For all Argentinians, sitting down to watch the 2022 World Cup final was special – but for Luciana Alvarengue there was additional emotion. In the Argentina side were not one but two players to whom she had taught maths at school: Enzo Fernández and Julián Álvarez.
“They are still my students, even if they are no longer in the classroom,” she says. “To see it with my son telling me: ‘Mamá, there are your students’ … that’s really nice.”
Alvarengue was 26 when, in 2012, she took a job at the school run by River Plate. The school was housed at Estadio Monumental, which meant lessons would be cancelled if River had a midweek game. Now, though, they have moved to a purpose-built facility a few minutes’ walk from the stadium. The school hall is dominated by six photographs – lvarez, Fernández, Gonzalo Montiel, Exequiel Palacios, Germán Pezzella and Guido Rodríguez: the players who attended the school who were in the 2022 World Cup squad.
The school is not just for footballers, or even for sportspeople (River also run teams in a wide variety of other sports, from hockey to chess), but Alvarengue soon realised the role was quite different from anything she had done before. Many of the pupils live in club accommodation, away from their families, and that meant they tended to form closer bonds with their teachers. “The boys would come and give you a kiss when they came to greet you,” she says. “‘Good morning, teacher, good afternoon.’”
That was particularly true of Álvarez, who is from Calchín, in the province of Córdoba, seven hours’ drive north-west of Buenos Aires. Away from his family, he needed more emotional support and would regularly give Alvarengue a hug. Álvarez was 12 when she started teaching him, Fernández 11; she taught both up to the age of 14. They were in different school years and very different personalities.
“You either love maths or you hate it,” Alvarengue says. “There are no grey areas. Julián was very good at maths. He had a very good way of working in the classroom in general. Enzo was a little more difficult to deal with. There are days when you would say he was more focused on a game, on whether he was going to be selected or not.
“When he came into the classroom, Enzo liked to make sounds, banging his pencil case on the table. I remember entering the classroom, and on the left side was Enzo’s place, and he was with his back against the wall, his feet on the other bench, and there were days when he was like: ‘Today I’m going to stay like this.’ Julián was calmer, much more respectful.
“In Enzo’s case, he was always thinking about football, what he wanted to do, who they were playing. And about what game was coming next, how he saw it, if they needed to make any changes, if they had to travel – it was 100% football all the time.
“I couldn’t start any class without asking him how the weekend went. Julián in the school environment was more focused on saying: ‘I’m at school, I’m going to study.’ But the two were always very positive leaders in the classroom. It was very nice to talk to them because it seemed that you were talking to adults, not children.”
That maturity, Alvarengue says, is characteristic of the best players. “It’s their teammates who notice there’s something special about them,” she says. “It’s not that they’re leaders of the group and always end up being captain, but they would tell others that they don’t know how to play. You can see a different discipline in football players. I always say that goalkeepers are extremely disciplined.”
That means sacrifice. Alvarengue remembers Álvarez once being upset because he could not go on a camping trip because of his footballing commitments. Athletes were banned from PE lessons at school, but teachers would find themselves constantly having to intervene as impromptu games broke out using a scrunched-up ball of paper or a can as a ball. “We were terrified they would get injured,” Alvarengue says.
Fitting education around pupils’ sporting commitments was never easy, which is one of the reasons the school was set up. It is common for pupils to be away for a fortnight or more on tours or for tournaments, but teachers are used to preparing work for them to take with them, and coaches then to supporting them in completing the prescribed exercises. The key is persuading students that education is part of their development as an athlete.
“Their head really says: ‘I want to do this, I want to succeed in sport,’” Alvarengue says. “And they don’t understand that education is part of being able to react quickly to a stimulus, to understand a word, to improve their speed to obtain certain things. So we always try to orient the academic part to something that they can see reflected in their training,.In mathematics, for example, we often work on statistics. So: ‘What were your stats? How many games did you play? How many goals did you score?’ They need to see that what we are teaching them really is useful for their sports career.”
Fernández in effect quit school at 14 but, acknowledging the importance of education, completed his studies remotely in his late teens while playing for River’s first team.
What would the pair have done if they had not made it as footballers? Alvarengue is reluctant to answer, saying she cannot conceive of them doing anything else, but eventually agrees that Álvarez could have done something that required a university education, and been a lawyer or an accountant. And Fernández? “He really liked hitting things,” she says uncertainly. “So, a drummer?”
Players are never formed by a single club or one coach, but by a range of influences. As she watched Argentina beat France in the final in Lusail, Alvarengue could reflect that she had played some small part in their triumph. “I can always think that they passed through our classrooms. I hope they took something away.”
