Why did an Argentine TV channel hold a minute’s silence after Thursday’s haunting defeat against Croatia?
Why did Diego Maradona say Jorge Sampaoli shouldn’t be let back into the country after the draw with Iceland?
Why is football in Argentina taken so seriously?
“Now the crisis is so great that not even winning the World Cup would fix it,” Cesar Luis Menotti said before the tournament, when actually winning it seemed vaguely plausible.
Menotti believes there is something fundamentally wrong with Argentine football and, by extension, society.
There has always been pressure on Argentina’s national team; Menotti himself, staunchly left-wing, led his country to its first World Cup triumph in 1978 under the watchful eye of a brutal dictator , and four years later he was swiftly sacked after second-phase elimination.
Argentina’s exit from Spain ‘82 was deemed such a failure that the country’s decision makers looked for a completely new direction, shunning Menotti’s free-flowing football for Carlos Bilardo’s conservative approach.
Bilardo himself would have considered the recent hammering of Sampaoli a walk in the park compared to what he went through ahead of the 1986 World Cup; the president – not of the football federation, but of the entire nation – urged his sports minister to sack Bilardo because results were not up to scratch.