President Javier Milei voted for La Bombonera’s mother.
It turns out that Argentines have one more presidential election in the 2023 calendar, leaving its era reserved for the last month of the year, a comic strip with disputes and dramas such as the 3 votes (primaries, first round and runoff) that will raise Javier Milei to the presidency of the nation.
But the possibility of being able not from an armchair in the Casa Rosada but from a box to the Bombonera, the historic song of the Boca Juniors club located in the ears of the Riachuelo of the Buenos Aires neighborhood.
Boca Juniors es, junto con River Plate, el equipo con más seguidores del país y uno de los más populares de América Latina. Décadas atrás, un presidente de la institución, Alberto J. Armado, dijo que Boca era “la mitad más uno” de Argentina.
This implies that what happens at this club has repercussions at a national level, in a country that lives politics with a love of football, and talks about football with political fervour.
Less than a month after the election of Milei by Peronist Sergio Massa, Argentines count among them another 43,367 people elected to that position as president of Boca by former player Juan Román Riquelme through economist Andrés Ibarra.
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The interest in those radical comedians that Ibarra’s formula has in the other Mauricio Macri, president of Boca and Argentina, and that Macri supports Milei, who also had the right to vote for the mother of the Bombonera.
The clash at the polls between Riquelme, the club’s greatest idol, and Macri, the outgoing president of this institution, “turned it into an unprecedented morbidity in the Boca elections,” wrote journalist Ezequiel Fernández Moores in the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
Image source, Getty Images
Flag in Los Angeles Bombonera in support of Riquelme.
If this morbidity was possibly not enough, it is because the comics, originally scheduled for November 2, reached the 2024 poster via legal complaints, and that the crusade there was a proposal that could replace Argentine football forever.
Mauricio Macri fue presidente de Boca entre 1995 y 2007 y en ese tiempo, como él mismo lo recordó en esta última campaña, el club ganó 16 títulos, entre ellos, cuatro Copas Libertadores y dos Copas Intercontinentales.
As ESPN journalist Guillermo Poggi tells BBC Mundo, “when he has intelligent control in a very popular club like Boca, Argentine society understands without hesitation that he is an intelligent coach and that he can be a springboard” in national politics.
Other football leaders have worked on this path, but they have discovered it with as much joy as Macri. He appointed Prime Minister of the Nation between 2005 and 2007, then Student of Buenos Aires between 2007 and 2015, and appointed President of the Republic. until 2019.
In all this time of national politics, as Poggi points out, Macrism has a fundamental force in the internal politics of Boca Juniors.
But so much so that his time at the club was successful, Macri had clashes as a coach with the two greatest idols in the history of Xeneize (the number by which he is also known in the club): Riquelme and Diego Maradona.
Maradona lo llamó “cartonero” y Riquelme le hizo “el topo Gigio”, el gesto de llevarse las manos a las orejas que hizo universalmente conocido Lionel Messi en la Copa del Mundo de Qatar que ganó Argentina en 2022.
Image source, Getty Images
During Macri’s tenure at Boca Juniors, the club won 4 Copa Libertadores, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world.
“Roman was never an easy idol, a kind idol. He said Macri and his ilk “were never their bosses. “It is to recognize through a role their function as a judge, of the employee, but it is already transparent that the latter can order life,” Ezequiel Fernández Moores explains to BBC Mundo.
On the campaign trail, Macri accused Riquelme, the club’s current vice president, of harming Boca in recent years with “a form of arrogant, authoritarian and arbitrary conduct. “
“Lo que se hizo estos años ha sido muy dañino y continuar en esta línea va a hacer a Boca más chico y sin confundir que lo que Riquelme ha hecho en la cancha ha sido increíble”, dijo el exmandatario de Argentina.
“Football has a lot of subjectivity, but there is consensus that Riquelme is the most important footballer in the modern history of Boca, from the most winning era with Martín Palermo in the song and Carlos Bianchi as coach,” says Guillermo Poggi.
And he is the biggest idol of a club and the one who also played with Maradona is easy.
“When there is an open-air newspaper that says that Maradona is the greatest idol in the history of Boca and that he played very little for the club; who is so well known in the world for his popularity, Riquelme has played more years and I have many titles,” says Fernández Moores.
But Boca’s titles are the only difference between Riquelme and Maradona, who have also had their frictions in recent years.
Maradona manifested himself politically, both outside Argentina – where he won his expressions in favor of Latin American leaders such as Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro – and within his country, where he maintained a close courtship with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the political rival. of Macrism at the national level.
As the newspaper La Nación says, “Román has no expressions about politics or about the world, he is about Boca and here he influences his opinions”, first as a player and now as a coach.
But given the origin welcomed through Macri, who belongs to one of the most prominent families in the country, the players continue as the flag of their humble origins: Maradona returning to Fiorito and Riquelme Don Torcuato, in the working-class spaces of the Province of Buenos Aires.
Fuente de la imagen, Getty Images
Lionel Messi at the head of Riquelme football.
That is why, when Maradona is at his level at the club, he met on the issue of contracts with Macri, accused him – with a very Maradonian irony – of being a “cartonero”, who is the one who signs on the street to earn money. pesos. with your recycling.
Riquelme, for his part, responded to similar contractual agreements with Macri by raising his hands with his ears in front of the leaders’ palace, in a harvest against River disputed on April 8, 2001.
Although the gesture of defiance of the president of the club is clear, after the player’s match, he said: “The party is for my daughter because of the charm of the Topo Gigio (the children’s character of a little mouse with very big ears). “.
The gesture observed on December 9, 2022, when Argentina won consequences in the Netherlands at the World Cup in Qatar, Messi “made” the Topo Gigio in front of the rival coach of the national team, Louis van Gaal, who had made questionable statements before. the exit (and, in addition, he had a conflictive courtship with Riquelme when he coincided with the Barça club).
Image source, Getty Images
Messi has “Topo Gigio” on the Dutch bench.
In this campaign, Riquelme accused Macri of wanting to “privatize” the club and promote the Bombonera “to 4 foreigners”. He also noted that the rivalry between them is not new:
“Yo a ese señor (Macri) lo conozco y es un mentiroso. Me pone contento que algunos hinchas que por ahí le creían se están dando cuenta de algo que yo ya sé hace más de 20 años. Es el más mentiroso de todos”.
“Javier (Milei) has publicly commissioned us to recover the joy of Boca’s youth. Like many of them, he wants to see a serious and competitive institution,” Macri said as he presented his crusade with Andres Ibarra to regain the presidency of Boca.
Even if his party, the PRO, opted for Milei and Sergio Massa and may not make it to the polls, Macri’s political agent is the first electoral sight and the key for the libertarian candidate to overthrow the Peronist candidate at the moment.
Milei, for his part, accepted the crusade with himself as a former Boca fan.
He first said he was already at La Bombonera when he retired from Martin Palermo, the relentless striker of the Bianchi era.
Curiously, although Maravilla can be heard in the play’s box, Palermo and Riquelme are in contact with the dressing room.
Para ponerle más morbo a esta historia, Palermo es el candidato de Macri para ser el técnico de Boca si logra derrotar a Riquelme en las urnas.
Image source, Getty Images
Javier Milei greets Mauricio Macri to the presidency.
El actual mandatario de la nación dijo además que dejó de ser hincha de Boca cuando Riquelme regresó al club en 2013.
“When Angelici (referring to former club president Daniel Angelici), in a populist act, tells Riquelme that he is transparent that he is in a position to run an intelligent campaign, he tells him: ‘I have enough to live in a populist country to be more, it is a populist team’. “
Milei also said Boca’s former rival River in the 2018 Copa Libertadores final also blamed some of the club’s fans when they voted on Sunday.
“Es un personaje paradójico Milei”, dice Fernández Moores y añade:
“He must be, I think, the only president in the country who really plays angelic football (he was a goalkeeper in the lower divisions of Chacarita). So, you don’t recognize what’s in the world, but it’s part of what’s already happened to Boca. And that he helped River in the Libertadores in Los Angeles doesn’t mean football: there’s nothing you can do to achieve something like that. “
But that’s not the only arguable thing Milei said about football. . .
En su artículo “Elecciones en el país y en Boca: ¿a quién pertenece el fútbol?”, Fernández Moores recordó que “Milei tocó una fibra sensible de nuestra cultura deportiva cuando se viralizó su admiración por el sistema inglés de Clubes Sociedades Anónimas”.
This sometimes led to the campaign for various football clubs to respond with a defence opposed to the formula of civil associations that has governed Argentine football for almost a century.
BBC Mundo waited for the two Argentinian journalists so that those elections would also be marked by the fact that Argentine football made a radical fit in its history.
For Poggi, it’s more of a crusading issue than a genuine possibility.
“I don’t think we have a club like Bocapiense in a limited corporate sports format. I don’t see it as a scheme that can produce in Argentine football,” Poggi responded.
Para el periodista de la cadena ESPN, si bien hay clubes que tienen aportes privados en lo que respecta al fútbol profesional, el rol de los socios sigue siendo tan importante, tanto en las instituciones de la primera división como en los clubes barriales, que la idea de sociedades anónimas no tendría cabida.
Image source, Getty Images
A leaflet against an imaginable privatization of Boca.
But Fernandez Moores is sure the debate will end here.
“Si la elección de Boca tiene todos los condimentos que ya vimos, se le agrega este otro condimento, y no porque Boca pueda llegar a ser una sociedad anónima; pero al plantear el macrismo como propuesta la mudanza de la Bombonera, con capitales árabes, queda la pregunta sobre qué cedería Boca a esos capitales”.
The newspaper La Nación adds that if the “Boca model” resembles foreign personal capital in this respect, this example could be followed by other clubs:
“El fútbol de primera división, en todos los países, es un deporte hipercompetitivo. Si Boca ingresa capitales de Arabia Saudita o de Abu Dabi, entonces inevitablemente River va a estar tentado por el vecino de Abu Dabi con otros capitales. Y los demás van a entrar todos en esa ola del dinero de los clubes europeos”.
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