age, sex, nationality, time zone and continent, aligning the transfixed masses goggle-eyed as one by the flight of a ball. But it’s also been politicised, hijacked, exploited, reinvented and reimagined almost beyond reason in countless improbable ways, both good and bad. “The beautiful game” is alive with unlikely tales so let’s explore five of the lesser-known but most fascinating to illustrate the enduring power at play, featuring an equally improbable all-star cast of Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, FIFA, Forest Green Rovers and Diego Maradona.

When not busy committing genocide or attempting to get higher than the sun, Hitler liked to keep his other arm in with sport. Not only did he seek to weaponise the 1936 Olympic Games with propaganda but he was also able to engineer the now stunning sight of a swastika flying above White Hart Lane, famous former home of Tottenham Hotspur. At the height of fascism in October 1935, much to the amazement of the club’s strong Jewish following and most people living today, Hitler’s Germany team were invited to play England in London, and the game went ahead despite widespread outrage.

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“If no action is taken, we can visualise from the present agitation amongst Jewish, Catholic and democratic organisations that the Nazis will be in for a very hot time,” said the secretary of the Edmonton and District Sunday Football League, adding: “Tottenham Hotspur will be holding the bag for Nazi advertisement.” Ahead of the match, the German players denied any political agenda. “We have nothing to do with governments. Herr Hitler has sent us no message. We are here as sportsmen to play football against the best in the world,” explained captain Fritz Szepan, who led his team in delivering a Heil Hitler salute ahead of kick off. Incidentally, the game finished 3-0 to England.

Donald Trump is now a political figure, a comical reality befitting his bizarre role in football folklore, which dates back to a time when he was taking over New York rather than the world and sought to plug into new revenue streams. Long before Nigel Farage got the gold lift treatment, Jimmy Greaves and Ian St John (aka Saint & Greavsie) were very unlikely guests at Trump Tower where they met the man bafflingly chosen to carry out the quarter-final draw of the 1992 Rumbelows Cup.

The electrical retailer decided to defy convention by enlisting anyone associated with football, sport or common sense but this was the same company who devised the equally mystifying Rumbelows Sprint Challenge, which saw English football’s finest run against each other for prizes including cash and a new telly. They went bust shortly after, despite Trump successfully completing the draw without any accusations of fake news or ball tampering, which is more than can be said for Carabao.

The scandalous and scandalised FIFA has somehow remained the highest power in football despite decades of mismanagement, bribery scandals and nefarious antics by its representatives in every corner of the globe. How do we explain Russia and Qatar hosting the World Cup when both nations are so entrenched in controversy? How can a nation run the greatest football competition in the world when it stands accused of the state-sponsored doping of sport? How is it possible to win the right to such a sporting event without disclosing it will be physically impossible to play football during the summer, as always happens? FIFA, that’s how.

But perhaps their greatest, most improbable achievement was 2015’s United Passions film. Shot as former leader Sepp Blatter continued his slow motion descent towards an unmarked grave alongside another reserved for fellow footballing pariah Jack Warner, his depiction as some sort of sporting deity was met with takings of $918 in its first weekend. Officially the lowest-grossing film in US box office history, it was dismissed as “cinematic excrement” by one critic who concluded: “As proof of corporate insanity it is a valuable case study.” Learn well, Infantino.

Naturally, the transformation of football can also be seen in the way it’s evolved for the players, who’ve been utterly swept up in the game’s modern gentrification. “I’ll always remember the moment Steve Bould went up to the bar and ordered 35 pints for five of us. After we left the bar we spotted all the French lads in the coffee shop and they were sitting around smoking. I thought, ’How are we going to win the league this year?’” wondered Ray Parlour of Arsene Wenger’s first season in charge at Arsenal when, remarkably, they did the double.

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Fast forward 20 years and we have Forest Green Rovers, the world’s first fully vegan football club. Led by green energy tycoon Dale Vince, they operate a policy of no meat, fish, dairy or animal products for players, visitors or fans, a vision of purity designed to enhance performance which saw the club promoted to the Football League in 2017 for the first time in their 128-year history. “Typically football food is hideous,” Vince explains, adding: “Burgers are really awful…We’ve replaced them with really high quality plant-based food.” So do the players still drink? Well, they have been spotted hanging out in Greggs, gazing lustily at the sausage rolls.

Of course, football’s unpredictable magic is best seen on the pitch. Take incredible comebacks like Arsenal overturning a 4-0 deficit against Reading in 2012’s Capital One Cup. Or Watford’s truly staggering breakaway goal in the following season’s Championship play-off semi-final, after Leicester, a team only four years from their own footballing miracle, had missed a penalty. But what’s more improbable than witnessing a swastika at White Hart Lane? Surely seeing Diego Maradona, then the greatest player in the world, lining up in a Spurs shirt to take part in a testimonial for Ossie Ardiles in 1986, two months before he led Argentina to World Cup glory in Mexico.

“I’ve never seen a better footballer. Never. He was by far the best player I’ve ever played with,” explained Chris Waddle of Maradona, who turned up without boots and had to borrow a pair from Clive Allen. A few years later, Ardiles became the club’s manager and approached Teddy Sheringham about a potential new signing, which, as history recalls, sadly didn’t happen. “I got on really well with Ossie and I think I was the captain at the time, and Ossie came to me one day and said, ‘I want your opinion, I’m thinking about signing someone…Diego Maradona.’” Now that really would have been unbelievable.

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