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RESISTANCE FIGHTER & REFEREE: THE LIFE & TIMES OF LEO HORN – PART ONE

BTLM is pleased to welcome back Hungarian football historian David AJ Reynoldswith another fascinating long-form piece, this one about the remarkable life and times of the Dutch referee Leo Horn – the man famous among other things for his role in the Dutch WW2 Resistance and officiating at the historic England v Hungary fixture of 1953. David’s article is split over two posts and you can read its concluding second part later this week.

As Billy Wright and Ferenc Puskas exchanged pennants and pleasantries before the cameras on that famous Middlesex afternoon, it was a unique figure that stood between them. Even in black and white, it could be clearly seen that the imposing-looking referee was not attired in the usual hue, but was in greys, his white collar nattily protruding. Reputation and honour in the football world was at stake on November 25, 1953. Yet it was not just a privilege to play in this game; for a referee, being handed the whistle that Wednesday came with a prestige which today would only attend the World Cup Final itself.

Even before the game kicked off, England-Hungary was widely hailed as the match of the century and an unofficial world championship decider. The World Cup had not attained the unquestioned prestige it now enjoys, with only thirteen teams competing in Brazil for the1950 title; what we now call “friendlies” were often highlights of the international calendar. Despite England’s poor performance in that 1950 tournament, the first World Cup it had deigned to attend, the sheen of being the game’s founders and proselytes still clung to the home team, especially at the majestic Empire Stadium, where a non-home nation visitor had never triumphed. Meanwhile, since 1950, the Hungarian team had emerged as football’s new wonders, stylishly winning gold at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

Only five weeks before, when attending the England-Rest of the World fixture (4-4) at the same stadium, did Leo Horn get the first inkling that he might be placed in charge of the forthcoming Hungary game. In some ways, Horn was an unlikely choice, having only been on the FIFA list for two years.

But he had come to the attention of the venerable Sir Stanley Rous in at least two ways. Rous, who was himself a former international referee, had helped amend the laws of the game before becoming FA Secretary and was influential in selecting referees for FIFA (he would become FIFA President in 1961).

Firstly, shortly after gaining his FIFA badge, Horn had refereed a match in Amsterdam between the Netherlands and England B. Impressed by Horn’s performance, Rous commended him afterwards, adding that he hoped to see him referee a game at Wembley soon.

But Horn had already been suggested to Rous when, after Horn refereed an April 1951 match between Sunderland and a Netherlands XI in Rotterdam, the Sunderland manager Bill Murray told Rous, according to The Sunderland Echo, that “he had seen one of the best ever continental officials and recommended him strongly for consideration by the English FA”. Sure enough, on November 26, 1952, Horn refereed his first England international, presiding over a 5-0 England win over Belgium that featured a Nat Lofthouse double.

 

Eleven months later, Horn had not long been back in the Netherlands when he received the phone call confirming what had been hinted at in London; he would referee what the Dutch were also calling the ‘wedstrijd van de eeuw’. Such was the weight of the game that Horn determined he needed to lose some of his own. Putting himself through a rigorous training regime, Horn was seventeen pounds lighter when he whistled the Aranycsapat into action at Wembley.

He was soon chasing the red shirts into the England half, where, less than a minute into the game, Hidegkuti collected the ball in the unconventional position that would bedevil England’s backline all day, pivoted right, and rifled a shot past Merrick. By the time Horn awarded England a penalty in the fifty-seventh minute, dispatched by Alf Ramsay, Hungary had already scored six, and the shock that would soon spread around the world had settled on a beaten home team.

Though it would not be the referee which the crowds would remember, for Horn this was the high point of a renowned refereeing career, much of which still lay ahead. But it was far from the greatest thing Leo Horn did in his life.

Eusébio & Leo Horn (1963)

Amsterdam

Far to the south-east of the capital, in the tail of the Netherlands that protrudes into Belgium, was where Leo grew up.

But in 1928, the Horns moved, on the insistence of Leo’s mother, from the cramped and curved Begijnenhofstraat of inner-city Sittard to the more salubrious Plantage neighbourhood of Amsterdam. Going from a provincial Catholic city to the nation’s metropolis would have been a big change for anyone, but for a Jewish family like the Horns it also came with the benefits of settling in the vibrant heart of Dutch-Jewish life. Their new home at Plantage Badlaan 20 lay between the traditional Jewish neighbourhoods of old East Amsterdam to the west and the newer suburbs further east, such as Transvaalbuurt and the greener expanses of Watergraafsmeer, where many Jewish andGentile Amsterdammers were moving at the time when the Horns arrived.

Particularly for twelve-year-old Leo, the move also opened up sporting opportunities. Since he was six, he had been playing in Sittard for VVS. As was typical in the development ofDutch football, VVS would later merge with Sittardse Boys to form Sittardia, before, in 1968, an amalgamation of that club and Fortuna ’54 brought Sittard’s current footballing standard bearer, Fortuna Sittard, into being. But in his new home, Leo not only found a developing football culture, but specifically Jewish football clubs in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Located deep into Watergraafsmeer to the south-east along the Middenweg, Ajax was a relatively big club (having already been twice crowned Dutch champions) whose future fans’ ostentatious embrace of Jewish identity has tended to obscure the history of the more authentically Jewish clubs of Amsterdam East. Around Leo’s new home, virtuously and verbosely named football clubs such as ODE (Overwinning Door Eenheid – Victory Through Unity), AED (Allen Één Doel – One Goal for All), and EDW (Eendracht Doet Winnen – Concord Wins) were established in the early twentieth century, attracting Jewish boys and young men from the streets around their home turf.

It was to another, Wilhelmina Vooruit, formed in 1908, that Leo was taken by a neighbour and for whom he began to play, working his way up through the junior ranks to the second team and some substitute appearances for the first eleven.

 

Even before his knee injury at the age of seventeen, however, it was already clear that there would be a limit to Leo’s progress in football. Leo’s father, who according to his son was not only a great football fan but something of a connoisseur, had told him back in Sittard that hewould not amount to much as a player.

And Leo himself could later admit that, for all his hard work and enthusiasm on the field, he “was never a good footballer”. So it seemed fortuitous—when the premature injury forced his hand—that the Amsterdamse Voetbal Bond (AVB; the Amsterdam FA) was in need of referees for youth team matches and offering a training course. A few months later, on the same day as his older brother Edgar, Leo was able to register as an AVB referee. Soon, not yet eighteen, he was refereeing his first match, between the youth teams of Blauw-Wit and TABA.

The first match did not go well and, by the time he had cycled home, Leo decided that refereeing was not for him. But overcoming the temptation to quit, he persisted. His second match saw a great improvement and Leo began ascending the ladder, going from vierde klasse (fourth class) to eerste klasse (first class) games in the AVB before, in 1938 at just twenty-two, refereeing the AVB Championship game. In that same year, he took the next step, starting to referee for the KNVB (the Dutch FA).

Hard though it is for most of us to imagine, refereeing was his relaxation and enjoyment; during the day, Leo worked for the textile company Lehman & Co., who had hired him when he left school. But it was not long before such simple things as careers and hobbies would become impossible for Leo Horn.

Occupation

After Nazi Germany invaded and rapidly seized control of the Netherlands in early May 1940, the persecution of Dutch Jews proceeded incrementally. At the beginning of 1941, the occupation regime mandated all Jews to register, and, over the course of the year, anti-Semitic policies and regulations accumulated, slowly constricting the lives of the 140,000-strong Jewish population. For example, from September the 15th, 1941, Jews could no longer participate in sport, devastating proud Jewish clubs like Wilhelmina Vooruit. But the decisive point for the Jews of the Netherlands, as it was for the Holocaust in general, came in the summer of 1942 when the systematic deportation of European Jews to extermination camps in Poland—a process known by the Nazis as the Final Solution—began.

On Sunday, July 5, 1942 orders were dispatched by courier to four thousand Jews in the Netherlands, requiring them to report for transportation to ‘labour service’ in ‘Germany’. Once this had begun, with the occupation regime having to resort to surprise raids and round-ups to fill their weekly quotas, there were two main options for Dutch Jews attempting to avoid deportation first to Westerbork in the east of the country (or Vught) and, ultimately for most sent there, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. The first option is exemplified by the famous recipient of one of those four thousand initial orders of July 5—Margot Frank, older sister of Anne. That very same day, the Frank family responded by implementing the plan they had concocted with Otto Frank’s employees, going into hiding in their achterhuis (annex) on the Prinsengracht. Eventually, around 25,000 Dutch Jews likewise became what the Dutch call onderduikers (literally, divers) during the occupation.Like Anne and Margot Frank, many still did not survive.

 

A second route was to be found in the exemptions issued through the Jewish Council (Joodse Raad), resulting in a stamp in one’s ID that declared the bearer “until further notice exempt from the labour force”. Initially, around 40,000 Jews in the Netherlands receivedthese coveted stamps, based on, for example, their work for the Jewish Council or their participation in a militarily vital industry. But the second means of avoiding deportation often led to the first, as the various categories of exemption were withdrawn or reduced until, in September 1943, virtually no officially exempted Jews remained.

But Horn settled on neither of these options. Before the summer of 1942, he had surprisingly survived in the textile trade. As a Jewish-owned business, Leo’s employers, Lehman & Co., were subject to October 1940 regulations that placed it under a Verwalter—an occupation regime-appointed overseer through whom all company business had to be funnelled. When Lehman received its Verwalter in 1941, Leo lost his job, but immediately set up his own textile business, along with other fired Lehman employees, under the name of a gentile friend from the refereeing world. Even such sleights of hand became impossible to maintain with the beginning of weekly deportations and the attendant constrictions and dangers. Yet Leo chose the boldest and riskiest option of all—along with his new wife Catharina (Ina) Boekbinder—they took on false identities and joined the resistance.

Resistance

In an age when the insignificant boast incessantly about the inconsequential, it is startling how reticent the men and women who risked their lives for others during the war were to speak of it afterwards. To have done what was necessary and right was enough. And there was a tremendous desire to put what Horn would call “die rot-oorlog” (that rotten war) behind them. Yet, slowly, through the testimony of those saved as well as old-age reminiscences, the experiences of the quietly heroic have been pieced together.

Leo Horn (3rd from the left) posing with other members of his resistance group STANZ, including its leader Tonny van Renterghem (2nd from left), after the war

“Jews who decided to resist took enormous risks,” explain historians Yehudi Lindeman and Hans de Vries. But the fragility of their “brand-new life in which they had to adopt acompletely new, false identity . . . had its advantages too. It meant contacts with people who knew how to forge documents and could even lead to the permanent availability of one or more hiding places.” So it was for Ina, under the pseudonym Catharina Weesing, and Leo, who had to go their separate ways in the resistance. Leo became part of the group named STANZ (Stormgroep Amsterdam Nieuw Zuid), formed by Tonny van Renterghem under the auspices of one of the main resistance organizations, OD (Orde Dienst – Order Service), which itself had been founded by former Dutch Army officers.

Van Renterghem, whose father Antonie actually played international football for the Netherlands, was an extraordinary individual in his own right. Recognized as RighteousAmong the Gentiles by Yad Vashem in 1987 for his efforts to hide Jews, Tonny spearheaded a wide range of resistance activities. With Fritz Kahlenberg and others, Van Renterghem even secretly took photographs to document the occupation. After the war, he would end up in California, where he worked as a cameraman and technical adviser on films, including The Diary of Anne Frank.

As Leo likewise risked his life to hide Jews and others, his own family came under his protection. Through Leo, his younger brother George found a hiding place with Kuki Krol, whose son Ruud would be a seventies star of Ajax and Oranje. Krol at one time hid as many as thirteen Dutch Jews in his flat above a Ten Katestraat café in Amsterdam West. But while George survived the war in hiding, Leo’s other two siblings were not as fortunate. Edgar was betrayed by the daughter of the family he was sheltered by, which led to his deportation to Sobibor, where he was killed in April 1943. The spring and summer of 1943 saw a pause in deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but Jews from the Netherlands continued to be sent to their deaths at Sobibor, which unlike Auschwitz, with its array of slave labour camps, was purely an extermination camp. Edgar was one of 34,000 Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibor in three months.

 The forged identitypapers of Horn’s wife, Ina Boekbinder, bearing her wartime pseudonym, Catharina Weesing.

Resistance work in the Netherlands came into its own in that spring and summer of 1943. This was partly because some organisations, such as the prominent LO (Landelijke Organizatie), had been spurred into action by the beginning of the Final Solution the previous summer. But sophisticated systems and networks were slow to develop; hiding even one person was usually a complex operation requiring multiple players and procedures. More than one hiding place was almost always needed for an onderduiker, while agents were required to take them from one haven to the next as well as regularly deliver supplies. For the latter to occur, identity cards and ration cards had to be stolen and forged—an unending task for the resistance. This was also the period when the Nazis called up all 300,000 former members of the Dutch Army for slave labour in Germany, later extending the order to all men aged between 18 and 50, sending hundreds of thousands of gentile Dutchmen into hiding, while driving others into the resistance. From this point until the end of the war, the Dutch countryside became the focus of resistance. And it was in this context that Leo was able to save his young nephews.

Back in 1942, Leo Koster, the husband of Horn’s sister Sophie, had been deported. He would die at Monowitz, the large sub-camp of Auschwitz for the slave labourers of the IG Farbenplant, in January 1944. Sophie herself, who had found hiding through Horn, was detained in 1943 by the Dutch bounty-hunter, Chris Bout, and also sent eastwards by the Nazi occupiers. Men like Bout spent the war reaping the large financial rewards available to those willing to hunt down and hand over Jews in hiding to the Nazi regime, considerably multiplying the risks and difficulties for every Jewish onderduiker. But Horn found a hiding place for Sophie’s two boys, Marcel and Paul Koster, deep in the north-western province of Friesland.

AThe whole Schipper family of rural Spanbroek in Friesland were involved in the resistance, and so, even though Cornelis (Cees) Schipper already had four children from his first marriage and his wife Margaretha (Grietje) Schipper-Pronk was pregnant, they agreed to take in four-year-old Paul and seven-year-old Marcel from Leo. For eighteen months, the boys lived happily on the farm with the Schippers until a raid forced Cees and Grietje themselves into hiding and the return of the Koster boys to Amsterdam, where they hid with Leo until the end of the war. Amazingly, despite the attention the Spanbroek farm had received in the raid, the family property became a major covert dropping zone of Allied arms and agents that autumn, under the direction of Cees’ relative, Hil Schippers.

The first such drop occurred in Spanbroek on Saturday, September 9, 1944, during which twelve containers of weapons, radio equipment, and two agents came down on those Frisian fields that had sheltered the Kosters. Many years after the war, in 2002, Cees and Grietje were recognized as Righteous Among the Gentiles for their lifesaving efforts.

Weapons and motorbikes stolen from the ARM garage by STANZ and stored in the Havenstraat tram depot.

Back in Amsterdam, Leo was also engaged in sabotage sorties, the most dramatic of which occurred in February 1945. After STANZ received a tip from a mechanic that the Wehrmacht was storing wagons of weapons in a south-west Amsterdam garage before conveying them to the front, Horn led a team of twelve on a daring night-time raid. The garage in question was the huge ARM (Amsterdamse Rijtuig Maatschappij – Amsterdam Carriage Company) building on the Overtoom boulevard. Approaching it from the back, having crept northwards through Vondelpark, Leo’s team crawled through a window that had been left open for them and caught the German guards entirely by surprise. After overpowering and tying up the ten German soldiers present, Leo’s team drove the wagons to the nearby secluded tram depot in Havenstraat, just north of the Olympic Stadium, where the weapons could be distributed tothe resistance.

 

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RESISTANCE FIGHTER & REFEREE: THE LIFE & TIMES OF LEO HORN – PART 2

BTLM guest contributor David AJ Reynolds returns with the concluding part of his long-form article about the remarkable life and times of the Dutch resistance fighter and referee Leo Horn. We pick up Leo’s story following the conclusion of WW2. Part One can be read here. 

By the time the country was fully liberated on May the 5th, 1945, over 75 percent of theNetherlands’ pre-war Jewish population had perished. At Wilhelmina Vooruit, Leo’s old football club, forty-nine of the club’s seventy-three members did not survive the Final Solution. Of the more than one hundred thousand Jews who had been sent eastwards from the Netherlands by the Nazi occupation regime, 5200 eventually returned, including 2000 who were at Bergen-Belsen and 1150 from Auschwitz. Happily for Leo, one of those few was his sister Sophie, who was reunited with the children Leo had protected, and married a fellow Auschwitz survivor, Isidore (Dorus) Wolf.

Initially, Leo served with the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (Interior Armed Forces), which had been established in September 1944 from the three largest resistance organisations to keep order in the transition from occupation. He also characteristically hunted down his property that had been stolen, as most possessions of Jewish people had been, during the war.
Most of all, like many, he wanted to return to life. In his 1962 autobiography, the chapter on his resistance exploits is written by someone else, so reluctant was he to dwell on it.

Having operated a textile business under the hardest circumstances during the occupation’s early days, he once more began his own textile company, turning it into a successful and expanding firm.

After being separated from Ina for most of the war, the couple divorced soon after, but Leo remarried Antoinette Ott in 1949. And, having risen through the refereeing ranks as a young man, he returned with a whistle to the football fields of Holland.

Considering all he had experienced and done during the occupation of his city and country, before even turning thirty, it is no wonder that Leo was a no-nonsense referee who became known and admired for his natural authority on the pitch.
As Horn freely admitted, he was also a showman, who enjoyed and cultivated the limelightthat his success in business and refereeing brought him.

In the fifties and sixties, he was rarely out of the Dutch news, while also authoring his own long-running column. A serious showman seems like a contradiction, especially in a referee.

In one of his few comments about the resistance, he further complicates the picture by self-effacingly explaining his war-time bravery as bravura—as well as a desire not to let down his friends—rather than courage. But bravura or not, he risked his life daily and led others in doing so. In the end, his authority on the pitch was effective because it was earned and genuine. And therefore, unclouded by the shallow pretentions of lesser referees, he could enjoy it.

 

Fisticuffs at Elland Road

While most football people could appreciate this authority and bravura, one who did not, twenty years after the war and in Leo’s last year of refereeing, was Don Revie. His Leeds United team were playing Valencia at home in the first leg of the 1965/66 Fairs Cup third round. After taking an early lead, the Spanish visitors sat deep and muscularly protected their advantage.

This resistance became yet more resolute after Lorimer equalised in the second half and Leeds pushed for a winner. With fifteen minutes to go, Jack Charlton came up for a corner and, by his account, had both a kick and punch directed at him. “Right there and then my anger boiled over,” Charlton later recalled. “I chased around that penalty area, intent upon only one thing – getting my own back. I had completely lost control of myself . . . and neither the Spaniards nor the restraining hands of my team mates could prevent my pursuit for vengeance.”

Leo Horn grabs Jack Charlton during the onfield brawl against Valencia.

“It was as incredible as it was furious,” The Times reported the next day, “for 60 awful seconds last night at Elland Road fists and feet flew with abandon . . . a mass of players heaved and struggled around the Spanish goal.” With policeman coming onto the pitch to pry the brawling players apart, Leo Horn pulled both teams into the dressing rooms.

During the suspension, he sent off both Charlton and the Valencia left-back, Francisco Vidagany, before, after the game restarted, dismissing a second Valencia player, the Argentinian José Maria Sanchez-Lage.

Horn had restored order, sending off players for the first time in a decade, but, after the game, Leeds accused him of losing control, blaming a failure to sooner sanction the Valencia players for the eventual eruption of violence.

Perhaps Horn’s authority did indeed fail to have its normal effect that night, but it is hard not to concur with his subsequent, still pertinent, conclusion: “It is no use clubs expecting referees to impose discipline. The referee is there to control a match. Players must be taught to control themselves.”

The outburst at Leeds, in Horn’s interpretation, was part of a trend that grew from the increasing financial rewards at stake. “Money was the cause of the trouble; you could see it in the nervousness and the excitement of the players. There was something in the air,” Horn observed, “…something unpleasant”.

This diagnosis was particularly linked to his statement that the Leeds players were on a special win bonus; a charge that Revie vehemently denied. “My players were on no special bonus. Mr. Horn is guessing, or has been misinformed. I resent these allegations,” the Leeds boss told reporters, before adding, “The referee was a complete fool and an attention seeker. He had no control of the game at Elland Road.” While Horn may have admitted to the charge of being, at times, an attention-seeker, he was most certainly no fool.

And it was foolish for Revie to take such umbrage at the suggestion of a special win bonus, since, in general, win bonuses were a tactic he favoured, introducing them at Leeds in the summer before his first fall season in charge (1961/62), as well as inaugurating them for England players when he took over the national team.

Either way, despite the conspicuous annoyance emanating from Yorkshire, the event did Leeds little harm. Charlton was not one of those lining up to critique Horn, who defended the defender both at his disciplinary hearing, which resulted in a ?50 fine for Jack, and in the press: “I have always regarded Charlton as a fine man. He was the cleanest player on the field, until he lost all control.”

Leeds won the second leg and the tie, thanks to a Mike O’Grady goal in Spain, and advanced to the semi-finals, before losing to Real Zaragoza in a May play-off that resolved a 2-2 aggregate in the initial two legs. But for Horn, the consequences were lasting. He had been expected to complete his career by officiating at the 1966 World Cup.

But despite his stature, Horn was passed over for selection. Leo was convinced that now FIFA President Rous had used the Elland Road furore as an excuse, due to his annoyance at Horn’s insistence, during the 1962 World Cup in Chile, to forgo a shared hotel room and pay for his own single room.

Either way, the Fairs Cup fisticuffs prevented a fitting finale to one of the great refereeing careers.

From Hilversum to Hampden

But this was all a long way off when Leo resumed refereeing after the war. His biggest football landmark so far came in 1948, when he travelled to Hilversum to officiate his first KNVB eerste klasse (first class) game, between HVV t’Gooi (now SC t’Gooi) and DOS. The visitors from Utrecht would ten years later become the second champions of the new Eredivisie, which united the regional sections of eerste klasse football into one top division.

This period saw incredible flux and development, as the best Dutch teams became professional for the first time and others merged in the scramble to survive and compete. Despite their 1958 championship, even DOS would eventually combine with two other Utrecht clubs to form FC Utrecht. It was a prestigious era for Leo to be making a name for himself in the game.

Leo Horn before the kick-off, England v Hungary, November 25, 1953

After joining the FIFA list in 1951 and presiding at the Wembley epic two years later, Horn was soon in high demand for international and European fixtures across the continent, with both England and Hungary featuring frequently in his impressive résumé.

When he refereed a Hungary-France international on October 6, 1957, Leo even stayed in Budapest at the request of the MLSZ (Hungarian FA) to preside over a domestic league match at the Népstadion between Ferencváros and Vasas (won 3-2 by Fradi)—a highly unusual occurrence.

At the 1962 World Cup in Chile, England’s group stage match with Hungary was one of three tournament games refereed by Horn, the others being a 2-1 West German victory against Switzerland and the hosts’ quarter-final triumph over Russia. Hungary predictably beat England 2-1, with goals by Tichy Lajos and Albert Flórián sandwiching a Ron Flowers penalty. Horn closed the tournament as one of the linesman for the final in which, despite the great Masopust’s opening goal, Czechoslovakia lost their second World Cup Final, 3-1 to Brazil.

Perhaps Horn’s most remarkable connection with English football, outside of 1953, was his appointment to referee three consecutive England-Scotland matches in the British Championship between 1962 and 1964.

This trio was remarkable in other ways too, as it comprised Scotland’s only hat-trick of wins over England outside the nineteenth century.

They came on the heels of England’s 9-3 win at Wembley in 1961 and, of course, on the verge of England’s World Cup success, but Scotland could boast a formidable eleven featuring the likes of Denis Law, Ian St. John, and John White.

Horn did play a significant role in the first two games, correctly awarding an ultimately decisive penalty to Scotland in each.

In the third, at Hampden Park, a header from a fully-thatched Alan Gilzean sufficed.

But Horn’s stature, and the respect he continued to garner in the game, were best exemplified by becoming the first (and to date the fourth) to referee two European Cup Finals, and the only one to combine that with a pair of the South American equivalent, the Copa Libertadores Final.

Bernabeu to Buenos Aires

The months of the 1956/57 football season were turbulent. Some will always believe that, were it not for the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the autumn of 1956, the great Honvéd side of Puskas would have become the continent’s second champions.

But kept abroad and on the road for weeks on end while turmoil continued at home, the Hungarian champions had to play the home leg of their first round tie in Brussels, drawing 3-3 with Athletic Bilbao and exiting 6-5 on aggregate.

The Basque eleven then lost to the Busby Babes in the last eight, setting up the first of many Real Madrid-Manchester United ties in the semi-finals.

Horn was given the first leg in the Spanish capital, experiencing the thrill of nearly 130,000 fans under the lights for the first time. Real were too much for United that night. In addition to a 3-1 victory, there was foreshadowing of the later Leeds complaints at Horn’s alleged leniency with an aggressive Spanish team. Reporting “the most squalid foul one remembers to have seen in either representative or cup football,” by Di Stéfano on Jackie Blanchflower (brother of Danny), the Manchester Guardian added that “the pretence of a reproof, conveyed to Di Stéfano at the referee’s instance by his captain almost made one vomit at its cynicism”.

Back at Old Trafford, another goal from Tommy Taylor—one of six players in that United team who would perish just a few months later on the way home from another European match—could not prevent a 5-3 aggregate win for Real, who also hosted the final with Fiorentina at the end of May.

Back at the Bernabeu for the dénouement, Horn presided over a 2-0 Real Madrid victory, featuring late goals from Madrid legends Di Stéfano and Gento. It is the lot, however, of top referees to have their greatest moments intermingled with the murmurings of controversy, and the award of a penalty, which was converted to open the scoring, remains a sore spot in Tuscany.

In a recent interview, Giuseppe Virgili, who played in midfield for the Viola that day, insisted that the foul in question was committed outside the area and that it was “a totally invented penalty”. Surviving footage does not permit such certainty, suggesting that if the foul which sent a galloping Enrique Mateos tumbling inside the area was initiated outside of it, the margin was a matter of inches.

But it was at Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium, in the vicinity of his wartime weapons heist seventeen years earlier, that Horn wielded the whistle for the 1962 classic. Reigning champions Benfica, managed by the mercurial and brilliant Hungarian, Béla Guttmann, had barely survived Spurs in the semi-finals, and faced the five-time champions from Madrid.

The previous May, Benfica had beaten Barcelona despite goals from Honvéd émigrés, Bozsik and Czibor, and in Amsterdam the third part of that Hungarian triumvirate, Ferenc Puskas, scored an astonishing first-half hat-trick.

Two years earlier in Glasgow, Puskas had scored four in a one-sided European Cup Final, but this time, as with his compatriots, Puskas’ efforts could not overcome the Lisboans and a second-half surge. It was another penalty, awarded with Horn’s usual flourish and buried by Eusebio, which put Benfica ahead for good at 4-3, before the Black Panther added a fifth.

Extraordinarily, when Horn refereed the Copa Libertadores Final a few months later in Buenos Aires, the winning manager in Amsterdam occupied one of the dugouts.

When, after winning his second consecutive European Cup with Benfica, Guttmann’s request for a pay increase was rejected, the Hungarian maestro departed, legendarily issuing one of the most effective curses in sporting history on the way out.

Having previously managed successfully in Sao Paulo, Guttmann returned to South America to take the helm at the reigning Copa Libertadores champions, Peñarol of Uruguay, who had beaten his Benfica side for the Intercontinental Cup in 1961.

Horn before the 1962 Copa Libertadores Final

Horn had good cause for trepidation heading into this match between Peñarol and the Brazilians of Santos, which was in fact a play-off made necessary when the two-legged final had earlier ended in an acrimonious 4-4 stalemate. The Chilean referee of those fixtures—as David Bolchover discusses in his forthcoming Guttmann biography,

The Greatest Comeback—had been struck in the head with a missile from the Brazilian crowd when Peñarol made it 3-2 in the second-leg to level the tie. When the referee came round, he was persuaded to resume the tie after nearly an hour’s suspension.

But a third Santos goal after that incident, which nominally secured the victory for Santos, and which was accompanied by a further missile hitting a linesman, was discounted when CONMEBOL voided the remainder of the match played after the outrage against the referee.

Along with his two Argentinian linesmen, Leo could at least be grateful that the game was played on neutral territory, although it is hard to imagine him taking a missile on the chin. But, in the end, Santos won the play-off without further incident, and with the help of Pele, missing from the first two games through injury, who scored two blistering goals. Horn was back in South America to referee the first leg of the 1964 final between eventual Argentine winners, Independiente, and Nacional from Uruguay. With these finals under his belt, the European Championship decider (which had occurred only twice before Horn retired) wouldbe the only one of football’s great finals not officiated by the Dutchman.

In Retrospect

As he refereed for the last time—at fifty in the summer of 1966—Leo could look back on more than 1600 matches, including 133 internationals and club matches outside of the Netherlands. In the years to come he remained a businessman and stayed in the public eye through his newspaper columns and ebullient willingness to talk.

His ongoing participation in football included hosting visiting referees for Ajax, which involved him in some memorable European football moments, including the decision of Antonio Sbardella to go ahead with the now legendary December 1966 mistwedstrid (Mist-match) in which Ajax thrashed Shankly’s Liverpool 5-1 amid the Amsterdam haze.

 Horn holding a gift presented to him at his last match in May 1966

Refereeing was a hobby which made Horn famous in his native Netherlands and beyond. But it was his character, which was hewn in hard times far beyond football fields, which enabled him to become a referee worthy of that repute. “You tolerate no opposition,” an indignant Horn wrote to Rous after the 1966 World Cup omission, “but Leo Horn tolerates no injustice.”

Unlike most, Horn had given more than lip service to that sentiment. But perhaps theheadline in the Dutch daily, De Volkskrant, after Leo passed away in September 1995, put it even better: “Football referee Leo Horn tolerated no injustice or colourlessness.” This was the serious showman. A man, as De Volkskrant also pointed out, who disproved the adage that the best referees are the ones you do not notice.

A remarkable man.  A remarkable story.

In case anyone wants a read.