Why England vs Argentina means more than just football

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11England face Argentina for a place in the World Cup final. Reviving a rivalry that began long before Maradona and more than a century before the Falklands War. This is why.

0:26How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

0:59England against Argentina a World Cup semi-final a place in the final at stake and a fixture carrying rather more baggage than most because this rivalry is about more than Maradona's hand of God more than David Beckham's red card more even than the Falklands War Britain tried to invade Buenos Aires even before Argentina had won its independence from Spain We later became the new country's most important trading partner, financing its railways, buying its beef, even introducing the game of football, which, of course, Argentina would ultimately make its own.

1:47It is a history of invasion and investment, admiration and resentment, dependence and defiance. And today in President Javier Milley's deeply divided Argentina, football remains one of very few things that can actually bring the country together. So when the opposition is England, are Argentinians simply supporting their team or acting out two centuries of unfinished business? The relationship is very complicated, but you see that expressed through football. When Argentina first played England in a game, if you look at the previews in the Argentinian press, it's all couched in the terms of this is pupils against masters.

2:27Jonathan Wilson is a sports journalist and author of Angels with Dirty Faces, the footballing history of Argentina. Jonathan, so much to talk about. This semi-final, do you think it is genuinely a bigger occasion in Argentina because they're up against the English? I think it is. I think it's a little bit like our rivalry with the Germans. The Germans just see it as, why are they getting so woke up about this? Whereas for us, it's all about the war. They maybe have processed that in a different way to us. Argentina, I mean, unless you're going right back to the war of the Triple Alliance in the 1870s, the only war they've ever had is the Falklands and Alvinas.

3:03and that still is a huge part of their culture. And I think from a British point of view, it's quite hard to grasp the degree of bitterness that exists in some quarters towards Britain. And the phrase that keeps being used is when they shot at our kids like birds and you sort of think, well, okay, fair enough. But the reason they were kids was because the military hunter sent in under-trained troops. National Service and I just think it begins on January 1st, it ends on December 31st. the hunters' plan to have this sort of war to bring the country together was to go in later in the year, which would have been in the summer, which obviously is a better campaigning time.

3:39And then because of the economic crisis in the early 80s, they decided, no, we've got to expedite this. We'll go in the beginning of April. And so you had 17-year-olds with inadequate weaponry and very little training being sent in. And it was a horrific slaughter. But does the fault lie in the government that sent them in? Does it lie on the professional troops who fought them off? I think to understand the rivalry that will exist on the pitch, we probably have to kind of take a closer look at Argentina itself. I mean, under President Millet, how is Argentina? I mean, from my perspective, all the way over this side of the ocean, it looks pretty divided.

4:11It is pretty divided. And I think it's a divide we're quite familiar with. That I was in Buenos Aires back in September, October time. And there, the mood is very much anti-Millet. You know, if you look at graffiti on the walls, a sort of rough gauge of a temperature, it's very anti-Millet. in the country, it's much more pro-Millay. This was what caused the Argentinian civil wars of the 19th century. I think most American civil wars, you have the metropolitan elites in the big city looking towards Europe with a much more liberal outlook. And then you have the rural areas with, shall we say, a more conservative outlook.

4:46And Millay, that's his power base. As I saw from populists, the power base lies in the countryside. But still, it feels like, particularly in a World Cup year, Football is one of the few things that properly unites the country. And that's always been true. I think if you look back at the 1920s, when Argentina's this very young country, it's looking for a sense of identity. What's the one thing that unites them? If you live in the jungles of Tucumán in the north, or if you live down in Tierra del Fuego, if you're living across the Andes, or if you're living on the Atlantic Littoral, what do you do at the weekend?

5:17You listen to the radio. What are you listening to? Well, maybe it's broadcast from the Tango Halls, but probably it's football commentaries. So football is this thing that pulls everybody together. and what's the greatest expression of nationhood? How do people express being Argentinian back in the 1920s now? It's they support the team that wears the blue and white stripes when they play against a different country. It almost feels like Argentina, the football team, represents something that actually works compared to a state that pretty much doesn't at the moment. I think you can look at that in two ways.

5:48On the one hand, you have the national team has been very successful. It's won three World Cups. Argentinian footballers are famous on the level that no other Argentinian is. If you go down a random street in Europe and say, name 20 Argentinians, maybe you get Evita, maybe you get Borges, but you're getting 18 footballers. And to be honest, you're getting 20 footballers. So football is the way that Argentina represents itself to the world. But I think it's actually something slightly deeper than that. I was talking to Jorge Brito, who at the time was a president of River Plate, who were one of the two big teams in Argentina.

6:20They would argue that, I don't think with some justification, They're the biggest team in South America. And Brito, one of the reasons he stood down as President of River Plate is I think he's eyeing a political career. I think we'll probably see him standing for the mayoralty of Buenos Aires in 2027, and if that goes well, potentially for the presidency of the Republic in 2031. And he seems to me an extremely competent man. But one of the things he said to me was, democracy in Argentina has failed over and over again. They've had 13 coups, depending on how you define a coup, since 1930. democracy at River Plate, a football club founded in 1901, has never failed.

6:56River Plate have always held the presidential elections and it has always worked. So in that sense, bizarre as it sounds, the football clubs are more stable institutions than the Argentinian state. So how then does football play into Millet's view of what Argentina is and what Argentina should be? I mean, that is really complicated because Millet at the moment is at war with the AFA, with the Argentinian Football Association, and particularly with the president of the AFRA, Claudio Tapia. Now Tapia, it should be said, is a controversial figure. There are various allegations of corruption that have been levelled against him.

7:29There was a big ticketing scandal last year. But he is, for what the term means these days, which is itself pretty contested, he is a Peronist. Millet is an economic libertarian, very opposed to Peronism. And Millet believes that football clubs should be like normal businesses. They should be on an open market, should be allowed to take investment. I sort of see the argument that Argentinian football lags way behind, for instance, Brazilian football from an economic point of view. The Copa Libertadores, which is the South American equivalent of the European Copa Champions League, Brazilian teams have won the last seven.

8:06Four of those seven finals have been between two Brazilian teams. Brazilian football at club level is way superior to Argentinian football. And one of the reasons, the main reason for that is ed economic. So there is an argument for, you know, we need to change the system. This system isn't working for Argentinian football. But then you have the AFRA, the traditionalists, who would say, but actually football shouldn't be about making money. This is a social good. And so, for instance, River Plate, which is the club I know best, they have all these social programs. It's not just a football club.

8:35It has 20-odd sports that it runs. It runs its own school. So they would say, well, no, we're a social institution. I think this is a point worth dwelling on, because I don't think it is a point that many people are aware of, particularly, you know, the part of the world that we are both from, football is entirely commercial and has been so for such a long time. Historically, though, what was the reason that football clubs in this part of the world were largely not-for-profit? I think it follows the Spanish model that their members institutions, football in the UK, occupies a slightly strange position because although it is extremely capitalistic, although you can have investment from wherever, if you look at the origins of the clubs, their factories, their churches, their teachers' associations, There is that sense of this is a social good.

9:17And there is something still lingering there that we still feel in Britain that a football club has a social responsibility. Now that is being diminished. And I think it's a real concern for English football. But in Argentina, that is front and centre. That these are members' organisations. And in the same way in Germany, 51 % of the club has to be owned by its fans. In Argentina, 100 % of the club has to be owned by its fans. And there's a sense that, no, this isn't actually about profit. But this is about providing an environment in which anybody can play sport. And if you want to ask the reasons for that, I think there are two of them.

9:52A lot of South American countries in the 19th century, their educational policy is very influenced by Auguste Comte. And his vision of positivism involves physical development as well as mental development. So if you look at the first World Cup in 1930, it's hosted by Uruguay because they'd won the Olympics in 24 and 28. They win the first World Cup. They beat Argentina in the final. Why are those countries the best in the world of football? Well, one of the reasons is sport is part of a school curriculum. It's also, these are Catholic countries, and in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical, Derm Noirum, which looks at the plight of the working classes.

10:25And one element of that, and actually the element that inspires Jules Rime, the president of FIFA, who sets up the World Cup in 1930, is this idea that sport is beneficial to the working classes, how you lift people out of penury. So I think that those two sides, it's Comte and Leo XIII, create this mindset where sport is seen as being a social good. But I'm just wondering, I mean, can Milley actually benefit politically from the success of a national team that in essence he has been taking on domestically? Yes, I think he can. I mean, we saw when Argentina won the World Cup in 2022, incredible scenes of Buenos Aires, five million people on the street, all wearing the blue and white of Argentina.

11:02The Hunter back in 78 benefited from the World Cup success, even though opposition doubts were beginning to grow about that government. If you have millions of people celebrating the nation on the street, the government of a time clearly benefits. And one thing that surprised me, I mean, most people tend to think that the enmity between England and Argentina stems from and is created by the Falklands. But actually, you can go back an awful lot further, a couple of centuries back, in fact. I mean, this goes all the way back to the point at which Argentina was seeking its independence, doesn't it?

11:32I mean, even earlier than that, so the British launch raids on Buenos Aires in both 1806 and 1807. But after independence is properly gained from Spain, Britain sort of takes over economically. So Argentina is part of the economic empire. And that leaves, I think, a very complex relationship between Argentina and the UK. I think it's almost Oedipal, the relationship, that there is a huge anglophilia. The postboxers in Buenos Aires are British postboxers. So if they really hated us, surely they'd have blown up the postboxes by now. But you have these red postboxes. British music is still hugely popular.

12:07Oasis did a huge tour over there a few years ago. The Beatles are massively popular there. The relationship is very complicated. But you see that expressed through football, that when Argentina first played England in a game as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951, if you look at the previews in the Argentinian press, it's all couched in the terms of this is pupils against masters I mean the irony of ironies in all of this is who was it that took the game of football to Argentina it was the British wasn't it I mean specifically the Scots but yes it was the British I didn't want to blow a modern trumpet here but absolutely so Alexander Watson Hutton is seen as the father of the game he was from the Goebbels his brother had died of tuberculosis and he saw sport as being this social good as we were saying before that could help ward off disease like that he's a school teacher and he sets up his own school.

12:56And then pupils from our school, alumni is the name of the team, they become the dominant team of Argentinian football in the 1890s and 1900s. It is the British that give them the game. But then Argentinian football almost defines itself against that. And that's why I say the relationship is Oedipal. So Buenos Aires, and Argentina more widely, as the British retreat just before the First World War, is left in this slightly odd position of the British have run the banks, They've run the railways. They've sort of run the social side of things. And when they go, what's left behind is this new country.

13:30And there's these huge debates on Caesac and Tindad. What is it to be Argentinian? Leopoldo Laguna is the great poet of the age in 1912, gives a series of lectures at the Audion Theatre. And major politicians all turn up to listen to this. And he says, well, the spirit of Argentina is to be found on the pampas. It's the gaucho, the cowboy who used to govern the huge herds. but of course the gaucho who'd been a huge player in the civil wars of the 19th century his power is destroyed by the british when the british a bloke called richard newton takes in barbed wire as soon as you're barbed wire you don't need the gaucho but you get people say well hang on the true argentinian is the gaucho so you get these gaucho revivalist clubs in the early 1920s people dressing as cowboys the asado the great argentinian barbecue that's where that grows from but it's it's sort of ridiculous people dressing as cowboys in the city, in a country that's urbanizing rapidly.

14:21But in El Grafico, the great sports magazine, they say, where do you find this spirit of a gaucho? You find it in the Pee Bay, in the street kid, the urchin, playing football. And those games on the Potreras, on the vacant lots of a growing city, they'd be crowded games on a hard, uneven pitch. So technical skill, virtuosity would be necessary, but also self-reliance. There's no teacher there with a whistle to calm things down. And this is seen as, this is the heart of Argentinian football. English football, British football is about the big open playing fields of the schools with the teacher to ensure fair play.

14:55Our football is not like that.

15:06How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

15:46Let's talk a little bit about the Falklands specifically, because you can go all the way back to the early part of the 19th century where it became properly an issue. I mean, today we've heard Millet talking about, you know, this is our territory, we do want it back. How live an issue is it for your average Argentinian? It's a thorn in their side, for sure. It's also this term, want it back, is interesting, because they never had it. It's not back. They just want it. So Britain settled the Falklands before Argentina existed. So I can understand it. It's right next to them. I can see why they want it.

16:20They can say this is part of some British imperial legacy. But they're not getting it back. They'd be getting it for the first time. And the 3 ,000 people who live there, who are British citizens, are quite opposed to that. And that's why when they were seized in 1982, the British government decided, well, we don't want to hand over 3 ,000 British citizens to this murderous regime. Do Argentinians think about it every day? Almost certainly not. But there are plenty of reminders of the war. And for instance, the most popular song among Argentinian fans and the players this World Cup contains a line about the kids who were shot down like birds on the Malvinas.

16:54Goday Cruz, one of the first division teams in Argentina, based over in Mendoza, in the Andes. Their stadium is the Estadio de los Malvinas, to the Falklands Stadium. So does the average person really, really care to have a burning desire to send in more troops? Probably not. Is there an awareness of it? Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason for that, I would posit, is of course, it wasn't long after the Falklands War that England faced off against Argentina in the 86 World Cup. Now, I remember it pretty clearly, but largely through watching it again and again over the years. For those who weren't there, just describe the match.

17:28And of course, the hand of God. I mean, Argentina were, their best player by far was Diego Maradona. England get to halftime at 0-0. I think subsequent English claims of being cheated. If you look at that first half and look at how often Sammy Fennec, the key PR defender, kicks Diego Maradona, you'd say, well, okay, depends how you define cheating. Then early in the second half, Steve Hodge, English midfielder, miscues a clearance to the ball, loops back. Peter Shilton, the 36-year-old English goalkeeper, he's slow to come out for it his jump is pretty limp and Maldonado gets up and with his hand knocks the ball into the net you see he knows what he's done because he glances over his shoulders he runs off to the corner to celebrate the English players are going berserk but the goal is given and then five minutes later Maldonado picks up the ball in his own half and runs past five English players and scores one of the greatest goals we've ever seen The goal of the century it became known as And I do wonder, though, I mean, obviously, people tend to focus on the result rather than how you got there.

18:34But this was a moment for Argentina, wasn't it, after the humiliation of what happened in the Falklands? Oh, yeah. I mean, all the players before the game said, this has got nothing to do with it. And all of them subsequently said, of course, it had everything to do with it, as it would do. But I think it also goes deeper than that. We mentioned this idea of the Pee Bay as a representation of the gaucho and the two sides of the character, the cunning, the streetwiseness. but also the virtuosity. Well, the first goal is the cunning, the second goal is the virtuosity. And so in a sense, you can say Maldonado's greatest ever game, of course it was against England, but the fact that it exemplifies both sides of that Gaucho ideal, that's very significant.

19:14This is the Gaucho's revenge on the British for introducing barbed wire. Remind us though, how David Beckham, obviously rather more famous these days for being David Beckham, remind him how he plays into this drama. So 1998 in the last 16, England play Argentina, the first half is an amazing game it's 2-2 at half time that's where Michael Owen scores his brilliant goal there's also a brilliant Argentinian free kick and then early in the second half he flicks his heel up with Diego Simeone Simeone stumbles over it makes the most of it and Beckham is sent off and England then defend heroically and lose on penalties which is very much the English way in those days Not saying anything and the headlines I think it's the mirror the following day the headline is 10 great lines, one stupid boy.

19:58And Beckham is booed every ground for a season or two. And then in 2002, they meet in the group stage. Michael Owen, as he had in 98, tumbles over an Argentinian leg in 2002. It's Mishio Pochettino's leg, so the former Tottenham and Chelsea manager, gets quite a soft penalty and Beckham scores it. England win 1-0 and Beckham has his redemption. How much of this do you think will actually be in the players' minds? I mean, you know, half of them play over here in Europe alongside plenty of the England players. I mean, really, I know we've heard from the coach that this has nothing to do with anything other than what's going on in the pitch.

20:30I mean, might he have a point? I mean, I think that's really interesting. We won't know until the game starts. I think they haven't played Argentina since 2005. Lionel Messi has never played against England. Now, that game in 2005 was a friendly in Geneva, and it's the best friendly I've ever been to. After about 20 minutes, both teams seemed to forget it was a friendly, and it was an incredible game that, to be honest, Argentina dominated, and Michael Owen scored twice in the last five minutes in England and won it 3-2. so that was a game that clearly existed on a different sphere to the normal friendly this game's a World Cup semi-final and so it's a hugely pressured environment anyway do these players I mean it's 40 years on 40 odd years on since the Falklands it's 40 years since the Hand of God is that playing in their minds when as you say they know these players quite well I suspect not I'd be fascinated to see what happens with fans there was no segregation in this tournament and I think there's reasons for anxiety there probably it'll be fine, but you can't quite be sure.

21:25So we will find out, but it's definitely a live question. And that is your lot for today. Do get in touch with your views. Is it coming home? Will England make it past the semifinals? Do let me know. Why at Sky.uk is the email address. We're back tomorrow.

21:48How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.