The obvious solution was a shared sense of national identity. But what was Argentina?
So basically what I plan to do over the next few weeks is extract all of the Argentina-related snippets from The Ball Is Round and type them up, so we'd ostensibly end up with a detailed yet condensed history of Argie football.
Central European professional football was born from the collapse of an empire and the death of an old social order. Professional football in Latin America was born of a tumultuous process of emergent economic development and social change. The leading edge of that change was in Argentina and Brazil. At the end of the First World War Argentina was a society transformed. In the fifty years since 1870 a predominantly rural, agrarian, criollo society had become urban and industrial. In the cities nearly half the population were first-generation immigrants to Argentina. Politically, the nation had been transformed by the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1912 which had ended the long rule of Argentina's conservative, landowning elites. Those elites had hoped to blind many of the newly enfranchised voters to their cause, but the electoral weight of urban middle- and working-class Argentines put the populist Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) into power and made its leader Hipólito Yrigoyen President in 1916. However, the exclusion of women and immigrant voters from the franchise and the economic turmoil of the immediate post-war years saw many flock to the colours of Argentine anarchism, syndicalism and radical unionism, a tide of support that backed a nationwide general strike in 1918. The erstwhile populists of the UCR government ordered the army and police to put the movement down. They showed little quarter in doing so. Thus the surge of working-class power in Argentina was checked, but only temporarily. As Argentina's economic and social structure steadily developed a more industrial and working-class character in the 1920s, successive radical presidents were challenged by the growth of socialism and communism and an increasingly confident and vibrant working-class culture in the big cities.
At the heart of that culture was football. The immense growth in playing, watching and following the game experienced before the First World War was sustained afterwards. Alongside four official divisions and countless local independent and junior competitions Buenos Aires could also boast a merchant sailors' league, a communist league and a separate socialists' league. The leading clubs continued to recruit paying socios and built themselves extensive social and sporting facilities. Crowds regularly exceeded 10,000 and the old stadiums and grounds were not up to the task. The combination of fierce competition, a pool of predominantly working-class players and the club's access to both money and power made the use of hidden payments, inflated expenses and fake jobs inevitable. The English-language press, always pious and haughty, wrote in 1926: 'The men who compose our leading local teams are every bit as professional as the hardest-headed big leagues in England. Argentine footballers play the game winter and summer and train every day ... nominally they are engaged in work for gentlemen financially interested in the big teams.'
The gentlemen in question not only had financial interests but political interests too. Argentine politicians had been attending international matches and basking in the team's international triumphs since the turn of the century. In the 1920s they began to turn their attention to the clubs who were happy to acquire influential presidents and directors, like Aldo Cantoni who was a senator for San Juan and president of both the AFA and Huracán; or Pedro Bidegan, president of San Lorenzo and a leading figure in the UCR. In 1926 the whole issue of domestic club football was deemed important enough for the President of the Republic, Marcelo T. de Alvear, to take responsibility for mediating the conflict between the two warring leagues in Buenos Aires who had split after a series of rancorous administrative and financial conflicts in 1919. That football had captured the popular imagination was beyond question, but how, if at all, could it be harnessed to the populist political project of the time? The central ideological dilemma of the radical movement of the 1920s was how to bind its cross-class electoral base together. Where would it find and how would it shape new collective identities that could outflank the threats from the Left? The obvious solution was a shared sense of national identity. But what was Argentina? What was an Argentine? The cultural legacy bequeathed by late nineteenth-century nationalists located the Argentine soul in the pampas, a landscape tamed and managed by the solitary cowboy-gauchos like Martín Fierro whose bone-dry machismo was the archetype of a heroic rural life; that might still work in the backwoods, but in the densely crowded immigrant barrios, in the tango halls of Parque Patricios, in the cinemas of Flores and the factories of Avellaneda it was ludicrous. By the end of the 1920s Argentina had swapped Martín Fierro for Guillermo Stábile as the Argentine football player and the Argentine football style became the central icons of new notions of masculinity and the nation.
Instead of the pastoral idea of the nation and the gaucho myth, the nation built in soccer was able to assume an urban form ... Instead of an idea of the nation anchored in the heroic pantheon of patrician families and Hispanic tradition, soccer introduced a national identity that was represented by the working class ... the national heroes proposed by soccer's organic intellectuals were members of the existing, recently urbanized working classes, themselves newly literate and pressing for cultural and political influence through the first wave of Argentinian populism.
-- E. Archetti (1997), Masculinities, p 66.
Soccer's organic intellectuals, who transformed the raw material of porteño football into an entire national mythology, were primarily the staff of the magazine El Gráfico. El Gráfico was founded in 1919 as an illustrated weekly magazine for men covering politics, sports, news, and photos of dancers and singers. By 1921 everything except the sport had been dropped. By 1930 El Gráfico was selling 100,000 copies in Buenos Aires alone and had assumed the mantle of Latin America's sports bible, available and quickly snapped up from the downtown news-stands of Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, Lima, Quito and Mexico City. Its tone was often moralistic, usually educative, and self-consciously modern. Above all it developed a model of sports journalism that was historical and comparative. Great teams and great players of every era were characterized and evaluated, lineages and golden ages were constantly being constructed and reconstructed. Each new twist and turn in the national championship was understood in relation to its predecessors, who were then required to reshuffle their place in the narrative canon in relation to the newest coup, comeback or bravado performance. Out of this mode of reporting and under self-conscious reflection El Gráfico's Uruguayan editor Lorenzo Borocotó elaborated an historical theory of the development of fútbol rioplatense:
It is logical as the years have gone by that all Anglo-Saxon influence in football has been disappearing, giving way to the less phlegmatic and more restless spirit of the Latin ... it is different from the British in that it is less monochrome, less disciplined and methodical, because it does not sacrifice individualism for the honour of collective values ... and for that reason it is a more agile and attractive football.
Thus criollo football and masculinity came to be defined in opposition to the English and Englishness. The English were focused and disciplined, combining collective organization and physical force -- the prerequisites of an industrial labour force turning out an industrial product. On the Río de la Plata where industrialization had yet to completely stamp its imprint on the economy, landscape or rhythms of life, masculinity was more restless, impetuous and individualistic, spurning crude force in favour of virtuoso agility. It is during this era that musical metaphors -- teams as orchestras, playmakers as conductors, wingers as soloists -- were first used and the recognition of, indeed the demand for, football as art was loudly proclaimed. Comparing the two styles of play, Borocotó asserted that fútbol rioplatense had almost caught up with the English:
We say almost on a par as we are convinced that our own style of play is technically more proficient, quicker and more precise. It perhaps lacks effectiveness due to the individual actions of our great players, but the football that the Argentinians, and by extension the Uruguayans, play is more beautiful, more artistic, more precise because eapproach work to the opposition penalty area is done not through long passes up field, which are over in an instant, but through a series of short, precise and collective actions; skilful dribbling and very delicate passes.
Borocotó argued that this style of play sprang from the peculiar urban experience of football in Buenos Aires. The pibe -- the young boy or scallywag -- was the archetypal player. He was drawn from the poorest families and barrios, playing with a rag or straw ball. The wastelands and open spaces of the city provided the physical canvas on which the pibe's imagination and energy could be expressed. Often finding himself in cramped spaces among huge numbers in informal games, unprotected by the application of conventional rules and refereeing, the pibe was forced to invent new moves and modes of playing. Above all, he had to use the essential guile and craftiness learned in the life of the street.
Thus by the beginning of the 1930s Argentine football had assumed a place in the national culture that was equal to that in England and Scotland. In fact, given the competition from cricket for the mantle of the national sport in England and the popularity of rugby in Scotland, football in Argentina was even more prominent; at the highest level the game was solvent and professional in all but name. What tipped the balance in favour of formalizing this arrangement was the loss of the country's leading players to Italy.
Enrico Maroni, the Italian industrialist, owner of the Cinzano drinks company and Torino football club, went to Buenos Aires on business in the early 1920s. He saw the striker Julio Libonatti from Newell's Old Boys play and decided on the spot to sign him. Libonatti was the first leading Argentine player to leave for Italy, moving to Torino in 1925. In 1928, after the all-South American final in the Amsterdam Olympics had shown off the continenent's talent, Raimondo Orsi left Independiente for Juventus, enticed by weekly wages of 8,000 lire, a signing-on fee of 100,000 lire and a Fiat 509. The flamboyant international striker Renato Cesarini followed the next year and after Argentina's appearance in the 1930 World Cup finals, defender Luis Monti was also signed by Juventus. A league without stars soon loses its audience, but how to keep them at home? The case for professionalism was becoming compelling.
In 1931 a players' strike was the trigger for the final transition. A deputation of players demanding freedom of contract marched on the presidential palace. President Uriburu directed them to the Mayor of Buenos Aires, who pointed out to all that if freedom of contract was the issue then the players could no longer be amateurs; what amateur had a contract or could be reasonably compelled to keep to it? It was time to deal with what the president of Boca Juniors called 'all that brooms-and-sawdust nonsense.' Twelve clubs declared themselves professional a month later. River Plate and Independiente, the last bastions of the amateur and patrician ethos, held out but only for a few weeks. The first eighteen-team professional league kicked off in May. Argentine football had reached a point of footballing modernity, unparalleled outside Europe, the match of anything within it. The players got paid openly rather than under the table, but they did not and would not get freedom of contract.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 201-205.
Central European professional football was born from the collapse of an empire and the death of an old social order. Professional football in Latin America was born of a tumultuous process of emergent economic development and social change. The leading edge of that change was in Argentina and Brazil. At the end of the First World War Argentina was a society transformed. In the fifty years since 1870 a predominantly rural, agrarian, criollo society had become urban and industrial. In the cities nearly half the population were first-generation immigrants to Argentina. Politically, the nation had been transformed by the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1912 which had ended the long rule of Argentina's conservative, landowning elites. Those elites had hoped to blind many of the newly enfranchised voters to their cause, but the electoral weight of urban middle- and working-class Argentines put the populist Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) into power and made its leader Hipólito Yrigoyen President in 1916. However, the exclusion of women and immigrant voters from the franchise and the economic turmoil of the immediate post-war years saw many flock to the colours of Argentine anarchism, syndicalism and radical unionism, a tide of support that backed a nationwide general strike in 1918. The erstwhile populists of the UCR government ordered the army and police to put the movement down. They showed little quarter in doing so. Thus the surge of working-class power in Argentina was checked, but only temporarily. As Argentina's economic and social structure steadily developed a more industrial and working-class character in the 1920s, successive radical presidents were challenged by the growth of socialism and communism and an increasingly confident and vibrant working-class culture in the big cities.
At the heart of that culture was football. The immense growth in playing, watching and following the game experienced before the First World War was sustained afterwards. Alongside four official divisions and countless local independent and junior competitions Buenos Aires could also boast a merchant sailors' league, a communist league and a separate socialists' league. The leading clubs continued to recruit paying socios and built themselves extensive social and sporting facilities. Crowds regularly exceeded 10,000 and the old stadiums and grounds were not up to the task. The combination of fierce competition, a pool of predominantly working-class players and the club's access to both money and power made the use of hidden payments, inflated expenses and fake jobs inevitable. The English-language press, always pious and haughty, wrote in 1926: 'The men who compose our leading local teams are every bit as professional as the hardest-headed big leagues in England. Argentine footballers play the game winter and summer and train every day ... nominally they are engaged in work for gentlemen financially interested in the big teams.'
The gentlemen in question not only had financial interests but political interests too. Argentine politicians had been attending international matches and basking in the team's international triumphs since the turn of the century. In the 1920s they began to turn their attention to the clubs who were happy to acquire influential presidents and directors, like Aldo Cantoni who was a senator for San Juan and president of both the AFA and Huracán; or Pedro Bidegan, president of San Lorenzo and a leading figure in the UCR. In 1926 the whole issue of domestic club football was deemed important enough for the President of the Republic, Marcelo T. de Alvear, to take responsibility for mediating the conflict between the two warring leagues in Buenos Aires who had split after a series of rancorous administrative and financial conflicts in 1919. That football had captured the popular imagination was beyond question, but how, if at all, could it be harnessed to the populist political project of the time? The central ideological dilemma of the radical movement of the 1920s was how to bind its cross-class electoral base together. Where would it find and how would it shape new collective identities that could outflank the threats from the Left? The obvious solution was a shared sense of national identity. But what was Argentina? What was an Argentine? The cultural legacy bequeathed by late nineteenth-century nationalists located the Argentine soul in the pampas, a landscape tamed and managed by the solitary cowboy-gauchos like Martín Fierro whose bone-dry machismo was the archetype of a heroic rural life; that might still work in the backwoods, but in the densely crowded immigrant barrios, in the tango halls of Parque Patricios, in the cinemas of Flores and the factories of Avellaneda it was ludicrous. By the end of the 1920s Argentina had swapped Martín Fierro for Guillermo Stábile as the Argentine football player and the Argentine football style became the central icons of new notions of masculinity and the nation.
Instead of the pastoral idea of the nation and the gaucho myth, the nation built in soccer was able to assume an urban form ... Instead of an idea of the nation anchored in the heroic pantheon of patrician families and Hispanic tradition, soccer introduced a national identity that was represented by the working class ... the national heroes proposed by soccer's organic intellectuals were members of the existing, recently urbanized working classes, themselves newly literate and pressing for cultural and political influence through the first wave of Argentinian populism.
-- E. Archetti (1997), Masculinities, p 66.
Soccer's organic intellectuals, who transformed the raw material of porteño football into an entire national mythology, were primarily the staff of the magazine El Gráfico. El Gráfico was founded in 1919 as an illustrated weekly magazine for men covering politics, sports, news, and photos of dancers and singers. By 1921 everything except the sport had been dropped. By 1930 El Gráfico was selling 100,000 copies in Buenos Aires alone and had assumed the mantle of Latin America's sports bible, available and quickly snapped up from the downtown news-stands of Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, Lima, Quito and Mexico City. Its tone was often moralistic, usually educative, and self-consciously modern. Above all it developed a model of sports journalism that was historical and comparative. Great teams and great players of every era were characterized and evaluated, lineages and golden ages were constantly being constructed and reconstructed. Each new twist and turn in the national championship was understood in relation to its predecessors, who were then required to reshuffle their place in the narrative canon in relation to the newest coup, comeback or bravado performance. Out of this mode of reporting and under self-conscious reflection El Gráfico's Uruguayan editor Lorenzo Borocotó elaborated an historical theory of the development of fútbol rioplatense:
It is logical as the years have gone by that all Anglo-Saxon influence in football has been disappearing, giving way to the less phlegmatic and more restless spirit of the Latin ... it is different from the British in that it is less monochrome, less disciplined and methodical, because it does not sacrifice individualism for the honour of collective values ... and for that reason it is a more agile and attractive football.
Thus criollo football and masculinity came to be defined in opposition to the English and Englishness. The English were focused and disciplined, combining collective organization and physical force -- the prerequisites of an industrial labour force turning out an industrial product. On the Río de la Plata where industrialization had yet to completely stamp its imprint on the economy, landscape or rhythms of life, masculinity was more restless, impetuous and individualistic, spurning crude force in favour of virtuoso agility. It is during this era that musical metaphors -- teams as orchestras, playmakers as conductors, wingers as soloists -- were first used and the recognition of, indeed the demand for, football as art was loudly proclaimed. Comparing the two styles of play, Borocotó asserted that fútbol rioplatense had almost caught up with the English:
We say almost on a par as we are convinced that our own style of play is technically more proficient, quicker and more precise. It perhaps lacks effectiveness due to the individual actions of our great players, but the football that the Argentinians, and by extension the Uruguayans, play is more beautiful, more artistic, more precise because eapproach work to the opposition penalty area is done not through long passes up field, which are over in an instant, but through a series of short, precise and collective actions; skilful dribbling and very delicate passes.
Borocotó argued that this style of play sprang from the peculiar urban experience of football in Buenos Aires. The pibe -- the young boy or scallywag -- was the archetypal player. He was drawn from the poorest families and barrios, playing with a rag or straw ball. The wastelands and open spaces of the city provided the physical canvas on which the pibe's imagination and energy could be expressed. Often finding himself in cramped spaces among huge numbers in informal games, unprotected by the application of conventional rules and refereeing, the pibe was forced to invent new moves and modes of playing. Above all, he had to use the essential guile and craftiness learned in the life of the street.
Thus by the beginning of the 1930s Argentine football had assumed a place in the national culture that was equal to that in England and Scotland. In fact, given the competition from cricket for the mantle of the national sport in England and the popularity of rugby in Scotland, football in Argentina was even more prominent; at the highest level the game was solvent and professional in all but name. What tipped the balance in favour of formalizing this arrangement was the loss of the country's leading players to Italy.
Enrico Maroni, the Italian industrialist, owner of the Cinzano drinks company and Torino football club, went to Buenos Aires on business in the early 1920s. He saw the striker Julio Libonatti from Newell's Old Boys play and decided on the spot to sign him. Libonatti was the first leading Argentine player to leave for Italy, moving to Torino in 1925. In 1928, after the all-South American final in the Amsterdam Olympics had shown off the continenent's talent, Raimondo Orsi left Independiente for Juventus, enticed by weekly wages of 8,000 lire, a signing-on fee of 100,000 lire and a Fiat 509. The flamboyant international striker Renato Cesarini followed the next year and after Argentina's appearance in the 1930 World Cup finals, defender Luis Monti was also signed by Juventus. A league without stars soon loses its audience, but how to keep them at home? The case for professionalism was becoming compelling.
In 1931 a players' strike was the trigger for the final transition. A deputation of players demanding freedom of contract marched on the presidential palace. President Uriburu directed them to the Mayor of Buenos Aires, who pointed out to all that if freedom of contract was the issue then the players could no longer be amateurs; what amateur had a contract or could be reasonably compelled to keep to it? It was time to deal with what the president of Boca Juniors called 'all that brooms-and-sawdust nonsense.' Twelve clubs declared themselves professional a month later. River Plate and Independiente, the last bastions of the amateur and patrician ethos, held out but only for a few weeks. The first eighteen-team professional league kicked off in May. Argentine football had reached a point of footballing modernity, unparalleled outside Europe, the match of anything within it. The players got paid openly rather than under the table, but they did not and would not get freedom of contract.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 201-205.