9 hours ago
Why Argentine club Boca Juniors's fans have invaded Miami, and why they said sorry to Messi at Club World Cup
Victoriano 'Toto' Caffarena never kicked a ball for Boca Juniors; he was from an affluent business family, but was more inclined to writing poetry and reporting crime for a local newspaper in the predominantly working class neighbourhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires. He devoted his weekends to his favourite club, Boca, travelling to wherever they played. In 1925, the club got its first invitation of a European tour and Caffarena decided to break his savings, sell some of his property to travel with the team and partly fund the club's trip, resisting stiff resistance from his family and the potential debts the trip would land him in.
In the three-month trip where they played in Spain, Germany and France, he was the lone supporter in the stands, waving the Boca flag, beating the drums and hooting the whistles, apart from occasionally performing the roles of kit man, masseur and water carrier. In Germany, he even assumed the role of the team's technical director. He became such a loved figure in the team that forward Agustín Cerrotti began to call him, La Doce, or the twelfth player.
A century later, the one-man 'La Doce' has become the loudest and most passionate fan-group in the world, thronging the stands wherever the team plays, filling the arena with life, music and colour. So passionate the fans are that before the Super Clasico against arch-enemies River Plate, a rivalry that divides the country as much as Peronism, that there had been public-service announcements instructing those with health problems to visit their doctor and make sure they did not run out of medicine, or avoid the game altogether. Doctors implore, through radio and television, 'to get plenty of exercise beforehand, to drink lots of water and not so much alcohol.' So hysterical are they that bursts of violence and hooliganism erupt frequently, despite an army of policemen.
Their vitality has been ubiquitous in the Club World Cup, where games of Boca Juniors have run full-house, as opposed to half-empty stands for most games in a tournament where officials have sold tickets at throwaway prices to fill the seats. The blue and gold tide have washed the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, with an estimated inflow of 50,000 fans, and taken over the beaches, streets and pubs of the sunshine city. In one of the thousands of videos in circulation, a fan is heard singing: 'Leo, please forgive us.' Miami is home to the club Messi turns up for, Inter, but loyalty is unshakeable.
But Messi is not their biggest icon. It is not Diego Maradona, or Carlos Tevez, two of their own either. It is Juan Roman Riquelme, the playmaker of divine imagination and intelligence, a rebel of the pitch, embodying the 'pibe' of the 'potrero' soul (the kids from the alleys). Riquelme is now the club's chairman and his face adorns a thousand furious flags waved in the stands.
They have been winless in both their games, after a narrow defeat to German champions Bayern Munich (1-2) and a tough draw to Porto (2-2). Their knockout hopes are slim, but that has not deterred them from packing their bags back home. The energy of the fans left Bayern captain Harry Kane positively stunned: 'A big part of their game is to have the fans behind them, to use them as the energy and to take them into tackles and to battle.'
GOOOOOOOOOL DE BOCAAAA!!
Merentiel takes matters into his own hands! 💪
A dazzling run and a cold finish — it's all square at 1-1! ⚽
Watch the @FIFACWC | June 14 – July 13 | Every Game | Free | | #FIFACWC #TakeItToTheWorld #BAYBOC
— DAZN Football (@DAZNFootball) June 21, 2025
Monikered Los Xeneizes, or the Genoese as the club's founding members were Italian immigrants, they instil their own rhythm into the game. The passion and emotion, by a natural extension, are the soul of Argentine football too. In Qatar, Argentina's supporters defied the government's plea to not travel halfway through the globe to the Middle East as part of austerity. The government was wading through its worst phase of economic slump, inflation and unemployment were at its zenith, but that did not deny a lakh fans descending for the 2022 World Cup.
Three images were omnipresent. Maradona, Messi and Pope Francis cohabited on flags, drums, banners, their face inked on human skin and their names blaring from jerseys. Several Argentina lodgings covered the facade with a poster of Maradona handing a ball to Messi, a symbolism that found a befitting climax. Another flag re-imaged Michelangelo's most-famous as well as parodied fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel The Creation of Adam, in which Maradona, from the clouds reaches his index finger out to Messi. Not just the most feverish, they were the most imaginative ones too.
They spilled into Doha's downtown locales Msheireb and Souq Waqif, where one night they held a memorial service for Maradona. Just as they had lashed into Times Square during the COPA last year and the Copacabana Beach promenade in Rio a decade ago. Their song, Muchachos, ahora nos volvimos a ilusionar (it's time to get excited again), set to the tune of Argentinian band La Mosca's song, became quite a hit among neutrals too.
Next year, during the World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada, the Argentina fans would descend again to cheer for their nation, potentially the last dance of Messi, but moreover to fill the stands with flavour and life. To knock the champions off the perch, their rivals would have to first beat the twelfth man too. What Kane beheld in Miami was only a test dose.
