FOOTBALL, FAMILY AND BUENOS AIRES

Photographer and filmmaker Agustina Frias on how Boca Juniors is not just a club, but a family, community, and memory in Buenos Aires.

“Boca is not just a club, it is a way of life,” says photographer and filmmaker Agustina Frias. “It is the neighbourhood, family, friends and identity. It is getting up on a Sunday to share with friends and family the barbecue, the pre-game with fernet and music, laughing, singing and living everything together before the match. Boca is hugging, getting excited and feeling that these colours unite generations. It is to share moments that are kept forever and to carry in your heart a love that cannot be explained, it can only be felt.”

Her description reaches beyond football. Boca Juniors, for her, is not about trophies or star players but about a sense of belonging, the way colours become emblems for whole families, and the way matchdays seep into the fabric of a week.

Football in everyday life

In Buenos Aires, the game is not confined to the stadium. “Soccer culture in Buenos Aires is present in everyday life,” Frias says. “It is in the murals on every corner, in the bars where people discuss tactics as if it were politics, in the buses full of jerseys and in the paddocks where kids dream of being idols. Soccer runs through daily life: it organises family gatherings, friendships and even the mood of the week. In Buenos Aires, it is not just about watching a game, but about living soccer as a shared tradition.”

It is this omnipresence that distinguishes the city. Football is both spectacle and routine, an activity and a language, something that shapes family meals as much as it does stadium atmospheres.

A city defined by its stadiums

“Buenos Aires has an intensity that is not found anywhere else,” Frias continues. “More than ten stadiums in the same city, classics that paralyse the country, fans that sing as if it were the last day. So many neighbourhood stadiums are temples that give the city its identity. There is no other city where soccer has such a strong influence on the pulse of urban life.”

The neighbourhood grounds carry their own weight. They stand not only as sporting venues but as cultural anchors, markers of local identity and belonging. To walk through Buenos Aires is to move from one football territory to another.

The living stadium

No ground embodies that more than Boca’s own. “To experience La Bombonera is to enter a unique place in the world,” Frias says. “The ground vibrates, the stands move, and thousands of flags paint the sky blue and gold. The people sing nonstop, and that collective shout goes through your body and soul. It doesn’t matter if you are in the front row or at the top; the energy is the same: pure passion. At La Bombonera, you laugh, you cry, you hug, and you feel like nowhere else. You can’t explain it with words… you live it.”

To her, the stadium is alive, not a structure of concrete and steel but something that breathes and moves with the crowd inside it.

A memory passed down

Her most powerful memory of Boca is also her most personal. “One of my favourite memories is the first time I went to the stadium with my dad,” she recalls. “Walking hand in hand with him into La Bombonera was a unique moment, impossible to forget. Seeing the emotion in his eyes as he sang with the fans made me understand that Boca was not just a club: it was love, heritage and union. That day, I felt how his passion also became mine, how the colours were our family emblem. Sharing that emotion together marked me for life; it taught me that to be a Boca fan is to transmit that love to those around us who share this passion that identifies us.”

In that moment, Boca became something to inherit as much as experience — a language of passion passed between generations, something to be carried and shared.