Are the champions ready to defend their World Cup title? A resounding 3-0 victory over Algeria offered an answer of sorts, though the question still looms over the Argentina national team as they face the possibility of a match up with Spain in the second round.
There is good reason for this: Since 2022, instead of scheduling friendlies with high-caliber opposition, as is customary, Argentina has played mostly against footballing minnows: Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Angola, and Mauritania. Following a tight victory against Mauritania in March, a reporter accosted coach Lionel Scaloni: Argentina struggled against the one hundred fifteenth ranked team in the world while “France’s C team,” he stressed, “just defeated Colombia. Their C team!”
Although the bizarre friendlies against featherweights were quickly drowned out by other doubts plaguing the team—Is Lionel Messi fully committed to playing in his sixth World Cup? Who will play defense in the potential absence of the team’s injured center-back Cristian Romero?—they tell a broader story about Argentine football and its future, which currently hangs in the balance.
At the center of this story is, ostensibly, Argentine President Javier Milei. Ever since his election in 2023, Milei has sold himself as a fiscal maverick battling a political status-quo that has, according to him, driven the nation into bankruptcy. As part of his “anarcho-capitalist” austerity drive—libertarianism on steroids, essentially—he has shuttered government agencies and moved to privatize state-owned utility companies. His pursuits even extend beyond the halls of government: Among the many organizations he was prepared to “clean up” was the venerable Argentine Football Association.
In a country where football is religion, the AFA is essentially God. From its headquarters in Buenos Aires, it oversees every aspect of the country’s major leagues, from refereeing appointments to prize money, and rakes in millions in broadcasting rights to distribute to its member clubs. It also manages the national team, deciding who the current world champions play friendlies against and how much to charge for the matches. It is effectively one of the most powerful institutions in Argentina.
During the campaign trail, Milei promised to enact what conservatives had long threatened: the conversion of its sporting clubs into for-profit corporations. In Argentina, these clubs are traditionally collectively-owned nonprofits. They double as social centers, keeping children off the streets and providing them with food and shelter, and form part of a broader social tapestry that extends to thousands of smaller neighborhood clubs. In recent years, however, they’ve been saddled with debt, lagging financially behind their counterparts in Brazil, whose clubs now dominate regional tournaments, as well as clubs in Europe and the United States. Privatization, boosters argue, would revitalize Argentine football. It would also upend the country’s social fabric.
Yet what appears from the outside to be an ideological clash between two models of governance is a battle driven by a smattering of competing interests.
In his first month, Milei repealed an Argentine law mandating that sporting clubs be registered as member-owned nonprofits, a move orchestrated by Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s President from 2015 to 2019 and a key establishment ally during Milei’s campaign in 2023. For over a quarter century, Macri has fought and failed to overturn a similar AFA statute enshrining nonprofit ownership. (In 1999, as chairman of Boca Juniors, his proposal to overturn the rule lost by a whopping thirty-four votes to one.) In Milei, he found a partner with the perfect mix of free-market zealotry and inhibition to finally pull it off.
Milei’s decree, now mired in judicial challenges and appeals, faces widespread opposition among major clubs including River Plate, Boca Juniors and Estudiantes. What’s more, FIFA prohibits state intervention into footballing matters—it recently banned Kuwait and Indonesia on such charges—meaning that while the government can allow Argentine clubs to privatize, it can’t force AFA to change its own rule; that would need approval from the AFA’s voting members. Those members are the sporting clubs, and those clubs are in thrall to one boss: Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia.
Tapia, the AFA president, is a former street sweeper and the son-in-law of one of the country’s most prominent trade union bosses. He has long gravitated toward the Peronists, Milei’s populist rivals, and publicly backed their candidate in 2023. With the association’s treasurer, Pablo Toviggino, he has also run the AFA with an iron fist, consolidating power and expanding business interests beyond Buenos Aires. In particular, the duo have developed close ties to provincial strongmen in northern Argentina such as Gerardo Zamora, the governor of Santiago del Estero, and Guillermo Raed, the owner of a soft drinks company that now sponsors over eighty clubs across the country. Under Tapia, the AFA has been enmeshed in one controversy after another, from doling out alleged favors to friendly clubs—a newly created “Champion of the Year” title awarded to Ángel Di María’s Rosario Central is one glaring example—and pushing for the construction of a national stadium in Zamora’s largely rural province.
So when the Milei-Macri alliance moved to privatization, Tapia stood firm in resistance—not out of a moral defense for member-owned clubs, but rather to protect the vast web of business interests built around his institution.
The Milei administration, now entering the second half of its term, is racing against the clock to ram through the AFA firewall. In the past several months, media reports have cited evidence of two hundred sixty million dollars funneled by the AFA into Florida shell companies and other opaque offshore accounts. Those funds include prize money from the 2022 World Cup and, crucially, revenue from recent friendlies against low-ranked opponents—teams like Puerto Rico and Zambia—that have been willing to pay handsomely to host such lopsided matchups. Angola alone reportedly paid the Argentine federation twelve million dollars to host the national team in a November 2025 friendly.
In March, a federal judge charged Tapia, Toviggino and three other AFA officials in a case involving thirteen million dollars in unpaid taxes, while the general inspector has commissioned a separate audit of the association’s accounts for financial irregularities. Still, the government’s toolkit is limited by FIFA regulations forbidding state interference—a shield the AFA has long relied on—and by the immense cultural weight of Argentine football. A FIFA suspension ahead of the World Cup is sure to spark a major crisis, a fact that Tapia knows well.
As questions proliferated around the national team’s preparations for the World Cup, Tapia spent part of the month of March feverishly attempting to secure a dinner meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump through his White House contacts. Shortly afterwards, Milei appeared in a series of jovial photographs alongside FIFA President—and Trump whisperer—Gianni Infantino. The moves were intended as coded messages to their respective adversaries: The battle rages on.