Fanning the Flames

Violence before and after three qualification matches for the 1970 FIFA World Cup between El Salvador and Honduras allegedly ‘triggered’ an armed conflict many call the ‘Soccer War’. Despite numerous refutations, the Soccer War narrative endures within both popular and scholarly histories of soccer. Although many have sought to disprove the falsehood, virtually none have noted the endurance of this seductive story. Although many have suggested alternative explanations for the war, none have presented a detailed, process-based assessment of the role of the matches. This article contributes to the questioning of this narrative by filling these two gaps. After providing evidence of the ongoing Soccer War mythology, the paper offers a detailed historical reconstruction of the events leading to the so-called ‘Soccer War’, falsifying the claim that the matches triggered the war. This process-tracing is based on a variety of primary sources, including US Office of the Historian materials, CIA documents, UK National Archives, newspaper archives and journalistic literature, military memoirs, and soccer actors’ interpretations of the conflict. The conclusion is simple: the after-match violence neither started the chain of events that led to war, nor did it cause the decision to go to war

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