Buenos Dias, Argentina

Succumbing (happily) to a case of World Cup fever

The affliction smites countless millions around the globe every four years, come what may. Duration of the attack: 25 days at its full-blown stage, preceded by weeks of increasingly restless intensity. The symptoms: curious declines in national productivity, chronic absenteeism, peripatesis, extraordinary outbursts of chauvinistic expression. The cure: absolutely none. The malady is World Cup fever, and as teams from 16 nations* descended on host country Argentina last week for this year's play-off for world soccer supremacy, North Americans were more or less on the sidelines: a large portion of humanity was preparing for its ultimate soccer kicks.

Frenzy over football--the sport's name outside the U.S. and Canada--has been building for two years, as 104 national teams battled through 251 games to select the finalists. The U.S., a member of the sponsoring Federation Internationale de Football Association since 1913, was eliminated late in 1976. But as this week's opening ceremonies loomed, and some 20,000 soccer fanatics and journalists (4,000 will cover the event) began arriving in Buenos Aires, World Cup fever reached its quadrennial pitch.

In West Germany, home of the defending World Cup champions, one of the most popular songs on the hit parade is a ditty called Buenos Dias, Argentina. It features the 22 members of the German national team themselves, and despite the fact that it is, well, awful, the record is expected to sell a million copies by kickoff time. Some 5,000 German fans had bought tickets for the World Cup event at prices ranging from $200 to $333 per seat, and were cheerfully anteing up as much as $3,000 each for air fare and accommodations besides. German television networks flew over 14 tons of equipment for broadcast of Cup play and planned to supply more than 114 hours of coverage. Local television sales have been booming for months; some businessmen expected that final sales figures for the first quarter of this year would show a 55% increase over those of 1977. Worldwide, as many as 1.5 billion people may watch some portion of the Cup play--the largest television audience since the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

In Poland, university students anguished over the fact that their final exams fall exactly in the weeks of the Cup series. State-run retail enterprises took the unusual step of advertising color-TV sets in major newspapers. Price: $520 in hard-to-come-by hard currency, the equivalent of more than three months' wages for the average citizen. The event even moved the political weekly Polityka to a rare spoof on the Communist Manifesto. Cracked an editorial: "The specter of football is haunting Poland."

The fanatically partisan fans of Britain's four national teams (representing England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) have all turned Scottish for a month, since the Highlanders are the only United Kingdom squad in the Cup finals. At Westminster, M.P.s were forced to break with a tradition of holding parliamentary by-elections on Thursdays, when one at Hamilton, near Glasgow, conflicted with World Cup opening ceremonies. Faced with a $2,500 airfare to Argentina, a number of frugal Scottish supporters flew to New York City and hitchhiked south, and at least two made the trip on bicycles.

In Brazil, an economic columnist complained that "it seems that there are only eleven important people in the world"--the Brazilian team members. Estimates of the games' cost to Brazil's G.N.P. in lost production ranged up to $2 billion. Auto industry workers were negotiating with manufacturers for afternoons off during the World Cup series, to be made up later.

All was not merely high spirits, however. The choice of Argentina as the World Cup venue, a decision made in 1966, has drawn strong criticism from human rights activists. One reason: the widespread operation in Argentina of rightwing death squads searching for members of the left-wing Montoneros terrorist units that have plagued the country for the past eight years. Amnesty International has launched a campaign against alleged torture used by government officials on Argentine political prisoners, and is backed by, among others, the West German Protestant Church. Anti-Argentina protesters in France bombed a travel agency offering World Cup tours. An assailant unsuccessfully attempted to kidnap Michel Hidalgo, the French team's manager. Nor was such violence by European protesters the only source of worry. West German officials, concerned about possible left-wing terrorism during the series, and mindful of the 1972 Olympic massacre at Munich, insisted on sending with their squad twelve members of the GSG-9 anti-terrorist commando unit that freed 86 skyjacked hostages at Mogadishu Airport last October.

The Argentines are all too aware of the possibilities for terrorist violence during the World Cup. In August 1976, as he was on his way to explain at a press conference the workings of the Cup organizing committee, which he had been chosen to head, retired Argentine Army General Omar Actis was ambushed and machine-gunned by Montoneros guerrillas. Montoneros members are known to be discussing the fomenting of demonstrations during the series, though they are also thought by most authorities to have decided that violence in the soccer stadiums themselves (the games will be played at six sites prior to the finals) would be counterproductive.

The military government of Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla is banking heavily on the World Cup as a means of burnishing the country's international image. Argentina has invested some $700 million in building the soccer stadiums, refurbishing airports and repairing local highways. Meanwhile, the Argentine military is winning its war of extermination with terrorists, despite the stubborn remnant of Montoneros. To counter its police-state image, the government has reduced its intended security allotment of 5,000 police and soldiers for Buenos Aires to 1,000.

All of which has provided no comfort for Argentina's pre-eminent master of poetry and prose, Jorge Luis Borges. Appalled at the prospect of weeks of soccer mania, he says he is leaving Buenos Aires for the World Cup duration. Usually a staunch Anglophile, Borges has even turned against the British. Why? "They have introduced stupidities such as football."

* Argentina. Austria, Brazil, France, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Scotland. Spain. Sweden, Tunisia, West Germany. At the start of the series, the three teams most favored to win the Cup were West Germany, Brazil and Argentina.

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