A speculator's speculator: Sabella and the trees that block the view of the forest

For most of their careers Messi, Higuaín, Di Maria, and Aguero have been offensive cornerstones for their respective teams.  Powerful European sides like Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Manchester City play a brand of football that privileges possession of the ball, control of the flow of the game, and, above all, the generation of multiple and repeated goal scoring opportunities. 

While Argentina is undefeated with Messi, Aguero, Higuaín, and Di Maria on the field, those approaches have little to do with Sabella’s team. Since he took over the national team in 2011 following the abject failure of Sergio ‘Checho’ Batista’s team in the 2011 Copa America—a team which, incidentally, tried to play possession football but was eliminated on home soil by Uruguay in the quarterfinals—Sabella’s principal tactical quandary has centered on finding a way to reconcile his usually conservative, cautious, and generally defensive approach with the skill set and talents of the ‘fantastic four.’ A speculator’s speculator, Sabella’s teams have always approached the game from the defensive back line to a front. The Estudiantes de La Plata he coached to the Copa Libertadores Championship was a defensive minded team that mired opponents with the strength its midfield, playing up to three defensive central midfielders (the position typically referred to as a number 5 or volante central in Argentina). His greatest tactical achievement came in the final of the World Club Cup in 2009, where his Estudiantes challenged the best version of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to the brink of elimination in regular time and, had it not been for a brilliant goal by Messi at the end of extra time, would have likely taken the game into a penalty shootout.  

Coaching Argentina, the best outcomes for Sabella’s team in qualifying and in international friendlies have unsurprisingly come in games featuring the ‘fantastic four.’ The spectacular offensive names on Argentina's starting eleven, however, belie the essence of Sabella's team. The best version of Argentina is a team that is built on the counterattacking speed and prowess of the ‘fantastic four.’ The first time the four played together the outcome was a 4-0 rout of Ecuador in a World Cup Qualifier. All four goals were generated from transitional counterattacking opportunities. In a spectacular 4-3 friendly win against Brazil in New Jersey, a game that included a hat trick performance by Messi, three of the four goals came via counterattack. After benefiting from a Kedhira own-goal off a set piece, Messi and Di Maria scored in counterattacks in a 3-1 friendly win in Frankfurt against Germany. Against teams that try to attack and play possession football, Argentina generally plays better and wins. Against stingier teams that cede the ball and sacrifice field position in favor of placing many players in their defensive area, the team suffers and struggles to score.

The team’s 2014 World Cup campaign mirrors that pattern. Against defensive minded teams (Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iran) the team played lackluster football and struggled to generate opportunities only to be

bailed out by Messi’s last minute goals. In the knockout stage, they struggled to score against Switzerland and Belgium with possession. Once again Argentina were only able to generate offense in transitional and counterattacking possessions after their opponents pushed into the attacking half and tried to assert their offensive play.

The countering speed and power of the albiceleste obscures its inability to generate its own offense and its utter dependence on the opponent’s field position. Even more to the point, counterattacking brilliance from the ‘fantastic four’ covers up the most significant weaknesses of a team built on a relatively shaky defensive foundation, starting with Sergio Romero’s haphazard goalkeeping and the constant doubts of the back four. In semis of this World Cup, Sabella is up against his worst nightmare in the Netherlands, another team that loves to counterattack with speed. The outcome of that game will likely be decided by the fate of whichever team is put on the back foot first. Even with the substantial loss of Di Maria, if Argentina can force the Netherlands into an offensive position, Sabella's team will likely be in the WC Final on July 13.

The Most Difficult Rivalry

Regardless of the origins of footballing rivalries, their continued meaning and relevance, and indeed their very existence, are absolutely and totally predicated by a significant degree of parity between the two sides which comprise the rivalry. For example, if Team A and B were once bitter rivals but the two sides have not played in the last fifty years, the rivalry is not likely to continue.[1]  Similarly, a situation in which Team A wins every single meeting against Team B is not likely to develop into a rivalry. In short, in order for a rivalry to be maintained it has to not only be continuously practiced but its meaning must demonstrated in the inability of one side or another to exert definitive domination. That is, an effective way to measure the degree of parity in a given rivalry in football is to look at both the historical differential between the teams involved (i.e. how many victories separate one from the other) and also consider at the percentage of ties produced in the rivalry (i.e. how many times was it effectively impossible to produce a victory).  Analyzed from this perspective, the Clasico Rosarino is the most difficult rivalry game in the world.

Rosario Central, 1934

Newell's Old Boys, 1935

Since the onset of professionalism in Argentina in 1931, the Clasico Rosarino has been played 199 times. In those meetings, Newell’s Old Boys has won fifty-two  times and Rosario Central on sixty-one occasions, giving  Rosario Central an edge of nine games in in the professional era. Between them, they have produced eighty-two ties. Put another way, 41% of the total games (or more than two out of five meetings) ended in parity.

Put into a larger context with thirty other celebrated rivalries and derbies from across the world, the Clasico Rosarino is on the opposite end of the rivalries like Barcelona-Real Madrid in Spain or Arsenal-Manchester United which are similarly close in terms of overall differential—six for the former, thirteen for the latter—but have produced many fewer ties, nineteen and twenty-two percent respectively. The point of comparison with other rivalries is even starker when only taking into consideration the outcomes of the last forty-five Clasicos (approximately since 1990): thirteen victories for Newell’s, nine for Central, and twenty-three ties. Stated differently, those numbers bring the wins (for either team) to ties ratio to 22:23 or just over fifty percent, a figure that far exceeds any of the other rivalries. As the chart below outlines, most of the other rivalries that are similar in percentile in terms of ties are largely situations where one team clearly dominates the series (i.e. Olympiakos-Panathinaikos, AS Roma- SS Lazio, Al Ahly-Zarmalek, and Independiente-Racing, and Flamengo-Fluminense) . Two important exceptions for this trend are the Peñarol-Nacional and America-Chivas. The Uruguayan Clasico, the oldest derby still active in the Americas (first meeting between the two Montevidean teams took place in 1900), has statistically been going in the opposite direction than the Clasico Rosarino. That is, unlike the situation in Rosario where the games have become increasingly more difficult to win, the Clasico Uruguayo has produced fewer ties in its last iterations than the historic trends. The Super Clasico of Mexico demonstrates a similar trend: the last forty-five meetings have produced thirty four victories for either side against eleven ties (again under the historic trend). While the percentage of ties continues holds steady in the case of the of the Argentine Superclasico, Boca Juniors has dominated River Plate in their last forty-five meetings with nineteen victories to ten in the national tournament and almost completely dominating their rivals in international play at four victories to one. In sum, in terms of the overall series history and the recent trends, the Clasico Rosarino statistically stands apart from other rivalries in world football and can be said to be the most difficult rivalry game in the world.

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Game	Country	Wins A	Wins B	Ties	Total Played	% Ties	Differential
Newell’s Old Boys-Rosario Central	Argentina	52	61	82	199	0.41	9
Olympiakos-Panathinaikos	Greece	58	35	56	149	0.38	23
AS Roma- SS Lazio	Italy	57	42	58	157	0.37	15
Al Ahly-Zarmalek	Egypt	56	33	49	138	0.36	23
Independiente-Racing	Argentina	70	48	63	181	0.35	22
Peñarol-Nacional	Uruguay	78	67	77	222	0.35	11
Flamengo-Fluminense	Brazil	137	121	124	382	0.32	16
America-Chivas	Mexico	76	71	67	214	0.31	5
Boca Jrs.-River Plate	Argentina	68	62	58	188	0.31	6
Palmeiras-Corinthians	Brazil	81	86	74	241	0.31	5
Olimpia-Cerro Porteño	Paraguay	94	99	85	278	0.31	5
Fenerbache-Galatasaray	Turkey	142	120	113	375	0.30	22
Red Star Belgrade-Partisan Belgrade	Serbia	59	42	43	144	0.30	17
AC Milan-Inter Milan	Italy	60	65	52	177	0.29	5
Alianza Lima-Universitario	Peru	127	114	100	341	0.29	13
Gremio-Internacional	Brazil	101	109	86	296	0.29	8
U. De Chile-Colo Colo	Chile	48	75	50	173	0.29	27
Celtic-Rangers	Scotland	100	119	85	304	0.28	19
Liverpool-Man. United	England	62	74	51	187	0.27	12
Porto-Benfica	Portugal	62	53	43	158	0.27	9
Vasco da Gama-Flamengo	Brazil	83	94	66	243	0.27	11
Athletic Bilbao-Real Sociedad	Spain	63	49	38	150	0.25	14
Hajduk Split-Dinamo Zagreb	Croatia	64	76	47	187	0.25	12
Olympique-Paris Saint-Germain	France	32	30	20	82	0.24	2
Shalke 04-Borussia Dortmund	Germany	56	47	33	136	0.24	9
Ajax-Feyenoord	Holland	73	54	40	167	0.24	19
Dep. La Coruña-Celta de Vigo	Spain	38	41	24	103	0.23	3
Sevilla FC-Betis Sevilla	Spain	38	28	20	86	0.23	10
Arsenal-Man. United	England	78	91	47	216	0.22	13
Barcelona- Real Madrid	Spain	64	70	32	166	0.19	6

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[1] An example is the Clasico Quimeño between Quilmes Atletico Club and Argentino de Quilmes. In the last 32 years both teams have occupied different divisions in AFA’s competitions and little of the once tense rivalry remains beyond geographic proximity and shared history. The last meeting between the two took place in 1981 and it was a friendly game precisely organized to maintain the rivalry. In the last 32 years both teams have occupied different divisions in AFA’s competitions.

Rivalries: Sedimentary Rock of Modern Football

Theoretically, professional football is a competitive sport. In practice, however, the vast majority of professional clubs have not and very likely will not win trophies at the national level. Even fewer will win at the international level. With very few marked exceptions, the logic of the championship continues to be available to only a select few clubs. Instead, it is precisely the divide between ‘champion’ and non-champion clubs that flavors ‘competitions’ across the world, simultaneously providing incentive and justification for the majority of clubs. ‘Big’ clubs need the ‘small’ clubs in order to prove their ‘superior’ level and ‘standing’. Small clubs rely on the possibilities offered by games against the big teams and the saving grace of the upset victory. The powerful are not prone to taking losses in any context and football is no different but when there is an upset, it can be the stuff of legend. Yet for every legendary upset, the record books are riddled with long standing defeat streaks and many clubs have managed to endure long decades without the possibility of grounding the fantasy of ‘competition’ in material experience by overturning the increasingly grotesque concentration of both financial and footballing capital. Noses pressed against the trophy cases of the powerful, most teams have adapted to the inherent and de facto participatory exclusion of football ‘championships’ worldwide by developing their own institutional and collective notion of competition based on rivalry games. Rivalry games give meaning to the sport, they provide championship-like stakes in the context of competitions that have never been truly competitive and will likely never be contests in which any and all teams have genuine aspirations to win a trophy. Despite many artificially flavored efforts to promote and generate rivalries by tournament organizers and the media, footballing rivalries are rooted in historical experience and cannot simply be conjured out of thin air. No one incident or wave of commercialized drum beat can generate the ingredients that build up over time to form these relationships. Instead, the construction of footballing rivalries mirrors the process of sedimentary rock formation. Football rivalries develop when years of memories and lived experience are crushed together into mixture of truth and myth that accumulates and decomposes under the weight of time. These accumulated deposits are irreducibly compounded together, forming a base that provides shape for future deposits and provide each rivalry with its own unique geography and relief. In the manner of geological core samples, I will dig into the Clasico Rosarino between Newell’s Old Boys and Rosario Central, one of football’s most intense rivalries in order to asses both the historical processes through which that rivalry was constructed, evaluate the ways in which history and myth are used and intertwined, and look at some of the social and cultural production that has emerged out this rivalry over the years.


(Left Rosario Central's 1971 Nacional Championship squad. Right, Newell's Old Boys' 1974 Metropolitano Championship squad)