Half an hour or so into my second interview with Hector, a self-described football fan of Huracán, with its clubhouse and stadium in Parque Patricios, a poor neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires, I asked this 46-yearold car mechanic and sometime-roofer why he remained invested in football but had turned apathetic toward politics:

None of the people that I know give a damn [bolilla] about politics. ... We have been betrayed so many times by so many politicians that I do not trust any of them, even those who want to help us, like Kirchner [current president of Argentina]. . . . Football is in my blood. I have been a Quemero [slang for Huracán fan] since I was a kid and will die wearing my jersey. I told my wife to bury me with it. My two oldest boys play football in the club, and in the summer they swim in the pool. When Huracán is playing at home, I often go with them or my friends to the stadium. ... During a match, I unplug [desenchufo] from all my worries; after a game, I am ready to face another week. . . . Huracán is so indebted that it declared itself bankrupt; we have lost so many matches that we [were relegated] and can play only against other second-division teams. Yes, Huracán is in a complete and total mess [quilombo], but my passion for it has not changed.¹

I reminded Hector that Huracán’s crisis had been brought about, in part, by its elected officials who had squandered and stolen large sums of money from its treasury. After evading the issue more than once, Hector admitted that the level of corruption in football clubs and political life is about the same. He then clarified why corruption had not dampened his enthusiasm for football:

I don’t know why football stirs me in ways that politics no longer does. I feel the same way about the neighborhood. It is a sentiment I cannot explain. [This phrase, which was first used by Peronists in the 1940s to describe their loyalty to the party, has become a cliché and acquired the status of an ontological truth among Peronists and anti-Peronists alike to describe strong feelings of identification with a public cause or institution.] Nothing I have ever felt outside the stadium compares with what I feel when I am inside. . . . In order to attend a Huracán match, I have sometimes requested sick leave from work and taken a cut in salary; missed family gatherings; and even cancelled meetings with my girlfriend. You know what they say: a football team will never betray you like a woman [meterte los cuernos].²

The sense of fulfillment that Hector derives from his club outweighs whatever ambivalence he feels toward it and appears to be based on a dual, perhaps incoherent, set of standards, with one set restricted to the world of football and rooted in personal gratification and the second limited to politics and rooted in public standards of accountability. Hector’s response seems to vindicate the center Left’s long-standing criticism of footballers (and other groups associated with popular culture such as evangelicals and rockers) who are accused of undermining democratic forms of life in the city by propagating “negative liberty,” especially among the poor and marginalized sectors of society.³

The goal of this essay is to explore why, during the 2003 municipal elections, so many Porteños (residents of the city of Buenos Aires) transformed the world of football into a “model of and a model for” city government and how they constituted themselves into a new type of citizen: democratic dribblers.⁴ Studying the subterranean links that surfaced between football and politics in Buenos Aires also provides an opportunity to make sense of the ways that local institutions, in the course of responding to the pressures of neoliberal globalization, are also transforming the age-old relationship between city life and citizenship.⁵ My essay is in six parts. The first describes how Porteños responded to the social and representational crises brought on by globalization in the years prior to the elections, underscoring why so many of them abandoned political society, became invested in civil society, and organized a variety of associations rooted in local, territorial forms of life. The second and third discuss the impact of globalization on the world of football, with the bulk of the discussion centered on Boca Juniors, the city’s leading club and known to fans throughout the world as Diego Maradona’s home team. The various sociomoral and administrative reforms that the club was compelled to make in order to survive enabled voters to construe it as a model for city government. These changes also encouraged fans to reaffirm their loyalty to their own club while at the same time predisposing many of them to conceive of each other as members of the same “family of footballers.” In parts four and five, I study the social and representational practices of the 2003 mayoral campaign in order to make sense of how voters, candidates, and their strategists, in the course of fusing the world of football and municipal politics, resignified the elections. In my closing remarks, I return to the center Left’s account of the “footballization” of politics and propose an alternative reading of it.