An Argentine Called Football a Game for Idiots

Borges said the popular thing is popular because the crowd is dumb. Constaín said football is culture. Turns out both of them were describing your move to Colombia, and only one of them was warning y

I‘m from Bucaramanga, amigos. Santander, up in the mountains. The year Atlético Bucaramanga won the league for the first time in the club’s history, the whole city cried in the street. Traffic died. Strangers hugged strangers. For us football is not a sport, it is religion, it is family, it is the thing that stops the city cold. So the first time I read what a certain Argentine said about the game we love, I wanted to fight him.

Jorge Luis Borges, maybe the best writer this continent ever produced, looked at fútbol and said this, and I’m quoting the man word for word: “Football is popular because stupidity is popular.”

I hated it. Then I spent a few years watching gringos move to Medellín, and now I think the blind old man might have been the most honest person in the room.

What Borges actually meant

He wasn’t really talking about soccer. He was talking about the crowd.

Popular, to Borges, meant the thing everyone does because everyone else is doing it. The wave in the stadium. The chant nobody started and nobody can stop. A place where doubt is not allowed and the only acceptable move is to agree louder than the guy next to you. He saw the same machine in nationalism, in flags, in any mob that runs on feeling instead of thinking. Popular because popular. The crowd feels, the crowd never checks.

Now hold that thought and picture Provenza on a Friday night.

The gringo stampede is the stadium

Here is what happens in Medellín right now. Somebody posts a rooftop in El Poblado. Somebody films the “$600 paradise” thumbnail. A hundred thousand people see it, a slice of them book a one way ticket, and they land in the exact same twelve blocks as everyone else who watched the exact same video. They moved because other people moved. Popular because popular.

That is not a strategy, parceros. That is a wave in a stadium. It is Borges’s crowd, except now it has a carry on and a remote job.

And you can watch it price itself out in real time. Rent in those twelve blocks doubled because the herd only knows twelve blocks. The same apartment a paisa rents for a fair number, a gringo pays triple for, because the gringo did what the crowd did instead of what a thinking person does. I wrote a whole piece about how Medellín got expensive. This is the mechanism. The stupidity was never the city. The stupidity is moving as a mob.

Constaín’s answer, and the knife hidden inside it

Now a Colombian writer, Juan Esteban Constaín, spent an entire book, Calcio, arguing the exact opposite of Borges. He said football is culture. It is belonging. It is one of the most beautiful things human beings ever built together, and to sneer at it is to sneer at the people who love it.

And honestly? As a bumangués who has cried over a trophy, my heart is with Constaín, completely.

But here is the knife hidden in that beautiful idea, and it is the whole reason I’m writing this. Belonging feels incredible. Belonging is exactly what the crowd sells you.

And when a gringo lands in Medellín and finally feels like he belongs to something, the rooftops, the nomad WhatsApp groups, the girl who smiles at his accent, he quietly stops being a man who decides and becomes a man who belongs. Constaín’s beauty and Borges’s warning are two sides of the same coin. Belonging is wonderful right up until it becomes the reason you stopped reading.

Because the crowd never reads the fine print. It is too busy singing.

The fine print does not chant

While the herd feels its way through Provenza, the rules are sitting there quietly deciding who keeps their money and who donates it to DIAN by accident.

Nobody in the crowd counted their days, so they crossed 183 without noticing, and now Colombia wants a cut of their worldwide income at rates that climb to 39%. Nobody in the crowd filed a Formulario 4 when they wired their money in, so pulling it back out cleanly is suddenly a nightmare. Nobody in the crowd knew the digital nomad visa gives zero tax protection, because that fact does not fit on a rooftop thumbnail. The crowd felt its way into an expensive mess, one beautiful sense of belonging at a time.

The people who actually win in Colombia are the ones doing the unsexy Borges thing. Sitting out the wave. Reading the rulebook before they join the party. Nobody makes a viral reel about tax residency thresholds, and that is exactly why the person who reads them keeps their money.

And right now the stadium is deafening

Colombia swears in a new government on August 7. Which means the whole country, and every expat account online, is one giant screaming stadium at this exact moment. Everyone has a take. Everyone is certain. The noise has never been louder.

Borges would love this. Loud crowd, empty library. When everyone is chanting about the new president, almost nobody is reading what actually changes underneath. The tax rules. The money rules. The property rules. The stuff that has no flag to wave and just quietly decides your outcome.

I love the game, amigos. I will scream for the Selección until I lose my voice. But with my money in this country, I am the boring man alone in the library, every single time.

The library, in one file

That is the whole reason I wrote The New Colombia Playbook. It is the fine print in plain English, for the person who would rather read the rules than get blindsided by them. The 183 day trap. Formulario 4, your money’s exit ticket. How to buy property without getting fleeced. Exactly what shifts when the new government takes office on August 7. Every claim verified with a source and a date, and reviewed by a Colombian attorney. No rooftop. No highlight reel. No 2023 math.

It is $49 until inauguration day, August 7. After that it goes to $79. Buyers get free updates through the entire transition, because when the rules move you should be the first to know, not the last one still singing.

👉 Get The New Colombia Playbook, $49

Enjoy the game. Just don’t let the crowd cost you the country.

Dios te bendiga,

Tu Parcero