"I believe 100 per cent we will win again and it will be a beautiful party — not only in Bukovka, around the world." That's Miloslav Urbanec talking, and he's not some Argentina native with homesick nostalgia. He's a 51-year-old Czech music promoter who lives 90 kilometres east of Prague, in a village most people have never heard of.
His house, though, you'd recognise immediately.
The three-storey building in Bukovka is painted sky-blue and white, Argentina's national colours. A life-size Maradona statue guards the courtyard. A Lionel Messi mural covers the back wall. The giant sun emblem from the Argentine flag sits high on the facade. Out back, an all-weather pitch is ringed with placards of Boca Juniors players. His van bears images of Maradona lifting the World Cup, Messi, and the slogan "In Messi We Trust" — with a custom plate that simply reads "MARADONA".
It started in 1978, and never stopped
Urbanec traces it all back to a four-year-old watching the 1978 World Cup with his father. Argentina won the tournament on home soil, and the sight of Mario Kempes — long hair, full sprint — was apparently all it took. Four decades later, he named his second son Lionel, now seven years old, because it was "clear" to him that Messi was "absolutely special."
Hard to argue with that particular piece of parenting logic.
What's striking about Urbanec isn't the obsession itself — football has produced stranger devotions — it's the consistency. This isn't a social media account or a themed bar. It's a house. A courtyard. A son's name. The kind of commitment that doesn't waver based on a tournament result.
Argentina next face Cape Verde on July 3
"La Selección this time is absolutely amazing," Urbanec says, and the odds currently support that confidence. Argentina enter their round of 32 clash with Cape Verde as heavy favourites, and anyone backing against them is swimming upstream against both form and history.
Whether the party Urbanec is predicting materialises, the Maradona statue in Bukovka will be standing either way.
