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This piece has been updated as part of our Euro 2024 coverage, having been first published in 2022.
In the final round of group matches today (Wednesday), if Slovakia vs Romania ends in a draw, both will be guaranteed a top-three finish in Group E, where all four sides currently have three points, and progression to the knockout stages. However, both managers have stated their teams will try to win the match in Frankfurt, and so the group.
The journey in search of some answers takes us to a quiet piece of suburbia on the edges of Dundee, on Scotland’s east coast, and a row of neatly-kept bungalows with pebble-dashed walls and well-nurtured gardens.
Bob Valentine opens the front door, apologises that a box containing his new lawnmower is blocking the way, and invites The Athletic into a front room where there is a signed plate from Pele in a display cabinet of treasured football possessions.
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It is more than 30 years since Valentine called time on his refereeing career, but it does not need long in his company to realise the memories from June 25, 1982, are seared into his mind. The story has never gone cold. What unfolded at the El Molinon stadium, in the northern Spanish city of Gijon, will always be with him.
“It changed football forever,” Valentine says. “What happened that day embarrassed the organisers of the World Cup so badly they changed the rules to make sure it could never happen. They couldn’t risk putting on another game that was remembered as so notorious.”
Every student of World Cup scandal has heard about the game that has gone down in history as The Disgrace Of Gijon.
It was an orchestrated act of theft involving the national teams West Germany and neighbour Austria and a swindle that still has the capacity to invoke feelings of anger and shame for anyone who ever wanted to believe in the so-called Beautiful Game.
What is not so well known is that the referee that day was a Scotsman taking charge of his first ever World Cup finals match.
“We were about 20 minutes in before I started getting a bad feeling,” Valentine, who was that ref, says. “I started thinking, ‘There’s not much tackling taking place here, you know’. Then one guy got over the halfway line, stopped with the ball and sent it all the way back to his goalkeeper. Instead of putting it into the opposition box, he played it backwards. That was the moment when I realised something was wrong.”
These were the days when the final group-stage matches of football tournaments did not have to be played simultaneously. This was the last fixture, and that meant they knew all the different permutations to qualify. The two teams had worked out that a 1-0 win for the Germans would be enough for them both to progress, at the expense of Algeria.
Horst Hrubesch opened the scoring after 11 minutes and, at that stage, there was at least a semblance of competition and drama. But it quickly became clear it was all a deception.
The remainder of the match the action was so pedestrian it became known as the Nichtangriffspakt von Gijon — the non-aggressive pact of Gijon. It was a carve-up. Others might simply call it match-fixing, in its most naked form.
“As soon as the goal went in, it was obvious it was going to be a no-contest,” says Valentine. “There was the odd foul — well, very odd — but mostly they would just keep the ball for a few passes, then the other team had the ball for a little while. No one was running. There was barely a tackle. My entire game was spent around the centre circle. The ball never went into the penalty area. You can find it on the internet.
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“You can see why they were booed off at the final whistle.”
The footage is, indeed, shocking.
It was a sham played out in front of 41,000 spectators, who became increasingly irate at the farcical scenes. Loud, indignant whistles filled the air. There were chants of “fuera, fuera” (“out, out”). One German supporter burned his flag. When the television cameras turned on the crowd, white handkerchiefs were being waved in protest.
Eberhard Stanjek, commentating on German television, sounded close to tears. One Austrian commentator told viewers to turn off their sets and refused to speak for the game’s last 30 minutes.
On ITV in the UK, meanwhile, Hugh Johns sounded like he had just seen an elderly lady being robbed of her handbag. “Breitner, for Breigel, for Stielike… names that roll off my tongue at the moment and leave a nasty, nasty taste.
“Quality players who should all be put in the book of referee Bob Valentine for bringing the game into disrepute. This is one of the most disgraceful international matches I’ve ever seen…
“This crowd is disgusted that West Germany could come here and win so gently, so easily, in a canter, allowed to by an Austria side who never got into anything approaching second gear, let alone top gear.”
Was Johns right? Should Valentine have reached for his pocket and started to book the players who had contrived to play at the pace of a seniors’ walking-football match? Should the referee have refused to tolerate the snail’s pace of the game?
Benali Sekkal, then president of the Algerian Soccer Federation, called it “scandalous and immoral”, and said he had lodged a complaint with FIFA about Valentine as well as the two teams.
Four decades on, Valentine sounds bemused by that. “There were people saying, ‘Both teams should be suspended, the referee should be suspended,’ the whole caboodle. But it wasn’t my job to tell the players what to do. You can’t tell football players, ‘You need to run harder, you need to tackle him, you need to try harder to get a goal’. You can’t stop a boxing match and say, ‘Look, you two need to punch each other a bit harder’. So, much to the embarrassment of the organisation, the game went on.
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“I will be honest with you: my only concern was that the game finished without any major incident and that I got out of there safely. There were 8,000 Algeria fans with tickets, because they wanted to be there on the night their country qualified for the next round. They knew what was going on. They were holding up bank notes and pushing them through the gaps in the fences. They were trying to get over the fences onto the pitch. The police were trying to keep them back.
“I was worried that, if they got past the police, the game might be abandoned. A game that finished poorly was better, in my opinion, than a game that didn’t finish at all.”
Who could not feel sorry for Algeria? They had won two of their three group matches, including a 2-1 defeat of the Germans that had been the shock of the tournament. Everything was set up for the final fixture. A draw or a win for Austria would have meant West Germany being knocked out and Algeria going through.
But the players knew the maths. So, too, presumably did Jupp Derwall, the West German coach, and Austria’s co-managers, George Schmidt and Felix Latzske. As Peter Seddon wrote in The World Cup’s Strangest Moments: “The conundrum didn’t fool Jupp and Georg. German beer and Austrian apfelstrudel went very well together that night.”
“You have to feel the coaches were to blame,” says Valentine. “They were on the sidelines and it was for them, not me, to tell their players, ‘Come on!’. None of the players even looked embarrassed. They set out to do it. And they did it, as simple as that. It was plain for everybody to see.”
Willi Schulz, a former West Germany international, branded the German-Austrian collaborators as “gangsters”. Famously, the Gijon-published newspaper El Comercio ran its match report in the crime section not on the sports pages. “Shame On You!”, read the headline of Bild, the biggest-selling German tabloid newspaper.
The gangsters, however, were unapologetic. When fans gathered outside the Germans’ hotel to hurl eggs and shout abuse, the players responded by throwing water bombs from their balconies.
Harald Schumacher, their goalkeeper who became infamous later in that same World Cup (we’ll come to that), was asked about it some years later and replied with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “I saved everything I had to save. Two balls came my way; one backpass and one throw-in. What should I have done? Run up front and throw myself on the ball?”.
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Hans Tschak, head of the Austrian delegation, did not seem too contrite, either. “Naturally, today’s game was played tactically. But if 10,000 ‘sons of the desert’ here in the stadium want to trigger a scandal because of this, it just goes to show that they have too few schools. Some sheikh comes out of an oasis, is allowed to get a sniff of World Cup air after 300 years and thinks he’s entitled to open his gob.” Charming, indeed.
Now in his eighties, Valentine restricts himself these days to playing bowls for Fairfield’s seniors in the local Angus championships. The home stadiums of Dundee FC and Dundee United are just a few minutes’ walk away and he remembers more innocent times when it was deemed perfectly acceptable for him to referee his area clubs. He was even in charge of the 1980 Scottish League Cup final between the two — played at Dens Park, Dundee’s home ground.
“I walked to the final, there and back,” he reminisces. “When I was growing up, I used to watch one team on Saturday, then the other team the following week (as they played home games on alternating weekends).
“It was different back then. Nowadays.. if you walk 100 yards up the road (from his house), there are four (public) park pitches, and you should hear the abuse the referees get. There have been instances of players scratching the referees’ cars with keys or letting their tyres down.”
Valentine knows there are some who criticise him for The Disgrace Of Gijon, but he says he lets it wash over him. He points out he was appointed to referee a second-group-stage game between Poland and the Soviet Union in Barcelona nine days later, which he took as validation that FIFA, organiser of the World Cup and global football’s governing body, did not hold him responsible.
Then, in West Germany’s semi-final against France, Valentine ran the line for a match that will always be remembered for Schumacher nearly taking opponent Patrick Battiston’s head clean off its shoulders and escaping without even a booking (Schumacher would later remark, when he found out Battiston had lost two teeth, that, “There’s no compassion amongst professionals … tell him I’ll pay for the crowns”).
“Everything I did in that tournament, there was some incident,” says Valentine. “Even now, there will be people who come up to me to ask about the game in Gijon. I tell them it was shameful and there was nothing I could do about it. My job was to apply the rules. Everything that happened on the field was correct. It was shameful, but it was correct.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)