Chiqui Tapia, Domínguez and the story of a relationship that will lead to an award similar to the one Conmebol awarded to Macri

South America’s candidacy for the 2030 World Cup has revealed the harmony with which the sport ministries of the governments of the four countries are working, which are at the basis of the centenary initiative. but also the great time which passes through the relationship between the president of the conmebol and the owner of Argentine Football Federation: Alejandro Dominguez AND Claudius Tapia form a bond that, since the days of Giulio Grondonait did not have Argentina in the foreground.

Domínguez took advantage of the press conference to announce that he will propose to the Council to grant Tapia the highest honor conferred by Conmebol: the Order of honor of South American football in the degree of Extraordinary large necklace. The last leader to receive it Arthur Hallpresident of the Chilean Football Federation, in 2017. The same award that Mauricio Macri received a year later, retroactively to his 12 years as a Boca starter between 1995 and 2007.

During the act of relaunching the candidacy of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguayan AND kilos In Ezeiza, Tapia and Domínguez have used their words to praise each other, without euphemisms. They buried the only short circuit they’ve been through since their first meeting. It was even the Paraguayan leader who mentioned the exact date. But the first compliment came out of the mouth of chikito place the South American football boss as the figurehead of Argentina’s recent World Cup success.

“The (achievement of the Argentine national team in) the world championship began with a political decision by Alejandro: to keep the Copa América in a pandemic to give the teams competitiveness”Tapia said, looking at Domínguez, a few meters to his right. At the end of the praise, the audience applauded the head of Conmebol.

It was there that Domínguez remembered June 26, 2016 and spoke to the same audience. “In that Copa América, Argentina was left without a leader. They resigned, they weren’t. The only one who was there at the time was Chiqui Tapia. I told him, please come, we have to deliver the medals. The only Argentine leader who hadn’t left was Chiqui Tapia.”he said and elicited a new, even more fiery applause.

At the time, Domínguez had only been president of Conmebol for three months. The so-called ‘FIFA scandal’ or ‘FIFA Gate’ had left the football organization in a state of emergency, with top management in jail or on the run. With new names, the football business was reorganized. In Argentina, that was a secondary matter: local leaders had spent two years trying to interpret which of two political spaces – unprecedented in the life of Don Julius– inherited the vacant power.

The Conmebol man’s anecdote is about a Tapia who was in New Jersey as a vice president of the AFA presiding Louis Segurathat right there and before the final he discovered that FIFA would interrupt his mandate to install a Regularization Committee, the euphemism for an intervention. Thus was born the relationship between Domínguez and Tapia.

A few America’s Cups later, Tapia had become president of the Association. The speech he presided over had already passed Armando Perez and that he had Conmebol embodied in the vice president Caroline Christian, an official at South American soccer’s governing body. Chiqui’s status was such that he was elected vice president of Conmebol and represented that entity before FIFA. They were the first vital signs of AFA after Grondona’s death.

However, the idyll was broken in 2019: Argentina were knocked out by Brazil in the Copa América semi-final being played there and Lionel Messi questioned Conmebol in harsh terms. She spoke of corruption and determined that the competition was tailor-made for the host. The team finished third and missed out on the final podium spot. A few days later, Tapia listened to the words of the team captain and signed a statement so strong as to condemn the privileges that the South American entity has given him as a representative before FIFA.

“What happened deserves a profound reflection that questions whether the principles of ethics, loyalty and transparency that you have repeatedly invoked have been respected”, said the letter who left the AFA. The answer that came from Asunción solved the problem: “REVOKE with immediate effect, the confidence in Mr. Claudio Tapia to exercise the ad interim representation of CONMEBOL before the FIFA Council”.

Tabula Rasa

All of that has been buried. It is gone. The relaunch of Ezeiza’s 2030 bid showed Domínguez and Tapia as united as ever. Today the main partner of Conmebol is AFAwith his team champion of the last Copa América, the Finalissima – the first edition of the strategic association between Conmebol and UEFA- and the World Cup, a trilogy that sees the Argentine team as the greatest exponent of the American continent.

“Sometimes it feels like preaching in the wilderness. I’m tired of saying that when you get used to losing, you get used to apologies and if anyone gets that message it’s Chiqui Tapia.”he reflected and went further when he pointed this out: “there is the embryo of all this, who worked to be champion and won the last three consecutive races”. As if more than words were missing, Domínguez gave him a pair of boots from the official brand that Argentina wears, with the detail of his image next to the World Cup engraved on the leather.

FIFA Gate is that game changer that changed things. If before the Conmebol was an administration calibrated on the measures of the federations that compose it and the Afa had the weight so that its decisions marked the administrative pulse, today the burden is reversed. The Confederacy is placed above each of its members. The strategic partner, at the national level, is Argentina e Tapia seems to have found the tone to handle this new performance.

In front of an audience composed of most of the world champion footballers in 1978 and ’86, part of the Qatar 2022 coaching staff, the leaders of all AFA categories and in the same place where the remains of Grondona and Alejandro Sabella were veiled , Domínguez has also shown himself without taboos to ban everything that corresponds to “old football”.

Before leaving Julio Humberto Grondona, without mentioning that name and surname and quoting a sentence by Sabella that you saw on the wall of the futsal stadium, he suggested: “I would like to propose that this property be renamed ‘Three-Time World Champions’. As the great Alejandro said: ‘the more we, the less I’”. And then, there was no more applause.