France 1938: the last World Cup before the war, the country that disappeared and Spain unable to compete

The 1934 World Cup was the first time a regime used it as a showcase. The 1938 one was worse: here football wasn't just following politics anymore, it was inside it. An entire country vanished between the draw and the tournament, Spain couldn't even show up, and the final was played fourteen months before the war started.

A country qualified and disappeared from the map

The draw took place in Paris on 5 March 1938. Ten days later, Germany annexed Austria: the Anschluss. Austria was qualified, had one of Europe's best teams, and suddenly it wasn't a country anymore.

They withdrew, naturally. And their spot was left empty, so Sweden advanced to the quarter-finals without playing. It's the only no-show in World Cup finals history: a team that reaches the quarter-finals without ever touching the ball.

That World Cup kicked off, then, with 15 teams instead of 16.

Germany signed up half of Austria and crashed out in the first round

The Nazis wanted to exploit the annexation to build a superteam. There's documented evidence of a quota system — six Germans and five Austrians in the starting XI — and manager Sepp Herberger even called up 38 players, fifteen of them Austrian, to choose from.

It backfired spectacularly. Germany drew 1-1 with Switzerland in the opening match and lost the replay 4-2, with the Swiss mounting a comeback from 0-2 against a Paris crowd hurling bottles at them. Knocked out in the first round. They wouldn't crash out that early again until 2018.

Herberger himself said afterwards he'd been "forced" to include Austrians and blamed their "defeatist attitude". A German journalist at the time summed it up better: Germans and Austrians prefer to play against each other even when they're on the same team.

Spain registered, and the Civil War knocked it out

This story is rarely told correctly: Spain wasn't excluded, Spain registered and had to withdraw. They'd made the quarter-finals in 1934, eliminated Brazil and given Italy a proper game with Zamora, Quincoces, Lángara and Iraragorri. They were a real national team, and they missed out on the World Cup because their country was at war.

During those years the Spanish national team simply didn't exist. The closest thing to a touring national squad was the Euzkadi national team, which toured Europe and the Americas between 1937 and 1938 raising funds for the Republic.

And there's a lovely detail about how heavily our war weighed on that World Cup: Switzerland refused to travel to Lisbon to play Portugal in their qualifier because it meant crossing war-torn Spain. The solution? The match was played in Milan. The Civil War moved a World Cup qualifier to a different country.

Brazil 6-5 Poland: the wildest match of the tournament

June 5th, Strasbourg, under a deluge. Brazil won 6-5 after extra time in the highest-scoring match in World Cup history at that point. Polish striker Ernest Wilimowski scored four — and lost. He remains the only footballer to score four goals in a World Cup match and get knocked out.

Kit trivia for the nerds: both teams were wearing white, so Brazil played in their blue training kit. It was the first time Brazil wore blue in an official match. Twenty years later, in the 1958 final, that blue would bring them their first World Cup.

The Battle of Bordeaux and football's last ever replay

In the quarter-finals, Brazil and Czechoslovakia drew 1-1 in a match that went down in history for what happened off the ball: three red cards — the first in World Cup history —, goalkeeper Plánička finished with a broken right arm (and continued playing the extra time) and Nejedlý with a broken leg.

With no penalty shootouts back then, they had to replay the match two days later. Brazil won 2-1. It was the last replay in World Cup history: it's never happened since.

The black shirt, and the salute that wouldn't come down

This needs to be precise, because it's told wrong everywhere. Italy wore black just once, in the quarter-final against France, on June 12th at Colombes. It wasn't in the final and it wasn't against Brazil.

And the shirt change wasn't meant to provoke: both teams were wearing blue, they drew lots to see who changed, and Italy lost the draw. What was provocative came after: despite being able to use their usual second kit, which was white, they were ordered to play in a black shirt with the fascist fasces on the chest. Italy won 3-1 and knocked out the hosts.

But the real scene of that World Cup was something else, and Pozzo himself told it in his memoirs. In the opener against Norway, in Marseille, there were around 10,000 Italian exiles in the stands. The players did the fascist salute and got booed to the rafters. Pozzo ordered them to keep their arms up until the crowd quieted down. When they lowered their arms and the whistling started again, he ordered them to do it again: «Team, ready. Salute».

The final: 4-2 and back-to-back titles

June 19th, 1938, Colombes, 45,000 spectators. Italy 4-2 Hungary, with a brace from Colaussi and a brace from Piola. It was already 3-1 at half-time. French president Albert Lebrun handed the Cup to Giuseppe Meazza.

Organisational quirk: the final and the third-place playoff were played on the same day at the same time. While Italy was winning in Paris, in Bordeaux Brazil came from 0-2 down and beat Sweden 4-2.

Sindelar, the man who said no

Matthias Sindelar was the captain of the Austrian Wunderteam, his country's greatest footballer of the 20th century. When Germany absorbed Austria and formed a joint national team, he refused to play, citing age and injuries. That's why he wasn't in France.

He died on 23 January 1939 in his Vienna flat alongside his girlfriend. The official verdict was carbon monoxide poisoning, and that's where the problem starts: three theories coexist — accident, suicide and murder — and none of them is proven. The Gestapo had a file on him. A neighbour had reported a faulty chimney days earlier. A friend of his claimed decades later that a official was bribed to register it as an accident.

What's worth clearing up, because it gets repeated constantly: Sindelar was not Jewish. The confusion stems from his club, Austria Wien, being the team of Vienna's Jewish bourgeoisie.

And then the ball stopped for sixteen years

The war cancelled the World Cups of 1942 and 1946. That made Italy world champions for sixteen consecutive years, from 1934 to 1950: a record nobody's going to break.

And there's a story that explains why the Jules Rimet Trophy arrived intact in 1950. Italian football boss Ottorino Barassi, FIFA vice-president, took the trophy out of a safe deposit box at a Roman bank and hid it throughout the war in a shoebox under his bed. If the cup still exists in those Maracanã photos, that's why.