Football and memory: the dictatorship’s shadow on the game

Like it or not, professional football is as tightly linked with the world of politics as any other mass public activity. As the events of the last few weeks have shown, political upheaval cannot help but intrude on the game. It is a phenomenon that holds special poignance in these days as Argentina commemorates one of the darkest, most tragic periods in its history.

Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of the coup d’etat that brought a civic-military dictatorship under the overall command of General Jorge Rafael Videla to power. Over seven years, the junta imposed a bloody repressive regime, ‘disappearing’ an estimated 30,000 political opponents in concentration centres scattered across the country. 

One of the most notorious was the Navy Mechanics’ School (ESMA) located in the porteño neighbourhood of Núñez, just down the road from River’s Estadio Monumental home. Surviving captives in the centre, made infamous as one of the sites from which the ‘death flights’ – where victims were drugged, bound and thrown from planes over the Río de la Plata – were conducted, later told of hearing the cheers from the stadium as Argentina won their first World Cup in 1978.

One of the most nefarious aspects of this story is the lack of information regarding the fate of victims. Even 50 years later the whereabouts of the disappeared in many cases remain unknown, an extra degree of anguish for their families and loved ones. Piecing together their history has been a decades-long labour, and one which has also touched the world of football.

Most of what we know about the footballers murdered during the dictatorship or by paramilitary groups is thanks to the exceptional work of journalist Gustavo Veiga. In his book Deporte, Desaparecidos y Dictadura (“Sport, the disappeared and dictatorship”), Veiga identifies 22 victims with a background in the game, while subsequent research has pushed that number up to 33 – a list that, sadly, is almost certainly still incomplete. 

Among them is goalkeeper Antonio Piovoso, Hugo Gatti’s back-up at Gimnasia y Esgrima de La Plata in 1973 and an architecture student; and Ernesto David Rojas, who played for Gimnasia de Jujuy and was murdered six days before the coup. Roberto Santoro was a poet by trade but one of football’s most eloquent voices, his Literatura de la pelota anthology required reading for any fan. On June 1, 1977, Santoro was abducted from the school in Buenos Aires where he worked and never heard from again.

Football also found itself indirectly involved in the state-sponsored carnage. On February 22, 1977, a group of six were forced up against one of the entrances to Racing’s Cilindro home and shot dead. The crime went undocumented for years until author Alejandro Wall mentioned it in his biography of Academia great Orestes Corbatta, who was walking near the stadium (which also was his home) with a friend Rafael Barone when he came upon the bodies. The Fusilados de Racing’s identities remain unknown, but thanks to exhaustive journalistic efforts and Barone’s recollections new light has been shed on the gruesome event, the subject of a documentary that first screened in November 2025.

Clubs across the country remain committed to uncovering the truth behind the dictatorship’s crimes, commemorating victims on March 24 each year, maintaining the victims’ membership numbers and, as in the last case, collaborating with journalists and criminal investigators where possible to solve atrocities like those shot up against the Cilindro. It is a long, arduous task, and after 50 years and so many missteps it sometimes feels we are only just scratching the surface of what really went on back then. 

Still, Argentine football remains dedicated as a collective to ensuring the memory of those dark days is never forgotten, and no matter what goes on elsewhere that is something which deserves to be marked and lauded as each year passes.