Jumping in unison inside the concrete bowels of Arrowhead Stadium, shirtless in their shorts and cleats, Argentina’s players chanted at the top of their voices, invoking a sacred pair of names — one a place, the other a person — that define any clash with England.
“Por las Malvinas, y por el Diego,” they sang.
Outside, in the stands, thousands of Argentine fans sang the same chant, and kept at it for more than an hour after the match.
The lyrics, a centerpiece of Argentina’s World Cup campaign, translate to “For the Malvinas, and for Diego,” and they emphasized that Wednesday’s semifinal in Atlanta carries enormous emotional weight. Few rivalries in international soccer carry the same charge — a collision of politics, culture and sports — as England against Argentina at the World Cup.
Argentina’s songbook, the richest at this World Cup, is a constant reminder of a rivalry that has endured since an epic game in 1986. Four years after Britain crushed Argentina’s military dictatorship in a war over the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas, Diego Maradona put England to the sword on the field.
That match, played at one of soccer’s great cathedrals, the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, came so soon after the war that it took on an outsized significance in Argentina still felt today. Maradona created two moments of World Cup history in the same game, scoring with his “Hand of God” — an illegal goal punched in with his fist — and then his “Goal of the Century.”
Argentina’s coach, Lionel Scaloni, has tried to play down the game on Wednesday as nothing more than a shootout for a place in the final. His players, bobbing as they sang about Maradona and the Malvinas, suggested otherwise.
Once both teams reached the semifinals, the fever already gripping the World Cup in Argentina rose again. Screenings for “El Partido,” a documentary reconstructing the 1986 match, jumped from a single daily showing at one Buenos Aires cinema to nearly 20 a day across the city.
“There was something like a form of historical justice, a historical revenge, achieved not through warfare but through football,” said Julia Rosemberg, a history professor at the University of Buenos Aires. “Four years after the war, the match became a way of confronting what had happened — a form of revenge, a form of justice, that could be realized through the game.”
Maradona, who died in 2020, said much the same during his lifetime.
Argentina’s foreign minister, Pablo Quirno, published an essay days before the game in the newspaper La Nación, reaffirming his country’s claim to the territory. “Time does not transform an illegitimate occupation into sovereignty,” he wrote. The Falklands have been a British territory for almost 200 years and in 2013, 99.8 percent of islanders voted to remain British.
The teams have met at two other World Cups, in 1966 and 1998 — and both games stoked the rivalry. Alf Ramsey, England’s coach in 1966, called the Argentine players “animals” after the match and refused to let his players swap jerseys with them. In 1998, David Beckham went from national darling to villain after being sent off following a foul on Diego Simeone. Mr. Simeone would later say he exaggerated to make sure Mr. Beckham received a red card.
But it is the 1986 game that remains the essence of the rivalry, unmatched for its timing and its cinematic outcome. It is woven into Argentina’s national identity, and it elevated Maradona, who lived a chaotic and often controversial life, to a nearly mythic status.
“It’s not what he did but what he represents,” said Pablo Alabarces, a sociologist who has written extensively about soccer and Maradona. Many Argentines, he noted, are too young to have seen Maradona play. He survives now as a legend, passed down through generations.
“I’m an ordinary guy who scored a great goal against the English, who killed our kids in Malvinas,” Maradona said in a 2019 interview. “That’s why everyone knows me now — because the grandfather told the father, and then the father told his son.”
Thousands of Argentina fans, many in their 20s and 30s, gathered in a Kansas City park for a rally on the eve of last week’s quarterfinal at Arrowhead Stadium. Most wore shirts bearing the name of Lionel Messi, the current idol. But almost all the gigantic flags they hoisted into the night carried only one image: Maradona’s.
“They are believers,” Mr. Alabarces said, describing Maradona’s enduring hold on Argentina’s sense of itself.
For Mr. Messi, after a long and successful career, the meeting is the first against England.
Globalization has made international soccer smaller; opponents at the World Cup are often teammates, or at least familiar rivals, at the club level. But some rivalries still burn hot.
More than four decades after the war, the loss of life it caused, remains a source of pain in Argentina and a subject of national conversation in a way that it is not in Britain.
Many of the Argentine soldiers killed or wounded in the war were young conscripts, as many as half were teenagers, outmatched and outgunned. The loss of life remains part of the soccer song canon and appears on flags and banners carried by Argentina’s traveling fans.
“For Argentina, I’d lay down my life, like the boys in the Malvinas,” goes one such song. “To England I demand a fight, come at me without your weapons, don’t be a coward.” This tournament’s anthem, “La Cuarta Estrella” links Maradona, Messi and the Malvinas to the pursuit of a fourth World Cup title.
In Britain, the memories of Maradona’s sleight of hand still haunt some of the English players who lost in 1986.
When Maradona made his coaching debut with the national team, against Scotland in 2008, Terry Butcher, a former England defender, was on the opposing bench and refused to shake Maradona’s hand. Peter Shilton, the goalkeeper beaten by the Hand of God, has said he can never forgive him.
Many images endure from the day Argentina beat England in 1986, but for Cristian Malaspina, president of Argentinos Juniors, Maradona’s first professional club, one stands out: Maradona celebrating while furious English fans hurl insults in the background. “It is the best example of who he was,” Mr. Malaspina said, “a popular man pursuing a cause.”
The Diego Armando Maradona Stadium, home to Argentinos Juniors, is a living shrine to its most famous son, his image on nearly every wall and on the bodies of fans. Outside the stadium, Diego Santonovich, who has a tattoo of Maradona on his forearm, said all Argentines, even those uneasy with the player’s often excessive lifestyle, “carry a part of him.”
Elsewhere in the city, a mural shows Maradona scowling — as he did during the national anthems before the game in 1986 — beside a group of young men in military fatigues, above the words “We will return to the Malvinas.”
A group of Argentine war veterans released a statement before the Wednesday game urging fans not to treat it as an extension of the conflict. “We believe it is essential to draw an unbreakable line between sporting fervor and the national cause,” said the organization, Federación Nacional de Veteranos de Guerra “2 de Abril.”
A separate group of veterans, from La Plata near Buenos Aires, said Maradona’s efforts in 1986 had left an indelible mark whatever the result on Wednesday. “As for the matches against the English, we want to tell you something with our hearts on our sleeves,” they said. “Diego has already avenged us. We have no sporting scores left to settle with them.”
