The Disappearing Act

Under a rainy Riviera sky, the Angers soccer team beat the crack Monaco eleven, 2-0, in a crucial game, but immediately afterwards, Angers' star forward disappeared. Then five of the best Monaco players vanished. All last week reports of missing footballeurs poured in: Lyon lost one player; so did Reims, Saint-Etienne and Nimes; Toulouse lost two.

The vanished players had one thing in common: they were all Algerians. It was as if, overnight, the best Latin American baseball players in the major leagues--men like Chico Carrasquel, Bobby Avila, Minnie Minoso, Ruben Gomez--had fled the U.S. and challenged the Yankees and Braves for the world championship.

When newsmen tracked down the Algerians in Switzerland and Tunisia, they found them hobnobbing with F.L.N. agents, were handed an F.L.N. communique stating that the footballeurs refused any longer to help French sport "at the moment when France makes merciless war on their country. They have placed the independence of Algeria above all, giving Algerian youth proof of their courage and disinterestedness." A "Free Algerian" team would now be formed to barnstorm through the Middle East, said F.L.N.

The players did not seem especially heroic. Mustapha Zitouni, who had been scheduled to play for France in an international match against Switzerland, said glumly in Tunis: "I have many friends in France, but the problem is bigger than us. What do you do if your country is at war and you get called up?"

To millions of French soccer fans it was the saddest blow of the Algerian rebellion. Favorite teams were badly crippled, and club owners put a trade value of $250,000 on the missing players. The players had not been treated meanly as Algerians; they were good friends of the other players, and were regarded as sports celebrities; most had French wives or girl friends.

Like all Algerians working in France, the footballeurs had been regularly visited by F.L.N. collectors who took a 15% bite of their salaries and bonuses to support the rebellion. But no one had imagined that the F.L.N. was powerful enough to make the players throw up good jobs, abandon their homes, and give up such sideline business as bars and bistros. The flight may not have been pure patriotism, but it was far from kidnaping. The exodus, with its complicated movement of wives and children, luggage and refrigerators and washing machines, was elaborately planned over a long period of time to avert suspicion, and not a single player appealed to the police for protection.

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