The Obelisco in Buenos Aires, ahead of the World Cup victory parade.AGUSTIN MARCARIAN/Reuters
Natalie Alcoba is a journalist based in Buenos Aires.
I will start this World Cup story at the end, standing on a balcony high above Buenos Aires’s 9 de Julio Avenue, the iconic Obelisco straight ahead. Night had fallen, but projections of football gods cast a light on the waves of humans below. I could see them gather like a storm at sea, heave together in unison, then melt away. Next to me, my friend and photojournalist Anita Pouchard Serra swayed with the anthem of an Argentine victory. “Muchaaaachos,” everyone sang.
We started this adventure together, and a little bit lost, on Nov. 22 in La Paternal, home to Diego Maradona’s first Buenos Aires club team, Argentinos Juniors. I had wanted to watch Argentina’s early morning debut match against Saudi Arabia at a mom-and-pop restaurant I found while gearing up for the greatest tournament on Earth (no arguments, please). It was closed and so was everything else. A woman saw the panic on my face and pointed me in the direction of an outdoor newspaper stand, whose owner had pulled out an extension cord and set up a small flat-screen television. A cardboard tray with traditional Argentine pastries and yerba mate, a South American tea, made the rounds as we rose and fell with the drama. Argentina lost that game 2-1, but my first World Cup in the country of my birth had kicked off perfectly – on the street, in a barrio, with a dear friend at my side.
A few weeks earlier, I had been in another working-class neighbourhood, which was home to a different famous son. I was in Leo Messi land, in the mid-sized city of Rosario. His name is sprayed on utility poles. His number 10 jersey is painted on windows that have been filled in with bricks.
I rounded the corner and met Olga Dawydowycz, 75, who was coiling a hose. She remembered the diminutive boy who played with her own children on the street before he moved to Europe to become a legend. Olga also moved around the world. The house she stood before was built with the money she and her husband earned working at a purse-making factory in New Jersey in the 1970s. Then they migrated back home, raised a family and heard the laughter of children fade away. “He was a good kid,” she said of Messi. In the nearby high school he attended for less than a year, the secretaries pulled out a record book that showed his grades. They beamed with pride at the fact that he had preserved the local accent, despite leaving Rosario at 13. “He never forgot where he came from,” said Cintia Vega, 40, a school administrator.
That’s what they say about Diego Maradona, too, in Villa Fiorito, the impoverished municipality on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where he grew up. Maradona died in 2020 of a heart attack at the age of 60, but fans still celebrate his birthday every October. Neighbours and former teammates gathered this year at Estrellas Unidas, the small football club where a young Diego honed his talent.
The party was a reunion. Men who had played with the club long ago trickled into the back patio, past a series of giant Maradona faces painted along a brick wall. Pulled in by the magnetic force of smoke rising from a grill, their grizzled faces broke out into grins. Some hadn’t seen each other in years; decades even. They reminisced about storied plays and local rivalries.
“In the hood you had to be good at playing football, fighting – and running away,” one man laughed. When the sun set, they’d line up trucks along dusty pitches and switch on the headlights to keep the game going. Those who had ascended to the national league were treated with reverence as they walked into Diego’s birthday party. There were tears as they folded each other in embraces. They were no longer boys, even though they felt it inside.
Anita and I talked a lot about belonging during this World Cup. Our “trans nationalities” – she is Franco Argentine, I am Argentine Canadian – are a constant source of inquiry as we navigate the spaces between places, and that overlap. During the tournament we’d share with each other stories about players who were born in one country, and found representation with another.
For me, the World Cup has always been more than a tournament and football more than a game. It is attached to some of my most vivid childhood memories of growing up in Ontario. Like the mattress we dragged to the basement of our first house, in Mississauga, to survive the sweltering summer of 1986, where we watched Maradona dazzle the world and bring the trophy home. I remember the light-blue-and-white flag we draped from a window of our second home – and the curiosity of neighbours who didn’t know where it was from. My dad slamming the wall as upstart Argentine keeper Sergio Goycochea stopped two penalty kicks by the Italians in the 1990 semi-final. The dank stairs up to the dingy dance hall at Toronto’s (now long gone) Plaza Flamingo – a sort of HQ back then for Latin-American football fans in the city. So many hopes, most of them dashed.
Being in Argentina for this World Cup made me realize just how important the tournament was to my immigrant-kid identity. The global event was one of the few times I could be Argentine and have it mean something that others understood in Canada. And it was one of the ways I forged an emotional bond with a place that I considered home, even though I had barely called it that because I left before I was two years old. That bond was strong enough to bring me back here, four years ago, in search of those things that we cannot put into words. Just feelings. Argentina has always been a feeling for me.
Roxana Orio, 35, understood as we entered a carpeted room of a beat-down 1980s-era chalet mansion in an upscale neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. She looked around in wonder, clutching her eight-year-old daughter’s hand. It was Dec. 13, and the semi-final game against Croatia. Argentina had not yet dominated 3 to 0. This was the nerve-racking prelude and we were on a tour of a house that had once belonged to Diego Maradona.
The house, where his parents primarily lived and he spent periods of time, sold this year. Its new owner had set up several giant screens, bought a ton of beef and chorizo for the grill and opened it up to fans to watch the matches. Now we were traipsing on the synthetic grass that the soccer legend practised on, climbing his marble staircase and peeking into the blue tiled bathroom where he probably brushed his teeth.
It felt as surreal as it sounds, one of those zany episodes that proves that in Argentina, anything is possible. Roxana traced the goosebumps up her legs in Maradona’s former room. He was as present to her as the number 10 she had tattooed on her left ankle. “What you’re going to live through here, you’re not going to live anywhere else,” she told me. “You have it inside, because you’re Argentine. The feeling I’m talking about, you have it too.”
My family’s group text this month has been a combination of cute updates about my toddler niece, and World Cup status reports. “A wake up call is always a good thing,” my dad wrote after our stunning loss against Saudi Arabia. “Futbol es futbol,” I responded, sharing the words of wisdom from a guy with a Maradona-themed bar. “Please no wisdom!!!” my mom interjected. “GOLES!!!!” We all mourned Canada’s early exit from the tournament. They deserved more than that, we knew; the Argentine broadcasters who praised their effervescent play concurred.
I was emotional for the final game on Sunday as I set out to a bar with my partner. It was more than just nerves. The gravity of the moment washed over me and I felt plugged into life in a visceral way. Argentina commanded the ball with foresight and precision. I pounded the table in front of me with that perfect goal by Angel Di Maria and trusted that the summit was near, until Kylian Mbappé took those 97 seconds in the second half and humbled us all. I’m always on the side of insanity in a football match, but that extra time was off the charts, a cocktail of adrenaline, confusion and sorcery. My companions in the bar paced around as if possessed. The chain-smoking set in. Nothing was secure. Mbappé was a sniper on the loose. And then that unbelievable starfish save by Dibu Martinez, which took us to penalty kicks. I said out loud: Good, he needs to feel invincible. And he was just enough. We gripped hands and lived on that exquisite edge with them.
After Argentina finally clinched victory, my brother Alex called me on FaceTime. Me and my mascara-streaked face in a dark bar in Buenos Aires. He wearing his jersey in Toronto with my sister-in-law and our parents. We screamed and said stuff I can’t remember. I fumbled to turn the camera around so they could see where I was – so we could feel like we were together.
I realized a few more things during this World Cup, and they are perhaps the most Argentine things of all – that football, on top of being more than a game, is about family. The family that nurtures you and teaches you all the meanings of home. The ones we find on our own and dance with on a balcony 11 storeys up, looking down on the sea of humanity rising with the music, moving as one.
“Muchaaaachos.”