It’s all about the ball, until, in an instant, it’s about something else entirely. On Sunday afternoon Godoy Cruz met Defensores de Belgrano in Nacional B, the second tier of Argentine football, and amid a sea of blue home banners hung two St George’s crosses, apparently snatched from England supporters at the 2014 World Cup. One flag reads: “Boys & Girls From Oakwell Barnsley.” The other: “Big Al – Y-Bird – South Croydon – CPFC.”
Now consider the sheer, exquisite malice – mere pettiness doesn’t capture it, nor does spite – required to travel to Brazil, seize an English flag, fold it away, carry it home in your luggage, preserve it in perfect condition for twelve years, only to unveil it in a second-division stadium the very week Argentina face England in a World Cup semi‑final. The patience and optimism needed to let a small act of territorial teasing ferment and mature for over a decade. That, ladies and gentlemen, is football rivalry.
And of course it’s a rivalry that rings so many other bells: conflict, culture, empire, nationalism, collective memory, the role of rules and law in shaping a nation, and above all a mutual fascination that time appears to have deepened rather than erased. Argentina versus England is often called a “grudge match”, but really the feeling is far more tangled than hatred, much more layered than tribal revulsion: a two‑way relationship defined not only by distance and difference, but by a strange and long‑suppressed kinship. No, we do not share more than what sets us apart. Yet that kinship does help explain the rift.
For a start, it’s frequently forgotten just how much this country shaped Argentine culture. Unlike Brazil, which the British imagination cast as an exotic, sensory jungle paradise, Argentina was raised almost like a loyal son, the empire’s “sixth dominion”. From place and street names, through the rugby and polo clubs founded by the colonial elite, to the custom of merienda borrowed from English afternoon tea. Harrods’ only ever overseas store operated in Buenos Aires from 1912 to 1998. English rock bands such as the Smiths and the Cure are hugely more popular in Argentina than in countries of a comparable size.
In football this surfaces through club names like Newell’s Old Boys, River Plate, Arsenal, and in everyday terms like crack (a star player) or orsai (offside). For many years amateur matches began with a captain shouting aurieli? (are you ready?) to his opposite number. Look closely enough and you will spot many similarities between the two footballing cultures: a deep league pyramid, the neighbourhood club as a vessel of local heritage, song and mass overseas travel as bonding rituals, the heavy presence of war and military imagery. For many Argentine fans the Falklands war seems to inhabit the same spiritual space the Second World War does in England, still visible not just on banners and murals but even in tattoos, invoked not only from the terraces but by the players themselves.
“For the Malvinas, for Diego, for Leo’s last one,” the Argentina squad roared in the dressing room after their quarter‑final win against Switzerland. Rodrigo De Paul sent his framed 2022 World Cup shirt to the Malvinas veterans centre in Lomas de Zamora. And, fairly, this was a process underway long before 1982 – a postcolonial push that arguably kicked off in the 1940s and 1950s under Juan Perón, a slow, deliberate rejection of English influence in which football served as a kind of rhetorical passageway.
Emlyn Hughes reacting after a challenge from Argentina’s Rubén Glaria in a 1974 ‘friendly’ at Wembley. Photograph: ANL/Shutterstock
“Very early, a distinctively Argentine style of play was born that clearly set itself apart from the English influence,” said Jorge Valdano, a veteran of the famous 1986 World Cup quarter‑final against England. “We aimed to be antagonistic towards the English. If they liked long balls, we preferred short ones. If the English favoured passing, we concentrated on dribbling. Against England, something else was on the line, and at that time it was worth more than the trophy.”
Over time the feeling turned mutual, if not quite equal. If Argentina had once been a favoured son, perhaps the caustic reaction to its later turn sprang from a kind of primal, wounded disappointment. An ill‑tempered friendly at Wembley in 1974 was punctuated by chants of “animals” every time Argentina touched the ball, echoing Alf Ramsey’s accusation eight years earlier. By 1986 Jimmy Greaves was cracking Falklands jokes on ITV’s World Cup coverage and proudly waving a German flag before the final against West Germany. “Just no class at all,” Sol Campbell said of the 1998 team who knocked them out in Saint‑Étienne. “Whirling their shirts around, banging on the window. Just a bunch of idiots.”
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Yet while most sporting rivalries eventually get commodified and flattened by the capitalist machinery of Big Sport, this one has somehow stayed authentic through scarcity. The two nations have not played a competitive match since 2002, and for such a weighty footballing culture, Argentina’s imprint on English football remains modest. We got Ossie Ardiles and Sergio Agüero but never Gabriel Batistuta or Juan Román Riquelme, Mauricio Pochettino but never Diego Simeone, and of course never the two greatest of all, Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona, who even in this saturated age still feel somehow remote and unknowable to us, a secret into which we were never fully let.
Too different and distant to be friends; too entwined and alike to be purely foes; neither a clash of true equals nor a simple tale of coloniser versus colonised. Perhaps that is why Argentina versus England has a strong claim to be the greatest and most romantic of football rivalries, less a blood feud and more a messy, century‑long break‑up.
Look beyond the flashpoints and eruptions, and something deeper is at work here. The teeth‑baring might as well be a mark of respect: a shared, illicit admiration, perhaps even a love that dare not speak its name.
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