A special exhibit entitled “A Country Made of Soccer” at Colombia’s National Museum features press photos, radio narratives, uniforms and other objects associated with the sport. Inaugurated last December 3, the exhibition told the story of this sport in Colombia and, in particular, the Colombian National Soccer Team (see http://www.museonacional.gov.co/sites/futbol/exposicion.html).

 

The exhibit shows the history of soccer and the history of the country as entwined, especially during the years 1989-1990. In May 1989, Medellín’s National Athletic team won the Copa Libertadores de América (Liberators of America Cup) for the first time for Colombia. In the second semester of 1989, this team was the core of the national team, which qualified for the World Cup in Italy in 1990. During this same period, three presidential candidates were assassinated (Luis Carlos Galán, Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro). The museum exhibit includes some front pages of one of the national newspapers. Images of a crowd at Galán’s funeral share the page with images from the national team’s triumph. How can one make sense of this “coincidence”? 

In an interview for the documentary film Los Dos Escobar, directed by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist for ESPN’s 2010 “30 for 30” collection, Francisco Maturana, the then-technical director of Medellín’s National Athletic team and of the national team, referred to this period of the history of soccer and the country itself as follows: “When people see the team winning, they identify with us, they say, ‘That’s our team, that’s our identity’… people embrace us; they adopt us. We were the extension of an illusion; we were joy and idiosyncracy… enough already! But when we saw what was happening in Colombia, for us it was motivation to defend our country, make more of an effort, play better” (http://www.the2escobars.com/lapelicula.html). Afterwards, referring to the assassination of player Andrés Escobar in June 1994, Maturana adds, “Soccer did not kill Andrés; he and soccer were the same thing, and the society killed him.” In a similar fashion, other players also tried to show how soccer history and other social processes were related: Leonel Álvarez, Alexis García, Luis Fernando “El Chonto” Herrera, among other national team players, comment on their own path to becoming top players in a city where they did not have access to playing fields or soccer schools.

 

Stories are told about how regional drug-trafficking networks with headquarters in Medellín, Cali and Bogotá infiltrated the teams and bought equipment and players to “launder drug money.” These accounts underestimate not only the deep-rootedness of these networks, but also the importance of sports as a social practice, its regional and institutional role in the country. Moreover, this narrative ignores the players themselves and their experiences, the social struggles of some of their communities of origin, as well as the achievement of competence and sports triumphs as reasons for pride and collective celebration. The images of drug lord Pablo Escobar inaugurating playing fields for microsoccer, for example, tend to elicit comments focused on “manipulation” by the head of the Medellín cartel of the working-class sectors from which he also recruited his army. Escobar’s closeness with certain players is seen only as an expression of power on his part or of “lack of values,” “lack of education and morals” on the part of the players. Very little attention has been paid to the history of public spaces in poor or working-class city neighborhoods and how they got to be used for sports and leisure in these communities. The importance of competitions and of the playing fields for youth like Leonel, Alexis and Chonto has simply been ignored. Perhaps the playing fields and soccer balls were indeed donated by Pablo Escobar. Perhaps this is true. However, this should not stop us from appreciating what different communities have constructed in these spaces, the great enjoyment different generations have enjoyed with soccer practice, the memories of the youth and the pride of the neighbors in seeing one of their kids turn into a professional player and join the national team.

 

Thinking about the sport thus provides an opportunity to explore how players themselves have experienced not only their professional formation, but also other processes such as political violence that is one of the characteristics of national society. We need to ask, for example, how the residents of a zone like Urabá—the venue of many massacres in the middle and late 1980s—experienced the rise to professionalism of players such as John Jairo Trellez, Luis Carlos Perea and Luis Hernando Gaviria. They must represent a great deal to those neighbors as they watch their boys triumph, win the title in Medellín, travel abroad. Colombian social scientists have not studied the social history of sports and sports players. The general understanding is that these sports players—at least in soccer and cycling—come (or came) from the so-called popular sectors. Much has been speculated about the regional origins of the players, who put places on the map with their talent. So, for instance, one renowned soccer historian comments:

 

“Colombians should play in their own style, essentially a short-passing game based on the individual ball control of the players, but he [Maturana] also insisted on the importance of teamwork, maximizing the regional characteristic of the players. So in midfield the need was for hard workers and well-disciplined players, provided by Alvarez and Gómez from Antioquia region where such qualities are commonplace, while the fantasy was left to Valderrama, Asprilla and Rincón, people from Cali and the Coast who were harder to discipline but more creative” (Tony Mason, Passion of the People? Football in South America, London: Verso. 1995, p.140).

 

 The quote brings out a soccer-oriented new kind of geography. As in other areas of Colombia’s social life, people from Antioquia are represented as hard-working and disciplined, while the inhabitants of the Caribbean and the Pacific Coast, especially Afro-Colombians, are seen as “difficult to discipline, but creative.” The attribution of a specific psychology and abilities to racial or regional groups has been very extensive and quite well studied in Colombia. However, the geography that is imagined through soccer players, their origins, physical capabilities and career trajectories has not yet been analyzed; neither has the bond between the state and forms of popular culture expressed in the social origins of many of the players and spectators, and the ties that are created among them through sports practice.

 

Perhaps our lack of curiosity about these subjects has to do with the idea that there are more pressing social problems or that soccer is prone to manipulation and lacks autonomy. Yet there is much to learn about the relationship between state and sports in Colombia, especially those sports that have fostered popular culture in the country, such as soccer, cycling and boxing. I’d like to know, for example, why the professional soccer championship began precisely in 1948—the year Colombia exploded into a period known simply as the Violence after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan—and who were the regional leaders behind the different departmental leagues. I’d also like to know how the competition among the different leagues from different cities was set up and maintained during the 1920s and 1930s, who the businessmen were behind the so-called Soccer of El Dorado, and how, at the height of the era of the Violence, various clubs could pay internationally famous soccer players such as Adolfo Pedernera, Alfredo Di Stefano, Nestor Rossi and Valeriano López.

 

We ought to know more about the interaction of the members of the cycling competition known as the vuelta a Colombia, which began in 1951, with social movements, peasant resistance and political violences in far-flung municipalities. In his lovely book Reyes de las Montañas, Matt Rendell recounts how in 1964 the newspaper El Tiempo published a front page story about the national government’s declaration of war against the independent republics and about the bombing of Marquetalia. At the same time, it published photos of all the phases of la vuelta a Colombia and the immense public acclaim for the cyclists (See Rendell, Matt. Reyes de la Montañas. Cómo los Héroes del ciclismo colombiano incidieron en la historia de su país. Grupo Editorial Norma. Colección Biografía y Documentos, 2004, also in English: Kings of the Mountains, Aurum Press, 2002). In June 1964, the war against Marquetalia was reported almost literally alongside the new victory by Antioquia cyclist Martín “El Cochise” Rodríguez, who had been cycling in the vuelta since 1961. En 1970, El Cochise participated in the so-called Marca de la Hora thanks to the sponsorship of a bicycle manufacturer, because the Colombian sports authorities did not recognize the vuelta as a championship contest. However, when Cochise became the champion and people enthusiastically hailed his victory, Colombian authorities—and particularly President Misael Pastrana Borrero—decided that the occasion did indeed have merit. Rendell tells how the day after Cochise’s victory, his photo appeared in an ad alongside the director of Proexport, the state agency that promotes exports. The ad extended an invitation to peasants and other sectors to take up the challenge like Cochise had done and to produce more to export more. Under the photo was a caption that thanked “the voluntary cooperation of Martin Emilio Cochise Rodríguez (…) as a patriotic gesture in the benefit of national development” (Rendell, 166). At the end of 1999, Cochise Rodríguez was honored as Sportsman of the Century in Colombia, but we do not know how he, now a national figure, his colleagues, the fans of cycling and of other sports had felt about the war against the Independent Republics and the other wars that were taking place throughout the country. As in 1970, many sports players needed to find their own sponsors because the state did not consider sports one of its priorities. And as in 1970, the authorities and other sectors waited for victories to acclaim sports as a form of patriotism. And when there were no victories, well, then it was just the fault of the players.