As a kid, all he ever wanted was to one day play for his country. He did just that and
became a real Colombian hero. He was one of the best defenders in the world, but after
scoring a goal in the 1994 World Cup in the USA, he went back home and met with a hail of bullets.
This is the story of Andrés Escobar, Colombia’s much-loved number two.
Before we get into the sad and frankly unbelievable tale, let’s just get one
thing straight. Football, soccer, soccer, football, which one is it? We’ve already used
both terms. Much of the world gets peeved when they hear Americans say soccer, but those people
should hold back with their complaining. The USA did NOT invent the word soccer.
The British did. It comes from association football. The English first called it “assoc”
and then “assoccer” and then “soccer”. The word has got nothing at all to do with so-called
American ignorance or arrogance. We hope that clears things up.
Andrés Escobar, “The Gentlemen of Football”, the man who has gone down in history not
just as an amazing football player, but the guy that scored the “deadly goal.”
He cut his teeth like most football players playing on the streets,
putting down two jackets for goalposts at each side and going for it for hours on end with a
bunch of other kids. But Andres was special, and that soon came to the attention of scouts.
When he was coming up as a player, people outside of Colombia rarely heard anything
about the country if it wasn’t about drugs or violence, headed by a man who would become famous,
one Pablo Escobar. Andres and he weren’t related, but they’d meet one day.
Pablo Escobar was also loved by many, mostly the people whose lives were a constant struggle
in a country where the wealth wasn’t exactly distributed even close to evenly.
Pablo actually built the football pitches where many future stars started playing.
What’s quite amazing is that he actually owned the country’s best team, Atlético Nacional.
Sure, he loved the game and he supported it in many positive ways, but he also used that
team to launder untold amounts of drug money. Other cartels, following Escobar,
bought their own teams, too. Football and crime weren’t too different from one another,
a matter of importance for today’s show. Now we come back to the other Escobar.
Andres started his professional career with Pablo’s team, Atlético Nacional. He then went
to play in Switzerland and later returned to his home country to play for Nacional again.
He became captain of the national team and an outstanding captain he was.
But Andres also tried his best to clean up the image of Colombian soccer.
He wasn’t just a gentleman on the pitch, he was a spokesperson for the game in general.
That might not have put him in Pablo’s good books, nor any of the other cartels’.
He played for the national team since he was in his early 20s in the late 1980s. He helped
the national team qualify to play in the 1990 World Cup, at a time when Colombia was seen
as a bit of a backwater team on a continent that had the likes of Brazil and Argentina.
He was seen as an indomitable player, hence he also got the name “The Immortal Number 2”. A
rather striking epithet when you consider what happened to him at such a young age.
When he was 27 he was called up to play in the next world cup. That was the 1994 FIFA World Cup
held in the new home of the word soccer, the United States. At this time, Colombia was no
longer seen as a backwater team. They played with verve, with style, and were a pleasure to watch.
In the qualifying stages before the finals, they’d come top of their group,
but something else they did was nothing short of spectacular. They beat Argentina twice in the
qualifying games, 2-1 and 0-5. No one had ever seen anything like it. Argentina was runner-up
in the previous world cup and the winner in the world cup before that. David had become a Goliath.
That’s one reason everyone couldn’t wait to watch their games in the US.
One of the greatest players ever to grace football fields with his studs, Pele,
even said Colombia might win the entire tournament.
When Pele talked about football, people listened. He told the world that if Colombia
didn’t win the cup, they should at least get to the semi-finals. They were that good, possibly
as good as Brazil. The trouble is, when you say things like, some people just think about money.
It was said drug cartels in Colombia put a ton of money on Colombia to win. Pablo Escobar was killed
in 1993, but that didn’t mean the war on drugs was over and the Colombia cartels just packed up and
started stacking shelves at the local supermarket. It meant a power vacuum and it meant
violence. Things changed after Pablo’s demise, but the cartels weren’t any less
vicious once he’d met his end on a hot tin roof. So, in 1994 when the world cup finals came around
again there was a violent turf war in Colombia. The king was dead, but blood flowed through the
streets where the children kicked their footballs. All the people of the country wanted that year
was to ignore all the violence and watch the beautiful game played by their now great team.
Tensions were really, really high, as were expectations, for the team,
for the public, for the betting drug cartels. Colombia played their first game against Romania
in Group A. The date was June 18. Many people had said Americans wouldn’t support this great event,
but they were very wrong. The USA’s world cup shattered attendance records.
In the opening stages, 91,856 people turned up at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to watch the colorful
Colombians take on a very good Romanian team. Romania scored in the 15th minute and then
their amazing player Hagi made it 2-0 in the 34th minute. The heavy betting cartels
were likely shooting bullets into their TVs at this point. But then Colombia got a goal back
through their striker, Valencia. The cartels may have put their smoking guns down at this point.
Romania scored another goal close to the end of the game and that was it. 3-1 Romania. What
didn’t bode well for Colombia is in Romania’s next game they got spanked 4-1 by Switzerland.
The US had already drawn a game with the Swiss, so Colombia wasn’t looking in good shape at all.
Then came the game that changed everything. The United States vs. Colombia. The US, still
not seen as a traditional footballing nation, was the underdog. Colombia really had to win.
Early on the Colombians had a shot kicked off the goal line by the US.
It was an amazing stop. The US, sporting some of the worst hairstyles in modern history,
attacked a lot, too, in what was becoming a very exciting game. It was end-to-end stuff,
as commenters like to say. Then in the 35th minute with the Americans on the attack,
Andres intercepted a crossed ball close to his team’s goal.
He got a bad connection and put the ball into his own net. Devastating can
be the only word. The cartels at this point were probably shooting other people’s TVs.
In Medellin, Andres’ sister was watching the game with her nine-year-old son.
When his uncle made that mistake, the kid said to her, “Mommy, they’re going to kill Andrés.”
She looked at his sweet face and assured him, “No sweetheart, people aren’t killed
for mistakes. Everyone in Colombia loves Andrés’.” It was an unfortunate mistake. And anyway, Escobar
had to make that incept because if he hadn’t the US player next to him would likely have gotten
the ball and scored. He did what he had to do, but the angels at that minute weren’t
smiling down on him. Colombia lost the game 2-1. They won their final game against Switzerland 2-0,
but with only three points they came bottom of their group and didn’t qualify for the rest of
the tournament. An entire nation was in a state of utter despair. This was supposed to be their year.
When he arrived back in Colombia, Andres tried to placate the people of the nation when he wrote an
article in the country’s Bogota’s El Tiempe newspaper. He wrote some wise words, saying:
“Life doesn’t end here. We have to go on. Life cannot end here.
No matter how difficult, we must stand back up.” That sounds a bit serious for a game of football,
but trust us, this loss went right to the heart of the nation. Remember, this was a country that
was being torn apart by violence. Football was the one thing that really gave people some hope.
Andres wrote something then he had no idea would be etched in Colombian history. He said:
“We only have two options: either allow anger to paralyze us and the violence continues,
or we overcome and try our best to help others. It’s our choice. Let us please maintain respect.
My warmest regards to everyone. It’s been a most amazing and rare experience. We’ll see each
other again soon because life does not end here.” The climate of fear at the time was so much that
many people advised Andres to keep his head down for a while as someone might want to hurt him.
He didn’t listen. Not because he was arrogant, because he didn’t want to show weakness and let
the scourge of the nation think he was scared. His coach warned him not to go out for a while,
but Andres was determined not to let fear win. He said to the coach,
“No, I must show my face to my people.” July 1, less than two weeks after his own goal,
Andres went out with some friends for a drink. First, they hit some bars in the El Poblado
neighborhood of Medellín. Then, after midnight passed, they headed to the El Indio nightclub.
At around 3 am, Andres was sitting in his car in the car park when some guys walked
up to him. An argument started when the men insulted him for scoring that own goal.
Always the fighter, Andres didn’t back down. And then came a sound which was too familiar
to the people of Colombia: Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang, and more bangs.
A witness later said, “All of a sudden, we heard gunfire, and then Escobar was on the ground,
groaning and clutching his chest.” He had 6 bullet holes in him.
He had no chance. It was reported that after every shot the assailant had shouted “Goal”
in the same excited pitch that South American football commentators are famous for.
Just before the assailants left in a Toyota truck, one of the men hissed, “Thanks for the auto-goal,
you son of a…” You know the last word. At first, people said this wasn’t an argument
that had gotten out of hand. Police said, “This wasn't spontaneous violence. It was an execution.”
After that, all the players on the team had to walk around with bodyguards.
The coach, having done his crying, said, “Much to our disgrace, Andres will go down in posterity as
the symbol of the internecine violence that remains the country's greatest challenge.”
Colombia mourned. The world pitied the people of that country for having to put up with this.
The world cup, for a brief moment, stopped and held a minute of silence for Andres. Later,
120,000 people attended his funeral. But who were the killers? Why did
they do it? Could the cartels be really that brutal over football?
Pablo Escobar, with his respect for the game, would have spun in his grave on hearing his
namesake had been murdered over an own goal. He might have had thousands killed, including
hundreds of police and judges and politicians, but he loved football. He would never have sullied
the great game with an innocent man’s blood. The two Escobar’s actually met, which Andres
wasn’t exactly over the moon about. He once told his sister, “Maria, I don’t want to go but I have
no choice.” Then Pablo was dead, and a kind of anti-Escobar cartel came to power. These guys
weren’t so much in love with football but in love with what they could gain from football.
An expert of the cartels said, “The boss was dead, so everyone became their own boss.
Pablo had prohibited kidnappings. He ran the underworld with complete order. Anything
illegal, you asked for Pablo’s permission.” Now there was chaos. Even the Colombian coach
knew this. He told The Guardian newspaper: “When Pablo Escobar died, the earth shook,
and the wind cried ‘Pablo Escobar!’ As of that moment, you had to be on guard at all times.
You couldn’t trust anyone. Even a policeman could be good or evil.”
In short, this was a bad time to score an own goal. No one could protect Andres.
But why it happened is also a bit of a mystery. One story says that brothers Pedro and Juan
Gallón, former traffickers with Pablo Escobar who’d gone over to another cartel, had committed
the crime. This story goes that they’d made a massive bet on the game and obviously lost.
They’d paid a bodyguard, Humberto Castro Muñoz, to kill Andres.
The Gallon brothers had approached the prosecutors’ office after the murder with
three million dollars in their hands. They said, here, take this money, and don’t say we did it,
blame it all on the bodyguard. The bodyguard then admitted he’d done it and no one had told him to.
Some people still believe this is true, because the bodyguard only served 11 years in prison,
a very short sentence for murdering one of the country’s most-cherished people. The Gallons
never served a day in prison, even though they were almost certainly there on the night. They
were the ones with the power. A bodyguard would have not dared make such a decision on his own.
Then there’s another story. It goes that the Gallon brothers did get into an argument with
Andres, but they hadn’t planned to kill him in revenge for his own goal
and the fact they lost money. Andres had simply returned insults and those
guys weren’t the kind of people you insulted. That’s’ what a former hitman for Pablo Escobar
said happened. This guy, Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, aka, Popeye, killed over 300 people for
Escobar. He later became a bit of a celebrity killer and then died in 2020 from cancer.
But before he died, he said he knew exactly what had happened that night.
He said it was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He explained:
“Andrés’s mistake was talking back to those guys. The Gallóns’ egos were so
inflated after taking down Pablo Escobar, they weren’t going to allow someone to talk back,
not even Andrés. It had nothing to do with betting; it was a fight, that’s all.”
As Andres said right after the game, words that he had no idea were to become
his closing speech to the world: Life goes on and people have to keep trying to be positive,
which is exactly what the people of Colombia did. Sure, there are still drug cartels in the country
and there is still drug-related violence, but it’s nothing like the past. The problem, though,
is still all about the three Cs. As long as there is Consumption, much of it in the USA, there will
always be Cocaine production, and as long as it remains illegal, there will always be Cartels. The
money is just too good not to risk your life for. But football will outlive drug wars and violence.
Andres Escobar understood that very well. Now you need to watch “How Pablo Escobar Spent
His Billions.” Or, have a look at “El Chapo Versus Pablo Escobar - How Do They Compare?”