Milei stays home for World Cup final to protect Argentina's unbeaten run

Argentine President Javier Milei will not travel to New Jersey for Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and Spain, choosing instead to watch from his presidential residence in Olivos — where he has sat through all seven of the defending champions’ victories in this tournament.

Speaking to Buenos Aires radio station El Observador on Thursday, Milei was asked whether he would join U.S. President Donald Trump and FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the game, as had been widely expected. His answer was blunt: “No way. I’m going to keep watching all the games from Olivos.”

The president also revealed a second ritual he intends to maintain. During Argentina’s round-of-16 match against Switzerland, he removed an oil company-branded jacket he had been wearing because of the heat — and Argentina immediately conceded. “I put it back on and never took it off again,” he said.

Milei’s caution reflects a deeply held Argentine football tradition known as “cábalas” — ritualistic beliefs and habits that fans follow to bring good fortune to their team. Supporters across the country repeat the same routines for every match when Argentina are winning: wearing unwashed jerseys, sitting in the same chair, or avoiding the television entirely if they happened to be elsewhere when a goal went in. During this World Cup, one widely circulated video showed a group of fans reading from the Bible at the precise moment Argentina began scoring against Egypt, locking them into repeating the ritual at every subsequent game.

The superstition around sitting presidents attending matches has a specific origin. At the 1990 World Cup, then-President Carlos Menem visited the squad before their opening game — which Argentina lost to Cameroon in one of the tournament’s most famous upsets. Menem was labelled a “mufa,” meaning a jinx, and no sitting Argentine president is known to have attended a national team match since.

With Argentina chasing a second consecutive World Cup title on Sunday, Milei appears unwilling to be the man who breaks that streak.