The Flame | Among ducks and oil sands

When Boca Juniors has a home game, several neighborhoods are lost. Banners hang from windows, and as you approach the La Boca area and the La Bombonera stadium, it becomes increasingly dense with loud groups, of all ages, in the blue and yellow colors of the team.

The team is one of the country’s biggest, and faces Argentina Juniors in a derby. A few blocks from La Bombinera, the air is constantly filled with songs, choirs and drums. “Boca a life, Boca a passion”. On a side street, an open circle has formed and some middle-aged men are performing some kind of folk dance number, a little wobbly due to alcohol.

Over the noise I speak to a group of fans – club members, it soon turns out – who have come from the suburb of Moreno an hour away.

– Football is more than sport. It is community, something that unites us as one big family. Today we already gathered in the morning to have a barbecue together before we went here, says Jorge Coria.

He only has a Boca shield on the chest of his jacket while most of his group are blue and yellow from head to toe. According to legend, the color combination comes from the Swedish-flagged boat Drottning Sophia. which was glimpsed in the harbor when the club decided on its symbols.

In Argentina, the proportion of the poor recently rose to over 50 percent of the population. The country’s ultra-liberal President Javier Milei, who named his dogs after neoliberal economists, has launched austerity packages that include slashed pensions and sharp cuts to the country’s budget. Since 2018, the country has also been plagued by an inflationary crisis, with constantly rising prices as a result.

But amid the stream of dark news from Argentina, there is one area where the country has managed to return to its former greatness: football. The country is the reigning world champion since 2022, and last summer they also won the Copa América.

If a club is mismanaged they are not limited to just complaining, they can vote the management out.

But Milei has plans to shake up football as well, leading to the biggest battle in sports in a long time.

Unlike in most football-heavy countries, Argentina’s football clubs are non-profit, association democratically controlled by the ordinary members. Los clubes son del barrio, “the clubs belong to the town”, it says. Continental top teams such as Boca Juniors and River Plate follow the same principles as the neighborhood club around the corner

At the same time, football today turns over multi-billion sums, a scale far beyond the money involved when the system was established. It attracts strong business interests, which must coexist with associational democracy. Or rather, don’t.

At the beginning of the year, Milei published a decree declaring that sports associations would henceforth be allowed to have whatever organizational form they wanted. In practice, they could now be converted into limited liability companies. Although the first court to look at the decree threw it in the trash, the government chose to go ahead with it. They argued that the judgment was only valid in the specific municipality where the court had its seat.

In the next half, the Argentine Football Association, AFA, hit back by publicly underlining that its statutes do not admit companies as members. It was rumored that the president, as a countermeasure, had plans to intervene in AFA and replace the board, but that the attempt fell on Fifa’s strict rules against government interference in member organizations.

Celebration. Javier Milei holds a replica of the World Cup trophy during a campaign meeting in October 2023. Photo: Natacha Pisarenko/AP.

– It was never said publicly, but in the football world and among political insiders it was said that the Milei government checked with Fifa and put down the idea of intervention after receiving confirmation that they intended to insist on their own statutes, says sports journalist Vardan Bleyan.

The proposal has divided the football world. Cesar Menotti, the legendary veteran coach who led the national team to gold in 1978, told Deutsche Welle that football is culture. “If you want to do business, open a hardware store.”

But others were attracted by the possibilities; former Milan player Javier Zanetti said on Argentinian television that “this transformation could be the key to solving many of the problems clubs have today”. Lionel Messi has expressed interest in buying his old team, Newell’s Old Boys. The proponents’ key argument is that Argentine teams have the potential to play at world level just like the national team, but are held back by insufficient financial muscle.

However, the only elite club that has so far shown any interest in transforming into a limited company is Talleres from Cordoba. And among supporters and club members, the proposal is far from popular. The players may be admired superstars, but the supporters do not uncritically accept their opinion in sports politics. Those who go on to successful international careers can also be reminded that it might never have taken off without the neighborhood club and the unpaid work of coaches and officials.

Vardan Bleyan says he is “completely against” the privatization plans.

The plan is to, along with all the increases in electricity and water and other costs, ruin the clubs so they have no choice but to accept.

– I think everyone here agrees. The club is ours, the members are its heart, we are the only ones who put football above all else. If businessmen come in, they will want to suck money out of the club and the fans, then it is no longer a club, but a company, he tells Flamman.

– Argentine supporters are proud to be members. If a club is mismanaged, which of course there are many examples of even without privatisations, then they are not limited to just complaining, they can vote the management out. But there is more behind it than that. A club has many activities; 90 percent of them make a loss. Elite football is what goes with profit. But for a company, it makes sense to eliminate the minus items. The club is losing its role as a social hub, for young people and families, says Vardan Bleyan.

Boca’s history is closely linked to the biggest player in the matter, along with Milei: ex-president Mauricio Macri, heir to a corporate empire that included the privatized post of chairman of Boca Juniors. It made him a media figure and became a step on the way to mayor of Buenos Aires inner city and later president.

Boca Juniors supporters cheer on their team in a match against Independiente in Buenos Aires, October 2022. Photo: Natacha Pisarenko/AP.

Under Macri’s leadership, the club won many trophies – but at the same time quintupled its debt. Often, the money went to contracts with companies linked to himself or his friends, according to a review in an essay by the Taller de Periodismo de Investigación, the equivalent of the Journalism School’s excavation program.

“Every time a deal was made, Macri would always squeeze something for himself, he ran the club like his own business,” says Jorge Bermudez, one of several critical former players, to the magazine Zoom, which also writes that “the debt was scandalous.”

Nowadays, Macri and the party he founded, PRO, are parliamentary allies of Milei’s government, although friction is not lacking. And Macri tried to return to Boca, as a supporter of his former minister Andres Ibarra as presidential candidate. But the members, including soccer supporter Jorge Coria, mobilized en masse and elected former national team player Roman Riquelme instead.

I ask Jorge Coria what he thinks of Macri.

– I don’t want to talk politics, he says, before someone else in the crowd breaks in:

– He is the biggest parasite on football in the last 30 years!

Are you worried about the club being privatized in the future?

– Never. It won’t happen. Boca’s members stand strong together and will not allow that.

And other clubs?

– I don’t know… I don’t care about that, I think.

The power struggle around football has been dramatic before. November 30 is “San Lorenzo Supporter’s Day”. Nothing remarkable about it, really – everyone has a day in Argentina, from the air force to the bus drivers.

However, the event it commemorates is remarkable: the violent riot in front of the gates of the club’s own premises. It was in 2001, during one of the most dramatic economic crises in the country’s history, that the management of the elite series team San Lorenzo secretly negotiated with the Swiss company ISL to hand over the rights to the club’s brand for the next ten years.

Medalists. Argentina’s women’s national team celebrates after winning bronze at the 2022 Copa America. Photo: Dolores Ochoa/AP.

The board meeting where the agreement was to be hammered out had not been announced, but the information was leaked. Thousands of supporters mobilized and were met by a strong police chain in front of the gates. After several hours of clashes, the members stormed the building and stopped the agreement. The following year, ISL went bankrupt. And that’s not even the most drastic example.

In the 90s, Rios Seoane, a hotelier with a reputation for mafia connections, tried to take control of Division One team Temperley, at one point in partnership with none other than Macri. The first attempt failed and Macri moved on to other deals. In a second, Seoane convinced the board to raise membership fees, so no one could afford to pay them and be able to vote against him.

It also failed – but one of the organizers behind the resistance, Ignacio Torres, had to pay with his life. Three men emptied cans of gasoline into the bar he owned, El rincón de Torres, and set it on fire. The suspects all had connections to Seoane, but no one was convicted of the attack.

But why this privatization offensive right now? Besides Milei’s ideological beliefs, there seems to be another motive, and you have to go halfway around the world to find it.

Among business acquaintances with whom Macri has been seen in recent years are the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the Emir of the United Arab Emirates. In recent years, funds from the Persian Gulf have gone on a formidable shopping spree in the world of sports, buying up a Formula 1 competition, the PGA Tour in golf, Newcastle among other teams in football, and much more. Saudi Arabia has even sponsored the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, and Sweden’s biggest e-sports event, Dreamhack.

Apart from purely business considerations, there is another underlying motive. Critics have coined the term sportswashing. “It is a way to wash clean the country’s miserable human rights history,” Human Rights Watch commented on the Saudi PGA purchase. The idea is that if it is not possible to convince journalists and intellectuals to think well of the Gulf monarchies, they can at least invest in buying stardom.

In September, Mileis’ finance minister visited Saudi Arabia in search of a $10 billion loan, in exchange for a “political and sporting alliance,” including club privatisations, according to Noticias newspaper. In the radio channel Radio Miter, Milei himself explained that “Arab groups are waiting to invest three billion dollars”. And Messi is already a Saudi tourism ambassador.

But for now, the Argentinian football fans are standing in the way. The latest attack strategy from the government, after they previously got stuck, is to withdraw a number of tax breaks sports associations have had until now.

– The plan is to, together with all the increases in electricity and water and other costs, ruin the clubs so that they have no choice but to accept. This of course applies to all associations. The elite teams are the only ones that are interesting to privatize, but now the club in the neighborhood will be financially strangled at the same time, says Vardan Bleyan.

Boca beats Argentina Juniors 1-0. The supporters sing “Boca, you bring joy to my heart”. The massive police effort proves redundant – the town remains calm during the night. But off the pitch, the battle for football has only just begun.