Monthly Archives: January 2011

The initial blitzkrieg, though, was a move on the monopoly’s cash cow, TyC, the cable sports channel. In August 2009 the start of the Clausura was delayed as the players’ union demanded that outstanding wages be paid. The clubs put on the poor mouth and started muttering things about the rains being late and the crops failing; their mothers were all sick and needed medicine; badgers had stolen their favourite cheque-signing pen. Their accounting procedures, of course, were impeccable, so there was nothing to look into there. Yet they could hardly be accused of having held on to too many players over the years – the trafficking of promising young talent . major leagues such as Portugal, Greece, Belgium and the Ukraine having continued unabated. So where had the money gone?

Well, it was clear the TV deal with the evil monopoly wasn’t paying enough! Cristina and Nestor Kirchner and erstwhile foe don Julio sat down together and tore up the existing agreement. Gone was the pernicious entity that had been ruining Argeieball by denying it the precious funds needed for it to keep up the fantastic work it had been doing; discarded the ludicrous idea that people should have to pay to see the most popular games on TV (TyC had been showing the clashes between the ‘smaller’ teams and other largely unappealing Friday night clashes on free-to-air telly). Now every match would be on tv and people wouldn’t have to wait for the brilliant Fútbol de Primera (the Argentine Match of the Day, on Sunday nights) to see the goals. Said la Presidenta:

They kidknapped our goals until Sunday, just as they kidnapped 30,000 of us.

Oh, pero oh dear. Sorry, Cristina, you know pegamequemegusta loathes the idea of reducing all your work to one extremely poor choice of words, but such a crass, inept, pathetic analogy, linking a football highlights programme to the abduction, torture and murder of 30,000 people some 30 years before, is Absolute Zero in terms of political credibility. Despite all the good work done by the Kirchners, especially the late Nestor Kirchner, in the field of human rights and facing up to the past, lines like that disclose the opportunism in an otherwise noble enterprise, the cheap while-we’re-at-it-why-don’t-we-carve-ourselves-and-our-mates-out-a-little-fiefdom side to righting the wrongs of the past. It was billed as the democratisation of football, the end of the dictatorship, again. Fútbol para todos, football for everyone! A socialist paradise of nationalised football. Anything that costs money is evil, after all, even in a land where money’s ability to decline in value would shock even Joleon Lescott, oho.

In order to sort out the clubs’ balance sheets, the government would now be paying two or three times more what the tightwad TyC had begrudgingly tossed the poor, starving clubs. The money for this would be no problem: the government had already earmarked some $400m for advertising, which, rather happily for us, in castellano translates as propaganda. There would be no silly ads or anything during the matches, just extended messages to the grateful people about what a good job the government are doing and how did you know Clarín actually eats babies and uses the pieces of skin that come out in their excrement to print newspapers, honest. Continue reading →