Eduardo González
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will join the Royal Family in the VIP box at the FIFA World Cup Final in New York. US President Donald Trump will be in attendance, but Argentine President Javier Milei will not.
The Spanish and Argentine national teams will play the World Cup final this Sunday, July 19. According to sources at Moncloa Palace, Sánchez has managed to rearrange his official schedule to attend the match at MetLife Stadium in New York. This will require him to travel directly from New York to Algiers for his official trip to Algeria, which begins on Monday.
The president of Spain’s rival, Argentina, will not be attending the match. Javier Milei has stated that he will watch the game from the official presidential residence in Olivos, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, purely out of superstition. In response to a question from the Argentine newspaper ‘El Observador’ about whether he would attend the meeting, Milei replied: “Absolutely not. I watch the matches from Olivos, just like the first day. It’s a superstition; I watch the matches at the Olivos cinema with my sister.”
Sánchez briefly met with Trump on July 8, during the recent NATO Summit in Ankara. Before the start of the meeting in the Turkish capital, the US president again attacked Spain, calling it a “lost cause” for refusing to increase its defense budget to five percent of GDP and for not handing over its Morón and Rota air bases for the offensive against Iran.
“Spain is a terrible partner in NATO; they don’t participate, they don’t pay. I want nothing to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, even visits,” he declared during a joint press conference with the Alliance’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte.
Trump had already issued similar threats a year ago, after the NATO Summit in The Hague, when he asserted that he would make Spain pay “double” the tariffs for Pedro Sánchez’s decision to withdraw from the commitment to five percent of GDP, adopted in the Summit’s final declaration.
In the press conference following the Ankara Summit, Pedro Sánchez explained that he had had “an informal chat with the President of the United States” in which they had both “talked about soccer, about the World Cup in the United States.”
He also stated that the government had taken Trump’s words “calmly, patiently, and with a certain degree of normalcy” and reiterated that “Spain has a trade deficit with the United States” and that “all trade agreements, including tariffs that the US administration has previously imposed on the European Union, must be negotiated with the European Commission.”