“If We Had Had Our Argentine Team Here!”: Football and the 1924 Argentine Olympic Team

Given the significance of football in the fabric of modern Argentine culture and considering the academic studies concerned with the role of the sport in twentieth-century Argentina, it is surprising how little attention many histories give to the 1924 unsuccessful attempt to field a team in Paris. Most of the scholarly references do not even raise the issue. Those that do attribute the Argentine absence to a serious rift between football’s ruling bodies in the early 1920s without exploring the complex negotiations involved in the attempt to include a football team. Therefore, the current scholarship locates the causes for the football absence exclusively in the dynamics of Argentine football and the discrepancies among football officials.