A Letter from Buenos Aires: Spurs Argentine Legacy

Following the catastrophic defeat to Nottingham Forest, Monday 23rd March 2026 might have felt like a long day for you. Trust me, it was a lot longer for me.

I decided to sleep through the game. Being in Sydney, the match kicked off at 1.15am on Monday. As I often do in these circumstances, I decided to stream the match and watch it as if it were live when I woke up, at 7am. You all know what happened, it didn’t go well.

Taking my mind off Spurs’ impending calamity, I next indulged in a bit of time travel. Departing from Sydney airport at lunchtime I arrived in Santiago, Chile, two hours before I set off. A short hop across the Andes and my wife Tracy and I were in Buenos Aires in good time to settle into the hotel and head out for dinner. By the time Monday ticked over into Tuesday, the day had been going for 38 hours!

The subject of football did not take long to rear its head in Argentina. We were met at the airport by a friendly tour guide who proceeded to give us an overview of the political history of the country. This was prompted by the fact that the following day, 24th March, was a public holiday to mark the beginning of the military dictatorship that commenced 50 years previously, in 1976. Quite why this is something to celebrate is a bit of a mystery, you’d have thought they’d wait another eight years to celebrate the end of that particularly dark period in the country’s history. 

I pointed out that the 1978 world cup would have taken place at the height, or I should say the depths, of the period of military dictatorship. This prompted the guide to share a particularly gruesome story. One of the principal sights of incarceration and torture of political opponents of the regime was within earshot of the River Plate Stadium and it is said that the detainees could hear the crowd as they were being abused. 

Argentina sits third in the list of non-UK countries that have provided first team players for Tottenham Hotspur, behind France and Brazil. The full list comes to ten, I will pop the names at the bottom of the article and in the meantime you can have a go at seeing how many you can recall. No prizes for also naming our Argentinian former manager!

So whilst it is not top in terms of numbers, it surely is in terms of the cultural influence on the club. 

It was 10th July 1978 when Tottenham Hotspur made one of the most historic announcements in the club’s history, pioneering a whole new era in global football transfers. Keith Burkinshaw had signed two players from the Argentina squad which, only a couple of weeks previously, had won the world cup in Buenos Aires; Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricky Villa. The signings were remarkable for a number of reasons. Overseas players were not unheard of at that time but the few that were playing in England were European. The signings of Ardiles and Villa, as high profile internationals from South America, were unprecedented. The fact that they had just won the world cup was another coup, and the announcement came completely out of the blue. 

Coming off the back of the successful Division 2 campaign that saw the club bounce straight back up to the First Division, the signings were a huge shot in the arm for Spurs and their supporters.

For those of us who were around at the time, the pair’s debut was a hugely exciting event. Spurs’ arrival back in the First Division had been rewarded with an opening day fixture at reigning champions Nottingham Forest, managed by Brian Clough. Both players were named in the starting line up and the game ended in a 1-1 draw, a credible result and a sign of better things to come for Spurs under Burkinshaw.

Close to 48,000 filled the old White Hart Lane for their home derby, providing a ticker-tape welcome, reminiscent of scenes from the world cup, to celebrate the Argentinians’ arrival. Sadly, Aston Villa spoiled the day, running out 4-1 winners.

Ardiles was a truly world class player. A magician on the ball, his small frame would glide across the turf with the ball at his feet until he released a telling pass or, very often, drew a foul to win a free kick. This was the man who had run the midfield for the world champions and he was more than capable of transferring his skills to the English game.

Villa was something quite different. More of a squad player in the successful Argentinian team, it was widely rumoured that he had been recruited as much to accompany Ardiles as for his own talents. In truth, he was an inconsistent player and drifted in and out of first team selection whilst at Spurs. But as all true Spurs fans will know, his legacy was assured one Thursday evening in May, 1981.

I was at that game too. It remains the highlight of my years as a Spurs supporter, 45 years later. With an exhilarating FA Cup final replay locked at 2-2 and a quarter of an hour left on the clock, Villa received the ball from Tony Galvin. Cutting across the penalty area leaving defenders in his wake, he was running straight towards where I was sitting in the stand when he dipped his shoulder again, turned to face the goal and slipped the ball beneath Joe Corrigan’s body and into the net. Cue fifteen minutes of agony before the final whistle sounded, the Spurs dominated crowd went into a delirious meltdown and Ricky Villa secured his place in Tottenham history.

It would be 20 years after the Ardiles/Villa coup that the next Argentinian player would arrive at Spurs in the shape of defender Mauricio Taricco who joined in 1998 and spent six seasons at the club.

It is a sign of how globalisation has accelerated that the fourth of the ten Argentinians to play for Spurs feels like a relatively recent player - Eric Lamela. Of the remaining six only one can be regarded as a success, and some are even starting to question that. It’s our current captain, Cristian Romero.

Of course, the Argentinian who has had the greatest impact on the club since Ardiles is the much loved Pochettino. Many of us hope that is a story that is still only part told, a return seeming inevitable at some point. 

I’m going to sign off now and go explore more of Buenos Aires. It is a beautiful, safe and cosmopolitan city. The capital of a great nation that has had an enormous impact on a football club located in North London, just shy of 7,000 miles away.

The full list of Argentinian Spurs players is: 

Osvaldo Ardiles

Ricky Villa

Mauricio Taricco

Erik Lamela

Federico Fazio

Paulo Gazzaniga

Juan Foyth

Giovani Lo Celso

Cristian Romero

Alejo Veliz

How many did you get?

Andrew Pettifer is the author of "When the Final Whistle Blows: Glory, Grief and Tottenham Hotspur"