Roberto Perfumo is better qualified than anyone to analyse his country's obsessive relationship with the game of football. Not only did he captain the Argentine national team for seven years, not only is he now a respected football columnist in a leading Argentine newspaper, not only is he the author of a knowledgeable and brutally honest book called Playing Football, he is a trained psychologist who has been treating patients in Buenos Aires for 20 years. So when he offers an insight into the special footballing rivalry that exists between Argentina and England, against whom he played twice, we can be confident that he knows exactly what he is talking about. And what he says is quite extraordinary.

'In 1986,' Perfumo told me a few weeks ago in Buenos Aires, 'winning that game against England was enough. Winning the World Cup that year was secondary for us. Beating England was our real aim.'

England fans looking forward to their team's renewal of World Cup hostilities with Argentina in just over a fortnight would do well to read - and re-read- that sentence. For if triumph on 7 June means an enormous amount to the English, never mind the prospect it would raise of going on to win the World Cup, one thing is certain: it means more to Argentina.

The Falklands War, four years before the 1986 finals, provides part of the explanation. It was also the reason why, as the 1978 World Cup winning-coach CËsar Luis Menotti told me a couple of years ago, Argentines took particular delight in Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal. 'People said, "Great! Better, much better, that the goal was so unjust, so cruel, because it hurt the English more."'

But the Falklands is far from the whole story. The reasons go far, far deeper. They are rooted in a tangled history between the two countries, going back more than 200 years into Argentina's colonial past, and sharpened by a succession of controversial matches since the first fixture between the two, at Wembley 51 years ago.

The result is that Argentina versus England has become the biggest - maybe the only truly serious - intercontinental rivalry in world football. Perfumo certainly thinks so. He says the only fixture to compare is the one against Brazil - the Latin equivalent of England-Germany. Perfumo played against England in the 1966 World Cup quarter-final at Wembley, captained Argentina in a friendly at Wembley in 1974 (score 2-2) at the age of 33 and is regarded as Argentina's most elegant, shrewdest, toughest defender. His only rival is Daniel Passarella. Maradona's verdict? 'Forget Passarella. Perfumo was our real Kaiser.'

'To play against England,' the Argentine Kaiser declares, 'is not to play against any team.' Playing Spain, France, Holland, Germany: for Argentines, he says, these games are compelling but not on the same plane of intensity. Not even playing Italy, the country from which most Argentines are descended. 'Brazil is the other big clasico, sure, but England is right up there with Brazil,' says Perfumo. 'Italy, yes, is a big game. It ought to be bigger than England. But it isn't. It's not as big a classic. Maybe because we too are Latin, we're closer, we're better friends'.

Clasicos are not games between friends. A classic, literally translated, is a local derby. In its more loose, common usage, it's a game in which the rivalry has come to acquire the mad, rancorous intensity of a Celtic-Rangers, a Real Madrid-Barcelona, an Arsenal-Tottenham, a River Plate-Boca Juniors. It's a game against an 'old enemy'.

Diego Simeone is the no-frills midfielder whose histrionic reaction to David Beckham's foolish flick of a foot resulted in Beckham being sent off at the World Cup in France. He will be there again in Sapporo on 7 June. 'Quite apart from all the political history, the desire of the whole country is to defeat England,' Simeone told me recently in Buenos Aires. 'So we knew that in 1998, and we knew that the hearts of the Argentine people were with us. And every time we meet this desire to win is bigger and more heartfelt. This is a classic. And we play it as a classic because we are all conscious of how happy we can make our country by winning.'

Daniel Bertoni, who made Argentina happy by scoring in a 1-1 draw against England in a friendly in 1977, says: 'England is the classic rival. It is for reasons of politics and history but also because we feel football is our game and so, when we play England, we are claiming back what we see as ours and what you see as belonging to you.'

Perfumo expands on this. 'When the English companies first brought this sport here the local people couldn't play with them. So the way we see it, they have this typical English superiority, but they know they have to play very hard to win against Argentina. Winning against England is like schoolkids beating the teachers.'

It was an English schoolteacher who founded the game in Argentina. Watson Hutton came to Buenos Aires to be headmaster of Saint Andrew's school. But he is remembered for starting the first Argentine football league in 1891. Not that local players were allowed a kick in those days. All five teams in that first league - Old Caledonians were the first champions - were made up of British players.

The very first organised game, at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club on 20 June 1867, was also an all-British affair. The White Caps beat the Red Caps 4-0. What the locals made of it all is summed up in the story of the little boy who asked his father who 'those funny people' chasing a ball around a field were. 'Ingleses,' his father replied. 'Ingleses locos.' Englishmen. Crazy Englishmen.

'Loco' Argentines started seeping into the league at the turn of the century but it took a while for the English influence to fade. In many ways it never has. In no other country where Spanish is spoken does the original English terminology, or something very much like it, permeate the language more than it does in Argentina. In Spain, Spanish words are used to describe a corner, a centre forward, a winger. In Argentina, they still say 'corner', or 'centro-forward', or 'wing'. Nor has it has occurred to anybody to change the utterly English names of so many leading clubs - River Plate, Racing or Newell's Old Boys, where the present Argentina coach, Marcelo Bielsa, began his career.

The very notion that football would become the ruling passion of Argentine society would have seemed as implausible to Watson Hutton as the discovery that, 90 years after he brought the game to Argentina, a couple of Argentine players would be taking English football by storm.

Tottenham had not won a trophy for five years in 1978 when Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa arrived fresh from their country's World Cup triumph that year. And while Ardiles was the better player, few Spurs fans would disagree that nothing he did matched the happiness Villa brought them on 14 May 1981. The stage was Wembley; the rivals, Manchester City; the occasion, the 100th FA Cup Final.

Many said it was the best final they could remember. With the teams level at 2-2 and 20 minutes to go Villa approached City's penalty area down the inside left channel. There was nothing on. To keep going was as heroic as it was suicidal. Villa kept going. He feinted right, veered left, twisted sharp right. Time seemed to advance in slow motion. The turf was littered with flailing sky blue bodies. But on the big, bushy-bearded Argentine went. Until the final act. Until Villa, in his own good time, decides the time has come to put his opponents out of their misery and clips the ball with his right foot into the back of the net.

Villa, sitting in the afternoon sun under a big pampas sky, smiles in recollection. The World Cup victory had been great, he said. 'But let's not kid ourselves. I only ever came on as a substitute. I only played a few minutes in total. But that goal, that final, at Wembley - Wembley! - that was something. That really was... something...'

As Villa's voice trails off, his eyes drift towards the distant horizon, flat as the sea for a thousand miles: the best farmland on the planet; the best beef, the best grain; the best combination of sun, rain and soil. And the breeding ground for arguably the best footballers in the world. In terms of pure talent one might argue that the Brazilians, or maybe the Nigerians, offer more (though no one offered more than Maradona). In terms of the physical strength and positional nous required of a defender, the Germans and Italians are hard to beat. But if you are looking for players who live and breathe the game, who understand it in their very bones, there is one country above all where you will find them, one country that offers one-stop shopping for the foreign manager looking to build a seriously competitive team, and that is Argentina (Antonio RattËn, the Argentine captain sent off against England at Wembley in 1966, told me that 'if only we could export players in the same volume that we export grain and meat we wouldn't find ourselves in the economic mess we're in; we would be the richest country in the world').

Exporting footballers is the business Ricardo Villa is in today. We are sitting in the dug-out of a small stadium (capacity about 1,500) in CaËuelas, 60 miles west of Buenos Aires. CaËuelas FC, of the fourth division, is teeming with football life. The senior team, average age 18, are playing a tight, one-touch practice game on a quarter of the impeccably green pitch. Over to the right a batch of younger players, 13 or 14, are developing basic skills: one touch passing; keeping the ball in the air - in a couple of cases, seemingly for ever. A still younger lot, eight- to 10-year-olds, are working on fitness, running in a tight platoon on an adjoining field.

'This,' explains Villa, 'is a football factory. A business. The idea is to identify young talent, develop it, then sell it. Preferably bypassing the top Argentine clubs. Preferably abroad.'

Villa today looks much as he did 21 years ago, except leaner. Perhaps it is the classically gaunt face, or maybe it is the aquiline nose, but he looks exactly like Don Quixote. Mad dreamer, though, he is not. 'Developing' talented players means working with a team of coaches to transform them into marketable professionals capable of adjusting swiftly to the demands of the game in Europe. 'That means teaching them the right habits - to work hard, to be disciplined, to be constant. We keep tabs on them through their parents. Boys who go to bed after 11 at night weekend after weekend do not interest us. The talent, the technical riches, are a given. Those players we manage successfully to professionalise - who we prepare to perform at a high level week in week out - those are the ones we hope that, three years from now, will give a good return on our investment.'

This, repeats Villa, is business. He is exporting not raw materials, not beef or grain, but manufactured goods; a home-grown product into which he is injecting the added value of his time, his experience, his intelligence. He is dead serious, but not hard-bitten. He is, actually, a delightful man, intelligent, understated, with a sharp sense of humour and a ready smile. There is something, you find after a while, of the Quixote in him after all. 'While this is a business for me, it's also my passion. I love it. It motivates me. It fills up my life.'

The explicit nature of Villa's enterprise, the stated purpose of exporting finished PhD-level professional football players, may be unique. But the competition is fierce. There are already more than 200 professional Argentine players in Europe and another 500 at least scattered around the Americas and Japan. The all-round depth today - it was virtually a reserve team that strolled to victory against the Germans in Munich last month - is amazing. Players like Batistuta, Crespo, Claudio Lopez; Veron, Zanetti, Simeone; Roma's Samuel and the central defenders who have marshalled the Valencia defence, the most watertight in Europe these past two seasons, Ayala and Pellegrino. As for goalkeepers, in Spain alone Argentines are the first choices of four first division teams, including Barcelona.

And there is one more thing. The clincher for anyone who still has doubts about the singular seriousness of the Argentine approach to football. Consider the examples of Helenio Herrera, Menotti, Alfredo di Stefano, Jorge Valdano, Hector CËper, among many others; what other non-European nation has, and has had, more coaches functioning at the highest level in Europe? Brazil? Certainly not. What other nation, for that matter, exports more coaches? None.

What is it about Argentina? What is it that accounts for the unique commitment the nation brings to its football? Ricardo Villa has a couple of explanations. 'First of all, if you live in this country you breathe football. It's in the air, every moment of your waking life. When a boy is born here football's written into his DNA. And then on top of that, a boy of 10 who makes it through to the first division in Argentina (and maybe six or seven of the 200 players we have in CaËuelas will do that) has gone through a series of obstacles and filters which are steeped in a fanatical tradition and a deep knowledge of the game.'

Cameroon cannot compete with that. Nor can Nigeria, nor can Mexico, nor can China or Japan. Nor, arguably, can Brazil, Germany or France. When one Argentine male meets another for the first time and the conversation turns, as it will, to football, one of the first questions one will ask is: 'Are you a Bilardista or a Menottista?' In other words, to what football ideology do you subscribe? Do you follow the teachings of Menotti, the coach who won the World Cup in 1978, or Carlos Bilardo, who won it in 1986? Football is serious everywhere, certainly. But where is it as serious as that? When has someone in Britain asked, are you a Ramseyist or Robsonist, a Fergieite or a Wengerite? How many fans outside Argentina have thought to define their identities around a football manager? Because we are talking more than football here, or rather of football as an extension, or mirror, of life. Menotti was bold, stylish, extrovert in his approach. Bilardo was cautious, neurotic, less concerned with winning than with stopping the other side from playing.

There are other, more practical reasons why it is difficult for other player-exporting countries (France perhaps being the exception) to compete. Argentine players correspond, physically, to the requirements of football in the big time in a way that few players from non-European countries do. As Villa says: 'Here, at least here in the Pampas region, children are well nourished. They are tall, strong meat-eaters.'

And there are a couple of other things. First, the weather in Argentina, unlike say in Brazil, is very similar to Europe: cold in winter and wet, so players are not shocked by freezing conditions and muddy pitches. Second, 97 per cent of Argentines being of European stock, they have European habits. An Argentine, especially one born in Buenos Aires, has a lot more in common culturally with a Spaniard and an Italian, or even an Englishman, than with a Mexican or a Peruvian. Which is another reason why, independent of talent, an Argentine is more likely to make a successful go of life in Madrid, Milan, Manchester or at a pinch (as with the case of the winger Carlos Marinelli) Middlesbrough.

One thing in particular that the likes of Marinelli and Manchester United's Juan Sebastian Veron will have found familiar about Britain will have been the tabloid newspaper culture. When it comes to stoking xenophobic sentiments before big international matches the Argentines know what they are doing - but never more so than when the rivals happen to be 'los Ingleses'. The response of the popular papers to the two-footed lunge by former Newell's Old Boys player Aldo Duscher that broke the most famous second metatarsal in history, was instantly vindictive - and celebratory. It was, returning to the clasico theory, the sort of reaction one might get from Barcelona fans to the news that Real Madrid's Luis Figo had broken his leg.

Photographs of Beckham seemingly in tears ran with gleeful captions that said, 'Don't cry for me England' or 'the Spice Boy has one foot out of the World Cup' or, simply, 'the English Patient'. OlË, the biggest-selling sports daily, defined the immediate reaction to the news as 'Duscher, national hero. If Beckham doesn't make it to the World Cup, great.' OlË's editorial comment was in a similar vein: 'The Empire, the Queen, London Bridge trembles ... once it was the hand of Diego Armando Maradona, now it is the foot of Aldo Duscher.'

What is it that generates such ill-feeling? Why is the rivalry between Argentina and England so uniquely intense?

From the point of view of an Englishman, it is relatively straightforward. One need go back no further than 1966, when RattËn refused to go off the pitch for 10 minutes after he was sent off at Wembley, an event that was followed by Alf Ramsey stepping onto the pitch to stop George Cohen swapping his shirt with Perfumo, then - in an episode never forgotten, or forgiven - publicly branding the Argentine players 'animals'. The Argentine press retorted, among other things, that after the game an English football official sitting in the vicinity of the royal box had kicked a pregnant Argentine in the stomach.

Since 1966, England-Argentina games have invariably generated controversy of one sort or another, with the effect that in the popular imagination each game becomes a grudge match. At the Boca Juniors stadium in 1977 the Argentine forward Daniel Bertoni punched out two of Trevor Cherry's teeth (Bertoni still bears the two marks on his right knuckle). In 1986 Argentina beat England with Maradona's Hand of God, as well as with the greatest goal ever scored in a World Cup. In 1998 Simeone conned the referee into sending off Beckham.

But, added to the litany of grievances that always seem to need to be redressed, there is the feeling both nations invest into the game, the sense of which (as the response in England to Beckham's injury eloquently displayed) national self-esteem is bound up with the fortunes of the national team. 'England and Argentina,' says Perfumo, who has played football the world over, 'are the great football nations of the world in terms of passion. Few teams, few nations, have such a desperate desire to succeed on the football field.'

Bertoni, who played for Napoli alongside Maradona in the Eighties, agrees. 'In South America, we are the most passionate football nation, and then you have the Brazilians. In Europe, it's the English. Not even the Spanish or the Italians are as devoted to football as the English.'

You see it in the crowds. The fans are not as passionate in Spain, Italy or Germany. They don't go to away matches in anything like the same numbers. And, talking of blood, they spill more of it in England and Argentina where football violence has traditionally been greater than anywhere else, where - even when there is no violence - you look at fans' faces during a game and you sense that the feelings they are experiencing during those 90 minutes are the one truly significant thing in their lives.

And for both countries that passion is intensified at international level, whereas in Spain and Italy regional rivalries dissipate the commitment to the national sides. There's also Brazil of course. But, mad as the Brazilians are about football, they are not as serious about it, ultimately, as the Argentines; they are too in love with the aesthetics of the game, with the choreography and the dance, to invest it with the gritty solemnity of purpose one finds in England and Argentina. Argentines not only understand exactly what Liverpool manager Bill Shankly meant when he said football was more important than life or death; they will nod furiously in approval. A Brazilian might pause and ask whether perhaps samba and sex might be accommodated into a similar category.

If the shared intensity of passion for the game is the one major reason why England v Argentina is so special, there is a second reason that concerns the Argentines alone, and their own hang-ups as a nation. And they have plenty of hang-ups - no city in the world has a higher percentage of psychoanalysts per head of population than Buenos Aires.

One has to do with their keen sense of displacement, of being refugees in their own land. The most common phrase you hear from an Argentine, especially if you happen to be a visiting foreigner, is this: 'Vivimos en el culo del mundo'. We live in the arsehole of the world. What this relates to, as any Argentine psychoanalyst worth his salt will explain, is Argentines' deep frustration at the sense that they are really Europeans who, in GarcËa MËrquez's phrase, 'by an accident of God' just happen to have ended up 10,000 miles away on the southern tip of Latin America.

Which in turn helps partially to explain the significance of the aphorism: 'An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is an Englishman.' The first two parts of the formulation are easy enough to explain. Argentines of Italian origin outnumber Argentines of the original conquistador caste, though they never succeeded in displacing Spanish as the dominant tongue.

The final third is less obvious, unless one happens to have spent time in Argentina and seen at first hand the natives' curiously colonial attachment to English culture. With the possible exception of a Caribbean island or two, and perhaps certain pockets of Indian society, no nation more solemnly upholds the ceremony of afternoon tea than Argentina. 'El five o'clock tea', as it is known, is a ritual practised daily in more middle-class homes all over Buenos Aires than in London. In Buenos Aires, the Richmond Salon- oak-panelled walls, chairs with red leather seats, extravagantly dripping candelabara - offers a straightforward 'Afternoon Tea' menu of biscuits, scones and toast with marmalade. At Claridge's, the setting is more exclusive: more prints of foxes and hounds and horseriders in red coats; a stuffed deer's head jutting out of a wall; the chairs, in dark green leather, more grand; the windows, of stained glass; the carpets, thick, spotless tartan. Prices are appreciably higher than at the Richmond but the teapots are silver, teabags unknown and they do serve crumpets they way crumpets should be served, on stiffly starched doilies and Wedgwood china plates.

Perhaps the single most telling indicator of the admiration the Argentines feel for the English is that as soon as any of them gets rich they install their children in one of the many private 'English schools' - Northlands, Saint Hilda's, Saint Andrew's - in Buenos Aires's posher suburbs. However, hand in hand with the admiration there coexists a deep resentment of the English, and it is the combination of the two, added to the unusual intensity of feeling for the game, that brings to the Argentina-England fixture that special venom.

Where does the resentment come from? First, there is the ill-feeling passed down from the Spanish colonisers, who saw the British first pillage their galleons and then gradually usurp their empire - this explains the still prevalent Argentine habit of calling the English piratas, as per the man who called into a Buenos Aires radio station to lament Beckham's injury because 'now those pirates will have an excuse when they lose'.

Second, there were the attempts made by small contingents of English troops to 'invade' Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807 (taught to Argentine children as if these were their nation's Agincourt and Waterloo). Third, there is the economic power Britain wielded over Argentina in the nineteenth century, prompting the sort of mixed feelings many Latin Americans feel today towards the USA. Fourth, the Falklands issue, which still exercises an almost lunatic grip on the popular imagination.

And, when it comes to football, there's that schoolkids versus the teachers syndrome Perfumo talks of, and which he describes in his book in terms of the old Oedipal thing of children lusting to annihilate their parents. 'Whenever I meet Bobby Charlton, and I've seen him a few times since Wembley in 1966,' says Perfumo, 'he makes the point that of all the teams Argentina is the one that's most difficult to play against for the English. And the reason is that we want to beat them so, so badly.'

So badly, indeed, that they will go to every available length to win. English players will try, by and large, to uphold the spirit of fair play. As Bertoni, in all candour says, 'in my opinion the English players are too honest'. Argentine players, on the other hand, are guided by the spirit of Machiavelli.

Diego Simeone's ludicrous reaction to the tap he received on the leg from Beckham in 1998 offered a perfect case in point. 'Our way of playing is inspired by the Italian model,' Perfumo told me. 'English players are more naive. Our game is more calculating. We study a rival more closely, we look for ways to destroy him. One of our approaches, for example, is to study a player's weak points so we can try and make him angry. Because in football if you get angry, you lose.'

Ricardo Villa makes the same point. 'In Argentina you go to the pitch with a masterplan in your mind. It is a destructive one instead of a creative one. It is better to destroy than to create. I played in England for five years and I never had anybody giving me advice on how to destroy a player.'

Which, according to Perfumo, was exactly what Simeone set out to do to Beckham. 'Simeone did an act and got Beckham sent off. This is not the kind of thing that could have been done by one of your naive, honest English players.'

Simeone himself does not disagree. 'I had tackled him,' he said, 'and we both fell to the ground. As I was trying to stand up that was when he kicked me from behind. And I took advantage of that. And I think any person would have taken advantage of that in just the same way. Sometimes you get sent off, sometimes you don't. Unfortunately for the English team that time they lost a player. Anyway, you take advantage of all the opportunities you find in your life. If you don't take advantage of a chance that comes your way you are lost.'

As Perfumo says, that is a way of thinking that applies in Argentina in all walks of life. So naturally you are not going to change your ways when it comes to something as enormously important as a game of football. 'You have to be bad to play football,' writes Perfumo in his book. 'I recognise that the longer I played the worse I became. I learnt to simulate that I was helping a rival off the ground when in reality I was grabbing him by the ear and giving him a yank.' He quotes approvingly a teammate who used to say, 'when your rival is down, stamp on his head.'

Argentine teams will never be short of competitiveness. Nor of self-belief. An old joke popular all over Latin America, where Argentines tend to be viewed as insufferably arrogant, goes like this: 'The best business deal in the world is to buy an Argentine for what he is worth and sell him for what he says he is worth.'

There is some truth in the joke. Argentines have a strutting self-confidence which often crosses over into gross self-delusion. This is a quality which in the long run is disastrous for a nation, in political and economic terms. They are always over-reaching themselves, always making promises they cannot keep, always falling desperately into debt. That same mad self-belief is a positive force in football, as in sport generally. Add to that the national chip on the shoulder about living where they do, about failing always to live up to the high European ideal they set themselves, and you have a potent rival before you. All the more so because football is the one sphere where Argentina really does excel in the world. Argentines will tell you that they have had great writers, Nobel prize winning scientists. And that is true, but as far the popular perception of the world is concerned, Argentina is celebrated only on account of its knack of producing, generation after generation, great footballers and teams.

And still there is one more reason why,

this year of all years, England should fear Argentina; why Argentina, for factors that go way beyond the individual quality of its players, is one of the favourites to win the competition. Because the country has gone to the dogs. Because of all the crises Argentina has endured in the past 50 years, since the days when it used to be one of the 10 richest nations in the world, the one it is enduring today is the worst of all. And as a result the players, having long understood their responsibility as the sole standard bearers of national pride, are aware that the burden of expectation is greater on them today than ever.

Simeone, who is the hardest, cleverest, most competitive, most cunning, most madly driven, least scrupulous of all the Argentine players, and as such embodies better than Veron or any other player the distinguishing essence of the Argentine game, understands what's at stake. Simeone, who will be the team captain in the World Cup, and who is a charming, articulate, funny man off the pitch (but that's not the point) gets it better than anyone.

'For an Argentine today,' he says, 'football is the one way we have to show the world that we are still alive. So we know how big our responsibility will be in the World Cup. And if we win against England we know too that we will be making our compatriots especially happy.' Let Beckham, let Eriksson, let everyone in England know: Simeone's Argentina will stop at nothing to get their way.

John Carlin, who lived in Argentina for 10 years, writes for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. He was interviewer and consultant for the Channel 4 documentary 'Beckham and the Battle with Argentina', broadcast earlier this month.