THE WORLD CUP : With the Start Six Days Away in Mexico, Emotions and Hype, but Not Pele, Prevail

It began in the most unlikely of places--Nicosia on the island of Cyprus being somewhat off the beaten track as far as international sport is concerned. Nevertheless, it was there on the afternoon of May 2, 1984, that the 1986 World Cup officially got under way.

Austria’s 2-1 victory over Cyprus that day was of little significance, for neither team advanced much further. But it did mark the beginning, the first qualifying match on the long trail leading to Mexico.

Now, that trail is reaching its end. The World Cup finals, international soccer’s quadrennial showcase, begin next weekend, with Italy meeting Bulgaria in the opening game in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium at noon on Saturday.

In all, the monthlong tournament will feature 52 games played in 12 stadiums in nine Mexican cities, capped by the championship match on June 29. Italy, as defending champion, and Mexico, as the host country, were automatic qualifiers. The other 22 teams are all that remain of the original 111-nation field after 308 qualifying games played worldwide.

The 24 finalists are an exclusive group, with the contenders including all six previous champions--Italy (1934, 1938 and 1982), Brazil (1958, 1962, 1970), West Germany (1954, 1974), Uruguay (1930, 1950), England (1966) and Argentina (1978).

What they all will be battling for is a 14-inch, 18-karat gold statuette weighing just over 10 pounds and symbolizing world soccer supremacy.

But the World Cup is far more than simply a tournament. For millions of soccer fans around the world, it is the ultimate sports spectacle, one that arouses passions on an unprecedented scale.

To get an idea of just what the World Cup is all about, the scrutiny it receives and the kind of emotions it stirs, take a look at what has happened in just the last two weeks:

--In Colombia, where the Argentine team was doing high-altitude training, a 28-year-old fan shot himself to death because he was unable to attend a warmup game featuring Argentine star Diego Maradona.

--When Argentina reached Mexico City a few days later, becoming the first foreign contingent to arrive, a near riot resulted at the airport because authorities had failed to anticipate the massive media and fan turnout that greeted the team. Security forces used rifle butts to hold fans back.

--The Italian team, fearing similar scenes, sidestepped an airport news conference and subsequently was lambasted in the Mexican press. “They fled like criminals,” wrote one newspaper. “Italy, champion of the world but without manners,” wrote another. The next day, Enzo Bearzot, Italy’s coach, got into a shouting match with reporters as a result of the articles.

--The Soviet Union fired Coach Eduard Malofeyev on the eve of the team’s departure for Mexico. The reason given was unhappiness over the squad’s lackluster performance in warmup games. All Malofeyev had done was qualify the team for the finals.

--With Brazil beset by internal turmoil and plagued by injuries, Pele, at age 45, volunteered to come to his country’s rescue. Although he has not played competitively since 1977, Pele said he believes he is capable of contributing at least 45 minutes a game. His offer was declined by Coach Tele Santana, and Pele will have to content himself by doing Brazilian television commentary instead.

--Worried about the continual presence of more than a dozen West German television crews at each of his team’s practice sessions in Toluca, Uruguayan Coach Omar Boras demanded a more private training facility away from the camera’s prying eye. Boras did not come out and directly accuse the West Germans of spying, but West Germany and Uruguay do play in the same group in the first round.

--Instead of worrying about the Uruguayans, the West Germans appeared more bothered by the quality of Mexico’s drinking water. The team brought in an expert on microbes and installed a second water-purifying unit at its hotel in Morelia. Earlier, the Brazilian team’s cook had been sidelined by the problem.

--If you can’t drink the water, at least there’s the beer. Well, maybe not. The head of the Mexican Medical Society called for a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages in the 12 World Cup stadiums, saying the uncontrolled sale of beer could lead to violent behavior of an “incalculable” dimension. “The reaction that alcohol combined with the tension of a soccer game provokes in the body has managed to cause hundreds of deaths in the stadiums of the world,” Jorge Barrera Vazquez said, apparently making free use of his figures for the sake of effect.

--Since most of the World Cup matches are scheduled to start at noon, a Roman Catholic priest in Mexico City said he and his congregation had decided to change the time of Sunday Mass from noon to 8 a.m. for those holding tickets to games and to 10 a.m. for those watching on television. Had he not done so, he said, “the people would not concentrate on the church.”

--When tournament organizers said the Moroccan team would have heavy security, they meant it. Two army tanks escorted the team to its training site near the northern city of Monterrey. That prompted a local newspaper to caption its photograph: “This is not Libya, but our city.”

--Joao Havelange, the Brazilian president of FIFA, world soccer’s ruling body, issued one of the more extreme, if not self-serving, pre-World Cup statements when, in response to a question on his own personal safety, he said: “If I were a victim of some terrorist action during the championship, filling my duty at the head of FIFA, I would die with pleasure.” Havelange is running for re-election as FIFA president.

Bearing in mind that the tournament does not begin for another six days and will last for 30, it takes little imagination to see that all of this is just a small sample of what lies ahead. If the previous 12 World Cups are anything to go by, Mexico ’86 will provide mo1919230068controversy to satisfy even the most avid soccer fan.

Whether it will provide soccer of a quality that will lift the sport out of its current doldrums is another matter. The hope, however, is that the matches will live up to the hype.

Mexico was not the original choice to play host to the 1986 tournament, that honor having been given to Colombia. But when economic difficulties forced the South American nation to reluctantly bow out, Mexico was awarded the event.

At the time, it seemed like a good idea. Mexico had been the site of the 1970 World Cup and, despite fears that the heat and the effects of playing at high altitude would ruin the tournament, it proved to be one of the most successful in terms of the quality of soccer played.

Sixteen years later, heat and altitude factors still trouble competing teams, especially those from Europe, but there are other, more serious problems that could prove too difficult to overcome.

The first and most troublesome is the ruinous state of the economy in Mexico economy, where runaway inflation has caused the value of the peso to plummet. The current exchange rate is 541 pesos to the dollar, but that figure fluctuates daily.

What this has meant in relation to the World Cup is that tickets have been priced far beyond the reach of most Mexican fans. Further complicating matters is that until recently, tournament organizers insisted on selling tickets for a series of games rather than for individual matches, thus making them even more difficult for fans to afford.

For example, the cheapest set of tickets to attend the six games scheduled for Irapuato and Leon, roughly 200 miles north of Mexico City, is $109. The minimum wage in Mexico, however, is $3.15 a day, meaning that it is all but impossible for many to even dream of attending.

In the industrial city of Monterrey, poor ticket sales have caused tournament organizers to agree to provide city employees with tickets and have the cost taken from their paychecks over a period of weeks or even months.

Naturally, prestige matches such as Saturday’s opener, the semifinals and final have long been sold out, but many other games are nowhere close to sellouts. According to the most recent figures, only about two-thirds of all tickets have been sold, a far cry from Spain in 1982, when ticket sales surpassed 82%.

Another factor that has held down sales, especially abroad, is safety. Last September’s devastating earthquakes in Mexico City, where between 8,000 and 10,000 people died and thousands of others were left homeless, did little to help matters.

Fear of further earthquakes, coupled with a fear of traveling because of the specter of terrorist incidents, has caused many would-be World Cup visitors to rethink their plans. Estimates on the number of foreign tourists the World Cup will lure have ranged from 20,000 to 60,000, but lately, the second figure is not being heard much.

The Mexican government, realizing that a successful World Cup could help revive the country’s slumping tourist industry, is trying to assure that the tournament will pass without an untoward incident. To say that security is tight would be an understatement. Already, a security force of 50,000, including police and Mexican army personnel, has been deployed throughout the nine World Cup cities. French experts were called in to advise Mexican officials on methods of thwarting terrorists who might want to use the World Cup as a stage. Although no official figures have been released, press estimates that the amount spent on security alone has topped $6 million have not been challenged.

There has been a fear expressed in some quarters that this massive security force could be used to quell any signs of social unrest. Opposition political parties in Mexico have been making much of the attention being lavished on the World Cup while thousands remain homeless, living either in cardboard shacks or on the street as a result of the earthquakes and the shattered economy.

At the demonstrations that are almost a way of life in Mexico City, slogans denouncing the World Cup have become commonplace, the protesters realizing that this brings quick media attention.

Still, all is not negative. Most Mexican soccer fans wish the World Cup well, even if their only chance of seeing a match is on television.

In order to further boost the drama leading to the June 29 final, organizers this time around have returned to a knockout system starting in the second round, replacing the league system used in Spain four years ago.

On Dec. 15 at an elaborately staged drawing held in Mexico City, the 24 nations were divided into six groups of four teams each, and each group was assigned a site or sites at which to play its first-round games.

The composition of the groups and the sites are as follows:

Group A (Mexico City and Puebla): Italy, Argentina, Bulgaria, South Korea.

Group B (Mexico City and Toluca): Mexico, Paraguay, Belgium, Iraq.

Group C (Leon and Irapuato): France, Soviet Union, Hungary, Canada.

Group D (Guadalajara): Brazil, Spain, Northern Ireland, Algeria.

Group E (Queretaro and Nezahualcoyotl): West Germany, Uruguay, Denmark, Scotland.

Group F (Monterrey): England, Poland, Portugal, Morocco.

Each team will play the others in its group, with a victory being worth two points and a tie one point. The top two teams in each group will advance to the second round, along with the four third-place teams with the best records. Goal differential will be the main tiebreaking criterion.

Once the 24 teams have been reduced to 16, the competition enters its knockout phase, with a single loss eliminating a team from the tournament. The quarterfinals will be played in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Puebla and Monterrey, with the semifinals in Mexico City and Guadalajara and the final at Azteca Stadium in the nation’s capital.

Just which two teams will reach the June 29 championship game has been the subject of debate since the last final, when Italy defeated West Germany, 3-1, in Madrid on July 11, 1982. This year’s tournament is more wide open than any in recent memory, with as many as one-third of the teams viewed as perfectly capable of winning it all.

The oddsmakers have made Brazil their favorite, but not overwhelmingly so. Argentina, Uruguay, Italy, England and Mexico are highly rated, as are France, West Germany and Denmark.

Many observers feel that it will be difficult for a European team to win, given the climatic and geographic conditions. The heat and the altitude, they believe, will be too great a handicap to overcome.

Geoff Hurst, who in 1966 made World Cup history by becoming the only player ever to score a hat trick in the final, in which England beat West Germany, 4-2, is one of many former players who caution against taking conditions in Mexico lightly.

“I found it physically hard to play in Mexico City (during a pre-World Cup tour in 1969) because we hadn’t had the time to acclimatize properly to the heat and altitude,” he recently told British sportswriter Michael Hart.

Added teammate Martin Peters in the same article: “The thing you couldn’t beat was the heat. In the (1970) World Cup we kicked off against Brazil in the middle of the day and it was about 98 degrees. You can adjust to the altitude if you’re out there long enough, but the heat gets to you.”

This time around, most of the 52 games are again beginning at noon Mexican time--a concession to European television--so the European teams can be expected to wilt unless they have prepared adequately.

Then, too, history is on the side of those who say a Latin American team is sure to triumph. No European team has ever won when the World Cup has been played on this side of the Atlantic. In 1930, Uruguay won at home and repeated as champion 20 years later in Brazil. In 1962, Brazil won in Chile and then won again in Mexico in 1970. Argentina kept the streak going by winning at home in 1978.

The reverse has been true in Europe, with Brazil being the only team able to crack the Europeans’ dominance on their own soil, winning the first of its three titles in Sweden in 1958.

The 1986 winner, in all probability, will be the nation whose star shines the brightest. But whether that will be France’s Michel Platini, Argentina’s Maradona, Uruguay’s Enzo Francescoli, Mexico’s Hugo Sanchez or a name yet to burst upon the scene, as Italy’s Paolo Rossi did in 1982, is one of the questions that gives the World Cup its fascination.

That, plus the contrast in styles of play and the ever-present possibility of a giant-killing act by one of the World Cup minnows, helps make the World Cup what it is.

And although the United States yet again failed to qualify--its last success in that feat was in 1950--for once American fans need not feel completely left out. The World Cup will be no farther away than the Americans’ television sets.

In 1984, ABC displayed indifference toward soccer in the L.A. Olympics, even though it was the top-drawing sport with attendance surpassing 1.4 million. That mistake is not being made again.

Viewers will have three choices. NBC will be televising seven games, including the opener, a semifinal and the final. Charlie Jones will do the play-by-play, with analysis by Paul Gardner and added commentary by Ricky Davis. Fifteen games will be shown on ESPN, including both semifinals.

The most extensive (and commercial-free) coverage will be provided by SIN, the Spanish International Network, which will broadcast all 52 matches, most of them live and the remainder on a same-day, tape-delay basis. In the Los Angeles area, KMEX, Channel 34, will be SIN’s signal.