History
Alongside the asylum, on a bald patch of grass in Buenos Aires, a group of young blond men were kicking a ball about.
‘Who are they?’ asked a child.
‘Lunatics,’ replied the boy’s father, ‘English lunatics.’
In the 130 years or so since Juan José de Soiza Reilly asked his father about those ‘English lunatics’ kicking a ball about down by the docks in the blazing heat of the Argentine summer, his country’s attitude to the game has become a little less uncomprehending, a little more welcoming. In spite of its distance from England, the birthplace of the game, and in spite of the bemused expressions of early porteño spectators, football took hold on the banks of the Río de la Plata much earlier than it did almost anywhere else in the world, and down the years, the rioplatense game has had its effect on the world game at large.
Origins
The Argentine Association Football League (later renamed Asociación del Fútbol Argentino, either way abbreviated to AFA) was founded by British ex-pats in Buenos Aires in 1893 and is South America’s oldest football association - the oldest in the world outside the British Isles. Argentina’s rivalry with Uruguay is the longest-running international sporting fixture anywhere outside the Home Nations, and the league is similarly ancient.
Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, founded in 1887, are the oldest surviving football club on the continent, though Argentina’s first club, Buenos Aires Football Club, was founded in 1867. The culture of the early clubs’ founders is evident in the names of clubs that are still around, from Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario (founded by ex-pupils of an English school in the city) to Banfield (whose hometown of the same name is named, obviously, after an Englishman). Everyone knows about the rivalry between England and Argentina at international level, but the depth of ‘English-ness’ in Argentina’s footballing culture is more rarely commented on.
The Planetario in Buenos Aires. The grass in front was the site of the first organised football match to be played in Argentina
Argentine football can, broadly speaking, be divided into two eras: the amateur, and the professional. The early amateur years of the championship, from 1893, were dominated by the British-run clubs set up by dockworkers, Anglo-Argentine schools, railway engineers and social clubs. Most famous among these sides were Alumni, who won nine of the eleven championships played between 1901 and 1911 inclusive. Thereafter, a split occured and Argentina operated, for a few years, with two rival football associations. At this point, British sides lost their dominance and criollo Argentine clubs came to command the championship. Racing were the first great club side, winning five consecutively between 1913 and 1918, before another split saw the Asociación Argentina de Football and the Asociación Amateur Argentina de Football (both, in spite of the latter’s name, were amateur leagues) operate side-by-side until 1926, when a reconciliation paved the way for the advent of the professional league in 1931.
Professionalism
The dawn of professional football in Argentina, then, coincided almost exactly with football’s realisation of itself as a truly world game, coming as it did just a year after the inaugural World Cup, held across the river in Montevideo, Uruguay (pub quiz answer - since all the 1930 matches were played in one city, Montevideo is the only single city ever to host an entire football World Cup). Argentina had lost the final of that tournament to the hosts, 4-2, but by this point had already played their part in the international game’s development, after effectively inaugurating the Copa América with an invitational tournament held in Buenos Aires in 1916 to celebrate the country’s centenary of independence (also won by Uruguay, the party-poopers).
The professional era saw the arrival in earnest of Argentina’s two most famous clubs, Boca Juniors and River Plate. Boca had already won a few titles in the amateur era, but after winning the first professional championship - which it should be stressed had, up until this point, been almost exclusively a competition for clubs from the Greater Buenos Aires area - they enjoyed their most successful domestic spell, winning six titles between 1931 and ‘34, with River claiming five in the same period. In the late 1940s River began to start putting together a team which would hit its peak in between 1952 and 1958, winning five out of those six championships and breaking goalscoring records all over the place. This was La Máquina (’The Machine’), a side talked about in hushed tones by Argentine football writers even today, with a forward line that a young Alfredo Di Stéfano was unable to convincingly break into.
After 1967, two championships were played each year: the Nacional, set up to allow provincial teams to take on the Buenos Aires sides, and the Metropolitano, a vestige of the former ‘city championship’. This state of affairs continued right up until 1985, with clubs today counting both leagues among their tallies of ‘first division championships’.
1960 also saw the birth of South America’s premier club tournament, the Copa Libertadores, after a letter from then UEFA President Stanley Rous to his CONMEBOL counterpart, suggesting an annual ‘world championship’ fixture to be played between the club champions of Europe and South America (this became the Intercontinental Cup and has now been expanded to the World Club Championship). Independiente dominated in the early years of the Libertadores, claiming seven titles - still the all-time record, although Boca’s 2007 win takes them to within one. Independiente couldn’t claim quite the same dominance at home, though, with San Lorenzo, Racing, Boca, Estudiantes and the two Rosario clubs, Newell’s and Central, all claiming titles.
During this period, only Uruguayan giants Peñarol (in 1966) and Nacional (in 1971), and Brazilian side Cruzeiro (1976) could break the Argentine monopoly on the Copa Libertadores, as Argentine clubs won 12 out of 15 editions of the tournament from 1964 to 1978. In that year, Argentina hosted and won their first World Cup, forty-eight years after that painful loss in the inaugural final.
When the side-by-side Nacional and Metropolitano were abolished and one truly national league created in 1985, there was a switch to a European-style season, from August to June, which of course ran through the excruciatingly hot Argentine summer (in December and January).
The crowd go wild at a River Plate match - photo © Kianoosh
The league system today
In 1991, partly to avoid having to play in such temperatures and partly, it would seem, to cram a bit more drama into each year, Argentina switched to the ’short championships’ still in place today. The season is split into Apertura (’Opening’) and Clausura (’Closing’) championships, of 19 matches each. During one championship, everyone plays everyone else once, with the return fixtures taking place in the Clausura. In some South American nations - notably Uruguay - the winners of the two championships play off against one another at the season’s end to decide the overall season champions. In Argentina this doesn’t occur.
There have recently been further changes - as from this season, the second and third divisions will revert to one single, year-long championship. The idea is that by cutting down on dramatic championship run-ins, there will be a little less tension and, hopefully, less of the violence that has blighted Argentine football in recent years. There have been mutterings for some time that the first division may also return to one year-long championship in the next few years. As it is, the short championships are fondly looked on, not least for their capacity to produce unexpected champions. Under a European-style league, for example, Boca Juniors would have won a hypothetical 2006-2007 championship, having gathered the most points over the whole season. But they failed to finish top in either Apertura or Clausura, and so instead the trophy went to two less predictable sides: Estudiantes de La Plata (Apertura) and San Lorenzo de Almagro (Clausura).
Below the top two divisions, Argentina’s league system is split into parallel ladders. The Primeras B, C and D are the ’standard’ lower tiers, but running alongside them are Torneo Argentino A, B and the Torneo del Interior. These latter are for clubs who - for reasons of cost, laziness, lack of popular support or due to amateur status - are not directly affiliated to the AFA. Torneo Argentino A is parallel to Primera B, and each season one club from each goes straight up to the B Nacional (second divsion) from each of these two third divsions. A further side from each plays off for promotion. Of course, it’s the lowest-placed non-AFA-affiliated side who go down to Torneo Argentino A, and likewise to Primera B for the affiliated sides. Needless to say, this makes relegation a little awkward to work out, as do the ‘points’ used for it.
Relegation is worked out from a separate table, known as the Promedio (’Average’). Basically, the average number of points-per-game that each side has won over their last three full seasons in their current division is worked out, and at the end of the season (that is, the end of the Clausura) the team with the lowest points-per-game percentage goes down (or the two lowest for the first division). If a side have just spent their first year in the current division, then points from any previous spell are carried over, if they were won in the last three years - if a side has been away from the present division for longer than this, they start from zero. Confused? Don’t worry. You’ll just have to trust me to work it all out for you when the end of the season comes. It’s ten months off yet.
The pyramid
Taking into account the ‘parallel divisions’ mentioned above, then, as well as the confusingly-named Primera B Nacional (second division) and Primera División B (third division), the Argentine league system looks as follows, with AFA-affiliated divisions on the left, and non-affiliated ones on the right:
Primera División (normally called ‘Primera A‘)
Primera B Nacional (’B Nacional‘)
Primera División B (’B Metropolitana‘) ——- Torneo Argentino A
Primera División C ————————– Torneo Argentino B
Primera División D ————————– Torneo del Interior
If you’re looking for a guide to travelling and taking in football in Buenos Aires, this article by me for Extra Football should cover most of the basics. For brief potted histories of the clubs in the Primera A for the 2007-2008 season, see this post. If there are any unanswered questions after all this, you know where to write to…
The italicised extract at the top of the page is taken from Eduardo Galeano’s El Fútbol A Sol Y Sombra (Football In Sun And Shadow), and the translation was done by me.
