What happened to the lost World Cup?

Last May I was staying at the Ritz in London for the first and only time in my life. Guy Oliver, who works for Fifa’s nascent football museum, came to meet me there. Feeling awkward amid the oligarchs, we found a quiet corner in the tearoom to discuss our joint obsession: football’s original World Cup, the lost Jules Rimet trophy. Most people believe the Rimet was stolen in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and melted down into gold bars. But I think the trophy might still be out there somewhere. Then recently, in the Fifa archives, Oliver made a great discovery: the Rimet’s original base. Now we need to find the rest of the cup.

The story is football’s version of The Maltese Falcon. When Fifa’s president Jules Rimet created the World Cup, the French sculptor Abel Lafleur made him a trophy: a gold statuette of Nike, Greek goddess of victory. The base was blue lapis lazuli.

In 1930 Uruguay won the inaugural World Cup. Each winning country got to keep the trophy for four years before returning it to Fifa. But over the decades, strange things happened to the Rimet. Two 1950s winners – Uruguay again, and West Germany – secretly made replicas of it without Fifa’s permission. When each winner returned the trophy, did it hand back the real Rimet – or a replica?

In the Ritz I told Oliver about the findings of the photojournalist Joseph Coyle, who, with Jim Lynch, is writing a book about the Rimet. Coyle analysed news photographs and spotted that the trophy changed between 1954 and 1958. The base was visibly different.

Oliver went back to Fifa in Zurich, studied about 50 photographs of the trophy and grasped what must have happened. The original base had only four sides. By 1950, each side was filled with one winner’s name: “Uruguay 1930”, “Italia 1934” et cetera. When the West Germans won in 1954, says Oliver, “They get home and think, ‘Where do we put our name?’”

So – he deduced – Fifa quietly replaced the original lapis lazuli base with a new eight-sided one, which could fit more winners’ names. Nobody except Coyle seems to have noticed the switch.

But where was the original base? Oliver guessed that Fifa wouldn’t have chucked it out. He and Dominik Petermann of Fifa’s documentation department found it, Oliver told me, “unnoticed and unlogged, hidden away on a shelf in Fifa’s vast archives. It was one of those moments when you just stand there and you feel all funny. You daren’t even pick it up, because it’s a priceless work of art. The thing is, it was among a load of cheap and nasty imitations made over the years, all with weird bases.” So how did Oliver know this base was the original? “I had looked at a whole lot of photos. The ‘Italia 1934’ – under the ‘1934’ there is a very big white splodge. The first thing I did was look for that and say, ‘Hallelujah, we’ve found it.’” Closer inspection confirmed his judgment.

When Fifa’s museum opens in March 2016 in Zurich, it will exhibit the base. But where is the Rimet trophy itself? In 1966 the trophy (or was it a 1950s replica?) was stolen in London. Days later a dog named Pickles found the cup under a bush but by then the English had commissioned at least one replica – again, without Fifa’s permission. That summer England won the World Cup at Wembley. After the final, policemen entered the English changing-room, took the Rimet from the players’ hands and carried it away for safekeeping, leaving the victors with a replica. From 1966 to 1970 the English often exhibited a replica, pretending it was the real thing.

In 1970 England’s Football Association returned the trophy (or a replica?) to Fifa. That year Brazil won its third World Cup, and was allowed to keep the Rimet for ever. But in 1983 thieves stole the cup from the Brazilian football federation’s office. Police said they had melted it down into gold bars.

I don’t think so. I believe sport’s greatest trophy is still around. Juan Carlos Hernandez, the late Argentine goldsmith who was among those jailed for the theft, told police it had not been melted down. When police rearrested Hernandez in the 1990s for drug trafficking, and out of curiosity asked him about the Rimet, he said an Italian collector had commissioned the theft.

Perhaps Hernandez was lying. But in 2012, at my request, the journalist Andrew Downie asked Pedro Berwanger, the Brazilian policeman who led the original investigation, why police thought the Rimet had been melted down. As I’ve written before, Berwanger admitted: “Nobody really knows what happened to the cup. I wouldn’t sign a document swearing it was melted down.” I suspect the police – under huge pressure to find the trophy – said it had been melted down so as to close the file. Berwanger agreed the Rimet would be worth most intact: “It’d almost be like having the Holy Grail, owning this trophy.”

This hunt isn’t over yet.

simon.kuper@ft.com; Twitter @KuperSimon

Illustration by Luis Grañena