Buenos Aires is a strong base of Football lovers and fortunately there are many clubs which are popular and have a big fan base. We have collected data, asked many people when it came to explaining everyone else the famous question “Which team dominates Buenos Aires?”.
Percentages were really difficult, simply because Buenos Aires has many teams and all of them have a big number of supporters who create amazing atmosphere during Football matches. Biggest teams of Buenos Aires also have lots of support outside of the city.
During our research we came to a conclusion that the two biggest team were obviously River Plate and Boca Juniors and right after them San Lorenzo, other big teams include Racing, Independiente, Vélez Sarsfield and Estudiantes. It was interesting to learn during our research that Boca in the beginning was considered the team of the people and River was considered the team of the wealthy of Buenos Aires, of course this doesn’t make sense now because both teams have fans of different economic backgrounds.
There is a very common joke about Boca fans, since Boca (which is a harbor area) gets flooded every now and then with the filthy water of Rio de la plata. Their fans are also referred to as “bosteros” derived from “bosta” which means manure/dung (bostero = someone who works with manure). Although the “bostero” thing has been kind of reclaimed by Boca fans who’d refer to themselves as “bosteros”.
However! A traditional story is that Boca is a working class team, and River is an upper class team. The rest of the Buenos Aires teams would usually have a reputation depending on their barrio. But the rich/poor-division between River and Boca is not as important anymore. But you’ll find a lot more poor people who are River fans than rich people who are Boca fans as Boca still has a bit of a slum reputation even today.
But that being said to the difference isn’t as broad as you might think. Boca and River are the two biggest teams in the country, that tends to normalize things. You’ll find plenty of people all over the country from all walks of life that are fans of the big 2 teams. You’ll find people who aren’t Argentine who have an affinity for one or the other team.
That and just time. Rich families become poor, poor ones become rich, people move out of or into a barrio but people rarely, if ever, will switch teams.
San Lorenzo comes right behind the other two we mentioned, San Lorenzo are well known for making the best chants in Argentina and even Pope San Francis I is a fan of San Lorenzo and who could blame him, after hearing their chants is hard to not enjoy it.
Other teams come behind these mentioned above and all of them make amazing atmospheres while supporting their teams. Fan culture in Argentina is quite different from Europe, during match days fans of both teams mix with each other, there are mocking there and then but that’s it, meanwhile in Europe they have to be separated for obvious reasons.
Here is a map of Buenos Aires and the fan distribution, note that they might not be fully correct:
Here we found another map and again we are not fully sure if it is fully correct:
