Andres Escobar once told a Colombian journalist named Gonzalo Medina why he loves football. “This game illustrates the close relationship between life and sport,” he said. “In football, unlike bullfighting, there is no death. Nobody dies in football; No one gets killed. It’s more about having fun, enjoying it.”
He was killed for football. He was 27 years old.
In the days following Colombia’s exit from the 1994 World Cup, Escobar sat down and wrote a column for El Pais. A journalist friend suggested it. He was offered broadcasting work in America for the rest of the tournament. He was offered to live with his brother’s family in Miami. He rejected both. “I want to go to Colombia and show my face,” he told his sister Maria Ester.
The column was titled “Life Doesn’t End Here.” He wrote this word four times. “Life doesn’t end here. We have to go on. Life can’t end here. No matter how hard it is, we have to get back up.” He demanded respect. He hugged everyone. He signed off: “See you soon, because life doesn’t end here.”
The column ran. He died days later.
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In terms of the way accidents happen, one’s own goals are memorable. June 22. The Rose Bowl, Pasadena. John Harkes’ cross flew into the Colombian box. Escobar extended his leg to block. The ball went off his heel and into the net. He fell face down on the grass for a moment.
In Medellin, watching television, his nine-year-old nephew turned to his mother. “At that moment,” Maria Ester would later say, “he said to me, ‘Mommy, they’re going to kill Andres.'” She replied: “No honey, people don’t get killed for mistakes. Everyone in Colombia loves Andres.”
Colombia lost 2-1.
Colombia reached the 1994 World Cup as one of Pele’s tips to reach the semi-finals. They defeated Argentina 5-0 in the qualifying round in Buenos Aires. Valderrama in midfield, Asprilla up front, Escobar in the center of defence.
Pablo Escobar, left, watches a soccer game in Medellin, Colombia in 1983. (AP Photo)
What the country felt about other things in those years: Pablo Escobar — no relation — was killed six months before the tournament. His death did not make Colombia any safer. It created a power vacuum. Medellin’s homicide rate was 380 per 100,000 inhabitants. Andres Escobar played football and believed that he could show people a better way to live.
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He was known as El Caballero del Futbol. He went to Mass with his mother every day until she died. His father founded an organization that gave youths a chance to play football instead of being on the streets. Andres won the Copa Libertadores with Atlético Nacional in 1989, the first Colombian club to do so. The country produced cocaine, and it produced Andres Escobar, and for a while in 1994 it seemed as if one would overtake the other.
Then Harkes Cross came in.
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Colombia defeated Switzerland in their final group match and still went home. Escobar later said: “It’s a very difficult moment. Not only because of the mistakes I made, but our team didn’t live up to our expectations in these games.”
He then wrote a column. Then he went home.
He had committed no crime by scoring his own goal. A cross came in, he extended a leg. The ball deflected. Somewhere in the same city, men who had bet heavily on Colombia were counting what they had lost.
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July 2. Escobar went to El Indio nightclub with friends. At another table sat Pedro David and Juan Santiago Galan, brothers, known drug traffickers, men who lost money in Colombia. They started shouting across the room. Own goal, Andres. own goal.
He asked for peace. He left.
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In the parking lot, the Galán brothers’ driver, Humberto Muñoz Castro, followed him. He shot Escobar six times. Witnesses said Munoz yelled “goal” with each shot.
Escobar died forty-five minutes after arriving at the hospital. The second round of the World Cup was still being played in America.
120,000 people attended his funeral. Muñoz Castro confessed, was sentenced to 43 years, and served eleven years. The Galen brothers did fifteen months without trial, never charged with murder. As of 2015 he was a member of La Oficina de Envigado, the successor to Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel, on a US Treasury sanctions blacklist.
The gentleman of football was doing just that in a country where the men who beat him served eleven years in their midst.
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After his death, the Escobar family founded the Andrés Escobar Project, teaching underprivileged children in Medellin to play football. A statue went up in 2002. He is buried in the Cementario de San Pedro. More flowers come.
Four months before the World Cup returned to Mexico and the United States, Juan Santiago Galan was shot and killed in a restaurant in Huquilucan, just outside Mexico City. The President of Colombia confirmed this on X. He wrote that Galan had destroyed the country’s international image.
In Cementerio de San Pedro, flowers still bloom. In the foundation that bears his name, children in Medellin are learning to play football. Escobar was trying to make it real for a country that was finding it hard to believe.