Many point to this as the moment the football rivalry between the two nations truly took hold.
They met in the quarter-finals, a game Argentina still say was unfairly decided, arguing Geoff Hurst’s winner should have been ruled offside.
Controversy went far beyond that. Argentina captain Antonio Rattin was dismissed after just 33 minutes for two incidents in three minutes: first for tripping Bobby Charlton, then for repeatedly arguing with German referee Rudolf Kreitlein. Rattin refused to leave, delaying play for nearly eight minutes.
England edged through in a bad-tempered contest. Three Lions manager Alf Ramsey branded the Argentina team “animals” and told his players not to swap shirts.
Looking back in 2009, England’s 1966 World Cup winner George Cohen said Argentina tried to intimidate them with underhand tactics—spitting, yanking at neck hairs, tugging ears—and, when that failed, descended into some of the worst behavior he’d witnessed. He lamented that Argentina didn’t simply play to their potential, noting England might even have lost had they done so. He also recalled significant commotion in the tunnel afterward, which players were prevented from seeing.
The fallout from the match is widely credited with helping prompt the introduction of red and yellow cards, first used at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico; previously, referees relied only on verbal cautions.
Rattin, who played for Argentina from 1959 to 1969 and featured at the 1962 and 1966 World Cups, died on Saturday at the age of 89.