Tonight a fan has died at the lanus v estudiantes game, is weekend two out of the ten fixtures have been suspended and since i started watching futbol argentino in 2010 ive pretty much lost count of the amount of incidents like this. Of the top of my head, boca, river, all boys, velez, san lorenzo, newells, estudiantes, racing, huracan, independiente have all been involved in incidents where the game was suspended, death occured or serious violence in or around the ground since i started watching it. There are many more but the fact ive lost count is really sad. In england a death at a football game is such a rare occurence that it would be remembered for a long time and s big issue would be made of it. For example the river fan who fell out of the stand and died recently, over here there would b a review into crowd safety and huge changes would be made to stop it happening again. But in argentina it just seems to be forgotten about, nobody does anything and we just stumble along from tragedy to tragedy. When got into boca oi read an article that suggested that as you get close to argentine football, it will leaveyou with a bitter taste in your mouth. Three years on i understand what he meant, things like this make me sick and i find it hard to get excited about watching the games (irrespective of bocas current plight) when the fans are treated with such contempt by the authorities who allow these events to occur. We often talk on here about the situation in argentina, about what needs to be done to make the league stronger, how unfair it is that all our players are stolen by europe etc etc. but do we really deserve any better when the infrastructure of the game is so rotten and broken? Please dont see this as an englishman bashing argentine football, because im more passionate about your game than english football. Im just sick of this nonsense every week.
The sad facts are that the average Argentine fan can do little or nothing to stop this.The reality too is that the passion of the fans one of the good things is allied to intolerance to the opposition.Add in the fact that AFA is run by an old mafioso with no interest in stopping the barras.Just look at how isolated Cantero is at Independiente someone brave enough to take them on.The government and most of the clubs have connections to the barras and the boss of Buenos Aires is former Boca president Macri who is hardly squeaky clean.
Of course the problem is the barras.its actually quite rare that there are incidents between opposing fans. It's almost always about the internal struggle at the barra... So what do these idiots do? Ban away fans in provincia which means we river fans are being punished for the actions of the Lanus barra we won't be able to see our team. It's pathetic The solution is to ban the barras, cut them out of the politics and ban them from the stadiums.
So all games are going to be played without away fans for the remaining fixtures of the season. Good move on a temporary basis, but i hope it ll be followed by afa/government/police to get their heads together to find a resolution during the preseason. Getting rid of the barras is going to help i agree, i never got the idea of banning them from bringing their flags and banners to the game, its ridiculous, like they wanna show that they are doing something about the problem, without actually doing anything. Dont take their banners off them, just dont let the bastards in the stadium full stop!!
If Independiente had a good season under Cantero maybe someone would have followed the lead but the reality is even in Velez the Barras have power.There are many economic interests at play here and only real government action could put a stop to this and there are links there too.
The Barras are basically the Argentine mafia at this point, it goes too beyond football for there to be an easy fix.