DAVID GOLDBLATT
In late June this year, on the final day of the football season, Boca Juniors were confirmed as the champions of Argentina’s Primera, the country’s equivalent of the Premier League. The usual delirium in the club’s stadium and in its tight-knit neighbourhood in Buenos Aires was matched in the Casa Rosada a few miles north where President Mauricio Macri, once president of Boca Juniors and a very open and partisan supporter, was also celebrating.
As well as his side’s success, Macri had other reasons to be satisfied. The end of the season also represented an important turning point in the political economy of Argentinian football, one that speaks to the wider economic transformations that the new right-wing president has been pursuing. Boca’s final match of the season, along with every other first division match, was available on television live, direct and free to everyone in Argentina through the semi-public operation Fútbol Para Todos (Football for Everyone). Not for much longer, though. Macri’s economic reforms, which seek to overturn the socialist approach of his two predecessors, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband Nestor, even extend to football. When the new season kicks off in August, Argentina’s biggest games will be available only to those with a cable subscription to the new rights holders Fox and Turner. An electrifying progressive experiment in football broadcasting is over.