The Argentina’s soccer championship started Friday, August 21, after two weeks of crisis. The season was originally scheduled to begin on 14th August but the Argentine Football Association (AFA) decided to postpone it because of clubs' massive debts. 21 football clubs owe a total of $78.43 million to the tax authorities and their own players and over $30 million to their players.

The crisis was finally resolved after the President Cristina Kirchner intervention. Mrs. Kirchner made a deal with Argentine Football Association (AFA) president Julio Grondona by which the matches will be transmitted live and free on state television, the state paying approximately $150 million dollars a year for the television rights.

The football crisis is a result of the clubs bad money management and the decline in the abroad transfers due to the world financial crisis.

AFA represented by Grondona proposed increasing fees for the right to air matches trying to get more money from cable television providers but they didn’t reach any agreement. TV companies accepted only to extent the contract from 2014 to 2020 and advance payments to clubs. The deal sealed with the president Cristina Kirchner will force the league to break the contract with private media networks started 18 years ago.

The new deal with the government is more than double the current package for TV rights. The government will broadcast matches on the national TV channel and will resell rights to other cable networks or private channels. The government will also sell publicity and 50% of the earnings will be paid to AFA while the rest will finance different Olympic sport disciplines.

The football league risks a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for unilaterally terminating the contract that was to run until 2014. By AFA breaking the contract, the media consortium that includes Argentina's leading media company, Grupo Clarin, and Torneos y Competencias (TyC) has lost one of its main businesses. It is speculated that the President Kirchner made the deal with AFA with the intention to strike a blow at the country’s biggest media empire and a prominent critic of Cristina’s administration.

The new deal made by the government with AFA is very popular among the Argentinean people, the matches being now free to watch for everyone. Argentinean opposition speculates that the agreement between President Cristina Kirchner and the President of AFA, Julio Grondona is just a desperate measure taken by the administration to gain more popularity in difficult times with a deepening recession and multiple cases of mismanagement within Kirchner’s government.