Soccer, passion and politics in the militant fans of Club Atlético River Plate

Abstract

The article summarizes a case study, that of the practices of a group of “activists-supporters” of the Club Atlético River Plate between 1996 and 2013, with the purpose of knowing their meanings and motivations in basically two dimensions: the emotional ones and those of political nature. The case is addressed at a double level: on the one hand, the emotional meaning, related to their actions the days of the first team's soccer games — mainly in the so-called “party at the stands”, in native voice —, and secondly, the passage of some of these soccer fans to the institutional and political activism inside the club, which leads them to become important political actors. The investigation goes in depth in the traditional model of sports clubs in Argentina, as non-profit civil associations, as part of social capital and sociability, and in the historical, political and institutional peculiarities of Club Atlético River Plate, to describe and analyze the football activism of these fans based on their “hinchismo” and sense of belonging to the culture of endurance (“aguante”) and, from there, towards the political arena of the club. The investigation expands on a series of specificities in relation to its activities and the bonds with other actors of the football configuration as leaders, “barras bravas” and other club supporters, after the political crisis of 2001 and 2002 in Argentina and prior to the process opened in 2003 — deepened from 2008 on — of opening up to political activism by groups of young people and adolescents. The article discusses whether their emotional practices imply certain “communitarian” values, concluding that both soccer and these actions achieves in them an integrating, identity and symbolic social function, able to gather and recreate a mixed feeling of community, not necessarily in terms of resistance to modern individualism, but in terms of an emotional collective that consolidates them as a social identity.