The day after tomorrow the final of the Copa Libertadores will be played at the Monumental between Botafogo and Atlético Mineiro, two Brazilian teams and, furthermore, two public limited companies. Yesterday I was having a coffee in Saint Moritz, my downtown bowling alley, and I saw two Botafogo fans enter. I approached them to ask them if anything had changed that their team is managed by a private company. “Some fans don’t like it,” one answered me. “But the truth is that two years ago Botafogo didn’t even have enough to buy balls and now we are in the final of the Libertadores and leaders in the Brasileirao.”
Since the Bernabéu final in 2018, 10 of the 12 Copa Libertadores finalists have been Brazilians (the exceptions are River in 2019 and Boca in 2023). Their dominance of the tournament is absolute and nothing suggests that it will change in the coming years. Global stars such as the Argentine Thiago Almada, the Dutchman Memphis Depay or Brazilians like Gerson and Luiz Henrique, repatriated at the best moment of their careers, play in Brazil.
What is the reason for this recent hegemony of Brazilian teams in the Copa Libertadores? The main explanation is silver, of course, but the origin of that difference is due, I believe, to three combined factors. The first, unrelated to football, is a stable economy without restrictions. Brazil grows little but no longer has financial crises: that helps to seduce foreigners or repatriate natives. The second, the organization of the tournament: the Brasileirao has a stable and competitive format, similar to that of the European leagues, which generates significant income inside and outside Brazil. And the third, most recent (2021), the possibility that clubs can transform into public limited companies. Seven Brasileirao clubs this year have a private majority shareholding.
Argentine football needs more money. For that you need a better economy (at least more stable and without stocks) and you need a better tournament. Do you also need sports corporations? It is not a controversy that I want to get into now, but I still say that I am in favor of members being able to choose, if they want, a model of sports corporations for their clubs.
In any case, I want to focus on the second factor, the format of the tournament, which has been going on for an insane decade in Argentina and will be even more insane starting next year. I include three graphs that I made to show the abnormality of the Argentine league and illustrate my arguments today, which go below. The graphs show 1) that the number of teams in our first division is delirious, 2) that we are going to go from having one of the longest seasons to one of the shortest, and 3) that we have an exaggerated and unusual fear of decline.
The Professional Soccer League is already the tournament with the most teams in the world (with the exception of the MLS, which has another tradition) and in 2025 it will be even more so: it will go from 28 to 30 teams. This is an absolute abnormality, to which we have been getting used to since 2014, the debut of the 30-team tournament, which then went down (with the Super League) and then went up again (with the return of the tournament to the AFA and the unexplained whims of its president, Chiqui Tapia). Everyone in Argentine football knows that this is terrible, that it is bad from any point of view (Tapia himself promised when he took office to go towards a 20-man tournament), but it happens anyway. In some sense, the AFA is the last caste that resists the anti-elite hurricane of recent years: governed by them, making decisions based on secret agreements, where dissent or debate are not allowed and formed by leaders of diffuse representation , voted mostly by a few thousand members.
less fulbo
The reform for 2025 has another very bad aspect: the number of guaranteed matches for the team drops by almost 27%. This year all teams will play 41 games, between the League and the League Cup. A few also added the League Cup playoffs that Estudiantes won in May. Next year, on the other hand, each team will have only 30 games guaranteed, because the League is eliminated and two tournaments will be played with the League Cup format: two zones of 15 teams, plus the classics date (another aberration sport, which takes away fairness from the competition). Fifteen plus fifteen: 30 games. This will take Argentine football from being one of those that plays the most games in 2024 to one of those that plays the least in 2025. These lurches from one end to the other (see graph) show that there are no serious people thinking these things.
The vast majority of fans want a two-round tournament of 20 teams (38 dates), like the major leagues in the world (also Brazil and Colombia) have, but the Argentine leaders insist on denying them. There hasn’t been a tournament like this since the late ’80s. In the ’90s and until the beginning of the century, 20 teams played and there were 38 dates, but two champions: tournaments of streaks, with variable but often forgettable and forgotten champions. What does it take for us to have something like this? To begin with, let the fans have a little more say in the conversation. Today the leaders can ignore them, because the fields are fuller than ever, television subscriptions are sold and journalism does not seem to care too much (with exceptions). But maybe that will change.
The 30-team season is bad for several reasons. To begin with, there are fewer home games (less income) for the clubs. Also fewer minutes to distribute among the players of the squads, who will be reduced and, probably, will have fewer youth players, because the pressure on each game will be greater (“all finals”, a terrible phrase) and the coaches will risk less. But that’s what we’re going for. On top of that, the champions will be decided in a single-match playoffs, without overtime, with the excess of penalty shootouts that we have been seeing in the League Cup and the Argentine Cup. There will be more deserved champions, who will dominate from start to finish, and others who will sneak in at the last minute and have goalkeepers inspired in the penalty shootout. Bad for football, in my opinion. Less desire to see it. Parity and uncertainty are nice in football, but they must be correlated with sporting merit. If not, flip a coin and it’s almost the same.
The taboo of descent
Another unusual problem in Argentine football is relegations, which the AFA has been trying to reduce to a minimum (or, like this year, eliminate) despite the fact that they have been part of the life of football for more than a century. Relegation and promotion again can be as epic, for some, as winning an international cup, because in football everyone has their own objectives and expectations. Next year, when two teams out of 30 (6.7%) are going to be relegated, Argentine soccer is going to be one of the worst in the world. In any serious tournament, between 12% and 20% of the teams are relegated each year. Brazil and Uruguay, the other big ones in the region, have a lot of declines. And nothing happens, life goes on.
This takes a long time, because it is mixed with many things. My goal today was to show these three abnormalities. Clearly Chiqui Tapia, who was right with the selection, wants a small and walled-in local football, with as little competition as possible. No relegations, no joint stock companies, no long competitions, no real bid to challenge Brazilian dominance. This situation is bad for the fans, who will see a worse spectacle (I no longer feel like watching next year’s tournaments); and for the players, who will leave faster and return later. It is only good for the leaders, who trust in the infinite passion of Argentines for their colors. For now they are getting it right.
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