Whilst we English wring our hands over the ever disappointing state of our football team, our situation is in no way as sorry a fall as others have experienced. Uruguay, for example, have scaled peaks of international football that England have never reached; equally, they have fallen to an ignnomy that England have also not yet matched.
Rodrigo Orihuela has connected the fall of the national team to the similar problems in England and Spain.
Uruguay’s problems are not exactly unique. The recent unconvincing form of the English national team has given rise to a barrage of comments from pundits who believe English football is suffering from the impact of too many foreign players blocking the emergence of local talent. Similar arguments have been heard in Spain and Germany over recent years. Uruguayan football suffers from a similar syndrome: too little homebred talent plays regularly in the top flight before being whisked off to far off lands where the pay is better.
But whilst club football thrives in England and Spain – at least, financially and in terms of continental success – Uruguayan teams have reached a new low in the Copa Libertadores. As Orihuela notes:
Results such as reigning champion Danubio’s defeat last week in a Copa Libertadores qualifier, which saw it knocked out of the tournament by Argentina’s Vélez Sarfsielfd on a 0-5 aggregate score, are cause of concern in the tiny Atlantic nation. It is unprecedented for Uruguayan club champions to miss out on the Libertadores group stage.
Once, it was Uruguay whose economic boom in the 1920s was reflected in its football: Nacional of Montevideo embarked on a six month European tour in 1925, playing 38 games often on the back of gruelling, long rail journeys, of which they won 26, drew seven and lost six. Uruguay’s Centenario stadium – built for the 1930 World Cup – was known as the greatest ever made and an architectural paean to Uruguay’s modernism.
And it was the Uruguayans who in many ways first brought South American flair to the world’s game, as Eduardo Galeano waxed in Soccer in Sun and Shadow:
Forty years before the Brazilians Pele and Coutinho, the Uruguayans Scarone and Cea rolled over the rival’s defense with zigzag passes that went back and forth from one to the other all the way to the goal, yours and mine, close and right to the foot, question and response, response and question: the ball rebounded without a moment’s pause, as if off a wall.
Uruguay have won the World Cup twice and the Copa America fourteen times (seven times more than Brazil). Not bad for a country of 3.5 million people. A decline from such heights, considering Uruguay can barely sustain its own league in good form, was probably inevitable. But it was football that made a Uruguayan pronounce on the back of their Olympic triumph in 1928: “We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world.”
Galeano again:
The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity.
Yet sadly, even the site of Uruguay’s greatest triumph – their shocking 4-2 defeat of Argentina in the World Cup final at Estadio Centenario in Montevideo on July 30th 1930 – has little time left. Unlike Wembley Stadium, it has not been rebuilt at massive (and admittedly overblown) cost. Uruguay have long had an enviable record at home, only losing twice in twenty games with Brazil. Still, Estadio Centenario is now a crumbling wreck, awaiting its final fate, as David Goldblatt writes in the The Ball is Round:
Soon it will be gone altogether, its experimental reinforced concrete unable to deal with the salt air of the Atlantic. It has, perhaps, less than a hundred years. Maybe climate change will get there first. The Rio de la Plata will flood the city and leave it marooned: a carved grey beacon alerting sailors to submerged treasures.
Reposted with permission. Original post appeared Sunday February 18, 2007 on Thomas Dunmore’s If This Is Football, a blog about “football politics, economics and history.”
Editor’s Note: My wife and I visited Uruguay in November 2005 and visited the Estadio Centenario. Unfortunately, our visit fell between Uruguay’s last World Cup qualifying match against Australia and the Classico derby between Nacional and Peñarol. We did, however, see Nacional play Liverpool (the Uruguayan team) to a boring scoreless draw at the much smaller Parque Central stadium. Uruguay has the melancholy feeling of an entire country lost in the remembrances of past glories, whether in sport, politics or business, and it’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful and hospitable place.
