“Jorge Sampaoli was not the sickness, he is merely a symptom.” Sebastian Fest’s line in La Nación on the day of Argentina’s World Cup 2018 elimination was so starkly poignant because it gets straight to the crux of the matter, cutting through every excuse offered and pointing straight to the institutional rot that is fundamentally to blame for Argentina’s ills.
That bumpy road that ended in Kazan, Russia, in the baking summer of 2018 is our current waypoint but this path truly began all the way back in the mid-winter of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978 on the day that the Albiceleste won their first-ever World Cup.
Stood on the pitch at the Monumental as the host nation’s captain, Daniel Passarella, lifted the trophy, was a rising star in the Argentinean FA, Julio Grondona. Within a year he had been elected president of the association but little did this country know – still cheered from a World Cup win which history has remembered less fondly – that from this point nearly 40 years of corruption would take hold or the devastating effect it would eventually have on their beloved national game.
To understand the successes and failures of the Argentina team, they must be viewed in the context of their team’s governing body, an organisation for so long one of the most corrupt in the game and in recent times, floundering since the death of Grondona, simply one of the most inept. It is a stain on a great country that he was in power for so long, acting with virtual impunity – but it is the ultimate disgrace that only his utterly corrupt direction of their FA could actually keep things going, as evidenced by the shambles ever since.
Take Argentina’s failure at this World Cup; a mix of disastrous preparation, pitiful resources (both financial and human, in certain positions) and mismanagement.
That is the AFA all over, and there is little sign that it will improve going forward even if Lionel Messi stuns the world and decides not to retire from international football a second time.
In having one of the oldest squads at the tournament, Argentina exposed what the destruction of their youth pipeline might mean for their future.
Argentina won the Under-20 World Cup in 2001, 2005 and 2007. 20 players featured for Argentina at the 2018 World Cup and seven of those were Under-20 World Cup winners from 11 or 13 years previously. Of their last three U20 World Cup squads (2011, 2015, 2017) only two players featured in Russia, evidence of a pipeline that dried of talent and eventually broke, with no system in place to champion or develop the youth players and no clear direction at the top had they even got there.
Argentina’s ‘Golden Generation’ should really be defined, then, as between 2010 and 2016, when those 2005 and 2007 winners matured towards their peak. Look at the teams that won major tournaments in the period, though, and they were mainly those with a clear long-term plan – Spain 2010 and 2012, Uruguay 2011, Germany 2014 and Chile in 2015 and 2016 – which highlights the lack of one from the AFA. It highlights their failure to maximise talent (the result) on top of the current failure of not developing it (the process).
Their preparation for this summer’s World Cup was shambolic, the worst of any team until Spain came along, asked Argentina to hold their cerveza, and sacked Julen Lopetegui the day before Russia 2018 kicked off. It began when the Albiceleste were struggling to qualify until they begged Lionel Messi to reverse his international retirement and the Barcelona man dragged them kicking and screaming to Russia.
The win over Ecuador should have been the turning point for Jorge Sampaoli, who had until that point been forced to take a pragmatic role that was the opposite of how he had achieved all the success in his career. Argentina would have six friendlies across three international breaks in which Sampaoli could work out the best way to implement his favoured system and take Argentina to success.
But having used 48 players in his first 10 games, the confusion over personnel never really went away and the friendlies that took place were disastrous – including heavy defeats to Nigeria and Spain – as well as two cancelled games on the eve of the tournament against Nicaragua and Israel.
Argentina’s only pre-World Cup friendly in the end was against Haiti (world ranking: 104) after negotiations over playing a Spanish club side failed in the wake of the Israel friendly being cancelled. That trip to Jerusalem didn’t go ahead because the players weren’t willing to travel over humanitarian and security concerns and was symbolic of their problems – something organised by the AFA for money-spinning purposes that completely backfired.
In the past few years Argentina have been paraded around the world like a travelling circus for international friendlies, the AFA ready to take offers from the highest bidder for games as long as they could guarantee Messi would feature. It has meant such lamentable moments as ‘Guinness The Match’ – a friendly in Nigeria that anyone watching could tell immediately was fixed and was subsequently deemed so by Fifa – as well as games in far-flung places like Bangladesh, India and Australia.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Argentina’s World Cup campaign ended way earlier than expected.