Soccer (née football) fans will rejoice at this all-new volume of crackling essays from the author of God Is Round. Here, Juan Villoro explores the sport through the elements that make it the world’s favorite pastime, from its ancient origins, mythic players, exhilarating matches, endemic rivalries, and the unlikely moments in which football has changed history.
A prolific writer and chronicler of World Cup games around the world, Villoro draws on our global cultural mosaic to inspire readers, players, and fans long after the final whistle blows. With a philosopher’s wit and a journalist’s ear, he has produced a book for curious newcomers and lifelong football fiends alike.
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The Death Match
In 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, several former players from local professional clubs Dynamo and Lokomotyv found work at Bakery No. 3.
The arrival of summer unleashed one of those miracles sunshine brings to frigid countries: the return of football. The communist bakers formed a team called FC Start. They beat several Ukrainian squads and a Hungarian one. The mood of the city began to depend on the victories of the former athletes turned bakers.
On July 28, Stalin issued Order 227, which was summed up with four words: “Not a step back.” Tensions were on the rise in Kyiv when FC Start took on the German team Flakelf, comprised of Luftwaffe pilots.
Despite playing the game under heavy enforcement, the Ukrainians acted as if they were carrying out Order 227, winning 5–1. The result offended German dignity. Thanks to Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of high aestheticism and low morals, the sport was becoming a decisive component of Nazi ideology. The documentary came out in 1935. A year later, Norway defeated Germany in the quarter-finals at the Berlin Olympics. Deeply dejected, minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “One hundred thousand left the stadium in a depressed state. Winning a match is of more importance to the people than the capture of a town somewhere in the east.”
Unsurprisingly, after losing to a team of malnourished bakers, Flakelf demanded a rematch.
The second game was held on August 9. The referee was a member of the SS, and the German team had received reinforcements (not with proper cracks, but airmen who were at least better fed).
Before kickoff, the referee visited the Ukrainians and demanded they give the Nazi salute when coming onto the pitch. As inhabitants of an occupied territory, they were little more than prisoners.
A discussion ensued, eventually concluding, as things typically do on the left, with discord. The only thing the communist bakers could agree on was that they disagreed. Nevertheless, when Flakelf cried out “Heil Hitler!” they responded in unison: “Fizkultura!” (“Long Live Sports!” the rallying cry of Soviet teams).
Start played in red shirts because it was all they had. The chromatic happenstance intensified the rivalry. The ref allowed the Germans to play rough, as if kicking another player had been authorized by the Geneva Conventions. Even so, Start led 3–1 at halftime.
During the break, an official warned the rebels about the consequences of winning. This time the team’s consensus was instantaneous: the contest ended 5–3 in favor of the Ukrainians, with 2,500 spectators gazing on.
What happened next was ignored for decades. But the human species has a mysterious need to believe certain things that hover at the edge of verifiability, and the “Death Match,” as it came to be called, is one of them.
One legend held that the footballers were executed immediately. This is how it was told by Eduardo Galeano, master of the sports epic, whose aphoristic style often simplified events. Nelson Rodrigues liked to call those who undermine stories with too many facts “objectivity’s fools.” The bakers’ demise wasn’t quite so sudden, but in this case, knowing the truth doesn’t diminish the story’s cruelty, it increases it. True to the patient and diligent nature of Nazi injustice, one player was tortured to death while the rest were sent to the Syrets concentration camp to the west of Kyiv.
In captivity, the bakers who had nourished thousands of people were given rations of 150 grams of bread per day. On February 24, the camp’s commandant awoke to find himself snowbound without sufficient rations for his prisoners. He decided to meet the crisis with arithmetic: one of every three convicts was killed. Three members of Start fell that day.
When the Red Army recaptured the city of Kyiv on November 6, 1943, the population had fallen from four hundred thousand to eighty thousand.
For the players left alive, liberation only offered relative relief. In an atmosphere of postwar paranoia, they were seen as collaborators who had played alongside the enemy. Persecuted by Nazis during the war, they were rebuked by the Soviets during peacetime. Their dissidence had been expressed on the pitch, but there were few who remembered.
Over time, the remaining players were compensated with the ambivalent favor of myth. In the Russian daily Izvestia, journalist Lev Kassil wrote a story about the players from Dynamo without mentioning “the death match.” This term was coined shortly after, in a 1946 article published in a newspaper with an emblematic name: Stalin’s Tribe. Without using precise dates, it told the story of the martyred footballers. The 1963 Soviet film The Third Half, seen by nearly thirty million people, and the publication of two novels further contributed to the legend that would eventually enshrine the players’ sacrifice.
More measured information about the incident began to come out during the Brezhnev era. The execution of the four players who participated in the match was real, but it hadn’t happened immediately, and may not have had anything to do with the 5–3 result. Whatever the case may be, the legend grew, and in 1971, Kyiv’s Zenit stadium where the events took place was renamed in honor of FC Start.
The fall of the Soviet Union allowed for deeper research in the archives. In 2001, Andy Dougan came out with a well-documented book about the events: Dynamo: Defending the Honour of Kiev. But legends are hard to overcome. Even Dougan felt it necessary to fill in certain lacunas with unverifiable conjecture. The inquiries have not ceased, and the most recent ones refute the involvement of the SS in the match and point to other contests in which the Germans lost without killing anyone in response. These versions don’t dismiss the murder of the four players, but position it in relation to the fate shared by many other prisoners of war. Even so, there is no doubt that a match was played, and that the scoreline ended 5–3 in favor of the Ukrainians. For a multitude of reasons, the game has been inscribed into collective memory.
The human species has a mysterious need to believe certain things that hover at the edge of verifiability. “The Death Match” is one of them.
Among all the details, true or false, that have been added to this story, here’s the one I like most: The meeting’s most eye-catching play wasn’t a goal. Newcomer Alexei Klimenko managed to elude Flakelf’s entire defense to arrive in the box—however, instead of rolling the ball into the net, he kicked it with graceful indifference back toward the center circle.
The story spread from one mouth to another, repeated by people who wanted to believe it. According to the most persistent version, the Nazis couldn’t stand the deliberately missed goal, and this is why the team’s youngest player was one of the three put to death in Syrets, shot behind the ear.
Even if the act never occurred on the field, it deserves to persist in our imagination. Football can’t afford to lose the fearless play attributed to Klimenko. Alone in front of the goal, the virtuoso showed his executioners he was nothing like them. In an act of dignified repudiation, he granted the pardon he would never be given in return.
Translated by Francisco Cantú
