Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina

Product Information

Starting from the late 19th century to the present day, Jonathan Wilson charts a country as it finds a voice in every sphere of its existence. Wilson, as you would expect from the author of several important books on football history and tactics, goes far deeper than the stereotype. p. 58: "He played at a time when soccer was played for the glory of love, and was also part of the time when soccer was played for the love of glory. Angels with Dirty Faces is actually three biographies in one, a ‘triography’ so to speak, of the lives of Mac, Kakamia, and Walidah converging at a California prison.

Indeed, it’s hard to escape the darkness of the history of Argentina, even in football where violence, rape cases, drug abuse, even murder became part of its horrifying past.From Alfredo Di Stefano, to Daniel Passarella, Mario Kempes, Maradona, Lionel Messi, and to so much more within their respective generations. Even the supply of talent seemed to have dried up: the youth team won the FIFA Under-20 World Cup five times between 1995 and 2007 but had failed to translate this into success at senior level, with six major finals lost between 2004 and 2016. And Argentina, since the start of its football journey in a delayed match played between 22 players of British origin, has struggled with identity – especially when it came to its European origins.

Another worrying development is that whereas Europe and South America had always been so evenly matched in World and Intercontinental Cups, the South Americans enjoying the slightest of advantages overall in both club and international competitions, Europe has won the last four World Cups and eight successive Club World Cups, emphasising the continent's unhealthy dominance of the global game. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. I would have liked more on the history of the bizarre phenomenon of the ‘barras bravas’ – the hooligan gangs that intimidate and extort money from domestic football clubs in Argentina, acting more like a mafia than the brutish hooligans of English tradition. Angels with Dirty Faces is a superbly written, shocking, sensuous, sometimes sadistic and even scandalous binding of biographies struggling with the question: What does redemption actually mean? From the spawning of the game by the British in Argentina back in the 1860s to 18 teams becoming professional in 1931.Football was first imported to Argentina, as elsewhere, by British immigrants, and Wilson gives prominence to Glaswegian schoolteacher Alexander Watson Hutton in organising structured games which led to the formation of a league in 1891 (making it the oldest football league outside Britain). Although dense, certain sections of the book are compelling, namely the more contemporary chapters; the fury of Argentina‘s World Cup victory on home soil in 1978, the enigma and addiction of El Diego, the journey of Marcelo Bielsa, and of course, the rise of Leo Messi and his seismic impact on modern football from the mid-2000s. Anyway, holidays over the last year and scaling down my involvement in fan activism and all that hoopla has freed up some time in my private life and I’m re-learning the skill of sitting and reading a book for a couple of hours at a go and that’s a very good thing.

He came to any new club as a hero and leave like a president who just got toppled by yet another military coup in the country. At the turn of the century it was buoyant, viewed more favourably than Australia or Canada, and in 1928 its GNP was the eighth highest in the world per capita. The story Wilson tells from that point onwards is broadly one of a conflict between those two tendencies within the Argentinian game. It is the history of the founding of a country that was followed by the introduction of its footballing soul not long after.Nie chodzi też o to, że w Aniołach nie ma suchych faktów i statystyk, bo są, ale książka jest na tyle niejednorodna w treści, że zanim czytelnik zdąży przysnąć, Wilson już opowiada o czymś innym. Cut out the play by play of Copa Libertadores and other tournaments from the last century, leave in only the controversies, politics, Diego Armando Maradonna and Messi. Yet the book’s subtitle, ‘The Footballing History of Argentina’, reveals that the true scope of the book is even greater: Wilson is attempting to tell, at least to some degree, the history of Argentina through the lens of football.