ARGENTINA’S FOOTBALL championship will kick off tonight after the government stepped in this week and put the national game on the state payroll in order to avoid a financial crisis gripping clubs from torpedoing the entire season.
President Cristina Kirchner was to meet Argentine Football Association (AFA) president Julio Grondona last night to sign a deal that would see the state pay more than €100 million a year to show games live on state television.
The move follows the AFA’s decision last week to rip up its existing contract with a pay-per-view company, claiming clubs needed more cash if they were to survive.
Argentina’s football is notoriously corrupt and badly administered, leaving clubs ransacked despite churning out many of the most sought-after talents in the global game.
The state of clubs has been exposed by the recession, which has devastated the international market for Argentinian players, denying clubs a vital source of income. Players are threatening legal action over unpaid wages, while clubs owe the state more than €50 million in back taxes.
The government’s move into football has been heavily criticised by many in the country, with the opposition labelling it the latest example of Ms Kirchner’s increasing populism as she tries to salvage her increasingly lame duck administration.
The president has seen her popularity battered by a deepening recession and multiplying cases of cronyism and mismanagement within her government.
In June her husband – former president Nestor Kirchner – was beaten into second place in a key mid-term poll in which the Kirchners lost control of congress.
The couple also stand accused of using the financial crisis in Argentinian football to strike a blow at the country’s biggest media empire and a prominent critic of Ms Kirchner’s administration.
The pay-per-view company that saw its contract to screen games on cable unilaterally terminated by the AFA is in part owned by the Clarín group, whose newspapers and television programmes have adopted an increasingly critical stance towards the government since the crisis in Argentina started to gather pace last year.
This has drawn the fury of the Kirchners who took several important decisions favouring Clarín during Mr Kirchner’s presidency earlier this decade, when Clarín largely supported his government.
Now the media group has lost one of its main businesses, although it is threatening to sue the AFA for breach of a contract that was to run until 2014.
“Many people in Argentina believe that the government has used this opportunity to hurt Clarín and take away an important part of its income,” says Andres D’Alessandro, executive director of the Forum of Argentine Journalism. “It is the escalation of a clash over the agenda in which there is no serious discussion, just public stand-offs that are not good for either side.”
Since Argentina’s mid-decade boom came to an abrupt halt last year, the government has stepped up its interventions in the economy. Last year it took over the country’s private pensions system, at a stroke devastating the country’s capital markets and sparking a flight of capital abroad.