Heartbreak on the Soccer Field

by Isabel Ortiz

89 wounded, Molotov cocktails, 50 arrests, vehicles spewing tear gas, rocks being thrown at policemen, barricades of 2000 people, images of shattered windows and shards of glass littering the streets… Explosive footage on Sunday’s evening news could easily have been that of a violent political protest, a race riot, or a war-torn frontier. Instead, the headline underneath these scenes read “Soccer team River Plate relegated to level B.” The intensity of Argentine passion for soccer has always been unmatched, near impossible to compare to any type of fanaticism in American culture. For the past 106 years, rival soccer teams River Plate and Boca Juniors have always been the top teams of the country. River or Boca is a choice synonymous with Democrat or a Republican: it is a fundamental identity marker, a force that simultaneously cleaves the Argentine population in two and turns it into a vast unified mass of unadulterated emotion. The rite of listening to a soccer game on the radio or watching it on television has always had its own crazed, melodramatic ethos, like some sort of bizarre countrywide cathartic ritual. As a child, I remember watching my grandfather, an avid River fan, sit on his sofa, eyes riveted to the television screen and tears streaming down his face, screaming and shaking his fist at the screen. It didn’t matter if River won or lost, scored or missed. Watching soccer was just about unrestrained passion as tears of joy and sadness mingled together into one big puddle of overemotional Argentine insanity.

Fans evade high pressure water blasts from police while protesting River's loss. (Courtesy Globovision/Flickr Creative Commons)

Well, I have to admit I’m glad my grandfather was not alive to see what happened last Sunday. River Plate, after 110 years in the major league, dropped down from the top level A to the secondary level B, after a string of losses over the season. To an Argentine audience, this was the upset of an all-important balance, akin to if the Yankees or the Red Sox dropped to the minor leagues (and if a lot more Americans cared passionately about baseball).

The stadium was going wild. I didn’t watch the game, but walking through the city it was impossible to ignore its presence, as I heard the intermingling cries of fervent soccer announcers blaring from fuzzy radio transmissions at every stand and store and saw old men biting their nails and kids clustering around tiny televisions in drugstore display windows. I got the bad news from a store clerk at the gift shop at the Museo de Bellas Artes. “River en el descenso [River has fallen],” he said to me with a hollow look in his eyes as he handed me my change for the postcard I’d just purchased. Five minutes later I got a frantic call from my mom: “Get out of the streets!” she said. “If you turn on the TV it looks like the Israel-Palestine frontier; you can’t be out there!” As I took a taxi home, the driver was also in hysterics. “Can I pull over?” he asked. “I need a minute…”

A team member laments the fall. (Courtesy Globovision/Flickr Creative Commons)

As I watched him bury his head in his hands by the side of the road I couldn’t help but reflect on this clash of passions, soccer as some sort of outlet, a cathartic mechanism in a country plagued by so many bigger issues that were perhaps less immediate and controllable than the soccer game going on right before their eyes. Was there any sense in telling these people that it’s… just a game? Over the next couple days, listening to my coworkers discuss the defeat nonstop in the office and reading the incessant front-page stories in the newspaper, I realized that there wasn’t. Even though setting fire to trash cans and destroying a stadium because of a prominent team’s fall from grace may have seemed a misplaced application of passions, I still couldn’t help but feel a little invigorated at the presence of such passion at all, in a city where anger and protest are the norm and apathy is never an option — especially at the soccer stadium.

River’s fall was addressed as a mark of societal upheaval — a dramatic shift in the way things would now function both on and off the soccer field. As Argentina’s political, economic, and social situation remains in constant flux, the loss of River Plate as a constant and dependable force in the eternal River/Boca tug of war was always bound to ignite ire. Though the social implications of this historic fall are as of now unclear, the gravity of response remains a testament to the enduring Argentine spirit of intensity and indignation in the face of adversity.