This is an updated version of an article first published in December 2022.Of all the strange things you have heard about the World Cup, all the weird and wonderful stories about how this daft old sport can influence human behaviour, is there anything quite so perplexing as Bangladesh’s relationship with Argentina’s football team?This nation of 169 million people, bordered to the north, east and west by India, has always been famous for cricket rather than football. So it isn’t always easy to understand why, on the streets of capital city Dhaka in particular, you might easily think you were in a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires during this World Cup.Rows and rows of apartment blocks are festooned in Argentina’s national colours — sky blue and white. Wall murals pay homage to Diego Maradona. The Argentine national flag, the Bandera Oficial de Ceremonia, is everywhere — balconies, spires, lamp-posts. You can even get an Argentina-themed rickshaw if you fancy a ride on a seat decorated with the image of Lionel Messi.The Athletic covered this phenomenon at the last World Cup in Qatar when millions of Bangladeshis waited up all night for the party of all parties to celebrate Messi finally getting his hands on the trophy.“It can be crazy,” said Soumik Saheb, one of the Bangladeshis who admits having the symptoms of what appears to be a very strong dose of World Cup fever. “Every time there is an Argentina game, big screens are put up. It’s like a festival.“There are tens of thousands of people outside and, if Argentina win, it ends each time with a rally through the streets. It’s 3am, everyone is asleep, all the shops are closed. But everyone is woken. Even the dogs who literally have nobody but themselves past midnight must be thinking, ‘Why on earth are so many people on the streets at this time?’.”