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James Calder recalls a time when the Colombian championship was dominated by well-paid foreign players

The long-term significance
The beginning of the end of El Dorado, the great Colombian gold rush. Blacklisted by FIFA following its foundation in 1948, the national professional league attracted some of the world’s leading players, lured by high wages funded by the country’s economic boom, massive attendances and a conservative government anxious to divert attention away from widespread and bloody political and social unrest.

Angered by the continuing exodus of its stars, the Argentinian FA complained of “piracy”, leading FIFA to expel Colombia in 1951. The dispute was ended shortly afterwards by the Pacto de Lima, an agreement by which an increasingly cash-strapped league agreed to let its well-paid imports return to their clubs of origin by October 15, 1954, in return for readmission to the international fold. The Colombian free-for-all also had an impact on the English game, the defection of a handful of players resulting in two sizeable increases in the maximum wage, which was eventually abolished in 1961.

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Relive four weeks of statements of the obvious from the pundits, daily complaints about the wobbly ball and over-emphatic pronunciations of Brazilian names

June 11
South Africa 1 Mexico 1
“It’s in Africa where humanity began and it is to Africa humanity now returns,” says Peter Drury who you feel would be available for film trailer voiceover work when it’s quieter next summer. Mexico dominate and have a goal disallowed when the flapping Itumeleng Khune inadvertently plays Carlos Vela offside. ITV establish that it was the right decision: “Where’s that linesman from, that football hotbed Uzbekistan?” asks Gareth Southgate who had previously seemed like a nice man. "What a moment in the history of sport… A goal for all Africa,” says Drury after Siphiwe Tshabalala crashes in the opener. We cut to Tshbalala’s home township – “they’ve only just got electricity” – where the game is being watched on a big screen which Jim Beglin thinks is a sheet. Cuauhtémoc Blanco looks about as athletic as a crab but nonetheless has a role in Mexico’s goal, his badly mishit pass being crossed for Rafael Márquez to score thanks to a woeful lack of marking. The hosts nearly get an undeserved winner a minute from time when Katlego Mphela hits the post. Óscar Pérez is described as “a personality goalkeeper” as if that is a tactical term like an attacking midfielder. Drury says “Bafana Bafana” so often it’s like he’s doing a Red Nose event where he earns a pound for an irrigation scheme in the Sudan every time he manages to fit it in.

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In their third year in League One and having lost in the play-offs for the last two seasons, Leeds were desperate to claim promotion at The Valley against hosts already guaranteed a top-six finish. Barney Ronay reports

This was supposed to be a Leeds United promotion party. That was the idea, or at least the mathematical possibility, at the start of a balmy late-spring afternoon in the Kentish London suburbs south of the River Thames. By the end of a match that started at chest-jabbing, off-the-ball-bust-up speed and just sort of took things from there, it still felt like a Leeds United promotion party; that is, a painful, soul-searching, but still aggressively defiant type of party. A party attended, perhaps, solely by feisty, gin-swilling, leopard-print-clad divorcees continually on the verge of a Gloria Gaynor party piece.

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Mark Segal looks at how Europe's media-savvy clubs are competing to reach new supporters on other continents

Manchester City’s ambitions to break into the Premier League’s top four may still be in the balance this season, but their determination to mix it with the elite in the online world continues apace. Since their takeover by the Abu Dhabi Group, City have relaunched their website to critical acclaim and become the kings of social media with popular feeds on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Soon after the take­over, City also launched an Arabic version of their website and now they’ve enhanced this offering by adding an Arabic Twitter feed (@CityArabia).

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American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes
by David Wangerin
Temple University, £19.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 296 October 2011

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Long is the history of failed football ventures in the US, and short is the list of writers who have been prepared to document them for the benefit of a doubtless unsuspecting world. In this follow-up to his excellent history of US football, the WSC-published Soccer In A Football World, David Wangerin focuses on a handful of the key characters and eras that were central to some of the game's false dawns in a country whose footballing possibilites have always loomed over the world game like a potential new age. Or potential apocalypse, depending on your view of US hegemony.

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