Associationist Footballing

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)