Argentina, Brazil and European Economic Power

I won't mention the name of the child who made me reflect on certain concepts during the 2022 World Cup final, to spare her the trouble. She made no secret of her preference for France; I leaned toward Argentina, for a non-football reason: the supposed regional connection.

And it was with this assumption that I provoked the child to celebrate a certain goal by the Argentine national team, because she came from a South American country, inferiorized by the inescapable and eternal European colonialist conviction, and for other reasons, which seemed like meaningless babble to her ears.

At the end of my untimely sermon, delivered while the game was proceeding at an unusual pace for a World Cup final (resembling, at times, a street football match, due to its tactical irresponsibility and the prevalence of will over strategy), she, with her eyes on the screen and without addressing me, said: "The French are black like Brazilians and play like Brazilians. The Argentines think they're European and despise Brazil. You should support France."

This childish construction, carried out without malice and influenced by the excesses that the football world tolerates (or tolerated, such as the prejudiced treatment often meted out to Brazilian players), presented apparent contradictions, which are irrelevant at this point.

That dialogue, which had been forgotten (or stored away) until this Club World Cup, was revived by the exposure of the economic and qualitative differences between European and South American teams—and their motivations.

Furthermore, it is also due to the perception that the power structures in Brazil and Argentina, despite their differences, have embraced the preservation of archaic football systems dominated by anti-national and patrimonialist interests, while both states have bowed to such interests (even when they have not participated, directly or through their agents, in the appropriation of the prospects—and the future, which is the present—of football).

Consequently, in addition to having offered, as if they were colonies, the elements (and talent) for European teams to equip themselves, they have been incapable of breaking free from their structures of privilege and adopting models that compete in an increasingly competitive and oligopolistic environment.

The Argentine situation is more serious than that of Brazil—despite its national team being the current world champion—as demonstrated by the failure of its main teams. And as has been demonstrated for years by Brazil's dominance in the Copa Libertadores.

In fact, a war is raging there between the country's current president and the president of the AFA, the association that governs the sport, for freedom in defining the legal model of football ownership.

While the former tries to break the monopoly (or dictatorship) of associations and thus facilitate teams' access to capital cities, the latter defends it with all his might, inversely inhibiting the inflow of resources that could finance the resumption of regional and, perhaps, global prominence or co-prominence.

The success of Palmeiras and Fluminense—for now, especially Fluminense, which advanced to the quarterfinals after defeating a powerful European club—reveals both the opportunities that have been ignored for years by the respective public authorities to reform legal systems to affirm football, and the feasibility of creating, in the southern hemisphere, specifically in South America—a continent reduced to an exporter of players—environments or markets comparable to or superior to those in Europe, both sportingly and economically.

The same success, especially if it intensifies with the possible advancement of one or both Brazilian teams to the subsequent and final stages, cannot cloud the general view of reality: at the end of the World Cup, both will return to Brazil with non-recurring revenues, which will help direct their immediate (and possibly intermediate) objectives, but they will continue to play in a championship whose players leave too early for European markets and return at the end of their careers, to fill gaps left by a lack of access to resources, flaws in the ownership model, and weaknesses in governance techniques.

Even worse in Argentina, whose status quo demonizes the legal and economic structures that have transformed it, along with Brazil in general, into a peripheral country.

The Club World Cup should ultimately serve, beyond the joy of the Tricolor Carioca and Palmeiras fans, to awaken the leaders of Brazil and Argentina to the riches on which they sit, instead of gazing at the horizon (or Europe) through binoculars.