By Joe Sharratt
Watching grainy footage of a swaggering 17-year-old Pele taking host nation Sweden apart with a blistering brace in Brazil’s 5-2 victory in the 1958 World Cup final, it’s hard to accept the possibility that the entire thing was faked. But according to historian Bror Jacques de Wærn that is exactly the problem; we simply want to believe in the drama of a World Cup final that remains the highest scoring of all time, despite the evidence he has unearthed that proves the tournament didn’t take place at all.
It is in Swedish director Johan Löfstedt’s 2002 film Konspiration 58 that De Wærn lays out his incredible claim that the 1958 World Cup wasn’t held in Sweden, but rather was staged in the USA as part of a Cold War era experiment into the power of televised propaganda orchestrated by the CIA, FIFA and powerful figures within the television industry. “The United States needed to test television’s power to influence people,” says De Wærn, who worked in the Swedish national archives for over twenty years. “It was a part of the Cold War that was raging at the time. I call it the ‘media race’….
When Konspiration 58 debuted on Swedish television in 2002 it caused outrage. “A lot of the older generation who have vivid memories from the World Cup in 1958, whether they were at the games or just saw them live on TV, got very upset,” Löfstedt says. But it wasn’t just those who lived through the event who were shocked….
But as the credits rolled, a statement played over the top revealed a crucial detail about Löfstedt’s film that many missed.
The entire thing was a hoax. There was no Konspiration 58 organisation and De Wærn’s theories were just fantasy. Thousands were duped. Johansson, De Wærn, Hamrin, Simonsson and the rest had all been in on it.
“We wanted to fool as many people as possible,” Löfstedt says. “I thought that if I could make people believe in this story or believe that these people or opinions exist then it would have a great impact on viewers when they realised it was all fiction.
“Some people realised quite soon that the story was fake, another group realised at the end of the film. Some people realised the next day when they [discussed it] with their workmates. But one small group of people didn’t just fall for the hoax, they also thought that the theories were real. That is a scary group of people.”
https://youtu.be/D7qsEsvjKY4
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