COMMENTARY Argentina used Messi marketing to make its soccer association perhaps the world's richest today — but in the process it's become an FBI-targeted poster child for what's wrong with the sport.
Argentina is perhaps the only country in the world named after a commodity: silver.
That’s something to keep in mind as the nation’s miracle-worker men’s soccer team plays for a repeat World Cup championship this weekend — and as the FBI investigates its soccer governing body, the Argentine Football Association (AFA), for allegedly laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through Miami and U.S. banks.
It’s a reminder that while Argentina represents a lot of what folks love about soccer — read Lionel Messi — it’s come to symbolize a lot more of what we really hate about the sport right now.
Argentina got its handle from Spanish conquistadors who were searching there for the mythical Sierra de la Plata, or Mountain of Silver. They never found it. But they named the place anyway after the Latin word for silver: argentum.
Four centuries later, that’s turned out to be a stunningly apt label for Argentine soccer — especially the AFA, which today is arguably the wealthiest national soccer governing body in the world, thought to be worth more than $1 billion.
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How, considering European soccer federations like England’s have always been the richest, did this happen?
Two words: Messi marketing.
A decade ago, Argentina found in its soccer legend that mountain of silver the conquistadors couldn’t locate.
In his revealing new book, De Argentina al Mundo (From Argentina to the World), Florida International University Latin America expert Eduardo Gamarra recounts how, since then, the AFA “has gone from a discredited institution to a global brand with a presence on five continents.”
Eight years ago, Gamarra points out, the AFA had only 10 international corporate sponsorships; today it has more than 130, most of them in Asia — where Messi and La Albiceleste, as Argentina's side is known, are the soccer rock stars in China, India and the Middle East.
And so more overpriced blue and white-striped Messi jerseys “can be sold in New Delhi than in Buenos Aires.”
As a result, Gamarra reports, the AFA is studied at the Harvard Business School “as a case study of accelerated growth.”
A decade ago, Argentina found in its soccer legend Messi that mountain of silver the Spanish conquistadors couldn’t locate four centuries ago.
But is the AFA also an accomplice in the accelerated if not obscene rise in the cost of watching soccer today — not to mention the fraud it’s being investigated for in the U.S.?
Leandro Petersen, the AFA’s chief commercial and marketing officer, has asserted the association “is a pride for [Argentina] and an inspiration for all of Argentine sport.”
Really?
$10 million tickets
Maybe we thought so three years ago, when the AFA, with great fanfare, opened an office here in Miami. But according to the Buenos Aires daily La Nación and the Miami Herald, the FBI is probing whether tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of AFA sponsorship revenue were laundered through South Florida shell companies for luxurious personal uses.
AFA bosses have declined comment. But for now they look less like Argentina’s “pride” and more like a crew in one of those Miami condo fraud scandals that Argentine nationals have perpetrated in the past.
Either way, the epic AFA cash involved in this alleged scheme points to a more important scandal: how all that surreal wealth has driven the price of enjoying international fútbol higher than a botched German penalty kick.
When soccer federations like the AFA — or the sport’s global governing body, the corruption-plagued FIFA — start mining the Mountain of Silver that their game’s popularity creates, their voracity makes even the NFL look like a nonprofit soup kitchen.
Which is why the cheapest tickets at Sunday’s World Cup final start at close to $10,000 — and the premium seats could demand more than $10 million.
I look forward someday to reading the touching passage in a memoir by one of Elon Musk’s kids about how they bonded when he took them to see Argentina and Spain square off in 2026.
Adding insult to cupidity, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, after already expanding the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams, says he’s now mulling an absurd 64 teams playing in it.
Translation: ka-ching.
The 2026 World Cup’s mascots are a moose, an eagle and a jaguar. The 2030 tournament’s totem will be the Wall Street bull.
Soccer will have a new name, too: avaritoball.
From the Latin avaritia, meaning greed.
