Argentina Football Fans Quotes

Pope Francis is a San Lorenzo fan, of course. He was born in December 1936 in Flores, the barrio immediately to the west of Almagro, where Father Lorenzo had founded the club three decades earlier. His father played for San Lorenzo’s basketball team, and as a child he would go with his mother to watch matches. There’s always a suspicion with public figures that their professed support for soccer clubs is skin deep, but not with Francis. If he sees somebody wearing a San Lorenzo shirt or carrying San Lorenzo colors in the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square, he makes a point of acknowledging them. If San Lorenzo have won their previous game, he will usually signal the score with his fingers. At his public audiences, there are always groups draped in Argentinian flags, looking less like pilgrims than a soccer crowd. Those who work regularly with Francis roll their eyes when asked about his love of the game; apparently, he talks incessantly about soccer.

Reinaldo ‘Mostaza’ Merlo, the former River midfielder with the mustard-coloured hair, ordered that the concrete moat around the pitch be ripped out. When it was, the skeleton of the seventh cat buried by Independiente fans in 1967 was discovered. Later that year, Racing won the league,

Maradona was quick to try to make capital. ‘For 364 days of the year,’ he told the fans who supported him every Sunday, ‘you are considered to be foreigners by your own country; today you must do what they want by supporting the Italian team. By contrast, I am a Neapolitan for 365 days of the year.