This is a journey through an Argentine football season, viewed mostly from the Diego Armando Maradona stadium in Buenos Aires – the home of modest, underachieving first division team, Argentinos Juniors.
Why them? Well, why not? The truth is that their ground is the closest to my home and easily accessible on the 113 bus. Also, they’re neither Boca Juniors nor River Plate – that would have been just too easy – like adopting Rangers or Celtic or Real Madrid or Barcelona if I were doing this in Scotland or Spain.
The Diego Armando Maradona Stadium
And to my mind they’re the closest thing I’ve found here, in size and in size of trophy cabinet, to my real club, West Ham United. A capital city outfit that prides itself on the quality and purity of its football and the community spirit of its fans. A seedbed of young talent which invariably goes on to shine elsewhere. So talented in fact that last season Argentinos Juniors finished last in the top division. They stayed up thanks to above average performances in previous seasons in a system rather crudely designed to ensure that the big clubs never get relegated.
My aim is to capture all the thrills, spills, controversies, tension and idiosyncrasies of a typical Argentine football season. I’ll try to explain the complexities of how things work here. And, since football is such an important and intrinsic part of Argentine society, I’ll use each game as an excuse to talk about life, love, politics and those huge, fatty sausage sarnies they call Choripans – an essential element of the pre-match ritual down here in the land of meat, meat and yet more meat. Vegetarians be warned!
Anyway, that was the plan – to kick off on the weekend of August 14-16 with the perfect opener for my newly adopted boys, away to the biggest club in South America, Boca Juniors. Only it didn’t happen. The start of the 2009 Apertura was delayed because of wrangling over television money. I’ve gone into detail elsewhere for anyone’s who’s interested.
For now, it’s enough to say that the dispute encapsulates all the greed, poor management, raw politics, corruption, rivalry and complete disregard for the common people, in this case the fans, that manifests itself, and has always manifested itself, in Argentina in particular and Latin America in general.
With a passion for football second to none, a seemingly endless supply of gifted players and a rich history, the Argentine league should be on a par with those in Italy, England and Spain.
Instead, grounds are crumbling, the barra brava or hard core fans are dealing drugs on the terraces and fighting over players’ contracts and tens of thousands of what are commonly known as ‘true fans’ stay away because of rampant violence that sees a number of fatalities each year.
To make matters worse, at the time of writing, the national team boasting Messi, Tevez and Aguero are hanging precariously on to one of the four automatic qualifying places for the 2010 World Cup, with the next two opponents the top teams, Brazil and Paraguay.
“The World Cup without Argentina is simply not a World Cup,” said their manager, Diego Maradona. Echoes of England in the nineteen-seventies perhaps?
More than 1,000 professional Argentine footballers play abroad. We know of the aforementioned Messi, Tevez and Aguero. But you’ll also find lesser known and lesser talented Sergios, Leos and Carlitoses in the Greek second division, Honduras and Guatemala and believe it or not – no offense intended – Bangladesh!
So Argentine football is in a mess. Some would say it’s in crisis. But then it’s always in crisis. Every season brings scandal, violence, political interference and prophesies about the imminent demise of the game here – and that’s just on the bus journey to the ground.
So, c’mon ref. Blow that whistle. Please!