'No rules, no protocols': Inside the system that p...

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Teenage boys came and went. Inside, a makeshift pub served fans of the local fútbol club before they filed into the stadium down the street. The house had orange and black stripes, tiny security cameras that twitched like eyes, and, over the entrance, a colorful mural of palm trees and late-model trucks.

One day a neighbor informed authorities that the house was filled with children living in "inhumane conditions." Police set up a raid, bringing along a small army of social workers, psychologists, city inspectors and medics. When they got inside, the house was dark and quiet, the morning light filtered by newspaper taped over the windows.

The rooms smelled of moldering laundry, teenagers and cleats.Three dozen boys, ages 12 to their early 20s, were living in the one-story house. The landlord was a stocky man who went by the nickname El Zurdo, or Lefty.

He told police he was the guardian for every boy and had the papers to prove it. "I'm not their biological father, but I'm their father," El Zurdo would later say. When the inspectors asked him for permits, he couldn't produce any.

The boys were herded into the dining room for questioning. Among themselves, they knew that there wasn't enough food at times and that El Zurdo could be temperamental. But they didn't tell that to the adults who had come to check on their welfare.

They all dreamed of becoming professional soccer players, the heirs to Lionel Messi and the reigning World Cup champions, and that dream lived with them inside the yellow house.Two years later, in April 2025, I visited Gallardo Street, on the gritty western edge of Buenos Aires. By then I'd heard many stories about the system that produces world-class soccer players in Argentina.

Some used words like "cruel" and "ugly" to describe it. One mother explained how her son was forced to survive on chicken carcasses and rice laced with black bugs. Another mother handed me an audio recording of her pleading with a club owner to turn in the coach who molested her son."

This happens everywhere," the owner says on the recording. "I've seen this on five different teams."The house on Gallardo was supposed to be closed.

After the raid, the city issued a 10-day eviction notice, according to an investigative document. But on the warm afternoon when I showed up, I found El Zurdo standing in the kitchen, the house filled with his many children.IN MARCH 2018, Argentina woke up to the realization that beneath the country's intense passion for fútbol was "an underworld of young people -- in the custody of adults who aren't their parents," as one Buenos Aires legislator told me.

Independiente, one of the country's premier clubs, had disclosed that a half-dozen men sexually assaulted some of its young prospects. The boys lived at the team's pensión, the name in Spanish for a dormitory used to board players as young as 10. The pedophiles had treated the pensión as a kind of pond in which they fished for young victims.

Like many people in Argentina, the lead investigator in the case, María Soledad Garibaldi, had never heard of a pensión for young futbolistas. She and her colleagues interviewed some 50 boys. Nearly all had been "groomed" -- or illegally lured -- by men over social media; more than a dozen had been sexually abused, she found.

Garibaldi noticed a consistency to the players' backgrounds. Most had traveled great distances from Argentina's interior, where a quarter to a third of the population lives in poverty. They were unpaid for their labor, isolated inside the pensión with only their teammates and