It’s a day football lovers everywhere eagerly anticipate as, after a long and tiresome qualification campaign, we find out just who will be playing who in the coming summer’s World Cup; but due to the chaotic and frankly cringeworthy events of January 1982 organisers will no doubt have everything crossed prior to this year’s draw in Moscow.
In recent years we have been treated to a collection of rather elongated and elaborate productions featuring ex-players, movie stars, models and more than the odd musical montage, but that wasn’t the case when Sepp Blatter and friends made such a mess of things in Madrid that they had to start some of it all over again.
After the undoubted success of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina FIFA had something of a hard act to follow four years later in Spain, but that didn’t stop them confidently announcing that this tournament would be bigger and better than ever before.
The format was changed and 24 nations rather than 16 would now star in the greatest show on earth, with the Spanish FA spending over £60 million on staging a tournament that would be watched by millions in over 100 countries around the world. But before all that could happen there was the small matter of the draw – what could possibly go wrong?
Four years before, in Buenos Aires, the draw for Argentina ‘78 was a much more modest affair but in keeping with all the hype that came with Spain ’82 organisers were keen to make this the major talking point in the build-up to that summer’s main event; and they wouldn’t be disappointed.
A worldwide TV audience looked-on open mouthed as a catalogue of catastrophes made the event gripping viewing for all the wrong reasons, as a younger and more hirsute Sepp Blatter presided over an elaborate format which involved a collection of awkward looking schoolboys, miniature footballs and large steel cages.
The plan was that each football contained the name of a participating nation which would drop down from the cages before being collected by one of the young lads and taken to an official, who would then open the ball and reveal the name of the team and what group they would be assigned to.
That was the idea anyway, but from the very outset it was clear that things weren’t exactly going the way the organisers had hoped. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, from the cages jamming and not producing a ball at the right time to the FIFA officials making a balls-up of unscrewing the balls.
If it seemed things couldn’t get any worse more chaos ensued when it was Scotland’s turn to be drawn. Ally McLeod’s side were originally put into Argentina’s group, however, after much confusion the officials acknowledged a mistake had been made and eventually announced that it would be Belgium that would be taking their place – thank goodness BBC commentator Archie MacPherson was paying attention.
At the second time of asking Scotland were drawn in Brazil’s group, though the debacle didn’t end there when a number of South American sides, who were meant to be kept apart in the initial stages of the competition, found themselves lumped in with everyone else.
Initially, it had been arranged that Peru and Chile would be excluded from pot three, until two European teams had been allocated to the groups involving Brazil and Argentina. However, even this most simple of plans couldn’t be executed properly and the error wasn’t noticed until it was too late.
To cap one of the most farcical events in the history of football one of the little balls - which must have seemed like such a good idea at the time - split inside its cage prematurely revealing the name of the nation inside to a now hysterical audience and providing this evening of hilarity and humiliation with the most appropriate of finales.
Not surprisingly the tabloids lapped it up. "Had it not been so enormously important, it would have been funny to see schoolboys decide the fate of footballing nations by plucking balls from the wrong box into the wrong sector of the draw," wrote Frank McGhee in the Daily Mirror, while Stuart Jones called it: "an embarrassment on the grandest scale," in The Times.
After such a dreadful start it’s fair to say that the only way was up for Spain ’82 and in fact the competition will generally be remembered as one of the more entertaining of its time. Even so, there were plenty of lessons for FIFA to learn from the fiasco which took place that evening and thank goodness common sense prevailed in the years that followed.
Having used machines to pick the nations with such shambolic results, human beings were called upon once again to ensure such scenes would never be repeated; but what about the man who presided over one of the most embarrassing events in World Cup history? Well, of course, Sepp Blatter was elevated to the dizzy heights of FIFA President six years later.
