The Professional Football Wedge

In the middle of discussions about the formation of SAD, the professional club Estudiantes de la Plata opened the path to clubs’ private ownership by international magnates when it signed a preliminary agreement to accept a $150 million investment from the US businessman Foster Gillett. Leaders and prominent figures in Argentine football understand this as the first step toward the definitive privatization of the country’s most popular sport.

Juan Sebastián Verón, a former player and the club’s president, denies this characterization, claiming that any decisions will only pass with the approval of members in a coming assembly. In any event, the club has already begun spending Gillett’s largesse, acquiring the young star Boca Cristian Medina for $15 million, an impossible figure for any championship team in Argentina.

Foster and his father, George Gillett — a mogul in communications and sports in the United States — already have experience at the helm of the English team Liverpool F.C., which they left in economic and competitive ruin. Now Gillett proposes not just a simple multimillion-dollar investment but a monied entrance into Argentine football, just as the federal government tries to twist the arm of the Argentine Football Association, which is opposed to the creation of SAD.

Verón demonstrated what he did not say when he posed with Foster Gillett for a photo together with Juliana Santillán, a House representative for Milei’s party, Libertad Avanza, and one of the most recognizable faces in national politics. The congresswoman posted the photo on Instagram and wrote, “We continue fighting the cultural battle! Argentina provides clear rules of the game for investment.”

The Survival of the Community Clubs

Before players go on to play professionally, many first pass through the country’s system of neighborhood sport or community clubs, clubes de barrio, of which Buenos Aires has 215. These have trained many of the kids who become professional players, some of whom have become international stars, even world champions, as is the case with Asociación de Fomento de Parque Chas, where the champions of Qatar 2022 Enzo Fernández, Exequiel Palacios, Gonzalo Montiel, and Guido Rodríguez all got their start. Or the Club Social y Deportivo Parque, the club that launched more careers than any other in the country. Among them are the former stars of Real Madrid CF Fernando Redondo and Fernando Gago, and the former Boca players Juan Román Riquelme and the current world champions Leandro Paredes and Alexis Mac Allister.

Three hundred kilometers from there, in the city of Rosario, a club called A. Grandoli FC in 1991 received a four-year-old who was dying to play football. His name was Lionel Messi, and thirteen years later made his debut in Barcelona. Like Club Parque, and many others, Grandoli remains to this day a community club with the same mission to welcome any child without any financial motive.

But these clubs aren’t just responsible for Argentina’s outsize role in global football. Always amateur and with little state support, they serve a dual purpose: provide athletic and community training to kids under fourteen years of age and at the same time mitigate the effects of a frayed social fabric. On the athletic level, they are schools where footballers learn not only the basic moves of the sport and its rules but also the values and codes that make up the national football culture.

“Community clubs are important in that they keep kids off the street and free them from the hold of screens, because today they’re hostage to their phones and tablets,” Facundo González, a thirty-five-year-old former player from Club Parque and the founder, in 2019, of Club Social y Deportivo El Campito, one of the city’s newest. “So the club gives them that mental health, of being sociable and learning to share. At the club they have to talk and come to agreements. And given the hard reality that our country faces, they also provide a bubble where boys and girls can come and be happy.”

After the Argentine national team won the World Cup in 2022, more and more kids came to join the clubs. El Campito now hosts some three hundred children among its various amateur football divisions.

Since Milei took office, the country has suffered its worst case of recession, unemployment, and poverty in thirty years. With collective utopian dreams shattered and the New Right in power, a hyperindividualist spirit prevails among the new generation. Today only one utopic formula remains: fast and easy money. In such a crisis, even those institutions that don’t seek profit are exposed to the ferocity of the market. The community clubs — where children from three to fourteen years old get their first connection to the world of football — are no exception.

“They face the dilemma between increasing membership fees and maintenance costs,” Gonález explains. “They are social clubs, and they can’t raise costs at the same rate as electricity, gas, and water. This means that if they don’t get help from the state or some other figure, they become increasingly impoverished, their facilities progressively older and their kids in progressively worse situations.”

In the case of his former club, Parque Chas, that “other figure” had a name: Javier Saviola. The former River Plate and Barcelona player also began his career at the club in the late ’80s. In 2009, the club was going through what seemed a terminal crisis. The roofs were caving. The locker rooms were in ruins. The whole building appeared on the verge of collapse. Saviola, at the time a player for the Spanish team Málaga CF, was made aware of the situation and put up the money to reverse its collapse, saving the club that reared him. In June 2011, after two years’ work, Parque Chas reopened its doors.

“If it weren’t for Javier Saviola, this club would have disappeared. . . . Name an elite professional player who’s done something like this. There aren’t any! There’s no one! Parque Chas is alive today thanks to Javier,” Gabriel Rodríguez, who discovered Saviola, told the newspaper La Nación.

The donation not only saved the club but also — as no one could have predicted — the Argentine national team. Eleven years later, a boy trained at Parque Chas converted the final penalty against France into a World Cup championship for Argentina. In his early years, with the club recently rescued, Gonzalo Montiel split his training between River Plate and Parque Chas. If it wasn’t for Saviola’s intervention, Montiel would have been left without a club or teammates to train with — and Argentina, perhaps, without a World Cup.

Club Parque and Parque Chas are just two of many clubs that face precarity absent an institutional framework or the political will to keep them alive. Subject to the economic crisis and abandoned by the political class, they’ve sometimes had to depend on philanthropists to save them from ruin. Any club that hasn’t had the luck of producing a world-class star will have difficulty finding one.

In January 2015, Congress passed a law to create the Scheme for the Advancement of Community and Town Clubs. It defined them as nonprofit associations for the public good. The current government, however, has buried the scheme’s budget, which consists of an annual contribution based on each club’s structure. Club leaders agree that this support from the state has had little bearing on clubs’ day-to-day operations.

The Cradle of Giants

Diego Maradona made his first-division debut in 1976 in the Argentinos Juniors jersey. From that moment on, the club became a powerhouse in the export of world-class football talent. Argentinos Juniors became the cradle of Argentine football. And if Argentinos was the cradle, Club Parque was the incubator. Because before playing eleven-on-eleven football, the kids began their training at the community club. And, like Parque Chas, the club was derelict and on the verge of collapse.

In 2013, as one club was opening its door, another was closing them. Club Parque was shuttered for seven years, until the former player César La Paglia and other former teammates put together a group to invest in the restoration and expansion of its facilities. In 2017, the club reopened in a modern building with a renovated field and a range of amenities for members.

La Paglia made his first moves as a player in the club that he helped revive. He was a star of the national youth team, played in Boca, and today is an agent. “Neighborhood clubs they provide support for kids and also an education,” says La Paglia. “Each kid that’s in a community club is one fewer that’s on the streets.”

Far from committing to a sports policy for young people, the national government launched a highly controversial measure authorizing minors and adolescents over thirteen to invest in the stock market. Gambling now consumes much of adolescents’ time. About 80 percent of bets are illegal and, according to a study in Buenos Aires, 40 percent of those betters are under eighteen.

Given this situation, the community clubs have become a last defense of collectivism. From the smallest, which perhaps haven’t trained a professional player in one hundred years, to the most prestigious, from which both past glories and current stars of European football have emerged, the clubs represent a quixotic rejection of social atomization under capitalism.

The Smallest

A roar of cheers. The neighborhood’s calm breaks like a window shattered by a stone. A small grouping of circular streets that intersect without rhyme or reason make Parque Chas a tranquil hamlet in the middle of Buenos Aires. Low buildings, trees, birds. A loud silence that is interrupted before the calm suddenly returns after the explosion of cheers, shouts, and celebrations. El Trébol turns the game around and commands a 2–1 lead at home. The goal is scored by Simón “El Kaiser” Linch, a ten-year-old defender who lives four blocks from the field. It was his first.

The club consists of the field and no more: an outdoor rectangle of cement, suitable for five-on-five. Both sides, also cement, are flanked by stands for the home and visiting teams, each with three rows. Little Linch runs toward one of them to celebrate his goal with his mother. It’s just another Saturday, but for these kids, it’s special because there’s a match. The field they plan on belongs to El Trébol, but it’s also the neighborhood’s. When there’s no game, anyone can come and use it. There’s no fee and no time limit.

Except on the days El Trébol plays. Then a green tarp stretches around the field, attached to the fence that surrounds it. To watch the kids play, you have to pay an entry of two thousand pesos, a little more than a dollar. Those tickets and the ten-thousand-peso monthly membership fee make up the club’s whole income. El Trébol is the smallest of the 215 community clubs officially registered with the city. Its only purpose is to bring joy — and sport and social training — to the boys and girls of the Buenos Aires neighborhood. Now it’s threatened by the privatizing spirit sweeping the country.

Established in 1943, El Treból Social, Sports, and Cultural Club has its public stadium in Éxodo Jujeño Plaza, the epicenter of this labyrinth of streets. Facing the square, vaguely distinguished by yellow letters, is the club’s headquarters, a house donated by a local family that today serves as a small lounge where retirees sometimes get together to play board games. There’s also martial arts and boxing. It is the sister organization of Parque Chas, which Saviola saved fourteen years ago. Barely 150 meters separates the two places.

An urban legend goes that many years ago, in the early days of Buenos Aires, a group of people decided to cross these dead-end streets but ended up trapped in the labyrinthine neighborhood. Tired of trying to escape, the adventurers decided to set down roots in the new area filled with birds and trees. This is how, according to the tale, Parque Chas was born.

Jorege Princic is the president of El Trébol, which is attended by around 230 boys and girls in addition to some sixty children between ages three and six — all to play football. Like many other clubs, it survives on the help of its members. They clean and paint the field, weld broken goal posts, fix what needs fixing. After the game, they pick up any trash left behind at the end of the day.

“We function more as a community than a club, with a cooperative rationale,” says Princic. “This is a place of training; it’s a home and it’s a school. We impart moral values: solidarity, comradery, respect for one’s opponents. We teach the kids to trust each other.”

These clubs constitute some of the basic building blocks of society in Argentina. They survived the dictatorship, and they’ll likely survive Milei’s anarchocapitalist “chainsaw” too. A government worthy of rule would invest in them directly. Absent that, they’ll have to depend on the same social values that have kept them alive until now.

“No one can win a game alone, nor lose it,” Princic tells me. “No one can save oneself alone.”