About El Gráfico

El Gráfico

El Gráfico is an Argentine sports magazine founded in Buenos Aires in 1919 that became, during its ninety-nine years as a print publication, the most regarded sports magazine in Argentina and one of the best-known in Latin America. Published first by Editorial Atlántida as a weekly and later monthly, it was nicknamed La Biblia del deporte, the Bible of sport, because of the quality of its chronicles, its notable journalists and collaborators and its photography. Its first issue was released on 30 May 1919, and its last print edition appeared in January 2018. Since then El Gráfico has continued exclusively online, at elgrafico.com.ar, as a digital sports magazine. Its print history covered almost the whole of Argentina's modern sporting century, from the amateur era of the 1920s to the World Cup triumphs of 1978 and 1986 and the professional, televised game that followed, and its covers, photographs and match reports remain a visual and written archive of that history.

Founding and the First Issue

El Gráfico was an initiative of Constancio C. Vigil, the Uruguayan entrepreneur and journalist who had founded the magazine Atlántida in 1918 with great success. The foundation story is closely tied to the turmoil of 1919. After the Semana Trágica, the tragic week riots in Buenos Aires in January 1919, disrupted publishing activity, Vigil was persuaded to acquire his own printing operation. With machines and premises ready, he established Editorial Atlántida as his own publishing house, headquartered in Buenos Aires. The first magazine from the newly created publisher was El Gráfico, whose issue number one was released on 30 May 1919.

The first El Gráfico looked very different from the sports magazine it later became. It was printed in a large tabloid format, 57 by 39 centimetres, with a great quantity of photographs. The predominance of the image was its distinctive mark from the launch, made explicit in its name, since gráfico refers to the graphic and illustrated in Spanish. The first cover showed a children's parade in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of the Argentine government, for the 119th anniversary of the May Revolution, and carried the legend Ilustración Semanal Argentina, Argentine Weekly Illustration. At the bottom of that first picture, image came before text: the magazine at first contained essentially photographs and captions, covered all sorts of news and events, and was not a sports publication at all. Its first director was Aníbal Vigil, a journalist and sportsman, and its first photographer was Alberto Palazzo, who worked under the pseudonym Garabito.

Publisher and Buenos Aires Context

El Gráfico was published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Atlántida, the house Vigil built around it, and it belonged from the start to a family of magazines that shaped Argentine reading for decades. The titles that followed it from the same publisher were Billiken, the children's magazine launched later in 1919, and Para Ti, the women's magazine launched in 1922. Headquarters in Buenos Aires placed El Gráfico at the centre of Argentine sport. The capital was where the major football clubs, the national sporting press and the country's publishing industry were concentrated, and the magazine's chronicles and photographs were produced within that world. For most of the twentieth century a Monday El Gráfico, reporting the weekend's sport with extensive photography, was part of the rhythm of sporting life well beyond Buenos Aires as well, circulating nationally and earning a reputation across Latin America. In 1998, in a very different media era, the magazine changed hands: the sports communications company Torneos y Competencias, which held exclusive rights to broadcast Argentine Primera División matches under an agreement with the Argentine Football Association, bought El Gráfico. It was thereafter published weekly by Revistas Deportivas S.A. until its frequency changed in 2002.

From General Illustrated Weekly to Sports Magazine

The turn to sport was gradual. Although El Gráfico was not at first a sports magazine, its issue number five was the first to include a football chronicle on its cover, a match between the Argentina and Uruguay national teams. The goalkeeper Américo Tesoriere was the first sportsman to appear on the cover, on issue number 158 in July 1922. It was not until 1925, with issue number 333, that El Gráfico became a full sports magazine. From that point sport was no longer one subject among many but the magazine's entire identity, and football, already Argentina's most popular sport, stood at its centre, alongside boxing, motor sport, athletics, cycling, rowing, basketball and other disciplines that its writers covered over the decades.

Its early sporting reach was international as well as domestic. Aníbal Vigil, its first director, travelled to Paris as a special correspondent to cover the 1924 Summer Olympics, and is described as probably the first Argentine sports journalist to attend an Olympic Games. That journey in the magazine's fifth year signalled the ambition that came to define it: not merely to list results, but to witness major events, photograph them richly and explain them to readers at home through long, literary chronicles.

Content, Photography and the Chronicle Tradition

What distinguished El Gráfico was the combination of image and chronicle. Photography was not decoration. The magazine was built around large, carefully produced photographs, and its staff photographers were named and remembered figures in their own right, beginning with Alberto Palazzo, Garabito, who served from 1919 to 1947, and continuing with Usaburo Kikuchi, who worked from 1928 to 1957, Ricardo Alfieri from 1936 into the 1980s, and Antonio Legarreta from 1948 to 1980. Their pictures of matches, boxers, racing drivers and crowds gave readers who could not attend an event, and who for much of the century could not watch it on television either, a visual record of Argentine sport.

Alongside the photographs stood the crónica, the long-form match chronicle, part report, part essay and part literature. That tradition earned El Gráfico its nickname, La Biblia del deporte. The Bible of sport was not a slogan the magazine gave itself in the sources consulted for this profile; it was the name readers and fellow journalists applied because of its chronicles, its notable journalists and collaborators and its photography. The magazine famously used that platform to argue for a distinctive Argentine way of playing football. It promoted a creole style, baptised La Nuestra, Our Own, based on elegance and improvisation, in contrast to the British style introduced to Argentina in the late nineteenth century, which it characterised as expressing force and discipline. Researcher Eduardo Archetti, quoted in studies of the magazine, described those opposed values as alternative styles reflecting different masculine virtues. In this way El Gráfico did not only report Argentine football; for decades it helped define how Argentine football understood itself.

Notable Journalists, Editors and Contributors

El Gráfico's reputation was built by successive generations of writers. Alfredo Rossi, who wrote as Chantecler, joined in 1925 and remained until 1941. He was probably the first Argentine sports journalist with a truly analytic view of the game, and his chronicles of footballers became memorable. From the 1930s to the 1950s the dominant names were Ricardo Lorenzo, universally known by his pseudonym Borocotó, and Félix Frascara. Borocotó, on the staff from 1926 to 1955, wrote about football, basketball, cycling, which was his favourite sport, and rowing in a characteristic simple style, and his column Apiladas was his most famous creation. Frascara, who worked from 1930 to 1960, made boxing his territory, and his column Contragolpes became his distinctive mark. Other long-serving figures of that era included Hugo Mackern, who wrote as Free Lance from 1931 to 1981.

Dante Panzeri, who joined the staff in 1945 and directed the magazine from 1959, brought a sharper and more controversial era. Panzeri opposed the excessive use of tactics in football and criticised coaches he regarded as obsessed with systems. His critical style remained a strong influence on the journalists who succeeded him, but sales fell considerably during his directorship, from around 250,000 to around 90,000 in the figures given in histories of the magazine. After the 1962 World Cup in Chile, Panzeri left his post after he was pressed to publish advertisements for the then Minister of Economy, Álvaro Alsogaray, and refused, arguing that the spirit of the magazine would be distorted if he agreed.

To reverse the decline, Aníbal and Constancio Vigil brought back Carlos Fontanarrosa as director. Under Fontanarrosa, who remained in charge until 1977, El Gráfico changed its editorial policy to focus on the most recent news and events, acquired the latest technology to improve production quality and hired journalists including Julio César Pasquato, known as Juvenal, Emilio Lafferranderie, known as El Veco and regarded as a successor to Borocotó, Osvaldo Ardizzone, Héctor Vega Onesime and Pepe Peña. Sales recovered under that modernisation. Later generations included Ernesto Cherquis Bialo, on the staff from 1963 to 1990, Osvaldo Orcasitas, known as O.R.O., from 1968 to 2014, Horacio Pagani, Gonzalo Bonadeo, Daniel Arcucci, Diego Fucks, Alejandro Fabbri and Diego Borinsky, among many others listed in the magazine's historical staff. Few Argentine publications can point to a comparable line of bylines across almost a century.

Women, Sport and the Wider Sporting World

El Gráfico's coverage was centred on men's football, but its early decades also played a documented role in changing how women in sport were seen in Argentina. Before the twentieth century, women received far less media exposure than men and their opportunities to play were overshadowed by a male-dominated sporting world. El Gráfico, by contrast, published many photographs of women athletes. Its third edition in 1919 featured women tennis players on the cover, and throughout the 1930s about 15 percent of its front covers featured women. The magazine showed women in action on the field, reported their accomplishments inside its pages and identified their club memberships, which highlighted their participation in the sporting community. Scholars quoted in histories of the magazine argue that this helped normalise the idea of sportswomen, presenting women as active subjects rather than passive objects and highlighting physical prowess rather than only beauty. The exposure remained a minority compared with men's coverage, but it exceeded that of similar publications in Argentina and beyond at the time.

Audience, Sales and Iconic Covers

At its peak El Gráfico was a mass-circulation weekly whose special issues became national events. Its best-selling era was the 1986 FIFA World Cup, when Argentina, captained by Diego Maradona, won the tournament in Mexico: the championship issue sold 690,998 copies, the highest figure in the magazine's history. Second in its all-time ranking was the 1978 World Cup, hosted and won by Argentina, with 595,924 copies sold. Those two numbers capture the magazine's position in the pre-internet era, when a printed El Gráfico was the fullest record most readers would ever own of a great sporting moment.

Its covers themselves became a measure of sporting fame. Diego Maradona was the sportsman with the most appearances on the cover of El Gráfico, with 134, followed by Daniel Passarella with 58 and Norberto Alonso with 54. To appear on that cover repeatedly was, for an Argentine athlete of the print era, a form of canonisation, and collections of El Gráfico covers are still reproduced and exhibited as a history of Argentine sport in images. The magazine was widely regarded as the most important sports magazine in Argentina and Latin America, a standing built on graphic and journalistic quality, circulation and the breadth of sports it covered, not on football alone.

Later Ownership, Frequency Change and the End of Print

The final two decades of print El Gráfico reflected the pressures on all print sport media from television and then the internet. After the 1998 purchase by Torneos y Competencias, the magazine continued weekly under Revistas Deportivas S.A. until April 2002, when its frequency switched to monthly. It remained monthly for almost sixteen years. The last monthly edition was published in January 2018, featuring Independiente manager Ariel Holan on its cover. The closure of the print edition, announced that month, was reported nationally as the end of an emblematic title, and former collaborators marked the moment publicly. Diego Fucks, a former collaborator, linked the closure to the destruction of reading culture in Argentina in the 1990s, while Ernesto Cherquis Bialo, a longtime collaborator, said in an interview in January 2018 that when El Gráfico was bought by Torneos, the magazine lost credibility. Those judgements belong to the debate that surrounded the closure; what is not in dispute is the chronology. A magazine launched weekly in May 1919, turned monthly in 2002, ended its print run in January 2018, just short of its ninety-ninth birthday.

Digital Presence, Current Status and Legacy

Since January 2018 El Gráfico has continued its run on the internet exclusively. Its website, elgrafico.com.ar, listed in the seed record for this profile as https://www.elgrafico.com.ar, presents it as an online sports magazine, publishing contemporary sports coverage in Spanish under the historic name. The print magazine is closed, and references in this profile to its weekly and monthly schedules, its newsstand sales and its great print issues are therefore in the past tense, but the brand itself did not disappear with the last printed edition. Online, it trades explicitly on the archive and authority built in print: the name El Gráfico still signals the chronicle tradition, the photography and the La Nuestra argument about Argentine football that the printed magazine created.

El Gráfico's legacy is therefore double. As a historical object, the print magazine, 1919 to 2018, is an unmatched record of Argentine sport, its heroes and its self-image, from Tesoriere's first cover portrait in 1922 to Maradona's 134 covers and the World Cup specials of 1978 and 1986. As a living title, it survives only digitally, a famous name adapting to a media world its founders, who built a magazine around the power of the printed photograph in 1919, could scarcely have imagined. That it is still called, in past and present accounts alike, La Biblia del deporte explains why its print closure was treated in Argentina not as the end of one magazine among many, but as the closing of a national sporting institution.