More than 16 years after Cristina Kirchner launched the “kidnapped goals” for soccer television that was in the hands of the Clarín Group, the one who now pays tribute to that metaphor is the AFA boss, Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia. The news these days is that, angry at the advance of Justice on him, he made the drastic decision to suspend the tournament. Until there is immunity for him, no more football.
The comparison is inevitable with that boy who at school recess lends the ball for everyone to play, but when something makes him angry, he pockets it and ends the game. The ball, after all, is his, just as Argentine soccer belongs to “Chiqui”, friend, for details, of a certain Lionel Messi.
That status, and the World Cup won in Qatar, make him feel above the rest of us, almost like another power of Argentine institutions: there is the Executive, the Legislative, the Judiciary, and also the AFA of “Chiqui”, who not so long ago, before the corruption scandals, the financial schemes in the light of day and the imposing properties that were attributed to him and his entourage, was the one that measured the best in the image surveys. Even in those times, politics, instead of repelling him, tempted him to participate in it and run for office. Tapia was the champion, or the friend of the champion -Leo-, he was the one who had brought the Cup back home after 36 long years, the one who had arrived at his chair as the political presumption of another heavyweight, his former father-in-law Hugo Moyano, but even so he had achieved autonomy and power of his own in the blink of an eye. He was, in short, an untouchable.
The irony of the case is that, in the best style of Al Capone – the American gangster who could not be proven that he was a mafia member, but ended up arresting him for evading -, Tapia’s collapse began with a minor detail, a whim of his: it was that day when, drunk with omnipotence, he decided that he could decree from a desk that the Rosario Central of his other friend, “Fideo” Di María, should be champion because it seemed to him that he deserved it. It was the beginning of the end, the moment when everyone saw that the king was naked, the day when all the other bullets started coming in. And it was a whim, nothing more than that.
The last decision he made now, the one about the angry kid who grabs the ball and says the game is over, is just another bad idea. It smells of desperation. And it is already known that desperation leads to the worst places.
