Yesterday's Eleven No.4: José Luis Chilavert

“Yesterday’s Eleven” is a series on Eleven Named People that examines what happened to cult football players. This time: the Paraguayan legend.

José Luis Chilavert was an excellent goalkeeper for the Paraguayan national team. In 1998, he became the first goalkeeper to take a free kick in the World Cup, which he coincidentally almost scored from. He is also the second-highest goalscoring goalkeeper of all time and is only one of three who have ever scored a hat-trick. Chilavert is also remembered for his fiery on-pitch personality, which led to incidents, including punching Colombian striker Faustino Asprilla, spitting on Roberto Carlos, and choking Marcelo Gallardo. Both Asprilla and Roberto Carlos are black. Gallardo is from Argentina. Chilavert’s career also spanned Paraguay, Argentina, France, and Spain, where he was recognized as the world’s best goalkeeper three times. These days, he is more in the news for his mostly offensive political comments.

He now lives between Argentina and Paraguay, both countries not known for their racial sensitivity and their mostly far-right politics.

César Luis Menotti, a former manager of Independiente and a rival club of Vélez Sarsfield, where Chilavert played once, stated inelegantly: “They should open the MERCOSUR [the South American economic common market] schools to show the kids how civilization behaved 40,000 years ago, first came the monkey, then Chilavert.” When Menotti died in May 2024, Chilavert tweeted: “ We monkeys are still alive and don’t have drug addicted sons.” There is no evidence that any of Menotti’s children were addicted to drugs.

Chilavert has taken the eccentricity and offense that characterized his football career to his post-playing career.

In 2012, when Paraguay’s then-president Fernando Lugo was removed from office after a rushed impeachment trial by parliament, which neighboring governments in South America widely criticized, Chilavert openly celebrated it. As he told a local media outlet: “Lugo has performed his duties very poorly; he failed to deliver any promises and mocked the Paraguayan people.” Lugo is the only leftist to have ruled Paraguay in the country’s history.

But this is not Chilavert’s only foray into politics. In 2023, he also tried to run for president of Paraguay. Chilavert was initially a member of the Colorado Party, a historically conservative party that, except for five years, has ruled Paraguay uninterrupted since 1940. In the end, even the Colorado Party thought he was too right-wing, so he became the candidate for a smaller outfit called the “Political Party of the Youth.” The voters, thankfully, rejected him: He received only 0.80% of the votes.

Around that time, Argentine senator Patricia Bullrich, who represents Libertad Avanza, one of Argentina’s right-wing parties, and who has served as President Javier Milei’s security minister since the beginning of this year, offered Chilavert the role of mayor of La Matanza, a county in Buenos Aires Province. Chilavert turned down the offer, but said he and Bullrich are allies against the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: “Europe is coming for our resources. They want to force synthetic meat on us. The European Union has Paraguay in its sights because we are the country that pollutes the most on the planet. They want to reduce the number of cattle we have because they emit a lot of methane gas.”

Chilavert has other electoral plans in Paraguay. He is in the running for mayor in his hometown of Luque.

Beyond Paraguay and Argentina, Chilavert has publicly sympathized with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and the new president of Chile, José Antonio Kast, both of whom are openly right-wing and pro-US. Previously, Chilavert stated his support for encouragement for former Argentine president Mauricio Macri, as well as Jair Bolsonaro, now in prison for planning a coup against democracy in Brazil. In interviews, Chilavert regularly goes off against Venezuela and Cuba, which he refers to as evil systems that have corrupted the minds of the people.

On X, where he is particularly active, he defends Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and retweets random Islamophobic posts to his nearly 270,000 followers.

In his most recent outburst, he blamed the black Brazilian footballer Vinicius Jnr for the racism he experiences from opposing players and Spanish football fans. He defended the behavior of Gianluca Prestianni, the Argentine player of Portuguese club Benfica, who allegedly called Vinicius Jnr a monkey during a recent UEFA Champions League game. In that same breath, he launched a transphobic attack against Kylian Mbappé for being a witness to Prestianni’s alleged racism: “Who stands with Vinícius? Mbappé. What can he say? He talks about values, but he lives with a transvestite, which is not normal. Everyone can do as they wish, but it is not normal for a man to live with a transvestite, for that, there is a woman.”

Chilavert’s story is striking: the audacity that defined his football greatness has morphed into provocation and resentment. In retirement, egged on by social media and driven by political ambition, he is just mean and bitter.