Mexico 1970: the greatest team in history, the first World Cup in colour and the Cup Brazil kept forever
- Mexico 1970 was considered the best team in the history of world football
- The 1970 World Cup was the first championship completely broadcast in color
- Brazil won the 1970 World Cup and kept the trophy permanently
Until now, this series has been in black and white. The ghost goal at Wembley we saw in grey and with poor definition, and that's why it's still debated. In 1970 football changes colour, literally: satellite arrives, colour television arrives and for the first time the entire planet sees just how yellow Brazil's shirt is.
🇲🇽 The 1970 World Cup by numbers
- Host
- Mexico
- Teams
- 16
- Champions
- 🏆 Brazil
- Runners-up
- Italy
- Final
- Brazil 4-1 Italy
- Stadium
- Azteca · Mexico City
- Attendance
- 107,412
- Top scorer
- Gerd Müller (West Germany), 10 goals
The five number tens
Legend has it that Brazil brought together the five best number tens from their league in the same team: Pelé, Gérson, Tostão, Rivelino and Jairzinho. On paper it was madness — five creative players, none defensive — and many thought it couldn't work. It worked so well it's still the benchmark by which any team is measured.
Jairzinho did something nobody has repeated: he scored in all six matches of the tournament, including the final. He won the entire World Cup while scoring in every game.
And what's curious about Pelé in this tournament is that his most memorable plays didn't end in goals: the shot from the middle of the field against Czechoslovakia that grazed the post, the dummy on Uruguayan goalkeeper Mazurkiewicz without touching the ball, and above all the header that Gordon Banks pulled off against England. That save, even today, appears on every list of greatest saves in history.
The war that wasn't caused by a match
Something happened in the qualifying phase for this World Cup that's always told wrong. In July 1969, El Salvador and Honduras faced each other in a playoff and shortly after a hundred-hour armed conflict broke out between the two countries, known as the Football War.
The name has done a lot of damage to understanding what actually happened. The matches were the trigger and the excuse, not the cause: behind it was years of tension over Salvadoran peasants migrating to Honduras, over Honduras' agrarian reform that was expelling them from their land and over an unmarked border. Football lit the spark to a powder keg that was already loaded.
Cards, substitutions and heat
Three things we take for granted today were born here.
Yellow and red cards. They made their debut at this World Cup. The idea came from Ken Aston, the English referee who had suffered the Battle of Santiago in 1962 — he came up with the colour-coding system standing at a traffic light, looking for a way for a player to understand they were being cautioned even if they didn't speak the referee's language. Curiously, no reds were shown in Mexico 70.
Substitutions. For the first time two substitutions per team were allowed. Before that, if you got injured, your team played with one less — and that explains half a dozen stories from the previous chapters.
And the heat. Matches were played at midday, with brutal temperatures and at altitude, so they could be shown during peak viewing time in Europe. It's the first time it becomes crystal clear that the television business runs the fixture calendar.
The Match of the Century
The semi-final between Italy and West Germany, at the Azteca, ended 4-3 to Italy. The 90 minutes finished 1-1 and in extra time five goals were scored.
The image that remains is Franz Beckenbauer playing with his arm strapped to his body in a sling, with a dislocated shoulder, because Germany had already used up their two substitutions. He lasted the rest of the match like that.
There's a plaque at the Azteca that commemorates it. It's the only football match in the world with a commemorative plaque at the stadium where it was played.
The final: the goal that gets studied
21 June, Azteca, over 107,000 people. Brazil against the Italy of catenaccio, the tournament's most defensive side. 4-1.
And the fourth goal, Carlos Alberto's, is probably the most analysed move in football history: a lengthy passage of play involving nearly the entire team, with Clodoaldo nutmegging four Italian defenders, and ending with Pelé's no-look pass — leaving the ball dead to the right, exactly where he knew his captain was coming — followed by a thunderbolt from the wing.
It's not just a spectacular goal. It's a one-minute demonstration of why that team is remembered the way it is.
That a qualifying match for this World Cup sparked a war between El Salvador and Honduras.
That the war did exist and the matches did trigger it, but the real causes ran deeper: hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans had emigrated to Honduras, Honduran land reform began expelling them, the border had been unmarked for decades, and both governments had domestic problems they wanted to bury. Football was the excuse and the spark. Calling it the «Football War» makes for a snappy headline and does a disservice to what really happened there.
That 1970 was the first one you could watch in colour.
That it's essentially true — it was the first broadcast in colour and via satellite to the whole world — but worth a clarification: colour footage existed from earlier tournaments, and in some countries colour broadcasts came later. What's indisputable is the leap: in 1966 the planet watched a World Cup in black and white, and in 1970 it saw it in yellow, green and blue. That contrast is real and explains much of the mythology surrounding this team.
That Brazil kept the original trophy as their property for winning three World Cups.
That it's absolutely true: that was the rule and Brazil met it in 1970. What almost nobody adds is how the story ends. In 1983 the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen from the Brazilian federation's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and was never recovered: it's believed it was melted down. The trophy that Barassi had saved by hiding it in a shoebox during the war ended up vanishing in peacetime.
What remained
Jogo bonito remained as an idea, the yellow shirt remained as a global symbol, and there remained a debate that never closed: whether that Brazil side was the greatest team ever. It has serious rivals — the Hungary of 1954, the Netherlands of 1974, Spain of 2010 — but it's the only one that combined the finest football with the finest result.
And what remained was the end of an era. Pelé retired from international football shortly after. The next revolution wouldn't come from Brazil, but from a small country in northern Europe that was about to reinvent how the game was played.
- From 1970 onwards, almost all World Cup photo material is agency-protected. Only public domain or Creative Commons images are used here, which is why you'll see fewer action shots than in earlier chapters.
- Photos include their author and licence in the caption, via Wikimedia Commons.
