Argentine teams live in an altered reality in which they feel superior to the majority of the greats of Europe; However, in the Club World Cup they received a bath of humility.
Boca Juniors and River Plate offered in the Club World Cup an radiography of what Argentine football is today: passion and fanaticism to the extreme accompanied by many kicks and little game.
The two most important teams in Argentina received a reality bath as they were eliminated in a little worthy of the fair in the United States.
Boca went on to face the powerful Bayern Munich after offering a very dignified game, to tie against a Semiprofessional Team of New Zealand to become the tournament snack, until River arrived to compete.
For several years the Argentine League ceased to be an attractive and much less competitive tournament. It is played in stadiums and courts that are mostly in deplorable conditions, there are no teams that practice a pleasant football, come on, they don’t even try because it is simply impossible.
What keeps Argentine football alive is the generation of soccer players and the practically immediate sale that clubs make: the most recent example, Franco Mastantuono, which without fulfilling the age of majority was transferred to Real Madrid for more than 60 million euros.
Before Manchester City bought Claudio Echeverri and further behind Julián Álvarez. Even Europe is no longer the only market for Argentine players who arise and who need to leave to obtain better contracts, while generating an economic spill to their teams. The MLS, Brazil and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia, are other alternatives.
Therefore there is no tuning between the League and the Argentine National Team, integrated practically in its entirety by players who are in the best European clubs, and by Messi that decided to spend his last years as a professional in the United States.
And it is not that Boca and River are not competitive, they are, the Argentine has that DNA that prevents him from shrinking or having a scenic panic in the great appointments, but it happens that they are also prey to his pride, to live from past glories, of thinking that his shield is more than anyone and sometimes, as happened in the Club World Cup, they encounter reality.
A league with 30 teams and a tournament that encourages mediocrity, sooner or later exhibits its main exponents, and if they had already had loud failures in Copa Libertadores and South American, I could not expect something different in a fair of greater demand.
The Argentines, it was clear in the dozens of interviews offered by Boca and River fans in different cities in the United States, live in an altered reality in which they make all their rivals less believing that they are up to Real Madrid or Bayern Munich.
Then the blow of humility and reality arrives when a physical education teacher, a hairdresser, a real estate agent and an insurance broker, among other amateur players, all commanded by a dentist.
Of that size was the failure of the two ‘greats’ of Argentina.
