The unpopularity of Argentina goes back much further than the reaction to its team’s behaviour during the 2026 World Cup. It’s rooted in the 150-year-old idea that “Argentines came from boats from Europe” and were — are — superior to other Latin American people, Matthew Carr explains.
The World Cup always produces villains as well as heroes, but few teams have aroused such visceral dislike as Argentina during the FIFA World Cup 2026. Before the final, a petition calling for the reigning champions to be removed from the tournament had gained more than 18 million signatories. These signatories were not only English or Egyptians. Many Latin Americans also preferred to see Spain win.
Argentina’s unpopularity was due to various factors, from allegations of referee bias, cheating, political interference, and unsportsmanlike behaviour, which reached its nadir at the end of a dour final when Argentinian players physically attacked members of the celebrating Spanish team and the entire team turned its back on the winners receiving the trophy.
Such behaviour reinforced a reputation for arrogance and entitlement that was not limited to Messi and co. A 2025 poll ranked Argentina at 24 out of the 30 ‘most hated countries’ in the world – the top Latin American country in this category.
Such perceptions reach beyond the football field, to the historical trajectory that Argentina followed in the 19th century, following its declaration of independence in 1816.
From 1829–32 and again from 1835–1852, the Argentine Confederation was ruled with an iron hand by the reactionary Federalist caudillo (strongman), cattle rancher and governor of Buenos Aires Province, Juan Manuel de Rosas. Rosas governed his unruly countrymen through a combination of violence and a cult of personality amongst the rural poor and the Buenos Aires masses who filled his private armies and his paramilitary police.
To his exiled Liberal critics, known as the ‘Generation of ‘37’, Rosas became a symbol of Latin ‘barbarism’, and an obstacle to Argentina’s development as a democratic republic that they believed should be orientated towards Europe and the United States.
This vision of Argentina’s future was most famously expressed in Domingo Sarmiento’s classic text, Facundo, which looked forward to a post-Rosas era in which the Argentine interior would be settled and transformed by “a million industrious Europeans.” To the lawyer Juan Bautista Alberdi: “Those of us who call ourselves American are nothing more than Europeans born in America; our skull, blood, colour – everything is from [Europe].”
With the fall of Rosas, these critics returned to Argentina and began to put these ideas into practice. Alberdi helped draft Argentina’s first constitution in 1853. Sarmiento served as president between 1868 and 1874.
By the early 1880s, the Argentinian army had subjugated or destroyed the Indigenous peoples of the interior. In the decades that followed, European immigrants poured into Argentina to the point where the 1900 Baedeker of the Argentine Republic boasted that “the basis of the population is European…All the civilized races of the earth have met here”.
In Rosa’s time, Afro-Argentines composed 25 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires. By 1887, they constituted two per cent – an outcome that the 1900 Baedeker attributed to “that inflexible biological law which condemns the inferior organisms [to disappearance]”.
Argentina’s First Peoples were also subject to the same ‘law’. Ignored in Argentina’s first national censuses, they became relics of a vanquished primitivism, objects of anthropological study or exhibits in museums and world fairs.
In practice, the Europeanisation of Argentina was synonymous with racial homogenization, even though the new immigrants did not always meet the expectations of the Generation of ’37.
Many came from Italy and Spain rather than ‘industrious’ northern Europe, bringing with them unwelcome political ideas such as anarchism and socialism.
As was the case in the United States, not all of the men and women who passed through the ‘immigration hotels’ of Buenos Aires realised their dreams of prosperity and a better life.
Nevertheless, it was in this period that Argentina became one of the richest countries in the world as a result of the spectacular expansion of its agro-export economy, and Buenos Aires became a cultural capital to rival Paris, London and New York.
Despite the economic and political crises that engulfed the country from the 1930s onwards, the belief that ‘Argentinians come from the boats’, from Europe, has remained central to Argentina’s national identity.
In 2021, during a state visit to Buenos Aires by the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Argentina’s Peronist president Alberto Fernández quoted a popular song, which declared that: “Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came out of the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats from Europe.”
Fernández was widely criticized both inside and outside Argentina for these remarks, and he issued an apology that same day.
In 2024, the Argentinian football team expressed the same sentiments more crudely, when their then-captain Enzo Fernández – the man whose goal put England out of the World Cup semi-final – celebrated Argentina’s victory in the Copa América by posted a video in which the team chanted a racist and transphobic song, mocking the French football team because it had so many black players.
To footballers brought up on a foundational myth that equated Europeanness with whiteness, their own team was a truer and more authentic representation of national identity than the multiracial French team.
Argentina was criticized in France for these videos, and Fernández was eventually obliged to make a personal apology to his Chelsea teammates, but there was no apology from the national team.
Nor have there been any apologies for the racial abuse of the black members of the England rugby team by Argentinian supporters, or the social media posts during the World Cup showing Argentinian fans telling Cape Verde supporters to “cry at the zoo”. There have also been some high-profile incidents involving racist behaviour from Argentinian tourists in neighbouring Brazil’.
Racism is hardly unique to Argentina amongst Latin American countries, but Argentina’s unwillingness to acknowledge the racism of its football team and fans has not endeared it to its neighbours. When Mexico were beaten by England, the Argentine journalist Eduardo Feinmann proclaimed: “I detest Mexicans. I detest them with my soul…The envy they feel for us, not only in football but in everything.”
Feinmann apologised, following criticisms from the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, and claimed that he was ‘only talking about soccer.’ But such statements have only reinforced negative perceptions of Argentinian arrogance that are likely to outlast this tournament, and which, rightly or wrongly, owe as much to Argentinian history as they do to soccer.
Matthew Carr is the author of Darwin’s Savages: Science, Race and the Conquest of Patagonia and of The Emperor of Seville, both published in 2025. A lifelong Hispanophile, he nevertheless lives in Sheffield.
Read Matthew’s Historia piece about crime and vice in 16th-century Seville.
Features in Historia on related topics include:
Researching the Land of Silver by Tom Williams
My voyage discovering Charles Darwin by Diana Preston
The ‘hidden’ Nazis of Argentina by Catherine Hokin
Images:
- Immigrants from Europe arriving in Argentina, 1904: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Posthumous portrait of Juan Manuel de Rosas by Helen Bramwell Norris, c1980: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Passage from Baedeker of the Argentine Republic by Alberto B Martínez, third edition, 1914: Internet Archive (public domain)
- Tehuelche Indigenous people exhibited as ‘Patagonian giants’ at the 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis, by Jessie Tarbox Beals: Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St Louis (public domain)
- Group of immigrants at the Immigrants Hotel in Buenos Aires from the The immigration offices and statistics from 1857 to 1903 by the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture, 1904: Project Gutenberg (public domain)
- Argentina World Cup Final Team, 2026: Executive Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia (public domain)
