Football in South America

Yet, despite the lack of a common structure of the game, historians have found that unofficial forms of football were played often, particularly amongst young men in public schools.

[5] So, when synthesizing the large European community employed by railroads in Buenos Aires with the habitual evolution that was occurring due to colonization, locals began to play football as their British counterparts brought it overseas.

[2] In Paraguay, Dutch physical education teacher William Paats taught his pupils the game and established rules, although he is not credited with the sport's breakthrough in the country.

The process also occurred in North America, where Europeans settling in the United States and Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century brought football with them.

The then President of Argentina, Julio Roca, attended the match, accompanied by his War Secretary and a military escort, as football had recently been introduced in the Argentine Army.

[19][20] The official first edition of the Copa América, at the time called the Campeonato Sudamericano de Fútbol, was organized by Argentina in 1916 to commemorate the centenary of the Argentine War of Independence (1810–1818).

A day after Uruguay's big victory in Chile, the Chilean Football Federation demanded reversal of the results, on the grounds that two Africans were on the Uruguayan team.

[21] The continental football confederation CONMEBOL was founded during the first Copa América on July 9, 1910, permanently ending the profound influence of the Western Europeans who had introduced the sport to Latin America.

For instance, 1951 marked the first edition of the Pan-American games, in which football was one of the events at the forefront; Argentina defended their home city, taking the gold medal while playing in Buenos Aires.

Indirectly, this gave rise to the creation of the first continental club tournament in sports history, the South American Championship of Champions (Campeonato Sudamericano de Campeones), in 1948.

Preparation time to ready a team for the trip to Europe and high-level play was short, funding insufficient, and Uruguayans feared humiliation by the European players despite success in their own part of the world.

The referees would take the necessary decisions, and the presence of the king, Alfonso XIII, among the twenty thousand spectators would add to the Spanish players’ motivation.

Uruguay won again at the next Olympic Games, in Amsterdam in 1928, with Argentina also reaching the final after a series of decisive victories which included an 11–2 win against the United States.

Illustrating this strict approach, goalkeeper Andrés Mazali, who had played in both Olympic finals, was dismissed from the selection for failing to respect the team curfew.

Surprisingly, these did not include defending champion Uruguay, which had not forgotten the European countries' wholesale rejection of invitations in 1930 and decided not to send a selection across the ocean.

Until that point, Brazil had been in the shadow of Uruguay and Argentina, lack of preparation and a naive attitude to international competition undermining the individual qualities of its selection.

Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Suriname withdrew from the qualifier, which meant Brazil and Cuba were assured a place in the main tournament.

During the historical period covered in this article, South America became a centre of football development, receiving European influences, and then becoming an influence on the rest of the world game at the level of clubs—for instance, compare recent MLS (United States) title winning rosters/coaching, or European club winners of international trophies showing South American contributors.

Supporters of European descent were enthusiastic about Nottingham's play, and its dominance, while the local population felt wronged by the disdain shown towards their own players' ball skills.

The English-language, anglophile Buenos Aires Herald reproached the representative team that "had dared to criticize Forest's play", writing that the sport was intended to improve the endurance of its practitioners and to test the fitness of young men, and that it was no parlor game.

The then former French international player and later editor of L'Équipe, Gabriel Hanot, said of the difference between Uruguayan and British football that it was "like comparing an Arabian thoroughbred with a workhorse".

Argentina had not yet mastered an essential aspect of tactical play, and so lacked balance between attacking speed and agility on the one hand, and structured, well-conceived thought defense on the other.

The 8–4 loss in a friendly match against Yugoslavia, following the unsuccessful World Cup of 1934, made it painfully clear that at a tactical level Brazil lagged significantly behind not only its Latin American opponents but also the Eastern European countries.

The biggest problem was the spaces between the lines: [note 9] the Yugoslav team was able to use the large unoccupied areas of the field to deploy their own tactics, and without difficulty regularly breached the Brazilian midfield and defense.

At the end of the 1930s, the previously unknown Brazilian Gentil Cardoso, who, as a jack-of-all-trades, had regularly travelled to Europe and devoted his free time to watching football, tried to introduce a new tactical system.

Kürschner accepted the offer made by the president of CR Flamengo in 1937, although he recognized the difficulty of his position as coach faced with the conservative attitude that the Brazilians had now developed in football, following the British example.

To make the most of the qualities of players like Garrincha and Valdir Pereira, tactics were developed to provide enough room for the creativity and artistry that typified Latin American football.

In addition to this general competition structure, with a season played in two separate halves, several countries show slight differences in their approach to promotion and relegation and the awarding of the championship title.

In Costa Rica, where the terminology is Invierno ("winter") and Verano ("summer") rather than Apertura and Clausura, the top four teams of the two halves of the season qualify for a second round, in which the overall champion is determined.

During the twentieth century, this sporting hostility gave rise to several conflicts, culminating in brawling between players, supporters, and police during the final of the 1946 South American Championship.