Prateek Tanmay
Andrés Escobar once told a Colombian journalist named Gonzalo Medina why he loved football. “This sport illustrates the close relationship between life and the game,” he said. “In football, unlike bullfighting, there is no death. In football no one dies; no one gets killed. It’s more about the fun of it, about enjoying.”
He was killed for football. He was 27 years old.
In the days after Colombia’s elimination from the 1994 World Cup, Escobar sat down and wrote a column for El País. A journalist friend had suggested it. He had been offered broadcasting work in America for the rest of the tournament. He had been offered the chance to stay with his brother’s family in Miami. He declined both. “I want to go to Colombia and show my face,” he told his sister, María Ester.
The column was titled “Life Doesn’t End Here.” He wrote the phrase four times. “Life doesn’t end here. We have to go on. Life cannot end here. No matter how difficult, we must stand back up.” He asked for respect. He sent a hug to everyone. He signed off: “See you soon, because life doesn’t end here.”
The column ran. He was dead days later.
***
The own goal itself was unremarkable in the way that accidents are. June 22. The Rose Bowl, Pasadena. A John Harkes cross flew into the Colombian box. Escobar stretched a leg to intercept. The ball rolled off his heel and into the net. He lay face down on the grass for a moment.
In Medellín, watching on television, his nine-year-old nephew turned to his mother. “In that moment,” María Ester would say later, “he said to me, ‘Mommy, they’re going to kill Andrés.’” She replied: “No sweetheart, people aren’t killed for mistakes. Everyone in Colombia loves Andrés.”
Colombia lost 2-1.
Colombia had arrived at the 1994 World Cup as one of Pelé’s tips to reach the semifinals. They had beaten Argentina 5-0 in Buenos Aires in qualifying. Valderrama in midfield, Asprilla up front, Escobar at the heart of the defence.
Pablo Escobar, left, watches a football game in Medellin, Colombia in 1983. (AP Photo)
What the country felt about other things in those years: Pablo Escobar — no relation — had been killed six months before the tournament. His death did not make Colombia safer. It created a power vacuum. Medellín’s murder rate was 380 per 100,000 inhabitants. These were the conditions under which Andrés Escobar played football and believed it could show people a better way to live.
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He was known as El Caballero del Fútbol. He went to Mass every day with his mother until she died. His father had founded an organisation giving young men the chance to play football instead of being on the streets. Andrés had won the Copa Libertadores with Atlético Nacional in 1989, the first Colombian club to do so. The country produced cocaine and produced Andrés Escobar, and for a while in 1994 it looked as if one might outrun the other.
Then the Harkes cross came in.
***
Colombia beat Switzerland in their final group game and went home anyway. Escobar said afterwards: “It’s a very trying moment. Not only because of the error I committed, but also because in these games, our team could not fulfil our expectations.”
Then he wrote the column. Then he flew home.
He had not committed any crime by scoring the own goal. A cross came in. He stretched a leg. The ball deflected. Somewhere in the same city, men who had bet heavily on Colombia were counting what they had lost.
***
July 2. Escobar went out with friends to El Indio nightclub. At another table sat Pedro David and Juan Santiago Gallón, brothers, known drug traffickers, men who had lost money on Colombia. They began shouting across the room. Own goal, Andrés. Own goal.
He asked for calm. He left.
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In the parking lot, the Gallón brothers’ driver, Humberto Muñoz Castro, followed him out. He shot Escobar six times. Eyewitnesses said Muñoz shouted “gol” with each shot.
Escobar died forty-five minutes after reaching hospital. The second round of the World Cup was still being played in the United States.
His funeral drew 120,000 people. Muñoz Castro confessed, was sentenced to 43 years and served eleven. The Gallón brothers did fifteen months without trial, never charged with the murder. By 2015 they were on the US Treasury sanctions blacklist, members of La Oficina de Envigado, successor to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel.
That is what the Gentleman of Football was doing in a country where the men who killed him served eleven years between them.
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After his death, the Escobar family founded the Andrés Escobar Project, teaching disadvantaged children in Medellín to play football. A statue went up in 2002. He is buried in the Cementerio de San Pedro. Flowers still arrive.
Four months before the World Cup returns to Mexico and the United States, Juan Santiago Gallón was shot dead in a restaurant in Huixquilucan, just outside Mexico City. Colombia’s president confirmed it on X. He wrote that Gallón had destroyed the country’s international image.
In the Cementerio de San Pedro, the flowers still arrive. In a foundation bearing his name, children in Medellín are learning to play football. Escobar was trying to make it true for a country that kept making it difficult to believe.
