Bad to worse: History of Argentina football: Part 4

The Argentine team, playing at Wembley Stadium in front of over 90,000 didn’t manage to score and England would win the match, after a late goal by Geoff Hurst, and later the whole tournament.

Things got from worse to worse. Juan Carlos Lorenzo left his post shortly after the World Cup in England and a period followed with many coaches lasting only short periods. The results on the field were weak and for the first time Argentina did not qualify for a World Cup.

Argentina qualified for the 1974 World Cup in Germany. After some half-convincing games, they would advance to the second round in the tournament together with Poland from Group 4. By this edition of the World Cup, the format had changed and a second group phase preceded the knockout stage. Argentina didn’t succeed to win any game in their group with the Netherlands, Brazil and East Germany.

The Campeonato Sudamericano had come to a halt after 1967, but was renewed in 1975 and rebranded to Copa América. The first edition of Copa América didn’t become a new success to Argentina that had been drawn in the same group as Brazil. Both Brazil and Argentina won comfortable against Venezuela (in one of the matches Argentina won 11-0, which is their second biggest win ever – the biggest was 12-0 against Ecuador in 1942), but Brazil would win 2-1 and 1-0 in the matches versus Argentina.

In the following year the president Isabel Perón was removed from the power and general Jorge Rafael Videla took over as a result of a military coup. The political situation in Argentine had been unstable even before the coup in 1976 – in 1930 came the first military coup and many governments up to 1976 had been established with the military involved in one way or another. But the 1976 coup have remained the most notorious in Argentine history and it was the beginning of a dark period in the country. Approximately 30,000 people that didn’t support the regime was “disappeared” during this period.