Maradona's Manchester by Andrew Bain

Many cities pride themselves on the immensity of their sporting passion but few are in Buenos Aires’ league. Here, in one of the city’s most notorious barrios, is a neighbourhood that’s a soccer team and a soccer team that’s a neighbourhood. La Boca hasn’t just spawned a great club, it’s created a truly apostolic sporting passion.

There are 20 teams in Argentina’s first division but a survey once found that more than 50 percent of the nation’s soccer fans supported Boca Juniors, the team that won Argentina’s first national professional title in 1931 and has now collected 19 championships.

Such is the team’s support that the match-day magazine for a friendly against Manchester United at Old Trafford two years ago raised the question: ‘Are today’s visitors United in disguise?’

The suburb of La Boca is not only responsible for the birth of this one giant team. The only Argentine side to surpass Boca Junior’s successes, if not its support, is River Plate, which also began its sporting life in La Boca, before shifting from the district in the 1930s. The two sides now maintain a rivalry that make Arsenal and Tottenham look like starry-eyed lovers.

La Boca – ‘the mouth’ – derives its name from its location at the mouth of the Riachuelo, and the river remains the overpowering presence in the blue-collar district. When I arrived in La Boca, there was a visible scum, like month-old bath water, across the river surface, which was pimpled with rubbish incapable of sinking in the mire. Its sulphurous stench made La Boca seem somehow volcanic in origin as well as temperament. A writer in New Internationalist magazine once called it ‘the most evil-smelling, polluted river I’ve ever come across’. Into this river sailed La Boca’s first residents, Italian migrants who, in 1905, formed the Boca Juniors soccer team under the guidance of an Irishman. The team nickname – Xeneises (the Genoese) – still reflects its imported origin.

The club’s first quandary was in selecting club colours, for which it settled on a unique approach. It would adopt the colours of the next ship that sailed into the Riachuelo. It was a Swedish ship and the blue-and-yellow juggernaut of Boca Juniors was born – a colourful strip for what had already become a very colourful district.

La Boca is a kaleidoscopic barrio, its facades a checkerboard of fairy floss colours. The sheet iron buildings were constructed with materials stripped from ships, while the colours were a homage to local painter Benito Quinquela Martin, reflecting the exuberancy of his work. The colours had the double effect of transforming unloved La Boca into one of Buenos Aires’ prime visitor attractions.

At one end of the Caminito tourist strip, backed against a facade coloured like a boiled sweet, is a balcony along which stand three caricatured figures, Argentine heroes each one – Tango king Carlos Gardel, Evita and Diego Maradona. A street away, on another balcony, there is only one figure, the soccer star Maradona, tipping the scales as to the identity of the true La Boca idol.

Tellingly, the Maradona statues wear not the national blue-and-white soccer strip, but the blue and yellow of the club that owes much of its popularity to the flawed star. This parochial display is indicative of La Boca’s local pride. Elsewhere in Argentina, national flags fly ritually but the flags that snap in the wind in La Boca are blue-and-yellow supporter flags.

In stepping only a few metres from Caminito, La Boca transforms into the rough-edged neighbourhood of reality. The colour is gone, the rubbish is out and, on my visit, there was an unspoken hint of menace in the groups of youths who gathered at the base of the high-rise housing. I wended through these streets towards Bombonera – the Chocolate Box – the 60,000-seat stadium that is home to Boca Juniors. On an abandoned corner lot a soccer game was underway, young kids scrapping to show off their smooth skills, hoping one day to make the leap from street performers to stadium professionals. One small boy wore the purple Fiorentina strip and long hair of Gabriel Batistuta, another famous La Boca export.

Outside Bombonera were two stores devoted to club merchandise, with a third store near Caminito. Inside Bombonera, I entered the Museo de la Pasion Boquense – the Museum of La Boca Passion – opened in 2001 to celebrate not so much the club but the passion it stirs in the Argentine blood.

Children too young to have heroes ran around the museum in team colours, dad’s football dream their inheritance. Videos of club legends played around the clock. There were cheers the day I visited, even an odd boo for apparently strayed stars. There was a display devoted to the barrio, and there were walls of championships, to which the faithful could pay footballing homage, including the 1981 title inspired by the arrival of a mop-haired lad named Maradona.

As I wandered back to the Caminito from the stadium I was stopped by an elderly man selling blue-and-yellow ribbons. As I dug in my pockets for a few pesos he asked me where I was from and he seemed pleasantly surprised by the distance. “Are you a fan of La Boca?” he asked. “I am now,” I answered.