Spain: The Brazilian Elegy

The 1982 Italian squad arrived in Spain in disgrace. Three years earlier, a match-fixing scandal had engulfed Italian football; several players in the current squad had served suspensions. Paolo Rossi, who had scored seventeen goals for Juventus before the ban, had played no competitive football for two years and arrived visibly underprepared, missing easy chances in the opening matches. Italy drew all three group games. The Italian press was merciless. The players continued quietly.

The second-round match against Brazil in the Sarriá Stadium in Barcelona is the game that Europe returns to most often when imagining football at its aesthetic peak. Brazil had to win; Italy needed only a draw. The Brazilian midfield — Sócrates drifting and distributing from deep, Zico orchestrating with the ball tied to his left foot, Falcão arriving from midfield with shot power that goalkeepers could only admire, Éder bending free kicks from positions that should not produce goals — was performing at a level that made the tournament's other participants feel they were in the presence of something categorically different.

Rossi scored three times. The first from close range after a corner. The second to make it 2-2 after Brazil had twice equalised with moments of individual brilliance. The third, the winner, from a deflected cross that fell to him exactly where he needed it, at exactly the right moment, as though the two-year exile had been preparation for this specific afternoon. Brazil pushed forward, and Brazil conceded instead of scoring, and Italy won 3-2, and the most beloved team of their generation went home.

Italy won the final against West Germany without difficulty. Rossi, Tardelli — whose goal celebration, the sprint and the roaring and the arms raised, became one of football's defining images — and Altobelli completed a 3-1 win. Dino Zoff, forty years old, lifted the trophy at the Bernabéu. It was a genuine, hard-earned triumph. But the tournament belongs, in football's memory, to the side that didn't win it.

MATCH FOOTAGE

1982

Italy 3–1 West Germany

1982

West Germany 3–3 France (5–4 pen)

1982

West Germany 1–2 Algeria

1982

Poland 3–2 France

1982

Italy 3–2 Brazil

1982

Brazil 3–1 Argentina