River Returns to AFA's Executive Committee With a Blueprint for Reforming Argentine Soccer

After more than six months away from the table at AFA's Executive Committee, River Plate returns this Tuesday with more than just its presence: the club is bringing a document that takes direct aim at the structure of Argentine soccer. This is no symbolic gesture. In a statement released Monday, the Nunez based club confirmed it will present "a critical document that proposes reforming different aspects of how things currently operate."

So what does the document say? According to the club itself, it offers "a diagnosis and a concrete proposal for each of the issues that currently compromise the competition." River frames this as unfinished business, something Argentine soccer has carried "by the sheer weight of its own history." The line the club used was blunt: "A century old history with a level of global competitiveness demands tournaments that live up to it, in format, in officiating, in transparency and in clarity of the rules, as well as in revenue generation."

The club also made a point of clarifying where it's coming from. Not as an outsider looking in, but as a founding part of AFA and as a nonprofit civil association that seeks, as it explained, "to work tirelessly with the other clubs on behalf of what our members are asking for." One idea runs through the entire statement, one that River chose to spell out almost as a guiding principle: "A nonprofit civil association is, by definition, the property of those who make it up. AFA belongs to the clubs, and the clubs belong to their members."

Six Pillars for Discussing the Future

The proposal is organized around six points, presented as the general framework of the club's institutional stance. River made clear that each point will be developed further down the line through specific projects, handled with technical rigor and in collaboration with the rest of the game's stakeholders.

• Change the format of competitions, with a gradual reduction in the number of teams in the top division, and rules that cannot be altered once a tournament is already underway.
• Reorganize the calendar and the transfer window.
• Establish clear criteria for institutional procedures and access to information.
• Rethink the roles of those currently running Argentine officiating, define objective criteria for referee assignments, evaluate officiating performance and create an independent committee to audit all of it.
• Maintain the solidarity based system for distributing revenue among clubs, rethink how AFA generates resources and propose new avenues for boosting income.
• Overhaul the television rights model, both domestically and internationally.

Six months of absence leave plenty of room for interpretation, but the message River is sending with this return is clear: the club isn't coming back to fill an empty seat, it's coming back with an agenda. Tournament format, scheduling, officiating, transparency and money: the very topics that tend to generate the most noise inside Argentine soccer are now on the table, spelled out in detail, ahead of Tuesday's meeting.