The Malvines, 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 Foreign Minister 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 collective imagination.

Quirno's text said nothing 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 accept to negotiate their return. But the whims of football have wanted those words to resonate with unexpected force. Because the World Cup semi-final bracket certified a new edition of the "infinite game between Argentinians and English, or as they are often still called in the River Plate, "the English pirates".

That the AFA, the Argentine Football Federation, published 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 shown, paraphrasing Clausewitz, that "football is the art of war by other means".

Especially considering that the World Cups are made to fuel "as much as possible the nationalist spirit: Flags, anthems sung with depth, a green field of dispute, unleashed passion… They are metaphors for war", he wrote this weekend the Argentinian 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 just a game, as the Argentinians have also done, perhaps more recklessly. In this context, the sensible voice of coach Scaloni tried to temper spirits. At the press conference following the victory against Switzerland, and when asked what he had to say to 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're not looking for anything else. We're playing a football match against a great team, which 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. The journalist and writer John Carlin, from Barcelona, British and Argentine by chance and by his own will, recalled this on Monday on the BBC Radio 4 program Today, the journalist and writer John Carlin, from Barcelona, British and Argentine by chance and by his own will. "I interviewed Maradona on the pitch at the Aztec Stadium while the Argentine national team was training twenty-four hours before the big match [the Hand of God match, 1986]. And, as a journalist, I wanted to stir the pot a bit. I asked him: 'And what about the war? Will this be your act of revenge, your vengeance against the hated pirates, so to speak?' And he replied: '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'll treat the English the same as we treat any other opponent.'"

The next day, the Hand of God arrived. And then the best goal in World Cup history. And a victory that many Argentines experienced as a symbolic reparation, "as if it were almost more important than winning the war; everyone was talking about the Falklands".

Before reducing such rivalry to a mere football legend, it is worth remembering the consequences of the invasion of that archipelago by Leopoldo Galtieri's military junta on April 2, 1982. Over the 74 days of conflict, the war claimed the lives of 255 British soldiers, 649 Argentines, 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 to be just a football match. And even more so considering that the belonging of the Malvinas to Argentina is part of the construction of national identity, quite the opposite of what happens in the United Kingdom, which only remembers them, in their case the Falklands, when Argentines claim them or when oil companies see possibilities of extracting crude oil from them.

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 lack of 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 match. 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, even though they had faced each other before in 1998 and 2002. In any case, when the ball starts rolling in Atlanta, the Argentine coach will continue to be right: it will only be the start of a football match. But there will be millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who will see something more.