Illusions don’t end, but neither tough luck ends in football. Except in England? By 1975 in England too – hard financial times were more and more noticeable. It was perhaps the first time English championships were no longer considered best in the world, but still England was the only country where lower divisions attracted considerable interest both at home and abroad. Down there sad celebration accured: Blackburn Rovers won the Third Division.
In a way, it was great – the club celebrated its 100 years since foundation with a title. Third division title, though… not much to brag about, if you are supporter of once upon a time glorius club. After all, Blackburn Rovers is one of only three founders of both the Football League and the Premier League (along with Aston Villa and Everton). That was in the 19th century – it was quite some time since Rovers did not know the taste of First Division football: they were relegated in 1966 and at the beginning of 1974-75 season the big dream was promotion to Second Division. Apparaantly, ‘arte’ was gone and only ‘labore’ remained… luckily enough for moving a bit up the tough English scale at their centenary year.
Third row, left to right: John Kenton, Graham Hawkins, Tim Parkin, Roger Jones, Don Martin, Kevin Hird, Mick Wood.
Middle: Andy Burgin, Mick Hickman, Ken Beamish, Graham Oates, Don Fazackerley, Phil Ashworth.
Bottom row: Jimmy Mullen, Pat Hilton, Mick Heaton, Stuart Metcalfe, Bobby Hoy, Mick Higgins.
Naturally, third division clubs have no stars and Blackburn was no exception. May be Derek Fazackerley – named wrongly in my original source as Don – is a club legend of a kind, but even he is better known as a coach, not as a player. They moved up a notch, yet there were 16 more years before Rovers returned to First Division.

It was all Real Madrid this season. Evidently, the influx of Leftists improved the Rightist club – Miljanic was from the dictatorial school of football coaches, but it was familiar approach to his pupils anyway, so nobody complained. He was very good coach too – he moved Breitner permanently to midfield, a brilliant decision, not only enforcing the weaker line of Real, but also utilizing fully the capacity of the player. And Breitner himself was willing, so the potential clash of strong heads was avoided. In fact, Breitner hardly lived up to his quarrelsome reputation in Spain – Maoist he may had been, but he was firstly German and discipline run strongly in his veins. Breitner on the pitch was the opposite of Breitner outside the pitch: on the pitch, he followed orders and tactical schemes. To a point, he proved more valuable than Neeskens, for he had bigger role and covered larger field, playing everything – attacking when attack was needed; defending when extra leg was needed in defense; and dispatching balls to teammates at all time. Netzer was quieter, if that is the world, but he never played to his full ability in Spain – partly, it was his aging. Yet, he was dangerous to ignore and still gave 40-metre long deadly passes at unexpected moments. His very presernce required attention… taking a man from the opposite team out of the game pretty much: keeping an eye on Netzer was idle, but full time job. Real Madrid was taking full advantage of reduced opposition, of course, and ended the season with a double!
It was better squad than the Catalunian one: it had debth. Miguel Angel edged Garcia Remon as number one goalkeepr, but even here the advantage was obvious: Barca really had one good goalie, who was dangerously old (Sadurni). Young defenders were rapidly making names for themselves and already were included in the national team: Camacho, Del Bosque, Jose Luis. Ahead, it was mixture of veterans, experienced strong players, and young talent: Velasquez, Grosso, Pirri, Aguilar. Add vastly talented Carlos Santillana, the brightest young star of Spain. Add Roberto Martinez, a deadly goalscorer. It was deep squad which Miljanic directed well. The Argentine Oscar Mas found himself a hopeless extra at the beginning of the season and returned to his home land, but his departure did not affect Real Madrid at all – the club was not looking that superior for a long, long time, and it looked like a new brilliant era was beginning. Spain first, Europe – next! Brand new great Real Madrid. And Barca – in the dust. Not even a cup final for them… Atletico Madird lost the final against Real Madrid. True, it was goalsless draw and only penalties gave the cup to Real, but – hey! For this team it was only a beginning. Just wait a year. Illusions never end…

Good old Spain was never about Second Division football… let’s oblige. According to the hype, it was about the battles of giants and superstars.
Netzer and Cruyff – the symbols of Primera. Here they are friends… which runs contrary to the fierse reputation of Spanish football and contrary to the legendary hatred between Real and Barcelona.
Well, it was between Barcelona and Madrid – in the news. Dutch or German football? Before the season started it looked like Barcelona was going to rule. Rinus Michels coaching. Cruyff and Neeskens. Lethal. Real Madrid was up to the challenge, of course, but seen slightly less strong – Miljan Miljanic, fresh from good Yugoslavian performance at the World Cup, took the reigns. Netzer and Breitner. It was exciting to speculate on how former Communist guerilla (Miljanic) and current Maoist (Breitner) will get along with Francoist Santiago Bernabeu, but in purely football terms the odds were in Barcelona’s favour. Alas, speculation is one thing; reality – quite another. Michels, Cruyff, and Neeskens were the highest priests of total football, but Barcelona did not play total football – it was more attack oriented brand of the uncromising tough fighting played in Spain. The Dutch superstars fitted surprisingly well in this envirenmont of murderous tackles and full spectrum of dirty tricks, but there was already a change: Cruyff settled in midfield and wasn’t scoring much. To my mind player like Sotil was needed permanently in attack – to score and to open space for the Flying Dutcman – but with the arrival of Neeskens, the Peruvian was permanently benched as a superfluous foreigner. Of course, Neeskens was not bought to keep the bench warm and he played well, but still he found himself playing a bit more defensive role than his familiar attacking roaming. It was not the Dutch, but the Spaniards in Barcelona – as good as they were, they not fantastic. There were problems in attack… problems in defense… the very reasons Cruyff and Neeskens took firm midfield roles and playing in a way below their own potentials. Barcelona finished third…
Just a year ago it looked like the long suffering of Barcelona came at end and new era of endless titles arrived. In 1975 it was back to normal… Barca was not even real challengers, but good only for a bronze medal. Barcelona had to wait another 10 years before becoming again champions. For Cruyff – 1974 was the single year he won the championship of Spain. Very, very little for the best player in the world. And for completion of humiliation, Real Zaragoza finished second – a distant second: 12 points behind the champions. Barcelona was even more remote.

Most of the foreign players in Spain were not international stars, but exotica – and probably the most exotic footballer belonged to Sevilla. Biri Biri. What a name! Straight from adventure novel.
Biri Biri in action.
Of course, Biri Biri is a nickname, but his real name was no less exotic: Alhaji Momodo Nije. And true to adventure books, he hailed from Africa – Gambia, to be precise. Not exactly a country known for its football, so the exotic grows larger and larger… which at the end is not fair to the man. Biri Biri played 5 years for Sevilla – 1973-78 – which is a good testament of his qualities. Perhaps he was not exceptionally gifted player, judging by his checkered career: born 1948 in Banjul, Gambia, he moved from his local club Augustians Football Club to Derby County in 1970. Did not impress Brian Clough and returned home to play for Wallidan Banjul for the next two years. In 1972 went to Denmark – B 1901. So far – nothing much. Sevilla acquired him from the Danes in 1973 and things changed. He played well in Spain and became a cult figure – a section of Sevilla fans call themselves ‘Biris Norte’ after him. In 1978, already aging, he moved again to Denmark and played three seasons for Herfolge Boldklub.
Post-Sevilla Biri Biri – older player, but with more modern kit in Herfolge.
In 1981 he quit European football, returned to Gambia, played 5 more seasons for Wallidan Banjul and finally retired to become a civil cervant. He is considered the all-time best Gambian player. By European standards, his career is less impressive – rather ups and downs, peaking during his spell with Sevilla. However, Sevilla in the 1970s was not the mighty club of nowadays – in 1974-75 Sevilla was still in the Second Division, struggling to get back to Primera after humiliating relegation in 1972.
Biri Biri or not, struggling they were. Successfully, in a way – they clinched promotion, although they did not finish first in Secunda.
The honour went to Real Oviedo.
Winners of Second Division 1974-75: top, left to right: Dujkovic, Lolin, Tensi, Jacquet, Iriarte, Milovan.
First row: Javier, Carrete, Alarcon, Galan, Cortes.
Founded in 1926, Real Oviedo has a place in Spanish football history – it is the first club from the province of Asturias to play in Primera Division: in 1933-34. Alas, historic notability and reality are not the same – Real was mostly bouncing between 1st and 2nd Divisions. Modest club, never winning anything, except Secunda Division. Which they did in the 1974-75 season, climbing again to Primera.
As a squad, more conventional than Sevilla – no Gambians arriving from Denmark here. Instead, the typical Spanish combination of foreigners and oriundi. Two Yugoslavians: Ratomir Dujkovic between the goalposts came from Crvena zvezda (Belgrade) in the summer of 1974. He played 4 matches for Yugoslavia, hardly a big star, but experienced and reliable surely. The curious thing about him is his past: he started as a handball player, eventuallt switching to football. The second is defender, listed here Spanish fashion – only first name: Milovan. This is Milovan Djoric Gvozdenja, also former Crvena zvezda player, who arrived in Oviedo one year before Dujkovic. Djoric played 1 match for Yugoslavia and finished his career immediately after winning Segunda with Oviedo this season – rather yearly retirement, for he was only 30 years old. He became a coach and resurfaced years later again: in 2001 he was the national team coach of the last incarnation of Yugoslavia. His national team spells were brief both as a player and as a coach.
The two oriundi were Paraguayans of no fame: Bravo (not on the picture) and Jacquet. The former, if I am not mistaken, is coaching the national team of Paraguay nowadays.
If there was any other player of note, it was Carrete – he later moved to Valenica and played 2 matches for Spain in 1978.
More or less, Real Oviedo were standard second division team – nothing big and really famous. Good enough to finish above Sevilla, though.

Hype is one thing, closer look – something entirely different. Cruyff, Netzer, Breitner, Neeskens… Real, Barcelona, and Atletico Madrid. Huge façade, but what was hiding beyond? Spain was getting rapidly the best players of the world, right?
Right… 65 foreign players appeared in the 1974-75 championship. Of the 18 First Division clubs, only Athletic Bilbao did not employ any foreigners – this is the peculiar policy of the club, valid to this very day: only Basques can play for Athletic. No foreigners, but no Spaniards too. The exception was amply ‘corrected’ by the foreign players employed by Second Division clubs, including some fairly big names, like the Uruguayan Ramon Esparrago, playing for Sevilla.
Esparrago – from the 1974 World Cup to Second Division.
Esparrago was not alone: the Chilean star Carlos Caszely graced Levante. Surely Spain was something else: what country could afford the luxury of employing World Cup players in the Second Division?
Speaks of overwhelming quality of football, not only of finacial strength.
But let’s make another step: who had the most foreign players? Barcelona, Elche, and Murcia – 6 foreigners each. Barca – fine, who else, if not Barca. Murcia, however, finished last in the table – so money cannot buy success? Ah, Spanish football was so competitive, that was why… But why having 6 foreigners, when under the rules only 2 can be fielded? If having Cruyff and Neeskens, why adding 4 more? What was the point, when they clearly were useless? Now the real mess begins: Spain was robbing everybody else from the best of talent, the big fear and outrage.
Europe was represented by grand total of 9 players. Four of them are already mentioned, so let us see the rest. Two Austrians – Kurt Jara (Valencia) and Tomas Parits (Granada); one more Dutch – Dick van Dijk (Murcia); one West German – Josef Elting (Murcia, goalkeeper); and one Swede – Sanny Aslund (Espanol). Some ‘robbery’… van Dijk was already over the hill. Kurt Jara was the only relatively big name, yet he was not exactly making news in Spain. From the other three, Aslund was kind of promising.
Aslund, aquired from AIK (Stockholm). He lasted only one year in Espanol. As for the ‘big foreign stars’ talk… he played a grand total of 5 matches for Sweden, scoring 2 goals.
Africa was represented by 2 players – Salif Keita (Valencia) from Mali, a major star in France, but now fading and unhappy (Keita complains from racism in Spain to this very day; he moved to Portugal eventually); and Ramos, listed as Moroccan, playing for Espanol. I think there was one more Morrocan with Spanish name in the League as well.
The rest were South Americans, yet, the distribution is suspect: only 2 Brazilians – Becerra (Atletico Madrid) and Mario Marinho Peres (Barcelona). Don’t even ask who was this Becerra guy, but Mario Marinho played at the 1974 World Cup:
Mario Marinho (number 3) for Brazil against Poland at the lost match for the third place in 1974 World Cup.
Barcelona got him after that, a transfer largely unmentioned because of the big hype over Neeskens.
Strange transger, for Mario Marinho, at a glance, looked like firm reserve… the fate of the single Peruvian in Primera – Hugo Sotil, also in Barcelona.
The rest of South Americans were Argentines, Paraguayans, and Uruguayans. Well known stars, naturally… Ayala, Heredia (Atletico Madrid); Santoro (Hercules); Carnevalli and Enrique Wolff (Las Palmas); Mazurkiewicz and Montero Castillo (Granada). Stars… do you know them? Bernardo Cos (Argentina) in Barcelona; Ortiz Aquiro (Argentina) in Espanol; Abel Perez (Paraguay) in Murcia – to give a few names. 13 Paraguayans; 4 Uruguayans; and 33 Argentines – most of them as famous as the already mentioned samples.
There is the myth that Spanish clubs bought largely midfielders and strikers – well, strangely enough 4 foreigners were goalkeepers: Mazurkiewicz, Santoro, Carnevalli, and Elting. Mazurkiewicz, one ot the top 100 goalies of 20th century, appeared only in 2 games this season and departed to South America in the summer of 1975. However, the goalies were proper foreign players and this is puzzling: contrary to mass opinion, Spanish clubs were buying goalies in fairly big numbers.
And yet for all foreign stars at hand, a typical Spanish club looked like this:
Las Palmas 1974-75: top left to right: Carnevalli (Argentina), Noly, Tonono, Roque, Felix, Castellano.
Bottom: Fernandez, Wolff (Argentina), Paez, German, Miguel Angel.
Carnevalli and Wolff played for Argentina at the World Cup 1974, and that was all… wait! Fernandez was also Argentine – three foreigners, despite the rule for fielding only two? Not quite… the mass of South Americans and the big numbers of foreigners in many a club was something else, very difficult not so much to explain, but rather to show. The Spanish Cup provides a helpful hint: no foreigners were allowed to play at this tournament at the time, yet, looking the lines at the final is interesting: no Netzer and Breitner, of course, but Real Madrid had the Argentines Roberto Martinez and Tourino on the pitch. Atletico Madrid was without Ayala and Heredia, but the Brazilian Becerra and the Paraguayan Benegas were on the pitch. And those, who appeared at the final often played along with the absentees, making the number of foreigners bigger than the ofcially permitted.
‘Oriundi’! Most of the South American import were oriundi – with proven Spanish ancestry, which gave them automatic Spanish citizenship. Such a player was domestic, not a foreigner. Oriundi played in Spain during the ban of foreign import and remained the bulk of ‘foreigners’ by 1975 as well, complicating the picture, for in today’s statistics they are most often listed by their orginal nationality. Thus, all those clubs with 5-6 foreign players legally had no more than two – at the end, the real number of foreigners in Spain was much, much smaller than thought. Some are even more complicated cases – the Morrocan born were probably not even oriundi, but repatriated families of ethic Spaniards left from the colonial days.
Looks like the ‘proper’ foreigners were the Europeans and those South Americans, who were already established national players for their country of origin. May be this is the reason why Ladislao Mazurkiewicz played only 2 games for Granada: he was a foreign extra – the club had and played Montero Castillo and Parits. The sorry fate of Hugo Sotil in Barcelona is in the same line: he was superfluous foreign player. Very likely Barcelona bought Mario Marinho with the hope that he will be transformed into oriundi – with his Spanish last name, as it was with Becerra in Atletico Madrid. May be this is the reason why Brazilians were not bought by the barrel: most of them had to remain foreign players. As a whole, the foreign legion in Spain was not at all that impressive and except for sheer numbers, aggravated by the confusing oriundi, there was nothing really to support the claim that Spain was hording all world’s talent, depleting everybody else from quality players. Just take away Cruyff, Neeskens, Netzer, and Breitner and look at the rest – West Germany had larger number of big names than Spain in 1975.

Sunny Spain. Big clubs, big money, big players, big football. What could be better? Spain was constantly in the news after lifting her ban on foreign players – a lot of hype! Not one-sided, though – Spanish football was observed with excitement, envy, and fear. Buying the best players of the world was exciting: Cruyff and Netzer in 1973; Neeskens and Breitner in 1974. It provided constant clash of the best brands of contemporary football in a way. And it was not to be long before all great players in the world concentrated in Spain – was it not the eternal dream of fans? To see the brightest stars in one championship? Of course, everybody outside Spain was envious… and critical. Big Spanish sharks combed every nation, snatching whatever talent appeared. Nobody can compete with their money – hence, they were robbing other countries. With all best players going to Spain other championships were to become poor and alienating fans. The Spanirads were killing football with their greed, not to mention their methods – who can forget the bitter saga of the possible transfer of Gerd Muller to Barcelona in 1973? Even the player complained from the unhealthy pressure. And did they not not buy Neeskens in the middle of the World Cup, thus creating undue tension if the Dutch dressing room when the team had to concentrate on the championship? The Spaniards were ruthless, shameless predators and nobody was safe. Football is not only money, critic said… but money ruled and Spain was the place players found irrestitable.
The big bang of 1973 continued with 1974 big bang: Paul Breitner went to Real Madrid. Johan Neeskens – to Barcelona.
One more flying Dutchman in Barca to confront the mean German Real.
Spain was becoming larger than the world… what better example than the testimonial of former Real Madrid defender Isidro, played in early December, 1974? Big testimonials were traditionally a game between ‘home team’ vs ‘World’s XI’. Traditionally, it was celebration of a great star, honoured by great stars coming from around the globe. Mighty Spain spat on tradition: Isidro was well known member of the great Real of the early 1960s, but hardly a big star – a journeyman, rather. To assemble world’s selection, Spain did not have to place long distance phone calls – the ‘world’ was already playing in Spain; it was enough to get a squad of foreign stars playing in Spanish clubs. Whe else was able to do that? To make a first class testimonial for second-string player, chosing world class players from those playing in the domestic championship?
What a fantastic tribute! It was also ironic and misleading.

Strong were Juventus, but not dominant yet. They won the championship in perhaps the most mediocre year of Italian football, but were no double – the Cup went to Fiorentina. Which was rather ordinary team when compared to Juventus…
Top left to right: Della Martira, Merlo, Guerini, Roggi, Beatrice, Superchi.
Bottom: Casarsa, Antognoni, Caso, Desolati, Pellegrini.
Forth Cup for Fiorentina, but hardly a great squad. Hard workers may be, tough surely, stars – no. But here is a young boy who eventually became instrumental part of the revival of Italian football and of the next generation of great stars – even without names provided, it is not difficult to spot him by following the 1970s rule of thumb: long hair signifies greatness. Giancarlo Antognoni was just a promising youngster in 1975. He was only 21 years old, but already debuted for the national team in 1974. Unfortunately, he was born on April 1 – the Fools Day… may be he will not be anything special, just another empty promise? 1975 was a skeptical year – and Savoldi was the ‘sure’ man of the future, not Antognoni. But that is why we have the Fools Day.