Even in a league where success often tends towards the fleeting, the collapse witnessed at Vélez Sarsfield has been staggering in its scale. The reigning Liga Profesional champions are sinking without a trace in 2025 with little sign of respite on the horizon for now.
Barely three months ago Liniers was engulfed in celebration as the Fortín, admittedly with a few missteps along the way, clinched the title with a 2-0 win over Huracán. It was a richly deserved triumph for the team coached by Gustavo Quinteros, arguably the best side in the country over the course of the year and certainly the most consistent, having also enjoyed trips to the final of the Copa de la Liga and Copa Argentina.
Even when Quinteros left after skipping Vélez’s humbling Trofeo de Campeones defeat at the hands of Estudiantes de la Plata – which in hindsight looks like a fairly solid clue as to what was to come – such a huge drop-off in form was hard to imagine.
What has unfolded since is beyond even the worst nightmare, keeping the most pessimistic Vélez up at night. Quinteros’ successor Sebastián Domínguez not only oversaw a run of eight games at the start of the season where his team did not grab a single win, Vélez could not even muster a goal over those 720 minutes of sub-standard football.
The final straw came on Sunday when Huracán turned the tables on their foe with a 2-0 win in the same stadium in which they had previously had to watch as the title festivities unfolded. Domínguez was promptly sacked with a damning record: six defeats and two draws in the 2025 Liga Profesional de Fútbol, zero goals scored and 13 conceded. It is officially the worst stint from any trainer in Vélez’s long and storied history.
The coach tasted victory exactly once before getting his marching orders and even that was a laboured 1-0 Copa Argentina victory over third-tier Midland (and with 66 teams in the top two tiers that is very low indeed) that prompted embarrassed relief rather than any great joy in the Fortín fanbase.
Most perplexing of all is that the meltdown has come mostly without huge external shocks. Unlike many teams who taste success in Argentine football and immediately become the subject of a sell-off, Vélez largely kept together the team which could have swept the board with four trophies last year if not for their final woes.
Granted, the whirlwind of incompetence surrounding Valentín Gómez’s botched Foster Gillett-aided sale did them few favours, and if Vélez had actually managed to cash the US$8 million promised, they may have been able to operate more freely in the transfer market instead of sitting on their hands. But Gómez aside, this is largely the same group of players that took on all-comers, just shorn of confidence and apparently missing greatly the no-nonsense approach of Quinteros that was such a feature of their 2025 campaign.
Vélez do at least have Gómez back now, though exactly when the talented young defender will be able to retake the field after spending most of the year training in a public square in Italy remains to be seen.
On the coaching front ex-Boca boss Guillermo Barros Schelotto is at the time of writing favourite to take over and steady the ship, and he will be comforted with the knowledge that making a worse go of it than Domínguez is almost impossible. Thanks to the vagaries of the Liga Profesional relegation system and no shortage of other, shall we say, less than formidable teams in the top flight, moreover, the chances of Vélez ending up in a battle against the drop are still remote – and that’s assuming that AFA chief Claudio ‘Chiqui’ Tapia even decides to relegate anyone come the end of the year, something we can never take for granted.
But for a side that looked so strong so recently, and (justifiably) likes to count itself among Argentina’s football elite, this combination of poor results, horrendous football and empty stands is very hard to swallow, a fall from grace the likes of which we have not seen for some time.
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