Argentina was on top of the world.
This is TOO LONG FOR LIFE.
The rapidity of Argentina's football development was such that when the first professional league was played in 1931 many of the key elements of the nation's football culture were already in place. Argentina had been playing international football for thirty years. They had been champions of South America, and twice runners-up to Uruguay in the 1928 Olympic Final and the first World Cup Final in 1930. In the hands of the new popular press, like El Gráfico magazine and the newspaper Clarín, a working mythology of a unique national playing style had been articulated. Buenos Aires was blessed with socially and geographically distinct neighborhoods that flocked to see their neighborhood clubs, and a public-transport network that could take them to away games too. Thus despite being launched in the depths of the global economic depression of the early 1930s Argentine professional football survived and thrived. It did so, in part, like the wide Argentine economy, by disengaging from the global economy and from global football. The AFA sent only an amateur team to the 1934 World Cup in Italy, which was quickly dispatched by the Swedes in a single game. No team at all was sent to the 1938 World Cup, where the Italians won again with a considerable phalanx of Argentine players who had taken Italian citizenship. No Argentine side would appear in a World Cup finals for another twenty years. The migration of high-profile players to Spain and Italy that had spurred the creation of a professional game was soon over. Buenos Aires looked a lot more attractive as the next war in Europe loomed. In South American Argentina were supreme. While Europe ad the Pacific burned, Argentina was winning the Copa América: as hosts in 1937; then in Chile in 1941; followed by a trio of bravura victories in 1945, 1946 and 1947.
Having made the breakthrough to professionalism the commercialization of domestic football that sustained these international triumphs was broadened and deepened in the 1930s. The radio finally arrived in the furthest reaches of the country and the music and football of Buenos Aires came with it. From chilly Patagonian villages 2,000 kilometres to the south, to Tucumán in the far north on the subtropical Brazilian border, people heard the swing and the strut of Héctor Varela's and Osvaldo Pugliese's tango big bands and the new ecstatic, staccato, radio football commentaries of Fioravanti. This created a nationwide fan base for the leading metropolitan teams that persists to this day. Buenos Aires sounded so good that people were leaving Patagonia and Tucumán and heading for the city. Just as the transatlantic migrations came to an end rural migration filled the gap in Argentina's relentless process of urbanization. Buenos Aires was not the only pole of demographic growth. Rural migrants moved to Santa Fe, Córdoba, and Rosario too. This demographic and economic shift helped propel the first provincial clubs, Newell's Old Boys and Rosario Central, into the professional league in 1937.
Through the 1930s average ticket sales in the league were recorded at around 7,000, but these figure exclude seats taken by club members or socios. The biggest clubs had over 10,000 apiece and the smaller clubs 2-4,000. Crowds of over 40,000 were not uncommon for the very biggest games and they were richly rewarded by a decade of free-scoring football: between September 1936 and April 1938 there were no goalless draws in the Argentinian first division. As Argentina's economy began to boom in the early years of the Second World War, average crowds doubled and continued to increase in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At their peak, River Plate had 72,000 socios and could get crowds approaching 100,000; even their third and fourth teams were watched by crowds of 15,000. El Gráfico was selling 200,000 copies a week and amateur and recreational football occupied every park, square and vacant lot in the metropolitan areas. The media industries continued to innovate through the 1930s and 1940s. La Crítica, for example, redoubled interest in games by offering cash prizes for goalkeepers who could keep a clean sheet against in-form strikers, or who managed to save penalties. The cinema, now a staple of everyday life in Buenos Aires, began to show sport too. Perón's government sponsored Sucesos Argentinos: short movie newsreels that combined reports of children's sporting competitions, public works on sports projects and international successes. But football barely needed sponsorship, as around 30 per cent of all commercial films made between 1944 and 1954 in Argentina took sport as their subject -- usually football.
What was almost immediately recognized as a golden era in football was known in politics as la década infame. Military rule gave way to twelve years of government by a dysfunctional and closed coalition of conservatives, socialists and the dominant Unión Cívica Radical, which by 1940 was resorting to stuffing ballot boxes to survive. For the most part football remained outside of politics. The directors of smaller and medium-sized clubs remained motivated by civic pride as much as political ambition. But the irresistible lure of the game and the essentially clientelistic system of political patronage of the era saw the growth of a tenticular network of interconnections between football and politics. General Juan Justo, president of the Argentine Republic between 1932 and 1938, made it known that he was a fan of Boca Juniors. His daughter married Eduardo Sánchez Terrero who went on to become president of Boca between 1939 and 1946; a term of office that coincided with a massive soft government loan that built their new stadium, colloquially known as La Bombonera -- The Chocolate Box -- in 1940. A subsequent present -- of the nation rather than Boca -- Ramón Castillo was not himself interested in football, but his son was. Lo and behold, Ramón Junior became president of the Argentine FA between 1941 and 1943.
Four teams dominated the first decade and a half of professional football in Argentina. Boca Juniors, River Plate, Independiente and San Lorenzo occupied the top two spots in the league for sixteen years. The identities and allegiances of the clus, first established in the 1920s, hardened into self-perpetuating mythologies. Boca Juniors, the team always most explicitly linked to an immigrant, Italian, working-class identity, were the only side to remain in the very heart of old Buenos Aires. By the early 1930s transatlantic migration had come to an end but the impact it had wrought on Argentina's demography was such that Boca could now claim to be the team of the masses, the team of the people; 50 per cent plus one, as they described their support. River, whose crowds remained mixed, had like all social aspirants moved out of the docks and headed north to the more exclusive barrios of Palermo and Belgrano. Along the way they acquired a reputation as the aristocrats of the league, with a preference for style over sweat; for good manners over gamesmanship. Independiente retained the grit and grime of Avellaneda -- Buenos Aires' industrial sinkhole -- while San Lorenzo occupied the space, west of the city centre, in Flores and Almagro where the middle class and working class, the workships and tango halls rubbed shoulders with one another. While each member of this quartet can claim its own distinctive contribution to the era it is perhaps River Plate's that was most emblematic.
River earned the sobriquet Millonarios in 1931 when they began the professional era with a wild spending spree on players like right wing Carlos Peucelle and striker Bernabé Ferreyra. As the best-connected club of the era River were the first to benefit from the government's low-key largesse, investing in the development of new football stadiums in return for both symbolic kudos and the practical use of their property for housing schools and clinics. Argentina's application of this obvious solution to the eternal problem of how to fund a piece of infrastructure that is only really used for ninety minutes a week was considerably in advance of anywhere else. The Estadio Antonio Vespuccio Liberti, always known as El Monumental, was opened on 25 May 1938, a national holiday, in the presence of President Ortiz. A two-tiered horse-shoe, El Monumental was Argentina's first industrial, steel and concrete football stadium, with a capacity of around 70,000. It contained a school and a medical practice and was built alongside a whole range of sporting and social facilities for the club's socios. It hosted its first game that day in which River thrashed Montevideo's Peñarol. The team that would truly grace El Monumental, matching sporting achievement to architectural ambition, was just evolving. It would mature three years later in 1941, as the champions. El Gráfico's editor Borocotó watched them demolish Chacarita Juniors 6-2 that season and wrote that they played like a machine. They were, henceforth, La Máquina.
La Máquina won their first title as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They went on to win another three titles. In 1942 they won the championship by a point from Boca on the final day of the season, while Stalingrad was reduced to ice and dust and corpses. In 1945 they took the title while the rubble of Japan's cities still throbbed with radiation. They claimed the 1947 championship while a winter so fierce gripped Europe that it seemed like the war had never ended. But in December, in Latin America, the sun shone. It was another world. In the six years between their first and last title, in this otherworldly haven, La Máquina came to define, to embody, everything that was La Nuestra -- our style, the best football in the world. Cut off from the carnage, freed from the imperatives of war and survival, Argentinian football could create a distinct blend of instrumentalism, art and entertainment. In the 1920s the cults of dribbling and flamboyant individualism had been central to the distinct criollo football of the Río de la Plata. Now, under the sterner conditions and imperatives of professionalization, the Scottish legacy of the passing game was added to the repertoire.
The style of play that evolved was an unreservedly attacking game exemplified by River Plate's forward quintet -- Muñoz, Moreno, Pedernera, Labruna and Lousteau -- then as now, an Argentinian football litany. Even the young Alfredo di Stéfano was a mere addendum to these five. La Máquina played for time and searched for space, passing, always passing. They kept possession and could slow the tempo of their game until a chink of light, a hint of a chance, offered up the opportunity of some remarkable feint, shot or dash. Muñoz, in particular, was adored for his trickery. "'The tango,' he'd say, 'is the best way to train, you maintain a rhythm then change it when you stride forward, you learn the profiles, you work on your waist and your legs'" (Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow).
But then there was room to tango on the pitch in Argentina. Defensive play and tactics were woefully underdeveloped. Man-to-man marking had barely been explored. Midfielders and strikers did nothing as inelegant or pointedly utilitarian as close down their opponents or press them in packs. Regaining the ball, if it were lost, was not treated as a priority. The man on the ball had time. And there was time for wine, women and song, for La Nuestra was not a puritan regime. In the magical air of Buenos Aires, professionalism and bohemianism could coexist. A team that played with artistry could be a machine. Eduardo Galeano retells Muñoz's story in suitably mythic terms:
On Sundays at midday, before each match he would devour a big bowl of chicken stew and drain several bottles of red wine. Those in charge at River ordered him to give up his rowdy ways ... he did his best. For an entire week he slept at night and drank nothing but milk. Then he played the worst game of his life. When he went back to carousing the team suspended him. His team-mates went on strike in solidarity with this incorrigible bohemian.
An unexpected but telling overview of Argentinian football at the peak of its prowess comes in the clipped tones of the British Diplomatic Service. In 1945 the president of the Rio club Botafogo was proposing a post-war South American tour by British clubs, and the Foreign Office had asked their South American embassies to comment on the likely course of events. The British Embassy in Buenos Aires was cautious:
Local interest in football has to be seen to be believed; games between the leaders in the championship draw crowds of 80,000 ... Under their own rules and on their own grounds the Argentine football players are first class and even the best First Division teams from England would have their work cut out to hold their own. Any football team below tip-top standard would do our football reputation more harm than good.
Even then we should have some hesitation in recommending. The local rules differ considerably from the English, particularly in regard to charging; an Argentine goalkeeper is a sort of untouchable ... Argentine players and spectators are very excitable and the sight of a twelve-stone Arsenal forward charging an Argentine goalkeeper with the ball into the net might easily start a battle.
-- Quoted in T. Mason (1995), Passion of the People, p. 102-3.*
* From the notes: Mason reports that these diplomatic premonitions came to pass when Arsenal toured Brazil in 1949. A shoulder barge on Flamengo's goalkeeper in Rio triggered a fight on the pitch, a small pitch invasion and police intervention. Bryn Jones, the offending Arsenal Forward, was struck on the head with a truncheon.
Argentina's crowds were big, voluble and volatile. There are scattered reports of fighting between fans but for the most part they were crude and rude rather than threatening.
What, it seems, most likely to ignite trouble were refereeing decisions. In 1932 Sr De Angelis was in charge of a game between Estudiantes and River Plate. River were top of the league and 1-0 up when De Angelis disallowed an Estudiantes goal. He was surrounded by players and fans on the pitch and was forced to retreat to his dressing room. He emerged fifteen minutes later announcing that in fact the goal would stand, inaugurating the now common phrase 'el gol de la casilla' -- scored in the changing rooms. Rumour abounded that the president of Estudiantes had held a gun to De Angelis's head. But what distinguished the crowds of Buenos Aires was that they sung a repertoire of taunts and support, slogans of love and hate that at the time had no equal for their intimacy, intensity, diversity or wit.
After twelve years in their barracks the Argentine army returned to politics. Alarmed by Argentina's fragile and inconsistent foreign policy in the midst of the Second World War and appalled by the pettiness and corruption of the old cabal of civilian politicians, a group of dissident officers staged a successful coup in 1943. They dissolved Congress, pushed the politicians out of the ministries and banned all political parties. A hitherto unkonwn Colonel, Juan Domingo Perón, was made Minister of Labour and in two short years he unleashed a torrent of social and industrial reform. Perón's immense popularity and personal political magnetism so worried the senior officer corps and the military government that they arrested and imprisoned him in October 1945. In the single greatest gathering of Argentina's working class hundreds of thousands filled the Plaza de Mayo and stood before La Cas Rosada -- the presidential residence -- demanding his release. Peronism -- the cult, the programme, the movement -- was born. Perón, now released, began to articulate an intoxicating blend of nationalism, independence and modernization. The working class were captivated by his delivery and the promise of more social reform, economic advance and inclusion in the political process. The new class of industrialists backed his plans for national economic independence and domestically controlled industrialization. This fusion of the two most dynamic sectors of Argentinian society in Perónism attracted the progressive wing of the military and a swathe of middle-class intellectuals. In 1946 Perón ran for the presidency and won.
Once in power Perón made good his promises to his working-class constituency. Real wages leapt as the government aided the trade unions and settled strikes in their favour; at the same time prices for key consumables like football matches were kept low. Foreign influence in the economy was diminished as the government nationalized the British-owned railways, the French-owned docks and the American-owned telephone system. As the economy boomed on exports to a Western Europe beginning the process of reconstruction, Perón paid off the national debt and declared a state of economic independence. Such flourishes hid the regime's awareness of the fragility of Argentina's industrial companies. Tariffs for foreign goods rose, throwing a protective wall around domestic industrialists that had rallied to Perón's cause. Correspondingly, the nation's self-esteem in its football was protected by limiting the national team's participation in world football. No team was sent to the 1949 Copa América or to the 1950 World Cup. Although bureaucratic differences were publicly cited as the reason for Argentina's absence, it was well known that the regime was acutely aware of the damage that could be done if notions of national superiority were punctured by the realities of open international competition.
The role of sport in domestic politics was considerable. Perón's government merged the Argentine Olympic Committee and the Confederation of Argentine Sport and brought them under direct state control. Perón made himself president of the new body which was launched with a spate of posters and sloganeering that declared "Perón: the First Sportsman." Perón, like Mussolini, preferred hunting to sport and was an expert fencer, but he also recognized football's potential role in nation-building and social policy. Strong nationals required strong bodies and intense collective experiences. Even so, San Lorenzo's 1946-7 tour of Europe, during which they soundly beat both the Spanish national team 6-1 and the Portuguese 10-4, did not embolden the football authorities. They preferred to draw the conclusions of Brazil's shattering home defeat in the 1950 World Cup; no Argentine team went to the 1954 World Cup either. International athletics, which excited fewer passions and lower expectations than football, was seen as a safer bet. Thus the government mdae money available for a large and successful Argentine team to travel to the 1948 London Olympics, and Argentina's medallists were presented with special commemorative Perónista medals by the General himself in 1949 at El Monumental. Argentina then hosted the first Pan-American Games in 1951 and the government was happy to bask in the international success of a gifted generation of Argentine boxers and racing drivers.
By contrast, domestic football was politics of a higher order, confirmed by the government's direct interest in and control over senior appointments at the Argentinian FA. AFA presidents Oscar Nicolini and Valentin Suárez were direct Perónista appointments. In return for control the government began to dispense money, with cash for new stadiums at Huracán 5n 1947 and Vélez Sarsfield in 1951. Every club acquired among its inner circles and boards of directors a padrino (godfather), who linked them to the tightly wired new circuits of power in Perón's Argentina. The nation's charismatic and omnipresent first lady Evita Perón possessed an instinctive political populism which led her to football too. The first Evita Perón football championships were played right across the nation in 1950. The competition was open to any team of kids from anywhere that presented itself to the now proliferating offices of the Evita Perón Foundation -- a para-statal welfare operation run by Evita herself. Every team was then supplied with kits -- for many poor children their first proper playing kit ever -- and the players submitted to a compulsory medical, immunization and x-rays. Hundreds of thousands of Argentina's children made their first contact with the country's fledgling health service in this way. After innumerable rounds the finals were held in Buenos Aires. They played the national anthem and a specially commissioned march for Evita who of course took the kick-off. Yet even Evita was aware of her limits. During a four-day rally to back her unsuccessful run for the vice-presidency all football was rescheduled; she knew she could not compete.
The rise of organized labour under Perón did not leave football untouched. Labour relations mirrored the wider urban economy: working conditions were poor, security of employment low. Conflict had been brewing for some time and the labour force had slowly but surely been organizing itself. Players had struck in Uruguay for four weeks in 1939, led by the star of their 1930 World Cup victory, José Nasazzi. In 1944 Mexico had started up its first professional football league and attracted Argentinian and Uruguayan players who had had enough of feudal labour contracts and poor wages. In the wider Argentinian economy of the late 1940s trade unions were growing fast, received government support in the labour market and were winning wage increases, concessions and improvements across the board. The first players' union in Argentina was formed in 1944 and named the Futbolistas Argentinos Agremiados. By 1948 the union was demanding recognition from the football authorities, the creation of a minimum wage and the establishment of freedom of contract. The clubs and the football authorities attempted to ignore the union and a strike was set for April. The AFA and the clubs agreed to recognize the union but would not relent on the other issues. The strike was delayed but only until July. Buenos Aires' stadiums went silent. There really was no football through the long winter months. The government then intervened in the dispute, creating a tribunal to adjudge the case. The league restarted, but the tribunal's recommendations were not enough for the players and the strike was back on in November. The clubs were forced to finish the season with amateur teams and rapidly declining crowds. New contracts and wages were agreed for 1949 but by then it was too late as the very elite of the Argentine league had left for the new pirate league in Colombia. Except, of course, for one club: Racing.
Although every club had its padrino (godfather), not all padrinos were equal. El Padrino of Racing Club was Ramón Cereijo, Perón's Minister of Finance. Although he held no formal post at the club his relationship was so close that Racing became known as Sportivo Cereijo. When the rest of Argentina's leading clubs were losing the core of their squads to the new leagues of Mexico, Colombia and even Guatemala, Racing lost no one. In 1949, while the other teams were depleted, Racing finally broke the stranglehold of the big four and won the championship. Such triumphs demanded an appropriate stage and Cereijo arranged for a loan deal of extraordinary generosity to be struck between the club and the government -- 3 million pesos to be paid back in sixty-five years. As the new stadium was being built 3 million became 11 million. President Perón, who had once announced his affection for Boca Juniors, attended the opening ceremony of the stadium named in his honour, while Bramuglia, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Miranda, president of the Central Bank, were made honorary members of the club. The team won the title again in 1950 and 1951, a victory rewarded in the third year by the presentation of a brand new Chevrolet to every player. Perón went on to win his second term in office in 1951; the power of Peronism and its place in history seemed secure. Untouched, as yet, by the harsh realities of the global economy and global sporting competition, Argentina was on top of the world.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 267-276.
The rapidity of Argentina's football development was such that when the first professional league was played in 1931 many of the key elements of the nation's football culture were already in place. Argentina had been playing international football for thirty years. They had been champions of South America, and twice runners-up to Uruguay in the 1928 Olympic Final and the first World Cup Final in 1930. In the hands of the new popular press, like El Gráfico magazine and the newspaper Clarín, a working mythology of a unique national playing style had been articulated. Buenos Aires was blessed with socially and geographically distinct neighborhoods that flocked to see their neighborhood clubs, and a public-transport network that could take them to away games too. Thus despite being launched in the depths of the global economic depression of the early 1930s Argentine professional football survived and thrived. It did so, in part, like the wide Argentine economy, by disengaging from the global economy and from global football. The AFA sent only an amateur team to the 1934 World Cup in Italy, which was quickly dispatched by the Swedes in a single game. No team at all was sent to the 1938 World Cup, where the Italians won again with a considerable phalanx of Argentine players who had taken Italian citizenship. No Argentine side would appear in a World Cup finals for another twenty years. The migration of high-profile players to Spain and Italy that had spurred the creation of a professional game was soon over. Buenos Aires looked a lot more attractive as the next war in Europe loomed. In South American Argentina were supreme. While Europe ad the Pacific burned, Argentina was winning the Copa América: as hosts in 1937; then in Chile in 1941; followed by a trio of bravura victories in 1945, 1946 and 1947.
Having made the breakthrough to professionalism the commercialization of domestic football that sustained these international triumphs was broadened and deepened in the 1930s. The radio finally arrived in the furthest reaches of the country and the music and football of Buenos Aires came with it. From chilly Patagonian villages 2,000 kilometres to the south, to Tucumán in the far north on the subtropical Brazilian border, people heard the swing and the strut of Héctor Varela's and Osvaldo Pugliese's tango big bands and the new ecstatic, staccato, radio football commentaries of Fioravanti. This created a nationwide fan base for the leading metropolitan teams that persists to this day. Buenos Aires sounded so good that people were leaving Patagonia and Tucumán and heading for the city. Just as the transatlantic migrations came to an end rural migration filled the gap in Argentina's relentless process of urbanization. Buenos Aires was not the only pole of demographic growth. Rural migrants moved to Santa Fe, Córdoba, and Rosario too. This demographic and economic shift helped propel the first provincial clubs, Newell's Old Boys and Rosario Central, into the professional league in 1937.
Through the 1930s average ticket sales in the league were recorded at around 7,000, but these figure exclude seats taken by club members or socios. The biggest clubs had over 10,000 apiece and the smaller clubs 2-4,000. Crowds of over 40,000 were not uncommon for the very biggest games and they were richly rewarded by a decade of free-scoring football: between September 1936 and April 1938 there were no goalless draws in the Argentinian first division. As Argentina's economy began to boom in the early years of the Second World War, average crowds doubled and continued to increase in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At their peak, River Plate had 72,000 socios and could get crowds approaching 100,000; even their third and fourth teams were watched by crowds of 15,000. El Gráfico was selling 200,000 copies a week and amateur and recreational football occupied every park, square and vacant lot in the metropolitan areas. The media industries continued to innovate through the 1930s and 1940s. La Crítica, for example, redoubled interest in games by offering cash prizes for goalkeepers who could keep a clean sheet against in-form strikers, or who managed to save penalties. The cinema, now a staple of everyday life in Buenos Aires, began to show sport too. Perón's government sponsored Sucesos Argentinos: short movie newsreels that combined reports of children's sporting competitions, public works on sports projects and international successes. But football barely needed sponsorship, as around 30 per cent of all commercial films made between 1944 and 1954 in Argentina took sport as their subject -- usually football.
What was almost immediately recognized as a golden era in football was known in politics as la década infame. Military rule gave way to twelve years of government by a dysfunctional and closed coalition of conservatives, socialists and the dominant Unión Cívica Radical, which by 1940 was resorting to stuffing ballot boxes to survive. For the most part football remained outside of politics. The directors of smaller and medium-sized clubs remained motivated by civic pride as much as political ambition. But the irresistible lure of the game and the essentially clientelistic system of political patronage of the era saw the growth of a tenticular network of interconnections between football and politics. General Juan Justo, president of the Argentine Republic between 1932 and 1938, made it known that he was a fan of Boca Juniors. His daughter married Eduardo Sánchez Terrero who went on to become president of Boca between 1939 and 1946; a term of office that coincided with a massive soft government loan that built their new stadium, colloquially known as La Bombonera -- The Chocolate Box -- in 1940. A subsequent present -- of the nation rather than Boca -- Ramón Castillo was not himself interested in football, but his son was. Lo and behold, Ramón Junior became president of the Argentine FA between 1941 and 1943.
Four teams dominated the first decade and a half of professional football in Argentina. Boca Juniors, River Plate, Independiente and San Lorenzo occupied the top two spots in the league for sixteen years. The identities and allegiances of the clus, first established in the 1920s, hardened into self-perpetuating mythologies. Boca Juniors, the team always most explicitly linked to an immigrant, Italian, working-class identity, were the only side to remain in the very heart of old Buenos Aires. By the early 1930s transatlantic migration had come to an end but the impact it had wrought on Argentina's demography was such that Boca could now claim to be the team of the masses, the team of the people; 50 per cent plus one, as they described their support. River, whose crowds remained mixed, had like all social aspirants moved out of the docks and headed north to the more exclusive barrios of Palermo and Belgrano. Along the way they acquired a reputation as the aristocrats of the league, with a preference for style over sweat; for good manners over gamesmanship. Independiente retained the grit and grime of Avellaneda -- Buenos Aires' industrial sinkhole -- while San Lorenzo occupied the space, west of the city centre, in Flores and Almagro where the middle class and working class, the workships and tango halls rubbed shoulders with one another. While each member of this quartet can claim its own distinctive contribution to the era it is perhaps River Plate's that was most emblematic.
River earned the sobriquet Millonarios in 1931 when they began the professional era with a wild spending spree on players like right wing Carlos Peucelle and striker Bernabé Ferreyra. As the best-connected club of the era River were the first to benefit from the government's low-key largesse, investing in the development of new football stadiums in return for both symbolic kudos and the practical use of their property for housing schools and clinics. Argentina's application of this obvious solution to the eternal problem of how to fund a piece of infrastructure that is only really used for ninety minutes a week was considerably in advance of anywhere else. The Estadio Antonio Vespuccio Liberti, always known as El Monumental, was opened on 25 May 1938, a national holiday, in the presence of President Ortiz. A two-tiered horse-shoe, El Monumental was Argentina's first industrial, steel and concrete football stadium, with a capacity of around 70,000. It contained a school and a medical practice and was built alongside a whole range of sporting and social facilities for the club's socios. It hosted its first game that day in which River thrashed Montevideo's Peñarol. The team that would truly grace El Monumental, matching sporting achievement to architectural ambition, was just evolving. It would mature three years later in 1941, as the champions. El Gráfico's editor Borocotó watched them demolish Chacarita Juniors 6-2 that season and wrote that they played like a machine. They were, henceforth, La Máquina.
La Máquina won their first title as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They went on to win another three titles. In 1942 they won the championship by a point from Boca on the final day of the season, while Stalingrad was reduced to ice and dust and corpses. In 1945 they took the title while the rubble of Japan's cities still throbbed with radiation. They claimed the 1947 championship while a winter so fierce gripped Europe that it seemed like the war had never ended. But in December, in Latin America, the sun shone. It was another world. In the six years between their first and last title, in this otherworldly haven, La Máquina came to define, to embody, everything that was La Nuestra -- our style, the best football in the world. Cut off from the carnage, freed from the imperatives of war and survival, Argentinian football could create a distinct blend of instrumentalism, art and entertainment. In the 1920s the cults of dribbling and flamboyant individualism had been central to the distinct criollo football of the Río de la Plata. Now, under the sterner conditions and imperatives of professionalization, the Scottish legacy of the passing game was added to the repertoire.
The style of play that evolved was an unreservedly attacking game exemplified by River Plate's forward quintet -- Muñoz, Moreno, Pedernera, Labruna and Lousteau -- then as now, an Argentinian football litany. Even the young Alfredo di Stéfano was a mere addendum to these five. La Máquina played for time and searched for space, passing, always passing. They kept possession and could slow the tempo of their game until a chink of light, a hint of a chance, offered up the opportunity of some remarkable feint, shot or dash. Muñoz, in particular, was adored for his trickery. "'The tango,' he'd say, 'is the best way to train, you maintain a rhythm then change it when you stride forward, you learn the profiles, you work on your waist and your legs'" (Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow).
But then there was room to tango on the pitch in Argentina. Defensive play and tactics were woefully underdeveloped. Man-to-man marking had barely been explored. Midfielders and strikers did nothing as inelegant or pointedly utilitarian as close down their opponents or press them in packs. Regaining the ball, if it were lost, was not treated as a priority. The man on the ball had time. And there was time for wine, women and song, for La Nuestra was not a puritan regime. In the magical air of Buenos Aires, professionalism and bohemianism could coexist. A team that played with artistry could be a machine. Eduardo Galeano retells Muñoz's story in suitably mythic terms:
On Sundays at midday, before each match he would devour a big bowl of chicken stew and drain several bottles of red wine. Those in charge at River ordered him to give up his rowdy ways ... he did his best. For an entire week he slept at night and drank nothing but milk. Then he played the worst game of his life. When he went back to carousing the team suspended him. His team-mates went on strike in solidarity with this incorrigible bohemian.
An unexpected but telling overview of Argentinian football at the peak of its prowess comes in the clipped tones of the British Diplomatic Service. In 1945 the president of the Rio club Botafogo was proposing a post-war South American tour by British clubs, and the Foreign Office had asked their South American embassies to comment on the likely course of events. The British Embassy in Buenos Aires was cautious:
Local interest in football has to be seen to be believed; games between the leaders in the championship draw crowds of 80,000 ... Under their own rules and on their own grounds the Argentine football players are first class and even the best First Division teams from England would have their work cut out to hold their own. Any football team below tip-top standard would do our football reputation more harm than good.
Even then we should have some hesitation in recommending. The local rules differ considerably from the English, particularly in regard to charging; an Argentine goalkeeper is a sort of untouchable ... Argentine players and spectators are very excitable and the sight of a twelve-stone Arsenal forward charging an Argentine goalkeeper with the ball into the net might easily start a battle.
-- Quoted in T. Mason (1995), Passion of the People, p. 102-3.*
* From the notes: Mason reports that these diplomatic premonitions came to pass when Arsenal toured Brazil in 1949. A shoulder barge on Flamengo's goalkeeper in Rio triggered a fight on the pitch, a small pitch invasion and police intervention. Bryn Jones, the offending Arsenal Forward, was struck on the head with a truncheon.
Argentina's crowds were big, voluble and volatile. There are scattered reports of fighting between fans but for the most part they were crude and rude rather than threatening.
What, it seems, most likely to ignite trouble were refereeing decisions. In 1932 Sr De Angelis was in charge of a game between Estudiantes and River Plate. River were top of the league and 1-0 up when De Angelis disallowed an Estudiantes goal. He was surrounded by players and fans on the pitch and was forced to retreat to his dressing room. He emerged fifteen minutes later announcing that in fact the goal would stand, inaugurating the now common phrase 'el gol de la casilla' -- scored in the changing rooms. Rumour abounded that the president of Estudiantes had held a gun to De Angelis's head. But what distinguished the crowds of Buenos Aires was that they sung a repertoire of taunts and support, slogans of love and hate that at the time had no equal for their intimacy, intensity, diversity or wit.
After twelve years in their barracks the Argentine army returned to politics. Alarmed by Argentina's fragile and inconsistent foreign policy in the midst of the Second World War and appalled by the pettiness and corruption of the old cabal of civilian politicians, a group of dissident officers staged a successful coup in 1943. They dissolved Congress, pushed the politicians out of the ministries and banned all political parties. A hitherto unkonwn Colonel, Juan Domingo Perón, was made Minister of Labour and in two short years he unleashed a torrent of social and industrial reform. Perón's immense popularity and personal political magnetism so worried the senior officer corps and the military government that they arrested and imprisoned him in October 1945. In the single greatest gathering of Argentina's working class hundreds of thousands filled the Plaza de Mayo and stood before La Cas Rosada -- the presidential residence -- demanding his release. Peronism -- the cult, the programme, the movement -- was born. Perón, now released, began to articulate an intoxicating blend of nationalism, independence and modernization. The working class were captivated by his delivery and the promise of more social reform, economic advance and inclusion in the political process. The new class of industrialists backed his plans for national economic independence and domestically controlled industrialization. This fusion of the two most dynamic sectors of Argentinian society in Perónism attracted the progressive wing of the military and a swathe of middle-class intellectuals. In 1946 Perón ran for the presidency and won.
Once in power Perón made good his promises to his working-class constituency. Real wages leapt as the government aided the trade unions and settled strikes in their favour; at the same time prices for key consumables like football matches were kept low. Foreign influence in the economy was diminished as the government nationalized the British-owned railways, the French-owned docks and the American-owned telephone system. As the economy boomed on exports to a Western Europe beginning the process of reconstruction, Perón paid off the national debt and declared a state of economic independence. Such flourishes hid the regime's awareness of the fragility of Argentina's industrial companies. Tariffs for foreign goods rose, throwing a protective wall around domestic industrialists that had rallied to Perón's cause. Correspondingly, the nation's self-esteem in its football was protected by limiting the national team's participation in world football. No team was sent to the 1949 Copa América or to the 1950 World Cup. Although bureaucratic differences were publicly cited as the reason for Argentina's absence, it was well known that the regime was acutely aware of the damage that could be done if notions of national superiority were punctured by the realities of open international competition.
The role of sport in domestic politics was considerable. Perón's government merged the Argentine Olympic Committee and the Confederation of Argentine Sport and brought them under direct state control. Perón made himself president of the new body which was launched with a spate of posters and sloganeering that declared "Perón: the First Sportsman." Perón, like Mussolini, preferred hunting to sport and was an expert fencer, but he also recognized football's potential role in nation-building and social policy. Strong nationals required strong bodies and intense collective experiences. Even so, San Lorenzo's 1946-7 tour of Europe, during which they soundly beat both the Spanish national team 6-1 and the Portuguese 10-4, did not embolden the football authorities. They preferred to draw the conclusions of Brazil's shattering home defeat in the 1950 World Cup; no Argentine team went to the 1954 World Cup either. International athletics, which excited fewer passions and lower expectations than football, was seen as a safer bet. Thus the government mdae money available for a large and successful Argentine team to travel to the 1948 London Olympics, and Argentina's medallists were presented with special commemorative Perónista medals by the General himself in 1949 at El Monumental. Argentina then hosted the first Pan-American Games in 1951 and the government was happy to bask in the international success of a gifted generation of Argentine boxers and racing drivers.
By contrast, domestic football was politics of a higher order, confirmed by the government's direct interest in and control over senior appointments at the Argentinian FA. AFA presidents Oscar Nicolini and Valentin Suárez were direct Perónista appointments. In return for control the government began to dispense money, with cash for new stadiums at Huracán 5n 1947 and Vélez Sarsfield in 1951. Every club acquired among its inner circles and boards of directors a padrino (godfather), who linked them to the tightly wired new circuits of power in Perón's Argentina. The nation's charismatic and omnipresent first lady Evita Perón possessed an instinctive political populism which led her to football too. The first Evita Perón football championships were played right across the nation in 1950. The competition was open to any team of kids from anywhere that presented itself to the now proliferating offices of the Evita Perón Foundation -- a para-statal welfare operation run by Evita herself. Every team was then supplied with kits -- for many poor children their first proper playing kit ever -- and the players submitted to a compulsory medical, immunization and x-rays. Hundreds of thousands of Argentina's children made their first contact with the country's fledgling health service in this way. After innumerable rounds the finals were held in Buenos Aires. They played the national anthem and a specially commissioned march for Evita who of course took the kick-off. Yet even Evita was aware of her limits. During a four-day rally to back her unsuccessful run for the vice-presidency all football was rescheduled; she knew she could not compete.
The rise of organized labour under Perón did not leave football untouched. Labour relations mirrored the wider urban economy: working conditions were poor, security of employment low. Conflict had been brewing for some time and the labour force had slowly but surely been organizing itself. Players had struck in Uruguay for four weeks in 1939, led by the star of their 1930 World Cup victory, José Nasazzi. In 1944 Mexico had started up its first professional football league and attracted Argentinian and Uruguayan players who had had enough of feudal labour contracts and poor wages. In the wider Argentinian economy of the late 1940s trade unions were growing fast, received government support in the labour market and were winning wage increases, concessions and improvements across the board. The first players' union in Argentina was formed in 1944 and named the Futbolistas Argentinos Agremiados. By 1948 the union was demanding recognition from the football authorities, the creation of a minimum wage and the establishment of freedom of contract. The clubs and the football authorities attempted to ignore the union and a strike was set for April. The AFA and the clubs agreed to recognize the union but would not relent on the other issues. The strike was delayed but only until July. Buenos Aires' stadiums went silent. There really was no football through the long winter months. The government then intervened in the dispute, creating a tribunal to adjudge the case. The league restarted, but the tribunal's recommendations were not enough for the players and the strike was back on in November. The clubs were forced to finish the season with amateur teams and rapidly declining crowds. New contracts and wages were agreed for 1949 but by then it was too late as the very elite of the Argentine league had left for the new pirate league in Colombia. Except, of course, for one club: Racing.
Although every club had its padrino (godfather), not all padrinos were equal. El Padrino of Racing Club was Ramón Cereijo, Perón's Minister of Finance. Although he held no formal post at the club his relationship was so close that Racing became known as Sportivo Cereijo. When the rest of Argentina's leading clubs were losing the core of their squads to the new leagues of Mexico, Colombia and even Guatemala, Racing lost no one. In 1949, while the other teams were depleted, Racing finally broke the stranglehold of the big four and won the championship. Such triumphs demanded an appropriate stage and Cereijo arranged for a loan deal of extraordinary generosity to be struck between the club and the government -- 3 million pesos to be paid back in sixty-five years. As the new stadium was being built 3 million became 11 million. President Perón, who had once announced his affection for Boca Juniors, attended the opening ceremony of the stadium named in his honour, while Bramuglia, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Miranda, president of the Central Bank, were made honorary members of the club. The team won the title again in 1950 and 1951, a victory rewarded in the third year by the presentation of a brand new Chevrolet to every player. Perón went on to win his second term in office in 1951; the power of Peronism and its place in history seemed secure. Untouched, as yet, by the harsh realities of the global economy and global sporting competition, Argentina was on top of the world.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 267-276.