Every four years, when the ball starts rolling in the World Cup, the lives of Argentinians stop and nothing else matters. The phenomenon is so notable that it led a former Minister of Labor like Kelly Olmos to declare, during the Qatar 2022 competition, that she preferred to win the Cup rather than have the prices on the supermarket shelves go down: “Then we continue working with inflation, but first, let Argentina win,” were her exact words. And now, once again, politics uses the formidable smokescreen that this World Cup fever represents to hide its miseries. There is a Chief of Staff like Manuel Adorni who waited until one day before the tournament began to present his sworn statement, and a president like Javier Milei who rides the euphoria of Messi’s goals so as not to refer to an economic reactivation that does not arrive.
Further back in time, our history exhibits the ignominy of a military regime that clung to the conquest of the ’78 World Cup to wash its image with that “Argentines are rights and human”, while a short distance from where the games were played simultaneously they continued to torture and kill people.
These days, a brand new study by the consulting firm Giacobbe reveals that a significant portion of those surveyed prefer the Scaloneta to win the World Cup rather than the economic situation improving: 44.2 percent against 48.8. According to the same work, the idols of the National Team are the Argentines with the best image in the country: Messi with 90.9 percent positive consideration, Scaloni with 92.3 and Julián Álvarez with 93.2, among others. Furthermore, 71.5 percent of those surveyed believe that Argentina will win again. And attention: 14.5 percent say that they completely forget about the country’s problems during the World Cup, while 46.9 percent declare that they are distracted from them. A shocking social majority.
In a few weeks, when everything is over, the spell will be broken. And that sweet and dangerous state of collective hypnosis will no longer serve to cover up anything.
