Between 1949 and 1954, many of the world’s finest footballers gathered in a new professional league.
They would all arrive for free and would all be taken against their clubs’ will.
This is the story of El Dorado: the golden age of Colombian football and the original pirate league.
Originally, Colombia’s clubs were divided into regional and amateur competitions.
But that changed in 1948 with the creation of DiMayor, the country’s first national,
professional division. It was a breakaway league comprising ten clubs, all from major cities,
each of whom agreed to pay 1,000 pesetas to join and, ultimately, begin a new centralised era.
Inevitably, it was controversial. DiMayor’s beginnings were blighted by conflict,
both with the amateur clubs and competitions that it had left behind and with Adefutbol,
the (still amateur) governing body, who were concerned by how revenues would be shared
and how its place in the national hierarchy was being threatened.
In fact, by August 1948, before a ball had even been kicked,
relations had deteriorated to such an extent that Adefutbol successfully petitioned
FIFA to suspend DiMayor from international competition, officially de-affiliating them.
It meant that the competition’s participating players were banned from representing their
countries, and that the clubs were prohibited from playing glamorous friendlies abroad.
An inadvertent consequence, however,
was that those same clubs were no longer bound by any FIFA statutes,
meaning that – crucially - they no longer had to respect the rules of the transfer market.
De-affiliation was meant as a punishment. But it would actually prove a tremendous advantage.
It became a loophole that allowed Colombia’s new professional clubs
to plunder the rest of the world – a process that began with an outbreak of militancy further south.
In November ‘48, a union of Argentinian players who had been pursuing greater
contract freedoms followed through on their threats to strike, bringing football in
Argentina to a halt and leaving some very high-profile players kicking their heels.
And for the clubs of DiMayor, it presented a unique opportunity.
Millonarios, a charter member whose president had founded the competition, used the opportunity
to sign one of the world’s best players, Huracan’s star inside forward Adolfo Pedernera.
And they were able to do so specifically because they’d been blacklisted by FIFA. As members of a
de-affiliated competition, Millonarios weren’t obliged to negotiate with anyone other than
the player. That meant that while Pedernera was offered a $5,000 signing on fee and wages of $50
a week – a hugely attractive offer for the time - Huracan, the club who owned his registration,
weren’t due a fee and nor were they even asked for their consent.
Pedernera – El Maestro, the winner of five Primera Division titles with River Plate,
and still one of the best players in the world – was heading for Colombia,
and there was nothing anybody in Argentina could do about it.
But whatever the financial incentives, Pedernera would still arrive to find a country in turmoil.
One of the ironies of El Dorado is that its short success depended partly on the
political unrest which had resulted from the 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.
Gaitan was the liberal Mayor of Bogota. He was also a Colombian presidential candidate
and, at the time of his murder, presumed to be headed for victory in the 1950 election.
His death provoked a visceral reaction. In the hours following his murder, his supporters rioted,
beginning the period known as La Violencia, a civil war
which would rage for ten years and cost the lives of around 300,000 people.
And football was an unlikely beneficiary of this.
As quoted in an article written for The Blizzard by Carl Worswick,
the historian Guillermo Ruiz Bonilla argued that the assassination was essential
to professional football’s initial success in Colombia. It was, he reasoned, ‘the only thing
that the government could think of to control and calm the population after the death of Gaitán.’
So, the new national league had support in government, it even had the backing of
President Mariano Ospina Perez. In addition to which, though, it was also nourished
and developed by pockets of commercial and individual wealth and by an economy which,
largely thanks to the sustained performance of its coffee industry throughout the 20th century,
remained prosperous throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The clubs were able to offer enormous, enticing contracts and without the inconvenience of
paying transfer fees, they could attract almost whomever they desired. And since the government
were keen for distraction, they were only too happy to ease foreign players into the
country with visas and citizenships, and even to contribute to the competition’s prize fund.
As you can imagine, the talent level rose exponentially.
Millonarios would sign Alfredo Di Stefano from River Plate, as well as midfielder Nestor Rossi
and goalkeeper Julio Cozzi. Atletico Junior poached Helenio de Freitas, as well as five
Hungarians. Cucuta Deportivo even recruited an entire team of Uruguayans,
while, elsewhere, Deportes Caldas signed a Lithuanian goalkeeper. At one point,
the entire Peruvian national team actually played in Colombia.
In ‘The Ball Is Round’, his history of football, David Goldblatt estimates that
there were ‘109 footballers of the highest calibre in Colombian football’ by 1950.
That included arrivals from Britain. Millonarios signed players from Hearts and Everton,
while Independiente Santa Fe would cast their net as far as the English potteries,
signing Neil Franklin and George Mountford from Stoke City. A rumoured move for Stanley Matthews
never materialised, but the club did prise Charlie Mitten away from Matt Busby and Manchester United.
Mitten was rumoured to be earning £10 a week at Old Trafford, but made 10 times that amount in
South America. Until as late as 1953, English players, still operating under a Maximum Wage,
were limited to earning £15 a week. In Colombia, Franklin, Mountford, and
Mitten were each paid in the region of £5,000 per year, roughly the equivalent of £175,000 today.
Not that it was a paradise. Players who joined were banned from representing their country
and, all the while, with players like Di Stefano setting the pitches ablaze, Colombia
itself continued to burn. La Violencia was a conflict between liberal and conservative
paramilitary forces, characterised by land grabs and guerrilla fighting,
but a decade of hostility would ultimately displace more than 900,000 people,
injure more than 800,000 and take the lives of over quarter of a million.
Unsurprisingly, all three British players had returned to England within a year,
with El Dorado as a concept on borrowed time.
The nature of its existence had quickly made enemies, most vocally in Argentina,
where the sporting press had been enraged by the snatching of Di Stefano,
Rossi, and Pedernera, and FIFA would respond by excommunicating Colombia entirely.
The official end would come in 1954, but it began in 1951 – at a special congress in Peru,
which followed years of negotiations. In what became known as the Lima Pact,
an accord was reached between FIFA, CONMEBOL and DiMayor,
in which it was agreed that Colombia and its clubs would be re-affiliated with FIFA,
but that the stars who had been signed would have to be relinquished within three years.
Many of the clubs attempted to steal a march on the sanctions,
selling off their best players early in an attempt to secure the biggest fees.
Di Stefano, for instance, would leave for Real Madrid and immortality, and the rest of
DiMayor’s jewels would soon follow, as the league itself receded back to modesty and compliance.
The Golden Age was over. Colombia football would rise again in the 1980s,
fuelled by the wealth of cartels and narco-terrorists,
but never again would international players migrate to the country in the same way. For
just over five years and for the last time in its history, DiMayor had been the centre of the world.