Milei’s offside trap
A shady AFA might seem an easy target for polarisation but Milei could be playing with fire.
If Karl Marx described religion as the opium of the masses a couple of centuries ago, then surely sport in general and football in particular is today’s opium of the masses (the more so now with World Cup group draws for rugby and football between Wednesday and yesterday). An open invitation for politics to rear its ugly head with a post-electoral Javier Milei administration seeking a more plausible target for its pet strategy of polarisation than a crestfallen Kirchnerism and finding it in the egregious figure of Argentine Football Association (AFA) president Claudio ‘Chiqui’ Tapia. The tempest in a teapot over Tapia inventing a trophy for Rosario Central turning into a raging storm would otherwise be inexplicable – the AFA chief was being merely silly or arbitrary at worst, not criminal, with his invention and the Estudiantes de La Plata reaction in turning their backs on a team with a title gained at a desk rather on the pitch was already overblown, never mind the political fall-out.
The forefront of the offensive against Tapia has been exposing his links to shady financing as if this were anything new in football – one needs only to recall FIFAgate reaching the highest global levels and toppling Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter 10 years ago. The exposés have centred on one figure, Ariel Vallejo, now under DGI tax bureau investigation for evasion to the tune of several hundred billion pesos but others are in the crosshairs. One is Elías Piccirillo, a highly visible target from being briefly married to the also scandalous Martín Insaurralde’s ex-wife Jesica Cirio and from being even more extravagant with his ill-gotten gains than Insaurralde and the rest – his fortune was amassed from hawking on parallel markets dollars irregularly acquired at the official exchange rate, despite currency controls.
But the most interesting link in the chain is AFA treasurer Pablo Toviggino since his Carnaval streaming platform aired the scandal of kickbacks at the ANDIS national disability, which might have cost the government the last midterms had it not been for Donald Trump. Might Toviggino be the target as much as Tapia on the logic that attack is the best means of defence, or could this be simple payback? Toviggino is also interesting because of his close links with Gerardo Zamora, who has just traded in four terms as governor of Santiago del Estero (the venue of one of Argentina’s most impressive football stadiums and also reportedly the highest number of clandestine landing-strips for drug-trafficking) for a Senate seat and seems to fancy himself as something of a kingmaker amid the current fragmented party landscape.
Another explanation for this offensive other than the obvious might be that this is a scheme to take out ex-president Mauricio Macri from party politics elegantly by installing him in AFA and thus completing the process of absorbing his PRO centre-right party into La Libertad Avanza – Macri might well be the only alternative acceptable to a FIFA chief Gianni Infantino who has made a point of emphatically endorsing Tapia amid the current critique. Yet this is mere speculation at this stage with no guarantee that Macri would not consider exchanging his current globe-trotting FIFA functions for AFA to be a demotion rather than a promotion.
Tapia could also be a symbol rather an exclusive target as perhaps the most obnoxious specimen of a model of entrenched power to be found in trade unions, provinces, town halls and even universities, thus reviving the onslaught against the “caste” which brought Milei to the presidency. Institutions thus lose their essence if they become projects of personal power, not to mention the business deals. Easily linked to trade unionism by his teamster past, the arbitrary AFA boss spreading his tentacles to refereeing and the ethics and discipline tribunals thus becomes only the most striking example of an institutional degeneration underlying the political and social fabric.
A shady AFA might seem an easy target for polarisation but Milei could be playing with fire. This clash has already cost him a trip to the United States for yesterday’s World Cup draw although the motive for staying home might also be not to expose how far Argentina is from signing the trade agreement with the United States promised for that occasion. Argentina’s general public is intensely loyal to its national football team to the point of considering it sacred and if Tapia takes cover behind the two Lionels (Messi and Scaloni) as the World Cup draws closer, a cunningly calculated political strategy might not resist the passion of multitudes.