Argentina Football Team Identity Over The Years And History

If you aspire to learn more about a land and its people, and genuinely widen your ways of seeing and thinking, it’s a good idea to indulge yourself in an articulation of that region’s culture, be it literature, music, sport, or any other meaning-making entity for its residents.

If the place which has caught your intrigue is Argentina, and you’re voyaging into its Jupiter-sized belly of football, you would’ve made a fascinating and edifying selection. As abundant works of an abundance of scholars would lay open, the sport’s hold on the country’s imagination and reality is such that it is possible to study Argentina’s modern-day history, politics, sociological trends as well as the everyday lives and passions of everyday people through football. 

For over a century, football and Argentina have shaped each other’s identity, and ever since the 1910s there has been a myriad of arguments, claiming that a peculiar, distinctive brand of football is played in Argentina known as La Nuestra, which translates as “Our Way”.

What is La Nuestra? 

In opposition to the historically monotonous and physical nature of the English game, the central tangents of La Nuestra are purely steeped in romanticism, and vociferously vouch for beauty and enjoyment in the spectacle, over winning for winning’s sake. Keeping the spectators on their toes through spontaneity, creativity, improvisation, and magic lies at the crux of La Nuestra. 

Just like how La Nuestra is similar to Joga Bonito in its values, the former also shares parallels with the latter in its conception. 

In a bid to celebrate the centenary of independence and reinforce Argentina’s self-governance, the uniqueness of La Nuestra was intellectually constructed by nationalist, revisionist writings in the pages of publications like El Gráfico. These narratives never dialled down on the use of strong doses of Argentine essentialism to unite the country’s increasingly diverse, immigrant communities into a solitary category. Through their discourse of difference, these opinion formers also wanted to obscure the role of Anglo-Argentines in introducing and subsequently shaping the development of the sport in the country. 

However, much more than the blood or dietary habits of Argentines, La Nuestra developed because of how the sport was played by the working classes of the country, including those belonging to Anglo communities and soccer lines. 

While the British installed the sport in their…