Argentina: The Donald Trump of World Cup Soccer

On winning, losing, and the uses of shamelessness

There is a way of winning that makes people hate you, and there is a way of losing that does the same. Over the past four years the Argentine national football team has perfected both. Watching the aftermath of Sunday’s World Cup final, I kept trying to find a comparison from sport and kept coming up empty-handed. The comparison that I think fits is from politics. The Argentine national team is the Donald Trump of international football: aggressive, litigious, allergic to defeat, contemptuous of rules it invokes constantly against everyone else, and, most maddeningly of all, very good.

Argentina lost last Sunday’s World Cup final to Spain, one to nil, on a Ferran Torres goal in extra time. They finished the match with two red cards, which would be remarkable enough, except that only one of them was earned while the game was being played. Enzo Fernández was sent off during the match. Leandro Paredes was sent off after it ended: after the whistle, with nothing left to contest, he shoved Eric García by the throat, wrestled Gavi to the ground and pushed into his face, and threw what Alan Shearer, watching from the studio, described as two or three haymakers. Nahuel Molina appeared to punch a Spanish player in the stomach in passing, the way a man might slap a doorframe on his way out of a room. In the medal presentation ceremony, Spain had formed a guard of honour for Argentina to collect their runner-up medals, two lines of the players who had just beaten them, applauding. Argentina did not return the gesture. Rather, when Spain lifted the trophy, the Argentine squad walked to the far side of the pitch and turned their backs. And when Rodri was handed the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player, the Argentine end of the stadium chanted Messi’s name over the presentation.

Until Sunday, the case that Argentina are poor losers suffered from a shortage of evidence, for the excellent reason that they almost never lose. You had to reach back to Diego Maradona weeping through the 1990 final and calling the result a robbery. What the record showed instead was that they are ungracious winners. After lifting the 2022 trophy, Emiliano Martínez celebrated his Golden Glove award with a lewd gesture broadcast to the planet, then led the dressing room in a mock minute of silence for Kylian Mbappé, who had scored a hat-trick against him in the final a few hours earlier. During the victory parade in Buenos Aires, he carried a baby doll with Mbappé’s face on it through the streets. Last Sunday completed the set. Graceless in victory, now graceless in defeat.

Throughout the tournament, Argentina kept benefiting from officiating decisions strange enough to breed conspiracy theories. An Egyptian goal was disallowed after a video review reached back twenty seconds and a hundred yards to locate a foul on an Argentine defender. In the quarterfinal, the referee booked the wrong man; the mistaken-identity provision moved the yellow card to a Swiss player who already had one, and off he went. I don’t believe FIFA rigged World Cup matches, and neither, probably, do most of the people who spent this month saying so. But rumours of this kind are selective about where they land. Nobody floats them about New Zealand. A conspiracy theory is a kind of credit rating: it tells you what the market considers you capable of. Decades of getting away with it will do that to a reputation, and Trump’s supporters and detractors alike will recognize the dynamic, in which every institutional outcome that favours you is taken by half the audience as proof the institution in question is yours.

This World Cup introduced a rule allowing referees to send off players who cover their mouths during confrontations. The rule exists because players have learned to hide verbal abuse behind their hands. Two players had already been sent off under the rule this tournament. In the final, Marc Cucurella approached Messi and, while they talked, covered his mouth for a fraction of a second, in an exchange the officials later judged to contain no hostility at all. Messi turned to the referee demanding the red card. Here was Argentina’s captain, of all people, petitioning for the game’s harshest sanction over a hand momentarily near a mouth. Wayne Rooney’s reaction on air said it best: “Argentina play like that, we know that’s what they do.” The Trumpian signature is asymmetry rather than simple rule-breaking, which is common and mostly boring: rules experienced as illegitimate when applied to you, wielded with sudden litigious enthusiasm when they might injure an enemy.

It must be said that Messi is famously mild. He does not dive much, rarely gets booked, gives interviews of numbing blandness, and has spent two decades being presented, with some justice, as the sainted exception to his football culture: proof that you can come out of that tradition and play as though the rules were your own idea. I believed in a version of this until Sunday. What the final showed is that the exception was always a role within the system rather than a refutation of it. The saint appealed for the pettiest red card of the tournament, and when the award for best player went to the Spaniard who deserved it, the faithful drowned out the ceremony with the saint’s name. He did not ask them to. He did not need to. That is how these arrangements work: the figure at the centre keeps his hands clean, and the surrounding apparatus, teammates, federation, the travelling thousands, does what the occasion requires. Devotion of that intensity is never really about the object’s conduct, which is why evidence about the object’s conduct never dents it.

There is a name for the tradition all this belongs to: viveza criolla, creole cunning, the folk virtue of the quick and the sly. The phrase is heard across Latin America, but it attaches most stubbornly to Buenos Aires, and there it has been used at least as often in reproach as in pride. Within the football culture, though, the word to notice is virtue. The sly handball and the time-wasted minute and the goaded opponent are the craft of players who learned that the game as officiated and the game as played are two different games, and that the space between them belongs to whoever claims it first. What the outsider calls cheating, the insider calls picardía, and the difference between those two descriptions is the whole dispute. Trump’s movement runs on the same translation. Where critics itemize violations, supporters see a man who fights, who refuses to be a sucker, who knows the system is a game and plays it as one. You cannot shame a person out of a behaviour their community scores as excellence.

If this essay were merely a catalogue of outrages, it would be a lie by omission, because the catalogue coexists with the most inconvenient fact of all: Argentina are magnificent. Between 2021 and 2024 they won essentially everything available to them, two Copas América and a World Cup, and the 2022 final they won was probably the greatest match the sport has produced. The football is inventive, brave, and frequently beautiful. This is what separates them from the merely cynical teams, the ones who foul because they cannot play. Argentina would win plenty with clean hands. The cunning is a choice, and the excellence is what makes the choice affordable, because excellence buys forgiveness in bulk. People rarely defend actions; they defend attachments, and then recruit the actions into the defence afterwards. Ask a fan, or a voter, to condemn the transgression and you are asking them to bill the cost to their own identity. Most will not, and few of us, differently attached, would either.

Losing teams have stood and watched their opponents lift trophies for as long as there have been trophies to lift. It is among the oldest rituals in sport. Public acknowledgement that the contest was real, and the result is true. Democracies run on the same technology at higher stakes. The concession speech, the outgoing president seated at his successor’s inauguration, the transfer of power that stays peaceful because the loser consents to it: two centuries and change of American practice. Neither ritual is decoration. Contests produce losers by design, and any system built on contests, a league or a republic, survives exactly as long as its losers keep agreeing to lose peacefully. The ceremony is where the agreement is performed, in public, so that everyone can see it made. There is no other enforcement mechanism, and there never has been.

This is why Sunday’s final read less like mere poor sportsmanship than a re-enactment. The whistle goes, and the result is certified. In the raw minutes that follow, the grievance turns physical, Paredes with his haymakers, Molina with his passing punch, rage standing in for argument when the time for legitimate argument has run out. Then comes the organized refusal: when the moment arrived to stand and witness the winner take possession, Argentina walked to the far side of the pitch and turned their backs, which is the trophy ceremony’s precise equivalent of skipping the inauguration, a thing no outgoing American president had done in a century and a half until the man in this essay’s title did it. And all the while the crowd kept up its counter-ceremony, chanting Messi’s name over the presentation of Rodri’s award, insisting in unison that the certified winner was not the real one: a Stop the Steal rally in everything but scale and consequence. Scale and consequence obviously matter; nobody stormed anything on Sunday, nobody died, and a football team’s tantrum is a small thing beside an assault on a legislature. But the act being refused is the same act. Watching concedes something no fine can price: that you lost, fairly, to someone better on the night. Refuse to witness the result and the result stays, for you and the faithful, forever unofficial. On the far side of that pitch, backs to the ceremony, the implication ceased to need an author. They performed it themselves.