Don Julio
The Argentine close season is a short but painful affair – and there are two of them to contend with since the competition is split in two. Two seasons a year – the Clausura or Closing and the Apertura or Opening. That’s two champions and, like I said, two close seasons.
There is no cricket or Wimbledon to tide us over, just big, black holes with a few pre-season tours and mini-tournaments in Argentina’s distant corners to provide a mere dribble of pissy relief in the ocean.
So imagine the discontent, the sheer horror in some cases, when a situation unravelled that delayed the start of the 2009 Apertura season by a whole week.
And for what? Well, money. It’s always about money these days. But it was also about the revenge of one man.
We first heard towards the end of July that the clubs were in debt. Some hadn’t paid their players a grand total of forty million pesos – that’s more than six million pounds. While another huge chunk was owed to the Argentine Football Association – the AFA.
Like so many, they blamed the world economic crisis, saying that European clubs had bought less Argentine players and their major source of income had dwindled to a trickle.
The Godfather of Argentine football, long-time AFA president and FIFA number two, Julio Grondona, said the season couldn’t kick-off until the money issue was resolved.
No sooner had the cries of panic died down than he revealed a cunning plan. The company that had televised Argentine football for the past eighteen years, Torneos y Competencias or TyC, must pay more.
The television executives said they’d fork out a bit more, on top of the 268 million pesos (£42m) they were already paying. That was the sum agreed when they signed the deal with the football authorities in 1991. A deal is a deal, they said, smug lawyers at their side, gently fondling the corners of the contract. Not their fault, they added. That lay with the directors who had mismanaged their clubs. Sound familiar?
They knew about the cunning and the contacts of Senor Grondona. No-one in this part of the world holds on to, and flourishes in his job during a repressive military regime and several corrupt, ruthless and plain inept civilian presidencies without knowing how to sharpen his own pencils.
But while all eyes were on the ball, they perhaps failed to spot a goggled-eyed, lank-haired lawyer in an ill-fitting suit sneaking up on the left-wing to slip one in by the near post.
Nestor Kirchner holds no formal position. OK, he is the former president of Argentina and is married to the current president. He takes up a seat in the national Congress later this year and is the former boss of the governing Peronist Party.
He resigned from that post in July after his party was thumped in mid-term congressional elections at the end of June. He blamed the Clarin media group for playing a large part in what was for him and his wife, a humiliating poke in the eye. Clarin owns TyC and the daily sports newspaper, Ole, among others. Losing football would be a huge blow. Losing football in a football obsessed country like Argentina simply doesn’t bear thinking about. But lost it they have, despite their lawyers bleating about suing for breach of contract.
Promises come easier in Latin America than a Craig Bellamy temper tantrum. The state-run TV channel, Canal 7, would cover the footy and the government would pay 600million pesos (£94m) – more than double the previous rate. Problem solved!
The cleaners were busy mopping up in club boardrooms as a number of directors lost control of their bodily functions in the excitement. The newspapers, especially Clarins’ competitors, shouted about football swimming in cash.
The start of the season had to be postponed since, while the clubs were ready, the cameras were not. And you can’t have football without television. Right?
It wasn’t even clear whether Canal 7 had enough cameras to cover ten matches in a weekend, never mind sufficient trained cameramen and all the other technical things with flashing lights and wires poking out.
The long-suffering fans know that little if any of this newly accrued wealth will be spent on improving crumbling grounds or on increasing players’ wages to stem the flood in the direction of Europe. But what they will get is free football on the tele. All that Pay Per View and codified nonsense will be thrown right out of the window. None of that slipping into the nearest bar to show your team in action and making one beer last the full ninety minutes, plus injury time.
According to some in the government, football, a bit like clean water and education, should be a basic right made available to all. Try as I might, I can’t see many flaws in that argument.
Some less footbally inclined Argentines – and there are a few such quirky, some would say eccentric, individuals – have suggested that six-hundred million pesos of government/tax-payers’ money might perhaps be better spent on other things, like alleviating poverty for example.
But that never has, and never will, win you elections.