Hello and welcome back to We Came To Win, a collection of stories about the World Cup.

I'm Matt Nelson, I'm Scottish, and again I'm joined by my American friend Steve Saruti, Steve, how you doing? Matt, what's going on? I'm going to be back again.

So Steve on this episode we're going to discuss the most misunderstood team in soccer history.

Zaire, that's the country that is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But truly this is a story about how a dictator with a fondness for leopard print headwear used football as a way to distract people from what was a really violent brutal dictatorship.

I'm talking about Mibutu here, Steve. But before we get into this one, I think it's important to say how timely this story is because sports washing, which is of course using sports to draw attention away from a government's tarnished reputation, is it's been in the news a lot and it's sort of having a moment.

It really is. I mean look at Newcastle United and the Premier League who have been taken over by the Saudis are now by far the richest club in the world.

You know, I would say there's a lot of controversy that goes behind this. I'm sure you've heard of the live golf tour as well, which is incredibly controversial golfers jumping ship from the PGA tour to take these massive checks in a league and basically a startup league.

It's never shocking Matt that there's corruption in soccer. It just feels like it's the number one sport it comes with the territory. Yeah, exactly. It's something that's massively present today.

And I think what's interesting about the story we're about to hear is we're going to trace sports washing back to I guess kind of one of the sort of Godfathers of using football as a political tool in Mibutu.

So let's get into it. This is the most misunderstood team in history. The story was originally published by we came to win and it's narrated by Nandovea and go fan on Bhutubwale.

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