Casual fans might think Argentine soccer is enjoying a golden age. The country’s national team finished second at the World Cup earlier this year, led by Lionel Messi, a player many consider one of the best to ever play the game, and Argentine players and coaches are key figures at many of the world’s biggest clubs.
However, those successes mask the poverty of domestic soccer in the nation, where financial scandals, crowd trouble and the lure of riches abroad have fueled a talent exodus that has left Argentine fans fewer chances to cheer their favorite players.
Most players depart for Europe as teenagers after only cameos in the Primera Division for powerhouse teams like River Plate and Boca Juniors; others, like Messi, never play in the league at all.
In fact, more than 2,700 Argentines now play in foreign leagues, according to a recent study, which makes Argentina — not its archrival, Brazil — the world’s biggest exporter of soccer players.
“When we were kids, we dreamed about playing for River and Boca,” said Angel Cappa, 68, an Argentine coach. “Now the players dream about playing abroad. The Argentine league is a display window.”
A result, at least at home, is that Argentine club soccer is blighted by a lack of continuity. In 2009, Cappa guided Huracan to a playoff final for the league title with a team that played fluid, attractive soccer. However, the next season, the team was dismantled and the club quickly headed toward obscurity.
The club’s leading scorer, Javier Pastore, was sold to US Citta di Palermo in the Italian league. He now plays for Paris Saint-Germain. However, in a deal that highlighted a problem believed to be widespread, Huracan was reported to have received little of the money because of the way it was distributed among third parties.
“The clubs end up with bread crumbs,” Cappa said.
Argentina’s top stars once cut their teeth playing for the country’s biggest clubs; during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the soccer federation here actively discouraged clubs from selling players aged under 25 to teams overseas and shunned players if they did move. However, these days rising stars like Pastore often play for as little as a season before they are sold off by directors looking to balance their accounts.
Angel di Maria, a midfielder signed by Manchester United in the summer for US$99 million, was still a rough diamond when he moved from Rosario Central to SL Benfica of Portugal in 2007. Angel Correa, a 19-year-old forward, played for just one year at San Lorenzo, Huracan’s rival and one of the so-called “big five” teams in Buenos Aires, before he was signed last summer by Atletico Madrid for a reported US$10.2 million.
Atletico previously bought Sergio Aguero, a forward who now plays for Manchester City, when he was 17 for about US$29 million. At the time, Aguero had been playing regularly for only a year at Independiente, another of the big five.
“Aguero represents what soccer is today,” said Eduardo Sacheri, 46, a prominent author of soccer fiction and an Independiente fan. “He’s a jewel, an outstanding player that you get the pleasure of seeing play for a year or two. Then you watch him on television.”
Sacheri pines for the era when a player like midfielder Ricardo Bochini could play his entire career at Independiente, who he led to a host of domestic and regional titles in the 1970s and 1980s.
When Argentina won the World Cup at home in 1978, only one of the players on their roster plied his trade outside the country. When they added a second crown in 1986, in Mexico, more than half the team — including Bochini — still played domestically, though by then stars like Osvaldo Ardiles and Diego Maradona had begun to open the path to Europe ever wider.
The trickle soon became a flood. A surge in television revenue gave European clubs millions to spend on scouting networks and player acquisitions, and the proliferation of agents eager to facilitate deals only fed the market.
By last summer, when Argentina reached the World Cup final in Brazil, their roster included only three domestic-based players. Two of them had spent most of their careers in Europe before returning home.
Now, European clubs scour the Primera Division for talent. One representative for a Russian agency called Argentine players the “raw material” of world soccer.
“That’s why we have to be here,” she said, adding that European teams are often viewed as finishing schools.
Often, those teams profit from desperation. The problems that afflict Argentine clubs off the field are well known, including debt, allegations of corruption and the frequently dangerous influence of mafia-like groups of supporters. This cocktail has destroyed even some of the best teams on the field.
In 2011, River Plate was relegated to the second division for the first time in its 110-year history, sparking riots in Buenos Aires. However, when new directors took over last year, they cut costs, restructured crushing debt and filed suit against the previous president.
The team’s fortunes immediately improved: River claimed the league title in May and is now on a 31-match unbeaten streak, equaling a record from 1922.
Matias Patanian, River’s vice president, said he hoped the resurgence would stop the club from functioning merely as a “boutique” for selling players.
“We’re trying to build a good working atmosphere,” he said. “We have to appeal to the players, seduce them, so that they first want to achieve things at River.”
However, the pull of paydays abroad is too much.
In August, River sold Manuel Lanzini, a 21-year-old creative midfielder, to a team in the United Arab Emirates, who increased his earnings seven times over, Patanian said. Former teammate Matias Kranevitter and young Estudiantes de La Plata players Guido Carrillo and Joaquin Correa might be the next to go.
Argentine Fans understand the math. German Bilancieri, 37, is a regular in the grandstands at Argentinos Juniors, which is known as el semillero, or the seedbed, because it has nurtured and then exported young talent from Maradona to Fernando Redondo to Juan Roman Riquelme, a distinguished creative midfielder who once played for Barcelona.
“The boys leave so young,” Bilancieri said in the grandstand. “We can’t hold on to them.”
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