The Malvinas, the Falklands and the infinite match between Argentina and "the English pirates"

LondonHours before England and Norway played on Saturday in Miami the World Cup quarter-finals, and that Argentina and Switzerland if they faced Kansas a little later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Javier Milei's government, Pablo Quirno, published a long article in the newspaper La Nación titled "Malvinas: the strength of a just cause". The memory of the 1982 war in which Margaret Thatcher's United Kingdom defeated the Argentine military junta, which attempted to regain sovereignty of the archipelago, remains alive in the South American country's imagination.

Quirno's text said nothing new that hadn't been heard before in Buenos Aires: that the islands are Argentine, that the British occupation – since 1833 – is illegitimate and that London should agree to negotiate their return. But the whims of football have willed that those words resonate with unexpected force. Because the World Cup semi-final draw certified a new edition of the "infinite game between Argentines and English or, as they are still often called in the Río de la Plata, "the English pirates".

That the AFA, the Argentine Football Federation, published the images of Lionel Scaloni's players framing this Wednesday's (9:00 PM) match as an act of redress "for the Malvinas", as a tribute to Diego Armando Maradona and his Hand of God, and also as a recognition of Leo Messi's "last" World Cup, it has once again demonstrated, paraphrasing Clausewitz, that "football is the art of war by other means".

Especially considering that the World Cups are made to fuel "the nationalist spirit as much as possible: flags, anthems sung with depth, a green field of dispute, unleashed passion… They are metaphors for war", he wrote this weekend the Argentine political scientist Marcelo Falak, not precisely a supporter of Milei's anarcho-capitalism, but also not a textbook Peronist.

The British press widely reported Quirno's words this Monday and made the match much more than a game, as the Argentinians also did, perhaps more recklessly. In this context, the sensible voice of coach Scaloni tried to temper spirits. In the press conference after the victory against Switzerland, and when asked what he had to say to the Argentinians regarding the supposed special significance of the semi-final, the reigning world champion in Qatar commented: "It's a football match, eh? The message is that it's a football match. We are not looking for anything else. We are playing a football match against a great team, who has a great coach, whom I appreciate and admire a lot."

Topics that are true?

It is easy to attribute these readings to the clichés of journalism, and perhaps, especially, to sports journalism. But clichés always contain doses of truth. This was recalled this Monday on the program "Today, from BBC Radio 4, the journalist and writer John Carlin, Barcelonian, British and Argentine by chance and by choice. "I interviewed Maradona on the pitch at the Azteca stadium while the Argentine team was training twenty-four hours before the big match [the Hand of God match, 1986]. And, acting as a journalist, I wanted to stir the pot a little. I asked him: 'And what about the war? This will be your act of revenge, your vengeance against the hated pirates, so to speak?” And he replied to me: “No, no, no, no. You journalists are all the same. Always trying to create controversy. It’s just another match. It’s an important match, but we will treat the English the same as we treat any other opponent.”

The next day God's hand arrived. And then the best goal in World Cup history. And a victory that many Argentinians experienced as a symbolic reparation, "as if it were almost more important than having won the war; everyone was talking about the Malvinas".

Before reducing so much rivalry to a simple football legend, it is worth remembering the consequences of the invasion of the archipelago by Leopoldo Galtieri's military junta on April 2, 1982. Throughout the 74 days of conflict, the war claimed the lives of 255 British military personnel, 649 Argentinian military personnel, and three inhabitants of the archipelago. More than 1,600 people were also injured.

National identity

This balance makes it difficult for an England-Argentina match to be just a football game. And even more so, considering that the Malvinas' belonging to Argentina is part of the construction of national identity, the complete opposite of what happens in the United Kingdom, where they only remember the Falklands, in their case, when Argentinians claim them or when oil companies see possibilities of extracting crude oil.

The new sporting confrontation also comes after, last April, a Pentagon memorandum leaked to the British press suggested that the United States was reviewing its position on the sovereignty of the islands as retaliation for London's poor cooperation following the war with Iran. Javier Milei, one of Donald Trump's closest international allies, insisted at the time that the Malvinas "were, are, and always will be Argentine." The vice president, Victoria Villarruel, went even further, stating that the British who live there should "return to England" someday. In his essay for La Nación, Quirno has cloaked in diplomacy a claim that the Argentine government has never stopped fueling.

Scaloni is the only one who is right when he says it's just a football game. But history never asks permission to rearrange its agents. Chance has it that an article about the Malvinas coincided with the first semi-final between England and Argentina, although they had faced each other before in 1998 and 2002. In any case, when the ball begins to roll in Atlanta, the Argentine coach will continue to be right: it will only be the start of a football game. But there will be millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who will see something more in it.