The increasing popularity of weekend football breaks is a clear illustration that these days we’re no longer content simply supporting our football clubs. We want to experience too the iconic stadia around the world.
Naturally, Barcelona’s Camp Nou is a big favourite in this regard while a couple of nights spent in Milan, complete with a trip to the San Siro, also ranks highly on our collective wish list.
For those with an especially adventurous streak however, who are willing to venture outside of Europe, one ground stands head and shoulders above the rest, a ground widely known as the ‘Chocolate Box’.
Home to the famed Boca Juniors, champions of Argentina on 35 occasions and the club that introduced Diego Maradona, Riquelme, and Carlos Tevez to an unprepared audience of millions, La Bombonera is located just a few kilometres south of Buenos Aires, a capital that itself elicits excitement and the tease of danger.
Firmly entrenched in a working class area of the city, it also happens to nestle up close to the Caminito of La Boca, a neighbourhood of great cultural significance, not to mention a neighbourhood of great beauty, its houses painted a multitude of colours.
It is here where Latin music was born and continues to thrive.
As for the stadium itself, its distinctive name derives from its distinctive structure, with its curved three sections awkwardly encountering a ‘flat’ stand that runs the entire length of the pitch.
This used to be lateral metal boxes until the ground was refurbished in the mid-Nineties and prior to this, and now, it’s shallowness is from necessity, the stand backing onto houses.
Legend has it that when La Bombonera – now regrettably named the much more prosaic ‘Alberto Jose Armando Stadium’, after an esteemed former president, though thankfully nobody really calls it that – was first designed, its architect noted the unusual D-shape and compared it to a box of bon-bons given to him as a present.
This nickname, shared among the few, quickly entered popular parlance.
If the ground itself is a welcomed curio in a modern world where so many stadiums all appear identical, its highly unusual design pales to La Bombonera’s biggest selling point, that of its ferocious, tribal atmosphere.
With a capacity of 54,000 and a pitch that just about meets the minimum size requirements set by FIFA, watching Boca is a cramped, intense affair, surrounded as you are by flare-wielding, blue-and-yellow zealots.
Here you can completely forget about your side’s depressing Premier League odds, and for that matter, the lengthy live betting odds as they trail back home and instead immerse yourself in relative carnage.
It’s an atmosphere that will make its mark forever, the memories remaining long after the tinnitus has eventually passed.
This is particularly true should you be fortunate enough to visit when River Plate are in town, the pair sharing a mutual antipathy that is legendary in the sport.
In 2004, the Observer observed that the ‘Superclasico’ makes the Old Firm look like ‘a primary school kick-about’.
A weekend in Milan therefore would undoubtedly be fun. An afternoon at the Chocolate Box however, would be little short of unforgettable.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
FIRST PUBLISHED: 27th February 2023
