The metamorphosis and secrets of Riestra, the club that arrived in the First Division after a wild sprint and that many look at with suspicion

The story of Deportivo Riestra It has all the toppings. As if it were a premonition, the club owes its name to a financier, Norberto de la Riestraunitary who was Minister of Finance during the presidencies of Santiago Derqui AND Nicola Avellaneda and held seats in Congress before his death in 1879. He has a street named after him and hence the baptism of the non-profit civil association founded in 1931 by “The boys from Riestra”. The founding members stopped at one of the corners of Nueva Pompeya and one of them was Antonio Pirolo. grandfather of the current president, Fabio, who manages everything that has nothing to do with football.

Starting in 1946, he joined the Argentine Football Federation and experienced his most critical moment in 1990, when he was the worst in the First D -then last category-, where the ghost is disaffiliation and not demotion. Riestra had to start from scratch. The first was when in 1981 the military dictatorship expropriated the land of Lacarra and Riestra to build a motorway – which today bears the name of the former president Héctor Cámpora – whose route was located above what had been his court since 1950 .

But there is a turning point that has changed the place that the club historically occupied in Argentine football. The arrival in 2013 of Vittorio Stinfale, a lawyer and businessman who financed an escalation of promotions to the First Division. 10 years after his arrival, Deportivo Riestra is one of the teams that will shape the Professional Football League (LPF) this year.

The club represents the paradigm of privatized clubs in Argentina. They are like witches: they don’t exist… but they are there, they are there. Riestra is one of many who have a company and a structure typical of joint-stock companies behind football: an injection of money into professional football unrelated to the rest of the sporting activities that coexist. If it weren’t for the fact that there are no SADs in Argentine football, Riestra’s could be held up as a case of sporting success.

The contrast between the demolished headquarters of Villa Soldati and the ownership of The candle in San Justo, to which only the professional team has access, is known. There, for example, players sign contracts. The flow of money, which has nothing to do with the real resources of the institution, only reaches professional football. Talking about clubs and football teams means talking about two different things. Furthermore, it could be pointed out that sporting success at the hands of a SAD does not translate into institutional growth.

The Malevos

There is an identification of the players with that omnipotence that characterizes the Riestra di Stinfale. The exit from the locker room is similar to that of a gang: the leader of the group goes out onto the pitch sipping a can of energy drink and the others follow him like a swarm. Similar to Rafael Di Zeo’s walk when he arrives on the pitch with “his troop” of La Doce. We will have to see how they will resolve the scenography when they have to leave the locker rooms and enter the field in single file as required by the LPF protocol.

They call them The Malevos. They were Los Malevos de Pompeya, but over the years their geolocation has become limited. Over the past 10 years, players or more have embodied that role. Beyond the myth of the help they would have received for promotion to the top of the First Division, the team has always played at the limits of the regulations.

The final for promotion from Primera B to B Nacional played against Comunicaciones ended in a scandal. Five minutes from the end there was an invasion of the pitch perpetrated by… a Riestra player who the club then disguised with a psychiatric licence. Leander Freyre He entered hooded and other fans followed him. All his life he played Malevo.

After the final one, the Communication actors denounced what was an open secret: the court did not have regulatory measures in one of the sectors. A false team widened the Southern team, where statistically more penalties were called.

In 2020, in full force of preventive and mandatory social isolation (ASPO) due to the coronavirus pandemic, Riestra made headlines again when the team was discovered training in its stadium. Despite there being a disciplinary file in AFA and cases in Justice, the club (or team) never received a sporting sanction.

Among the measures that characterize the Riestra there are other carelessness that do not conflict with the regulations. In the local locker room, for example, you can’t hear cumbia or reggaetón: electronic and very loud music. It is another weakness of Stymphale and is closely associated with the energy drink that is part of the team’s image.

“It’s a bowling alley, it was impossible to do the technical talk before going out to play. That day too they reduced the field by two metres. “They moved the lines on the sides to make it narrower”a Chacarita Juniors coach denounced, recalling the last match between the two in 2023.

Airs of greatness

The historic black and white shirt has become black since the arrival of the energy drink that sponsors the team and for which Stimphale has the exclusive license in the country. The tin is stamped on the same brand of clothing that the Argentine national team wears, even without a commercial agreement. The jackets are paid for by the entrepreneur, who also prints the legend on the numbers. “Iraq”the name of the football team he is part of with his friends.

They also have a patron scope: Diego Armando Maradona. The 1986 world champion and football legend, a close friend of the coach, visited the team several times, trained with them, offered technical talks and on some occasions showed himself to be a fan like everyone else. So much so that some offered him the historic promotion in the midst of the celebrations.

To play the final in Mendoza which gave them the unprecedented leap into the First Division, for example, they boarded an air taxi from the same company that Boca or River usually use when they charter national flights. Those airs of greatness, among other things, are what make the rest of the teams look askance Malevo.

“At half-time the club invites the managers of the clubs competing against each other to a lunch where, obviously, there is Speed. Stymphale looks like an Arab sheik“He is permanently in custody and travels in vans with escorts.”the leader of a club that faced Riestra in several categories told this newspaper.

Those boys from Riestra dreamed of the finish line of the boys from Stinfale and the arrival in the First Division. It seemed like a utopia. Today it is reality. Thus, to reach ten points on Thursday’s debut, in Córdoba, against Instituto, the team confined themselves to Pinamar. There the players completed an atypical pre-season, not divided into single days or double shifts, but rather into several segments that started at dawn and ended at night.

A workout almost military which prepared them for the challenge that awaits them, which will be their home pitch, Gullermo Laza, with a capacity of just three thousand spectators and in a category in which, due to the simple existence of VAR, there will be no asymmetries between the areas .