Sportblog | The Guardian — Copa Libertadores RSS

Apr 22, 2021

A lesson from history: the European Super League battle is not over | Jonathan Wilson

The last, short-lived rebel-league experiment seven decades ago in Columbia tells us much about why breakaways happenBogotá, Colombia: 9 April 1948. Before the 2pm meeting he had scheduled with a young Cuban lawyer called Fidel Castro, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, leader of the Liberal Party, decided to go for lunch at the Hotel Continental, five minutes’ walk from his office on Carrera Séptima. He never got to the restaurant. An assassin walked up to him, shot him four times and, five minutes before he had been due to meet Castro, Gaitán was pronounced dead in a local hospital.Violence was inevitable. The Colombian government knew what was coming and desperately sought a way to calm tensions. What could they do to distract...

Nov 26, 2018

How Argentinian football had the chance to prove it had changed – and blew it

Talk before the Copa Libertadores final was of putting on a new face to the world but River Plate fans’ attack on Boca Juniors changed all thatAt around 6pm on Sunday evening, an hour after the second leg of the Copa Libertadores final had been due to kick off, four hours after the game had, yet again, been postponed, a group of River Plate fans on the Subte [Buenos Aires’ underground trains] started up a slow, melancholic song, talking of attacks and pepper spray. Already the events of Saturday, what the Conmebol president, Alejandro Domínguez, described as “a disgrace”, have passed into legend: the game that wasn’t and, depending on the outcome of a meeting in Asunción, Paraguay on Tuesday,...