In Captivity, I Used to Recite Every Argentina World Cup Squad From Memory | Special Interview

“There is no such thing as an Argentine who is not interested in football,” says Eitan Horn. “Even someone who, in everyday life, does not support a team and knows nothing about football, when there is a match or a major tournament for the national team, the whole country stops and everyone watches the game. Not only watches. They talk about it a week before and a week after.” The stars, the national teams and the stories in one place: World Cup 2026, the Argentine special page.

Horn, 39, is not only Argentine. In fact, he is not even primarily Argentine. He immigrated from there in 2002, after his older brothers, Amos and Yair, had already moved to Israel separately. He is an Israeli resident of Kfar Saba who was released from Hamas captivity after 738 days in the tunnels. He is also, very much, a football fan, of Club Atlético Atlanta, the team of the Jewish community in Argentina, but that is beside the point. He mainly supports Hapoel Be'er Sheva, whose matches he used to attend religiously before he was abducted and to which he returned after his release, albeit in a different status.

The comforting anonymity of the stands was taken from him. Today he is known throughout the country. He accepts it, sometimes he even finds it amusing. “At Teddy, Beitar Jerusalem fans shout, ‘Hey, it’s the brothers, the hostages,’” he smiles. “I need to learn to live with it in the best way possible.”

“In the World Cup you become abnormal”

Last month, when Be'er Sheva won the championship for the sixth time in its history, Eitan and his brother Yair, who was released from captivity after 498 days, presented the medals to the players. “Every football fan dreams of winning a championship,” he said after the ceremony. “It is the peak for every fan, but this championship is completely different because of the way we were treated by the club, by Alona Barkat, through the players and the fans. We found a home.

“To think that after the two years I went through I would be able to celebrate a championship with my family and the players is simply a dream. There is no one happier than me these days, and it will stay with me for life. People who say, ‘It’s just football,’ are wrong. It is football, without the ‘just.’ There are people with different levels of illness. Right now I follow it less. If you asked me before 2023, I could tell you the numbers and names of almost every player in almost every league, and today, apart from Be'er Sheva and here and there Atlanta, I have no idea what is going on. It occupies me less. The moment there is a World Cup, I’ll go back to being the same person whose life is run by the World Cup.”

Like any obsessive fan, Horn also has a complicated love-hate relationship with the game. Saying he enjoys being a football fan would be inaccurate. It is an overwhelming emotional storm, an addictive whirlpool that sometimes leaves the feeling that perhaps it would have been better without it.

“Don’t let anyone think I’m waiting for the World Cup. It’s annoying. You become a bit of an abnormal person compared with how you’re supposed to behave,” he says. “We talked a lot about football, about whatever you want, the Champions League, games in Israel, which team is better, and which player is better. Whenever possible, we would ask the captors what was happening with the Champions League. As long as you can talk to them about something and they are not violent, you take the opportunity. When we talked about football, they forgot they were terrorists and we were hostages.”

Football was an inseparable part of Horn’s life as a free man, and it remained so, and in many ways even more so, in captivity. Football is an alternative universe in which concepts like life and death are synthesized and stripped of their fatal meaning. The perfect place to escape to when free, and, as it turns out, the natural place to cling to when independence is taken away.

“We asked who won the Copa America,” he recalls of conversations with his captors. “They didn’t know. They didn’t answer us. They hated all of us because we live in Israel and, in their view, it belongs to them, but because of the narrative they are told, if you weren’t born in the country, then it’s not a problem, he will return to another country. He’s not really Israeli. They didn’t beat me from the moment they abducted me. That doesn’t mean they liked me, but maybe they said, ‘Okay, he’s Argentine.’ We used that as a card so it would be good for everyone.”

Horn had already prepared himself for the possibility that he would not be released until the World Cup. That did not mean he was prepared to give up on the matches. “When the mood was okay, I told them everything was fine, but until the World Cup. Either you put a television in for me or that’s the end of it.” He does not mean anything that others might interpret. “I never thought about suicide,” he clarifies. “With all my modesty, and because I come from the world of informal education, my strength is my mind, not physicality. The question is not how we survived, because the fact is we survived. The question is what do we do now. I started working on the release while I was still in those two years. I did psychological work on myself, processed things. That is part of the tools that helped me take everything in a positive direction, to create for myself a reality and thoughts, even if false, that helped me there.”

“We talked a lot about football whenever it was possible,” he says. “Mostly with David Cunio and Yair. Sometimes Sagi Dekel Chen would join too, and Nimrod Cohen, who knew nothing about football, would come in and become very interested in it. It really held us together. First of all, when you are there, you need to train your mind so you don’t lose your edge. Second, it is good to think about things to escape reality. We talked a lot about football, about whatever you want, the Champions League, games in Israel, which team is better, and which player is better. Whenever possible, we would ask the captors what was happening with the Champions League. As long as you can talk to them about something and they are not violent, you take the opportunity. When we talked about football, they forgot they were terrorists and we were hostages.

“There are many who don’t like football because, supposedly, religion and sport do not go together. Those over 40 may still know a little about Israeli sport, but below that, no. Anyone who really loved it knew about Maccabi Haifa and knew its players from the 1990s, probably a remnant of periods when people used to go work in Israel. The question, ‘Messi or Ronaldo?’ occupied them too.”

For Horn, it is not a question. “Messi is natural, even if he worked hard for it,” he explains, for those who don’t know it deep in their bones, like he does. “Ronaldo is more work than natural talent. Like Messi in Argentina, there are millions doing it at the age of eight. The trick is to get there, and Messi got there and became fucking Messi. Ronaldo started as someone who was fine and managed to be the best in the world, or number 2, for 15 years. That is also worthy of respect.”

Comparing Messi and Diego Maradona is already a more complex matter. For many Argentines, it is like answering the question of whom you love more, your mother or your father. Horn: “You can’t compare because it is not the same era, not the same position or style of football. Second, in terms of titles and numbers Messi has much more, but without diminishing it, what Maradona achieved with Napoli and with the 1986 national team was much harder than what Messi did at Barcelona with all the great players beside him. For a conversation, I would sit with Messi. Maradona is more controversial. I would tell Messi ‘thank you’ for the World Cup.”

“Remember things by football”

One of the things that helped Horn survive captivity was moving his thoughts backward, not forward. The past was certain and known, and the way he remembered it was under his control alone. It was the future, whose influence on him had been taken away, that became more unknown than ever. In the hardest moments of loneliness, and there were many, he would take himself on a journey through the different stations of his life, as every Argentine has them divided in four-year cycles.

“You remember things by football,” he explains. “I remember where I worked by the World Cup. In 2018 I worked at Hadassim, at a boarding school for at-risk youth. A few months before that I went to the principal and told him that in the month of the World Cup, without saying there was a World Cup, I need time off or to work as little as possible. He asks if something happened to me. I say no, everything is fine, there is just a World Cup, so he laughed. I said, why are you laughing, I don’t work during the World Cup. In the end we reached an arrangement that on days when Argentina had a match I did not work, and the next day depended on whether we won or lost.”

In Gaza, Horn stretched his mind as far as he could toward the deepest drawers of memory in an attempt to extract information that for others was only a few taps away on a smartphone touchscreen. “I would run through all of Argentina’s squads in my head, from 1994 to 2022,” he shares, “all 23, up to the last World Cup, including the number and which club they played for. At a certain point I got hold of a piece of paper and a pen and started writing and said that if I got out, I would check whether I was right. They told us to burn everything before we left.”

“I do not believe in superstitions,” Horn notes, and that is not a sentence you will hear from many Argentines, but the World Cup is extra-territorial, and for the sake of the collective goal Horn understood in December 2022 that he had to carry that burden. “In the first match, when we lost against Saudi Arabia, I was in Malaga,” he recalls. “I watched it at a friend’s house. The second match I watched at an airport in Switzerland during a connection, and we won. The third match I watched in Nir Oz and we won. Then I understood that my superstition was to watch every match in a different place. We watched the final at Amos’s house in Kfar Saba.

“When I sat in captivity with David Cunio, who comes from an Argentine family, we talked about how I don’t remember anything from that match except Dibu Martinez’s save against Kolo Muani. It is a World Cup that I do not really have in my memory. After we won, I encountered a vacuum I had never felt in my life. I waited 39 years for that moment in my life, and suddenly it arrived. And it is as if you ask yourself: ‘What now?’”

So what happens now, meaning at the World Cup? Horn believes in good things. The emptiness after the victory was replaced by a desire to win for a second straight time. “I think Argentina will take it again,” he says. “In terms of squad, without really knowing what is actually happening because I’m not following it that much, France, Spain and England are probably the best in the world, but the World Cup is not about names, it is about a team, and the dressing room is excellent.

“I would like to fly, but I don’t have time to deal with it, and maybe it is already too late. If an angel comes and invites me to the World Cup, I’ll go. When I was on assignment in Peru I went to watch a match against the Argentina national team. It is impossible in Argentina itself. There are 40 million people, at least 20 million of whom would want and be ready to fly from another province for the national team’s match.”

“I consider myself a hostage”

Nine months after returning from Gaza, something of Horn remained there. It will always be that way. “I consider myself a hostage,” he says. “From now until I die, it will be part of who I am. Both what I went through and how I deal with life.” He points to the yellow bracelet, and to the pin for the struggle to bring the hostages home that is on his backpack. “You will see me in every corner of Kfar Saba on the signs. I asked not to take them down. Why take them down? Let them come down on their own. I was there. Just as it is part of my life, it is part of the country.

“I understand that you can’t stand seeing our faces as hostages anymore. The fact that we are already here means you succeeded in the mission. I am the opposite. I am now learning to live with the fact that I am a public figure and people know me. I know how much the people fought, so when someone stops me on the street, that is my way of saying thank you. I pose for photos, give hugs, everything. I know that I belong to the people and to the soldiers and to the people who prayed and went out into the streets.

“I apologize to the soldiers even though I do not need to. During rehab at Ichilov, soldiers approach me without a leg, without an arm, without an eye, and come proudly and say that it happened in the war. And I say to him: ‘Wow, brother, I’m sorry, if I had known I would have told you to stay at home.’ There is no going back to what I was. Maybe with time they will look at me less, treat me more normally and from a real, natural place. Is there someone who recognizes Gilad Shalit and does not say, ‘Wow, there is Gilad Shalit’? It is part of me. I do not know what the best version of myself I can reach is, but I need to build a new reality with everything that means. To be a hostage for 738 days? Only 20 people like that are alive in Israel.”

There is no manual for surviving captivity. Horn can only tell how he survived. “Until I was abducted I smoked a pack a day,” he recalls. “Since then I have not thought about a cigarette. I stopped every desire and thought about things I could not get. You are fucking a hostage of Hamas. Every second that passes and they are not abusing you, say thank you, so what am I going to think about, how much I want a cigarette? How much I miss shawarma? You shrink to something minimalistic. I was in the same filthy room for a year and a half. I lost 64 kilos. When Yair was released, it was the best day I had. For Yair it was the worst day. I would have preferred to come out last.”

Together with 19 other living hostages, Eitan did in fact come out last, and at this point in time he is the world champion and the national champion. May he remain so forever.

First published: 01:30, 08.06.26