What is the most successful footballing country in the world?
The answer depends on what you use to measure achievement – World Cup wins? Tournaments
qualified for? Influence on the sport as a whole? Any criteria of that combination will spit out
Brazil, Germany, France, Argentina and Spain. A nostalgic view might even offer England.
But there’s no definitive right answer, only a conversation – a conversation
in which Uruguay absolutely belongs. Uruguay is tucked between Brazil - which
lies to its east and north - and Argentina - which lies to its west and south. It’s
tiny. While Brazil has a population of 214 million people and Argentina 45.3m people,
Uruguay is home to just 3.5m, making it only the tenth largest country in South America.
In fact, it’s several times smaller than many capital cities – half the size of Bogota,
more than two and a half times smaller than London and almost quarter the size of Tokyo.
And yet Uruguay is the joint-most successful team in Copa America history, having won 15
titles. It’s also won two World Cups and is one of only 6 nations to have done so more than once.
On top of this, Uruguay has consistently produced world class players. Hector Scarone, Jose Andrade
and the one-armed Hector Castro, who were all part of the first World Cup win in 1930.
Obdulio Varela and Juan Alberto Schiaffino, who snatched the World Cup from Brazil in
1950. Then, through the decades, up to more contemporary icons like Enzo Francescoli,
Zinedine Zidane’s childhood hero, and Diego Forlan, Edinson Cavani and Luis Suarez,
all of whom enjoyed major success with their country, but in European club football as well.
But how is it that Uruguay remains a footballing power beyond its means?
Well, to understand, it’s important to appreciate football’s place in the country.
It isn’t so much the most popular sport or even a national obsession, even if that is
commonly how the relationship is described. No, football in Uruguay is entwined with its sense of
identity and has been since the national team, known as La Celeste, first became successful.
Prior to winning the inaugural World Cup on home soil in 1930, Uruguay had already won the South
American Championship – the precursor to the Copa America – six times. More significantly
from an international perspective, they had also become two-time Olympic champions.
In 1924, they won gold in Paris. Four years on, in the Netherlands, they would repeat
their triumph and the author Eduardo Galeano wrote of that victory that “the sky blue shirt
was proof of the existence of the nation” and that “football had pulled this tiny country out
of the shadows of universal anonymity”. Galeano also records Atilio Narancio, a
politician who had subsidised the Uruguayan team’s journey to Europe, rejoicing in the triumph.
“We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world”, he said after the win in 1924.
It wasn’t hyperbole. It was those twin Olympic triumphs that really announced the country to the
world. In 1924, the squad sailed to Europe in third-class cabins. When they arrived,
they funded their journey onwards by playing friendly matches against local opponents and,
according to some accounts, spent nights sleeping on park benches, all the while remaining unbeaten.
According to Galeano, they were the first Latin American team to play in Europe.
That they would win Olympic Gold was remarkable. That they did so with such a seductive backstory
and one which epitomised values associated with Uruguayan self-image made it all the more
powerful. They were resilient and tough. They thrived in adversity and played for each other.
In The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt described the reaction to that 1924 Olympic gold back in
Uruguay, depicting just how important a moment of national history that was.
“When the news came down the telegraph Cables, Montevideo went wild, the government declared a
national holiday, stamps were issued commemorating the events, crowds flooded the city streets
and on their return the players were treated to a dockside celebration.”
Goldblatt also notes that the Argentinians, who were “used
to thinking of themselves as the leading edge of Latin American football”, were “incensed”.
But while Uruguay’s defiance helps to explain the gravitas of their early success and Argentinian
irritation no doubt helped dilute local inferiority, neither explains how or why
they had the players and teams to achieve what they did. That’s really more of a political
story – a lightning in a bottle moment that was the manifestation of social reform.
Like everywhere else in South America, football had arrived in Uruguay in the 19th Century via
English immigrants. And, again like other countries to which it had been exported,
Uruguayan football in its formative years was predominantly a white and middle-class game.
And yet the players from those Olympic triumphs were anything but white-collared workers or sons
of wealthy immigrants. Again, In Football in Sun and Shadow, Galeano describes the “workers and
wanderers” behind the “miracles of ‘24 and ‘28”. “Pedro Arispe was a meatpacker.
Jose Nassazi cut marble. ‘Perucho’ Petrone was a grocer. Pedro Cea sold ice.”
There were no merchants or captains of industry, because what was actually being described were
the fruits of a highly progressive society. For two separate periods beginning in 1904
and ending in 1915, the country was under the presidency of Jose Batlle
Y Ordonez. Batlle was a reformist and with him came a batch of policies that enabled healthcare
to be free, education to be a right by law, and social mobility to become an achievable aim.
The concept of a welfare state was new in Latin America.
In the book “the United States and the Southern Cone”, Arthur P Whitaker describes the Uruguay
of the early 20th Century as a “utopia of social justice”. Thanks to the government’s
strong belief in and commitment to physical education, it was also a country full of
community facilities and football pitches, and it was there that the country’s distinguishing,
unique excellence would be allowed to take root. In an article for FIFA magazine in 2002,
Angel V Ruocco wrote that “Uruguay’s first footballers transformed a sport, which in
Great Britain and other European countries was primarily a show of strength, into an art form
replete with refined technique, beautiful expression, intelligent play, clever twists,
ingenious improvisation combined with physical commitment, athletic elegance and team spirit.”
It was football unrestrained by societal norms and accepted beliefs. Most importantly,
it was accessible and meritocratic and nothing demonstrated that better than Uruguay winning
the 1916 South American Championship behind the goals of Isabelino Gradin,
a tricky, technically brilliant player who had been raised in a Montevideo barrio.
Gradin and teammate Juan Delgado were actually the first two black players to appear in an
international football tournament. Such were the attitudes of the day that the Chilean FA
lodged a protest against the Uruguayans fielding “two Africans” in their side.
Jose Andrade would win two gold medals and the World Cup in 1930.
He was crudely christened The Black Marvel by the French media but was
inarguably one of the finest players of his era. Alongside his marble-cutting,
ice-selling teammates, he was a carnival musician and a former shoe-shiner,
and – like many of his teammates – still an outlier in a game which was far from accepting.
He and they are part of a remarkable story from which a country’s lasting love for a sport would
grow. Yes, Uruguayan football has its peaks and troughs like any other nation and nothing
has been won since the Copa America in 2011, but that misses the point about a tiny South
American enclave that has now punched well above its weight for more than a century.