By Tony Attwood
Argentina midfielder Leandro Paredes has been given a 10-match ban for being part of some clashes he was involved in after the 2026 World Cup final.
Such bans are becoming more common, and indeed recently Fifa also gave Nahuel Molina a seven-match suspension. And although countries and clubs don’t like such punishments they cope, because they are used to coping with players not being there. Players get injured all the time, and so clubs and countries have backups.
Argentina have also been ordered to play their next two home matches with 50% capacity, though one match of that sanction is suspended.
Meanwhile we also learn that the Argentinian Football Association was fined something over quarter of a million pounds for breaches of allowing a demonstration of a “non-sporting nature” which basically means showing a banner proclaiming that the Falklands are Argentine.
The country also has to develop an educational programme to stop people using football for political purposes – this following Argentina players parading around a similar banner. Others are being fined for fighting and pushing between players, but the bans only relate to international matches. The local Football Association concerned has said it will take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Meanwhile the team as a whole got fined for seeming to support the unveiling of the “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” banner.
And… And well, clubs and countries have been trying to find ways to suspend or fine players for some time over behaviour they don’t like, but I am not sure any of these approaches have had any effect. Fining players in particular doesn’t seem to hurt because the players are so well paid anyway, and banning them from internationals doesn’t really have too deep an impact because there is often little immediacy concerning when the ban will be implemented.
But is there any other form of punishment that might work? Surely there must be some solution because football has found solutions before. After all if you think back to earlier times, we had grounds closed because of fan misbehaviour, and now there seems to be far less or a problem with crowds than their used to be.
Yet it seems Fifa and Uefa don’t really want to engage in the matters that they find offensive – at least not in a way that really does sort things out. For surely everyone in the Argentine team must have known they were going to get punished for the political messaging about the Falklands, and yet they engaged in it nonetheless.
I suspect the prospect is that the international authorities are concerned that if they really do start punishing players for things they don’t like (such as what are deemed political messages) fans might simply stop being interested in international matches.
And the authorities have done this before. For example there was the time when English football clubs being banned from European competitions for five years from 2nd June 1985 following the events during the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus. The authorities selling tickets had failed to implement a proper separation policy which meant that supporters both from Liverpool and Juventus were able to get into the same part of the ground and start fighting each other.
Obviously fighting between supporters needs to be stopped, but that failed in the Liverpool case because of the way the security was organised, which was wholly inadequate. At the time, as I recall, Liverpool fans had quite a bad reputation in terms of crowd violence, and yet the authorities seemed to have put profit above everything else, by getting the maximum number of people into the ground, with only a modest amount of security, separation and protection.
Now of course I wasn’t there, I just saw it on TV, and read about the truly appalling with multiple deaths and injuries. And although Liverpool were punished subsequently, the reality is that the game continued.
That has always seemed to me to be a key point, that the “game must go on” mentality meant more than dealing with the situation on the terraces. The explanation given is that calling the game off would cause more problems – but that simply puts the power into the hands of people causing problems.
I noted above “Argentina have also been ordered to play their next two home matches with 50% capacity, though one match of that sanction is suspended,” and that again seems to me to be a ludicrous response. Surely the rule for all clubs and countries that hold matches is that both inside the ground and in the surrounding area around the ground, the clubs or the association have the responsibility of ensuring everyone is safe. Anything less will result in long term match bans for the country or team arranging the match.
The argument against this is that people who are not responsible for the violence suffer – and that is true. But if the process works in stopping behaviour that is not liked (be it violence or political point making) then surely it is worth it.
