Argentina scraps two champions per season
Reuters - Wednesday 09 May 2012, 14:42
The Argentine first
division, bloated by two champions per season for 21 years, will
revert to crowning only one winner from the 2012/13 campaign
starting in August.
The season will continue to be divided in two with the
"Inicial" and "Final" tournaments replacing the current Apertura
and Clausura but the winners of each will meet in a grand final,
the Argentine FA said on its website on
Wednesday.
The last time there was a single champion was when a young
Marcelo Bielsa's Newell's Old Boys won the title, the third of
the Rosario-based club's five, in 1990/91 in a two-legged final
against Boca Juniors.
Since the advent of two championships per season comprising
19 matches each, now relegated giants River Plate boosted their
record number of titles by 12 to 33 and arch-rivals Boca by
eight to 24.
Racing Club, another of the so-called Big Five, ended a
35-year wait for their seventh title in the 2001 Apertura.
The system occasionally favoured smaller clubs with Lanus
lifting their first title in the 2007 Apertura and Banfield two
years later.
Boca, this season's Apertura title winners, are joint
Clausura leaders with Newell's Old Boys on 25 points with six
matches remaining.
The teams finishing top of the two halves of the season
qualify for two of Argentina's five berths in the elite
Libertadores Cup, South America's equivalent of Europe's
Champions League.
An AFA board meeting on Tuesday night also confirmed there
would be three teams relegated, using the current system, with
those with the worst points averages over three seasons going
down.
Several countries in Latin America followed Argentina into a
system of Apertura and Clausura in the 1990s although in South
America some are played in the calendar year from February to
December.