‘Playing sport is building nation’: Issues of Colombian Football and Nation in the Magazines Estadio and Semana during the El Dorado Professional League (1948–1954)

This chapter shows that the success of Colombia’s first professional league provided the opportunity for sport to return to being a central aspect of press discussion relating to questions about the development and improvement of the nation. Sportswriters, being very aware of national problems, saw in football the chance to develop a national sporting culture that could distance Colombians from political partisanship, violence and vice. Football was posited as an antidote to enduring political passions and hatreds, and a chance for Colombia to civilize itself according to modernizing essentialist values attributed to the practice of sport. This is based on the realization that given the popularity of the league, based around the presence of imported football stars, football had become a mass popular phenomenon capable of being exploited for messages about the nation. Given the presence of so many imports and the relegation of native players to relative invisibility as part of the footballing spectacle, the El Dorado period only served to further embed a sense of sporting inferiority, as Dimayor, club owners and the government focused more on accruing short-term economic benefits and diverting attention from national problems. The best efforts of sportswriters in Estadio and Semana in their editorials and articles to stimulate the expansion of sports practice and physical education across the nation and develop a sense of a national sporting culture and identity were largely frustrated.