Dutch ace adds strange tale to an already murky history

Until now, it had widely been assumed that Johan Cruyff, in spite of being the most exciting player in the world at the time, missed the 1978 World Cup in Argentina as a protest against that country’s odious torture-happy dictatorship. Speaking on Catalan radio this morning, however, he revealed that a strange incident in 1978 helped make his mind up.

He said that a number of men broke into his home in Barcelona, where he was playing at the time, threatened him and his wife with shotguns in front of their children and tied them to chairs. His wife, however, managed to escape, as did Cruyff before the clearly incompetent kidnappers