Definition of AFA (Argentine Soccer)

Argentina is a country of emigrants and this circumstance has a direct relationship with football. In the mid-19th century, British-born emigrants began to spread the new sport in the main Argentine cities and for this reason at the beginning of the 1890s (specifically in 1893) the AFA, the Association of Argentine Soccer. It should be noted that in its origin this institution It was called with the English terminology (Argentine Association Football) but over the years its name was Spanishized and it was renamed AFA. As for its headquarters, it is located in the city of Buenos Aires, where precisely the first football match in Argentina, specifically in 1867 in the area popularly known as the Bosques de Palermo.

According to the journalistic chronicles of that time, the first match took place between the team Blanco and the Colorado team, whose match was played with eight players per team and all the players had British names.

On the national team's shield

At present, the acronym AFA is quite well known because they are found on the shield of the Argentine team below the national flag; a shield that incorporates two five-pointed stars, which represent the two world soccer championships that the national team has achieved (The first was in 1978 by Mario Alberto Kempes and the second was in 1986, with Diego Armando Maradona as the main protagonist of the victory).

The role of the AFA and its integration into FIFA

The AFA has the function of organizing all football in Argentina, that is, the competitions professionals and amateurs, the sports calendar, doping control systems, the disciplinary, the commission of referees, everything related to the national team and, ultimately, everything that is part of football management.

The most important competition organized by the AFA is the Argentine league, which has been held since same year of the founding of the AFA (from 1934 the Argentine league abandoned amateurism and began its stage professional).

The AFA has been part of FIFA since 1912 and in this sense the federation Argentina was the third federation to be founded, only behind the English and the Dutch, the first and the second respectively. FIFA was founded after the AFA, exactly in 1904. Currently, FIFA is made up of 209 federations around the world, a number that exceeds the number of countries in the entire planet (there are 198 nations). Thus, the fact that there are more soccer federations than countries in the world reminds us that soccer is a icon of the globalized culture in which we live.

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