The Economics of a Breakaway Football League : The Rise and Fall of Colombia's El Dorado in the 1950s

Throughout the history of football, new leagues have periodically emerged offering high salaries to lure foreign stars. The Colombian professional football league was a brief but remarkable experiment that attracted top South American and European players in the early 1950s, commonly referred to as El Dorado.

Throughout the history of football, new leagues have periodically emerged offering high salaries to lure foreign stars — the United States, Japan, and China being prominent examples. Less well known, however, is the case of Colombia. The Colombian professional football league was a brief but remarkable experiment that attracted top South American and European players in the early 1950s, commonly referred to as El Dorado. Drawing on a wide array of archival material and other primary sources, this book explores how a small, economically underdeveloped country with no established football tradition managed to finance such a high-profile "pirate" league while confronting the international football establishment. It examines the economic and social conditions that made it possible to field world-class players such as Alfredo Di Stéfano and Charlie Mitten, and explicitly addresses the domestic and international circumstances that allowed so powerful a league to emerge so far from football's traditional centers of power. This book also traces the collapse of the league and its lasting ramifications for the history of football in the region. It will be of great interest to readers in sports economics, sports history, economic history, and Latin American studies.