The strange thing about covering a World Cup is how it dominates everything for weeks, and then suddenly it’s over and is forgotten as quickly as a dream. What felt like the most important thing in the world was not important at all.
The exceptions are in Spain, where they continue to revel in victory, and Argentina, where they’re showing that revelling in defeat can actually be far more stimulating.
The aftermath of the final in Argentina laid bare the tormented collective consciousness of humanity in the age when everyone has the power to see and react to every stupid, annoying thing everyone else is saying.
Within hours of the match, some in Argentina were claiming their team had been forced to take a dive as punishment for displaying a Malvinas Argentinas flag when they won the semi-final against England. What other explanation could there be for Argentina playing that badly?
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Certain established media figures pushed back, arguing that Argentina were outplayed by a better team on the day, and urging people not to be taken in by cynical trolls who get paid to create viral lies. Of course their plaintive cries of “nothing to see here” only proved they were in on the cover-up.
But the internet war quickly mushroomed far beyond the game to encompass the whole country. Last Sunday was Argentina against Spain – since then it’s Argentina against the world. People out there were saying the Argentinian team were ugly and ungracious (“Felons” – Daily Telegraph, “charmless, uniquely unappealing” – New York Times). You expect that from those quarters, but people out there were saying much more. They were saying VARgentina benefited from a Fifa conspiracy to get them to the final. They were saying Argentina was a haven for Nazis. They were saying Messi is a Zionist. They were saying Argentines eat donkey meat ...
Maybe the most outrageous thing many of them were saying is that Argentina is somehow exceptionally racist. World Cup superfan Samuel L Jackson was one of the key nodes here, reposting on his Instagram a comment that described Argentina as “historically one of, if not the most racist countries in the world … If you are a Black person cheering for Argentina, this is what you look like to me”, followed by a picture of Jackson’s evil House Negro character from Django Unchained, wearing an Argentina shirt.
This is infuriating to many Argentinians because they think it’s untrue and because even if it is partly true, the people saying it are hypocrites, and Argentina is no more racist than their countries.
What’s going on here? Why does it seem like so many foreigners are suddenly against Argentina? Some blame Global North neoimperialism, others, woke anti-western forces. Still others diagnose a bought-and-paid-for psyop run by shady betting companies and the permanently embittered Madrid-Ronaldo complex.
Maybe it shows my naivety, but I feel like it’s simpler than that. In the case of the racist-Argentina meme, there was a specific moment when that germinated in the football context. It was in the summer of 2024, when Enzo Fernández livestreamed himself and other Argentina players on their team bus singing a racist song about the French national team. That video got Argentinian athletes in a variety of sports booed by the French crowds at the Paris Olympics. People hadn’t forgotten it.
After winning all their tournaments since 2021, Argentina had had things their own way too long; even many of those who cheered them on in 2022 were now ready to see them lose.
And it’s a fact that on their run to the final, Argentina created images that were antagonistic not only to their direct opponents but to almost everyone watching. Look at Cristian Romero’s aggressive gloating celebrations into the faces of Mohamed Salah and then Jordan Pickford and Marc Guehi when Argentina scored against Egypt and England. Who can be blamed for enjoying the downfall of such a character?
Supporters have a tendency to excuse such behaviour as the natural overflowing of passion. “Cuti just wants to win!” Sure, and the way he goes about it makes lots of other people want to see him lose. Argentina now find themselves in the position of the defeated Salah or Guehi, with the rest of the world Romeroing them in the face.
Clearly, it’s almost as unfair to tar the rest of the Argentina team for the actions of Enzo or Romero as it is to tar Argentinian society as a whole for the actions of a few trolls and madmen. But that’s how our minds work, reasoning from the particular to the general.
Romero aside, I wasn’t one of those taking pleasure in Argentina’s defeat. They were again, clearly, the stars of the World Cup, the most watchable, the most interesting team, even if this time they were far from the best one.
How can anyone love the game and not admire the Argentinian football culture that produces so many great players and so much passion and spectacle? Though the more I read about it, the more familiar it starts to sound.
Take Alejandro Wall’s piece in Tiempo, July 18th: “Nothing is a coincidence; it is no coincidence that Messi exists and that Maradona existed … they are products of the tradition of Argentine football, of its structure, its network of clubs, from neighbourhood teams to village sides, the youth teams, the reserve teams and the first teams. This national team embodies the streets and the squares, the desire to play all the time and to be able to do so without needing money.
“It is the national team of Argentina, a country with a social power that allows it to put up a fight and beat others with far superior economies, even if only symbolically, even if only in football, and that is what some progressives in the North fail to understand … What they fail to see, or refuse to see, is that the Argentine national team is built from the ground up, from the bonds forged in villages they cannot even imagine, with coaches who surely worked without pay, out of love, for the joy of watching a young lad play any given weekend and seeing their players grow … This national team was built by clubs that don’t charge fees to those who can’t afford them – because they have neighbours who paint a wall, organise a barbecue or a raffle, and raise money to buy a pair of boots for someone who can’t afford them. It was this collective spirit that gave rise to teams like this one, not individualism, not ‘every man for himself’.”
Did you recognise it? It’s the GAA! He’s talking about the GAA! The patchwork of parishes, the bonds of childhood, the cult of the local, the veneration of amateurism, the individual submitted to the collective, social power over market power, village pride, volunteerism, raffles and fundraisers, eating and drinking, neighbours painting a wall!
We in Ireland were kicking balls and painting walls long before the first Argentinians gazed curiously at British railwaymen setting up goalposts and asked “Qué es?”
In Argentina, all their GAA energy goes into football. Argentina shows us what we could be if our GAA culture escaped containment on the island and infiltrated the world’s biggest sporting event – if all our national sporting passion, and all our national neuroses, were poured into a game where Ireland competed against the world, instead of being channelled into games where we compete only against ourselves.
If all the pride and exceptionalism Ireland puts into GAA went into football instead, well ... I won’t say you would never have heard of Argentina, but they, who reign as the current undisputed kings of international fan drama and hysteria, might suddenly find they’d be playing second fiddle in a lot of respects.
As it is, with only a part of Ireland devoted to football, we already take more fans to our tournaments than Argentina does (and literally 10 times more fans than Spain).
The Argentinians may believe that nobody can get more carried away over football than they do, that nobody can self-romanticise like they do, that nobody can answer the ignorant insults of foreigners with more furious magnificent defiance than they do, but we know better. (You think nobody hates England more than you do?)
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And then when you look at how Argentina works itself up every four years, you wonder if it might be for the best that in Ireland we keep much of this stuff behind closed doors.
During the week, watching Argentinians trade internet blows with each other and the world, I came across a TV clip from Alejandro Dolina, who is an Argentinian radio personality, musician and writer. From the style of the clip, it was broadcast years ago, probably around the time of the 1990 World Cup.
Dolina begins by saying that what really captures the imagination of the crowd in a stadium and the millions who watch a World Cup is the illusion, even just the hope, that something of national importance is really at stake. Drama requires you to suspend disbelief. You don’t sit in the theatre and say to the person next to you, “don’t worry, that’s not really the Prince of Denmark, it’s just some guy who works as an actor”.
So it is with football. “You have to believe – even if it’s a lie – that there’s something of national pride at stake there, that something will change for us if we win, even though we know deep down that’s not the case. This whole reference treats football as an illusion. The illusion of being better than the Colombians, the illusion of having a more fortunate destiny, the illusion of living through some great feat, although afterwards we can say, we know it isn’t really like that.
“And that’s a bit dangerous. In the myths of Arabia there are two angels who question those who have just died, asking them about trivial things and important things. Those who mistake the trivial for the important and the important for the trivial are led to hell. It’s all very well to enjoy football, and I say this enjoying it immensely, but be careful, we mustn’t forget.
“I think that behind all this immense enormous joy, behind all this passion we have, behind this admiration for Diego and for the national team, there’s a reality we’re not prepared for: that one day some angel will ask us about trivial things and important things and we won’t know which is which.”
Source: The Irish Times
