An unwashed shirt, the same chair, a sweet before kick-off. What a cábala is, why Argentina fans and players keep them, and how yours might start on this side of the world.
Ask an Argentina fan for a score before the match and you may get a wince. Saying it out loud can be mufa, bad luck. Ask about their cábala instead and you will be there a while.
A cábala is a matchday ritual: something you happened to be doing when Argentina won, and now cannot risk changing. Nobody claims it makes sense. Plenty of fans have one anyway.
What fans do
On the eve of the 2022 World Cup final, reporters in Argentina went round collecting them. They met a 55-year-old who had worn his number 10 shirt the wrong way round ever since the win over Mexico, because the one time he wore it the usual way Argentina lost. A 15-year-old who had not washed her Argentina shirt since the second match, and who laid out all her World Cup stickers on the table for each game. A man who sat cross-legged with one foot pointing at the other team’s goal, then swapped legs at half-time. A grandmother of 86 who watched from the same chair every time. And a 24-year-old student who would not predict a result at all, because that would be mufa.
One of them gave the rule: while a cábala keeps working, you do not break it.
The players keep them too
During the 2021 Copa América, Rodrigo De Paul and two teammates fell into a habit. On arriving at the stadium they would be the first out onto the pitch, look around the stands, and eat a sweet. It took hold after a quarter-final win over Ecuador, and once a ritual has a win attached it stays. They were still doing it at the World Cup in Qatar.
Then there is the asado, the long, slow grill that Argentines treat as a gathering more than a meal. The national team sits down to one three days before each match. During the 2026 World Cup the federation shared photos of the squad around the grill at its base in the United States, and one Argentine outlet called the asado the cábala that holds the group together. There is a line for all of this, popular with fans since the 2022 World Cup and heard around the squad too: Elijo creer, “I choose to believe”.
Yours starts with an alarm
Argentina does not change its clocks, and it sits 13 or 14 hours behind Sydney and 15 or 16 behind Auckland, depending on our daylight saving. An evening kick-off in Buenos Aires is the next morning here. So a cábala on this side of the world is likely to start early: the same mug, the same spot on the couch, the same friend who gets the 5 am message.
You do not need to be Argentine to have one. You only need Argentina to win once while you are doing something, and to be unwilling to find out what happens if you stop.
Already have yours? Fans send us theirs, and the ones we publish are on the fan wall. ¿Cuál es tu cábala? Now you know what the question means.
