Gary Lineker on the most toxic rivalry on Earth

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0:41The match between England and Argentina tomorrow night has so much importance attached to it. The Atlanta police, where the game will take place tomorrow night, have already put out a statement saying, we welcome increased numbers of residents, but we have enhanced citywide public safety and security. The FBI have raised the security level to the highest degree. In this World Cup, the Argentina players have been singing about winning the World Cup for the Malvinas. We didn't invade them in the same way that we invaded most parts of Africa and in Asia too. We call it the Falklands after an English pocho.

1:20The Argentinians call it Malvinas. Well, that's what they call it. That's what I said. That's what they call it in Argentina. and Las Marlenas, so it's just a factually correct term. It's far more than a game. The 90 minutes is only a part of it. It would appear the sun has set on yet another corner of the British Empire, this one far down in the South Atlantic. Argentina today invaded and seized the Falkland Islands, which have been under British rule for nearly 150 years. Britain promptly broke diplomatic relations with Argentina, sent several of Her Majesty's warships steaming south, and appealed to the United Nations.

1:53It all seems like something out of the 18th century, but the British, and for that matter, the Americans, are not amused. Well, it wasn't quite the end of the British Empire, but it was the start of the Falklands War and certainly a rekindled rivalry between England, Britain and Argentina. This is about so much more than 90 minutes of football. This has become potentially a source of enormous rivalry and perhaps the most toxic game in world sport today. Welcome to the News Agents.

2:34The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. What we're not going to do is talk about the potential of Nico O 'Reilly marking Lionel Messi. We're not pundits. There are plenty of other podcasts for that, but it is such a fascinating game that is going to take place tomorrow night. And it's got so much, it's freighted with so much more than just football. because from that clip we played at the top of the Falklands War that took place in 1982, I was a student at the time and kind of in Southampton and watched the ships set sail for the South Atlantic. It all seemed utterly unreal. And I think in British kind of minds, it all seems a very long time ago.

3:16It was a weird kind of post-colonial thing that was really important for Margaret Thatcher, but she survived it and the Falklands were won. I'm not sure that is how it is seen in Argentina, where, of course, the Falkland Islands are just off the coast. Look, it is not something that we're making up. The Atlanta police, where the game will take place tomorrow night, have already put out a statement saying, we welcome increased numbers of residents, but we have enhanced citywide public safety and security. This game, this semi-final, has been rated the highest risk match of the World Cup after a meeting between FIFA, the FBI and the Atlanta Police Department.

3:58In other words, the temperature is high. The temperature is already high because there is something about the characters of England v Argentina fans which is almost expectant of trouble. And over the course of this episode, we're going to take you through some of the flashpoints, both on the pitch and off the pitch to try and explain where this, I mean, it's more than a rivalry, isn't it? It's a real sort of dark sense of nationhood and statehood comes from, I think. Yes, I think it does. I think it's also about countries that have got huge amounts of national pride, but also kind of, you know, an antipathy in Argentina's case towards sort of colonial rule in this sense that what the hell are Britain still doing holding this crop of islands in the South Atlantic?

4:54Those should belong to Argentina. That was what the war was fought over when General Gautieri launched the invasion in 1982, took the British by surprise. British had to fight back. And so there has been a festering resentment in Argentina ever since then. I don't know for the young British fan who is out there today, whether they have really care about that much about Argentina. I think it's disproportionately Argentina who are animated by playing England. I mean, England have got some bad blood. 1986, hand of God goal. You know, people know that bit of the history. They're less, I think, animated by what happened in the Falklands War in 1982.

5:38Look, we don't as a country talk that much about the Falklands. We kind of accept it as a bit of the sort of Thatcher legacy, if you like. But we don't really think about the Falklands day to day. Sorry, Falklands listeners, you know, we love you, we get you, but we're not thinking constantly about you. If you go to Argentina, and I was in Argentina in Buenos Aires in January this year, there are signs everywhere that say Las Malvinas, you know, para Las Malvinas, Las Malvinas are ours. We are the country of Las Malvinas, of the Falkland Islands. In other words, it is sewn in to that sense of national pride.

6:14It is sewn in to that sense of Argentinian ownership. It is something that needs to happen for Argentina to feel complete. It is a bit like the way China talks about Taiwan, you know, getting back this renegade island that somehow got away, but they need to get it back. That is the mindset. If you're Argentinian, you think of Las Malvinas as being part of you, part of the mothership that just isn't yours at the moment. Yeah. And it comes to something when the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, finds it necessary or important to stress that, please, can we just focus less on this and more on the football?

6:53football? UK's position remains the same. The Falklands are British and they have right to self-determination. That remains the position. Just some friendly football banter. Absolutely remains unchanged. I know there's a lot of focus suddenly on all of these things again because of the football match, but actually we should concentrate on the football match. That's what's important this week and not get distracted about things that simply have not changed and are not going to change as well. So let's focus on the football. Well, we're joined now by Peter Frankopan, great friend of the podcast, professor of global history at Oxford University, author of The Earth, Transform the Silk Roads and the New Silk Roads.

7:32And you've recently returned from the Falkland Islands. We've just had a clip there of Yvette Cooper talking about how, you know, nothing has changed. This is a football match. It's not a change in foreign policy. Everything is exactly as it was in 1982. And yet it feels that it is more than a football match somehow. Well, that competition rivalry between Britain and Argentina, or England and Argentina, masks a long and deep and very intertwined history. I mean, it was thanks to the Brits that Argentina not only got football, I mean, it was a Scottish teacher called Alexander Watson Hutton who brought football and not just that, but cricket and tennis, all the kind of places in Buenos Aires that were really famous in the early 20th century were all founded by Brits, places like the Hurlingham Club.

8:16Only one outside England is in Buenos Aires. Harrods, the only one outside England, was in Buenos Aires. So there's been a long, happy relationship. And the British investors in Argentina and in South America in the late 19th and 20th century meant that the relationship between the two countries couldn't have been closer. So where did it all go wrong? We did invade them. I suppose it was a little bit too close in 1806. Well, we invaded them in a different way to how we invaded other parts of the world, where we stuck off lagging and stayed. So we didn't invade them in the same way that we invaded most parts of Africa and in Asia too.

8:51So the relationship was much more transactional, partly because the British saw in Argentina the ability to have very cheap protein. The ability for their big cattle ranchers. And we bought their beef in a massive scale. And the first kind of wobble in the relationship came in the early part of the 20th century, where the British, after the First World War, were down on their luck and started trying to encourage people to buy British. And that created a kind of first trade wobble. The Falklands has always stood slightly to one side, and it's a long and complicated history about that relationship.

9:24I mean, we call it the Falklands after an English pocho. The Argentinians call it Malvinas, which is the name of a Welsh saint who's venerated in France. And so Malvinas is named after Saint Malo because the people who went to settle the Falklands were from France. So these things are complicated, and a lot depends on history how you want to cut your thread and it suits the Argentinians to go back to the claims. In fact, you'll find frontline Argentinian politicians talk about the reason why Argentina has a claim to the Falklands and has the right to the Falklands is because of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which I don't think I've ever heard mentioned on the newsagents podcast.

10:02Really? I'm surprised. That's an oversight on our part. Can we fix that? We have just fixed it. Emergency podcast. We have just fixed it thanks to you. But it's a treaty created by the Pope in 1493 that divided the world between Portugal and Spain. And that provides some form of legal precedent. And that is fallen back on by Argentinians for the last 200 years to say that's why this outcrop shouldn't be a colonial outpost of the British Empire as well as Britain as it is. But was there something of a surprise in 1982? I mean, the Thatcher government was caught by surprise. It withdrawn kind of the icebreaker or whatever, you know, that was there.

10:41The endurance, yeah. The endurance that was there. It thought this was fine. And the Argentinians took that as a signal that Britain would no longer care about the Falklands and that they could go. Well, it helped that we'd be giving that signal for a long time. So over the course of the previous 20 years, there'd been lots of discussions around what the status of the Falklands could be. Could the British give sovereignty to the Argentinians and retain a lease? was their way of having co-divided rule. And that was a function of the fact that the British didn't pay much attention to it. It was a long way away.

11:12There was a cost to it. At the time, the Falklands produced sheep. The fishing business that's grown massively in the last 30 years, and now oil, mean that the Falklands is a different size jewel. But at the time, it was the British trying to work out disengage. And had the junta in 1982 not jumped the way that it had done, probably there would have been some form of settlement. I mean, it was always noisy in Parliament, as you both know better than anybody, getting politicians to agree to sign off. And the Falkland Islands themselves were not just petrified. They were very resistant to the idea that their lives and fates should be decided by anybody else.

11:47But the ways that Galtieri and the Junta pushed it in 82 was a miscalculation that had it not happened that way, possibly things would have looked rather different. You mentioned oil. I mean, this is properly about oil now, untapped oil to this point. But we, I mean, that's the economics of why we are clinging on to the Falklands, isn't it? Well, yeah, it is. I mean, partly there's a field that's due to come on stream towards the end of this year that will be bringing oil back to the UK and global markets by 2028. That's quite soon. It's really soon, right? It's really soon. And that's quite helpful if you, for example, a new prime minister and want to win the favour of Donald Trump.

12:25You can say we're going to drill baby drill, not in the North Sea where the costs of exploitation are high and the volumes are low. but in a part of the UK that looks like we're, and this was a long way away, that no one really protests about it here in the UK. Even the Green Lobby will find it hard to get in the news a lot about it. That's quite helpful. And there's a substantial amount that looks like it's there. So an Israeli company and a British company called Rockhopper are going to start exploiting. That changes the dynamics. As it happens, I think that the Southern Atlantic and the Southern Ocean are important for lots of other reasons as well, not just oil.

12:59But that suddenly focuses the mind and Millet is aware of the fact that once oil starts to become viable, the ship has sailed. So he is going to try later this year to make more and more noise about the Falklands. Not invade. You don't think there's military action on the cards? Well, I think it's no particular secret to say we're not particularly well prepared at the moment to send a task force like we did in 1982. But invasions, as we've seen with Trump in Iran, Putin in Russia, they're very risky. They cost lives. They cost money. They seldom go according to plan. And probably there are better ways that if you were in Buenos Aires of playing the system and the best way to play the system would be to be drilling into the White House.

13:40It's quite an interesting point you make there about the attitude of the United States of America, because if you go back to 1982 and it was at the height of the close relationship between Reagan and Thatcher, and you would think that Thatcher had Ronald Reagan in her pocket and he kind of wanted to keep, you know, arm's length. Well, the CIA were caught by surprise in 82, so they hadn't seen it coming. There was a great... I mean, of course, that was in the context of the Cold War and the Falklands then and Argentina were separate to the Soviet Union, which was the big threat. And the worry was always that if you're diverted with your attention to a faraway part of the world from the NATO perspective, then you've got less resilience to cope with what might come in the north.

14:27And so the US, I think, were trying to juggle things for lots of different reasons. But the challenge, I think, is about colonialism. And that noise that Millet is making about how can the British have a colonial outpost that is controlled and run and for the benefit of people a long way away, that goes down very well with smaller nations and more recently independent nations, the United Nations. The problem is Argentina is itself a colonised country, where the indigenous peoples got pushed out by immigrants from places like Italy, from Spain. That Treaty of Tordesillas was great if you're Spanish and Portuguese, but Argentina doesn't see it that way.

15:00They didn't see that they themselves might be seen as colonisers in the Falklands. Of course, the difference is that the Falklands didn't have an indigenous population. And so whoever gets there is a coloniser. So it's different if you have a terra nullius, if you have a place that's uninhabited, and if you're displacing people. Well, let's go back to where we started. Do you think this football game will make any difference to any of this or the kind of geopolitical atmospherics between England, Argentina and the United States? Look, I'm sadly old fashioned. I think it's great when these things happen because it gives you an opportunity to wave your flag, beat your drum and get some of it out of your system to take some of the pressure out of the tyres.

15:40So lots of my friends and colleagues in Argentina are really looking forward to it. They are talking about it in terms of this is an epochal battle between the two countries. But, you know, in 98, which was one of the most dramatic England matches where Beckham got sent off after he'd fouled Diego Simeone, the Sol Campbell's goal, of course, should have stood. And then when England got their revenge in 2002, when Beckham scored that penalty. You know, I think there is a way in which it's quite a useful way of diverting attention. I mean, Jorge Luis Borges, the famous great Argentine writer, described the confrontation of the Falklands as two bald men arguing over a cone.

16:15and you know that there is a point at which these things they can get resolved it's not hard to work out what the price is of making acquiescence that the challenge is if the worse the economy goes in Argentina typically the more noise there is about the Falklands that was the case in 82 and Millet has got a difficult hand of cards to play you know his popularity and then that slumped he's had a he was a great poster child of Elon Musk and others and he loves Thatcher and Confusingly. I mean, just while we're on the Borges stuff, who's this, you know, Argentinian sort of short story writer and author.

16:48The other the other quote is that Argentinians, he says Argentinians are Italians who speak Spanish and like to feel English. is there something in the Argentinian sort of like, is there a sort of almost an anti-snobbery that they slightly resent the English for coming in and sort of showing them this and sort of imposing their way of life and making them feel like, you know, they sort of want to be a different character to the South American they are. I think Argentina is just a fantastic country. You know, it's got everything that, you know, the good law could have ever plonked on anyone. It's got natural beauty.

17:24It's got smart people. It's got industry. it's got art, architecture, food, you know, you name it. The Falklands is a thorn in Argentina's side and it won't let it go. And it's a footballing thorn. That's what's so interesting. Well, it's turned into a footballing thorn. I mean, it's not just there. There's South Georgia, there's South Fuel, there's the South Orkney Islands, there's the South Shetlands and what it means for the claims in the Antarctic. And I think Argentina, they really see it as being somebody who's parked their bus in their own backyard. And the challenge is the Falkland Islanders, having just been there, have no interest at all in any form of change of sovereignty.

17:59With this new windfall that represents something like£80 ,000 a year for each Faulkner Islander, that will put money in their pockets that makes things harder, of course, because you can build better infrastructure, there are higher qualities of life, you can invest in things. That makes it more difficult. But because it became such a national rallying cry that the reason why Argentina hasn't reached greatness is because it's being blocked because of the pesky British, that serves a purpose. So you can see that happening in other parts of the world. So it's a similar role to Taiwan for China, which is kind of other people are ganging up on us.

18:31We don't have our natural place in the world because of people in London. And here in the UK, we don't understand that because we have a depleted military. We have a stressed economy. We keep changing our prime ministers. You know, as all of Twitter has been saying this week, you know, we've finally turned into a Mediterranean country where we've got great weather, terrible economy, change prime ministers all the time and a good football team at last. There's something in that. But I don't think we understand it from the perspective here. We think the Argentinians should know their place. They should respect international law.

18:59But when you go back through all the foreign office accounts in the 20th century, there's always been nerves that our claim is not as solid as it could be or should be. And that these things are disputed. History doesn't lock in the past and set us a prison. And people like Putin, people like Trump, look at Greenland, look at Ukraine and go, boundaries have moved in the past. Why shouldn't they move in the future? The problem is the way that Argentinians try to solve that in the past has backfired. Potentially, there are ways in which they could address this in a different way. But winning on the football pitch, from a British perspective, or English perspective, I should say, because none of my Scottish friends want England to beat the Argentinians.

19:36None of my Welsh or Irish friends either. It's a whole different rivalry. We'll talk about next week. Peter, thank you very much. We're going to speak now to Andy Mitton, football writer, many of you all know, founder of United We Stand, the fanzine, and writes for The Athletic as well. But more importantly, perhaps to today, Andy, you've met Maradona. I'm assuming you have shaken the hand that became or had been the hand of God. How did that conversation go? Well, I went when he was in Sinaloa and the British government and the US government told me not to go there because it was the most dangerous city on the planet at the time.

20:14And my editor said, no, I'm going to send you with a war photographer. and I went to Sinaloa where Maradona's club said he does absolutely no media but we'd love you to write about us but you're not speaking to him I got there I spoke to lots of people there there was an open training session I spoke to his boss who spoke perfect English he was a fan of Newcastle United and I said can I just get five minutes with Diego and he said of course why not I said well all your employees have been saying he does no interviews and he said well do you want to meet his wife yeah why not so I met Maradona's wife she said you're not from here uh why you're here I said I've I've come to interview a guy called Diego from Buenos Aires and she said oh that's my husband but I said he does no interviews she went who's told you that so now I had his boss and his wife on side and I was led down to meet him I spoke to him and we had a we had a great conversation you know he's one of the greatest players ever and he found out I was from Manchester and he was like, I've been there.

21:14And I'm like, obviously, you're Maradona. Everybody knows you've been there. He said, I used to support a team called United, but then I changed to City because my nephew, Con Aguero, plays for City. I said, you can't just change teams. Imagine me changing from Boca Juniors to River. And he said, well, you can't do that. And we had a chat about Buenos Aires and I'd been to Argentina several times. And he was fascinated by what it was like for me as an Englishman, given that every time I've been there, and I've probably been to 15 different stadiums there, the whole crowd bounces to this song, If You Don't Dance, You're an Englishman.

21:51And I'm from Manchester, which is not Finnish or Danish. And I'm sort of prepared all the time with my get-out clause, which is to say I'm Irish from Dublin. Never actually needed it. But, yeah, being English, it's a wonderful country, Argentina. I love going there. I love the football culture there. Andy, there's a whole subset of questions I could ask you about why your editor wanted to send you to Sinaloa when it was the most dangerous place on earth and what you'd possibly done to piss him off that he wanted to clearly have you finished off journalistically and on this planet. But we won't go there just on the sort of Maradona and the significance of the Falklands to Argentinian football that, you know, maps of the Malvinas on stadiums and the like.

22:39everywhere to this day. You know, there are airports and there are football stadiums named after the Malvinas. Every time I've been to Buenos Aires, one of the first things I do is I go to the memorial of, I think, 700 Argentinian soldiers died. And I explain that people from my part of Manchester also fought in that war. I think 255 people died. And it's incredibly sad. And I speak to people there. I've got very close friends who are Argentinians. But when you go there and you meet some people for the first time, you know, a lady in Rosario just looked me in the eye and had a go at me about the Falklands and she said she'd never met a polite Englishman.

23:18I said, well, you've just met one now. And then I was once outside one of the main train stations, Constitución, and a lady asked me where I was from and I didn't lie and she amplified it and suddenly I felt all these stares coming at me. and then I said look Margaret Thatcher because she said is Margaret Thatcher still alive and she was not very complimentary about her I said well she's probably less popular in my city Manchester than she is in Argentina. Andy the thing that strikes me and you know I'm I am a Tottenham fan I was at the 1981 cup final with you know Ricky Fier and Artiles and then of course the war happens and they're they can't play you know there's a period where that one's loaned out and one just sort of is lying low in london um but yet given the passage of time it feels that in britain if you stopped young brits and talk to them and say what happened in the falkland islands they'd say the what the where it doesn't have that part of our national consciousness in the way i think it probably does still in argentina it's you're absolutely right it's a huge issue it's part of mainstream in Argentina you see it on flags at every stadium I've been at games where veterans from the Falklands have been wheeled out as heroes on the pitch one at Maradona's old club I've been in Lanus and I walked out the ground and this is a suburb of Buenos Aires and there's a big veterans association building there with all these men who are now in the 50s and early 60s who fought And I kept my nationality sort of quite low at that point.

24:59And I've been to Stanley and the Falklands where they're equally proud. And it's absolutely an issue there. You know, there's memorials there for the people who died, like H. Jones. And I've read a lot about it as well. There's a Thatcher Drive in Stanley. So I've seen it from all sides. And I've read a lot of books about it as well. And one article I'd love to write, and maybe I can never write it, is interviewing the soldiers who became professional footballers, because several of them did from the Argentinian side. Is it possible that what has happened off the pitch actually affects what happens on the pitch?

25:37It just seems very interesting, doesn't it? That, you know, in the years after the Falklands, we've had the Maradona incident in 86. We've had that clash with Beckham in 98. We've had the whole sort of rehabilitation narrative in 2002. Do you think that football imbibes the kind of rivalry of the geopolitics? Is that possible? Of course it does. It's far more than a game. The 90 minutes is only a part of it. And it's a bigger part, this game on the side of the Argentinians, because of what they call the Malvinas. They sing songs about it. In this World Cup, the Argentina players have been singing about winning the World Cup for the Malvinas.

26:19And if you ask the England players where the Falkland Islands are, I dare say that most of them simply don't know. That's not to say that the English players are not taking it massively seriously because they are. On a personal level, you had the antagonism between Diego Simeone and David Beckham in 1998. But now these two people respect each other. I've interviewed all the Argentinian players who've come to England and they're really respected. There's a huge respect between the two countries, between the two professions. I love Argentina as a footballing country, but there is this thorn, there is this big issue, and it's not going to go away, which is who owns those islands in the South Atlantic.