With its 2024 Copa America crowning, Argentina’s men’s national football team has now won four straight international titles. Most presidents would stick to praising the team, eager for a photo with the players and the trophy, and some popularity points as the country endures yet another crisis.
Javier Milei, of course, isn’t most presidents.
On Friday he decided to go on yet another tirade against the Argentine Football Association (AFA), the organization responsible — for better or worse — for the Albiceleste, adding another episode to his battle to turn Argentina’s beloved member-owned football clubs into private sports corporations (SADs, by their Spanish acronym).
“If AFA is against the SADs, why is it the [national team] starting lineup is allowed to come from teams run like that?” Milei wrote on X. “Could it be that results are important and SADs get the best players? Let’s end impoverishing socialism in football.”
The main issue with Milei’s argument is that saying the best players come from SADs is like saying the best wines come from the bottle: just because you found them there doesn’t mean they just sprang forth ready-formed.
The majority of Argentina’s squad plays in privately-owned teams not because of the management model, but because European and especially English clubs, privately-owned or otherwise, can easily outspend their Argentine counterparts.
Let’s forget for a moment that the image he shared is wrong — Portugal’s SL Benfica, where Ángel Di María plays, is a member-owned club. The professional football team is run by a company, but said company is club-owned.
Let’s also forget that he can only tweet this now that Lionel Messi, the team’s undisputed leader and star, is seeing out his footballing twilight years in the U.S. after spending most of his career, and arguably his best seasons, in a member-owned club, FC Barcelona.
Let’s also pretend fans in the English Premier League, where six of the 11 starters mentioned by Milei play, haven’t on multiple occasions demanded a switch to a model that includes fans more in the decision-making process.
When the Albiceleste beat France in the Qatar 2022 World Cup final, both teams fielded squads of players plying their trade abroad, but French clubs are privately owned. So how come they can’t hold on to their home talent? In fact, Les Bleu’s biggest star, Kylian Mbappé, has just moved from a privately owned club like Paris Saint Germain to Real Madrid, arguably the most successful team in football history and a member-owned club.
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The German Bundesliga, where private investors aren’t allowed to hold more than 49% of any club’s stake, regularly outperforms the rest of Europe’s top leagues — most of which are exclusively privately owned — in terms of fan attendance and satisfaction.
There is no denying that the organizations that make up Argentine football need a few tweaks. The phrase “the club is owned by its members” has become a catch-all argument against SADs, but the foundations are shaky.
Many of the country’s biggest clubs have recently faced economic struggles. In 2023, seven-time Copa Libertadores winners Independiente had to organize a fundraiser to pay their debts.
Conversely, clubs toying with virtual private ownership, such as Defensa y Justicia, are seeing unprecedented success and making many fans ask whether it might be the path forward.
Even then, the private sports corporations model hasn’t led to teams in Uruguay or Chile outperforming Argentine member-owned clubs internationally.
Most top-tier Argentine clubs can probably survive becoming private corporations. Sure, some may have their colors changed, like when Cardiff City switched from blue to red at the owner’s behest in 2012. They may move cities entirely and leave a fanbase orphaned, like when Wimbledon FC’s owner moved it to Milton Keynes in 2004. But a few will eventually find the investment Milei guarantees and the success some fans desperately crave.
The big question is what could happen to clubs such as El Torito, a small Rosario club where Ángel Di María first started playing, or to Club Parque, Alexis MacAllister’s first club and home to three World Cup winners.
Argentine clubs aren’t just teams or franchises. They’re meeting points that fulfill a fundamental role within our society. Places where children can run about freely, learn and make friends, and in many cases, find a safe haven from the cruel realities of the outside world.
Those small neighborhood clubs, every bit as important to the Argentine conveyor belt of footballing talent, would be lost forever. And more than a few top talents would be lost along the way.