Long before the North American Soccer League (NASL) was a thing, and certainly long before places such as China and Saudi Arabia threatened to pillage the footballing powers of their talent, Colombia was the scene of a gold rush.
In a bid to set up a professional league, they got themselves banned by FIFA. With a political vacuum in the country, and not bound by FIFA’s rules regarding overseas players, they then went all out to throw money at attracting some stars from around the world.
These were known as the ‘El Dorado Years’. Its reach stretched as far as the English league, the England national side and Matt Busby’s Manchester United.
But as with the mythical city, El Dorado, the dream was short-lived and ultimately lacked real substance.
In truth, it all began with the assassination of Liberal politician, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in April 1948. He was gunned down in a Bogota street on his way to lunch. Gaitán, a defence lawyer, was taking a break before his next meeting, which would be with a 21-year-old law student, Fidel Castro.
Colombian football was centred on a regional structure with no professional system.
The social unrest which followed Gaitán’s death opened up the opportunity for a national professional league.
The government, run by Mariano Ospina Pérez, was fully in favour of a professional league. Many associations around the world had battled over the debate between the amateur and the professional.
Many political structures around South America were ruled by military dictatorships. Often it could be frustrating when the public won’t behave as you want them to. Pérez’s government saw football as an ideal way to maintain law and order, particularly after Gaitán’s death.
Two men emerged as huge cheerleaders for the project, Alfonso Senior and Humberto Salcedo. Years later Salcedo confirmed Gaitán’s murder triggered the move towards professional football. Otherwise, it may have been years before the idea took off.
Within four months a league was created. Division Mayor del Futbol Colombiano (Dimayor). This rivalled the established Adefutbol, which overlooked the league system in the country.
This was not without opposition. The regional leagues saw their power being pulled from underneath them and were naturally unhappy with the whole idea.
As usual it was cold hard cash which persuaded them. The new league agreed to pay 3% of the gate receipts to the regional leagues.
With the league set up and ready to go, there were still obstacles to overcome. Due to the conflict between Dimayor and the Colombian FA, FIFA expelled the country.
But far from being deterred many of the club officials saw this as an opportunity to bypass the rules. They were free to pay players whatever they wanted without fear of the regulator. They could also sign foreign players and if they didn’t want to pay transfer fees, who were the originating club going to complain to?
Against this backdrop, the league kicked off in August 1948.
It’s not just a recent idea where a breakaway sport will include other attractions to try and bring in the punters, and the Dimayor was no exception. A sport to rival football in Colombia at the time was horse racing.
The organisers came up with the genius idea of starting the first game in the morning, with horse racing in the same venue in the afternoon. What could be better?
Bogota’s Millonarios were overwhelming favourites for the inaugural season but finished fourth as city rivals, Santa Fe lifted the trophy. Millonarios had only been going two years after it was founded by a group of wealthy businessmen.
Needless to say, they decided they weren’t prepared to wait and grow organically, they threw money at the project. Another trait of businessmen running a football club was that they weren’t necessarily bothered about rules and guidelines.
Senior was club president and seeing as he was one of the driving forces behind the league, he needed his club to become champions as soon as possible.
As the seeds of the league were being sown in Colombia, elsewhere in South America events were conspiring to create further opportunities.
In Argentina, the football union stood up to the government demanding better payments and working conditions. They argued the clubs pocketed too much rather than pass it down to the players. The result was a players’ strike.
Not all the players were happy with not being able to play football and inevitably they looked abroad for opportunities to ply their trade.
Enter Senior and Millonarios.
In early 1949 they signed Argentinian Carlos ‘Cacho’ Aldabe and made him player-manager. Aldabe was well-connected. He was a friend of the great Argentinian player, Adolfo Pedernera.
Pederna was one of the best players in the world at the time, and the star man in River Plate’s ‘La Maquina’ team.
With him kicking his heels in his Buenos Aires home, Senior sent ‘Cacho’ there to persuade him Millonarios would welcome him into their arms.
‘Cacho’ had with him a briefcase full of cash. Pederna knew if the government didn’t back down, at the age of 30 he wouldn’t have long left on his career. He demanded a salary way above what Huracán were paying him. Initially ‘Cacho’ doubted Senior would agree to this but soon received a telegram saying simply, “bring him”.
Huracán had no idea of the meeting. Pederna negotiated on his own and signed to Millonarios as if he was a free agent, rather than one under contract. Needless to say, not only did his club not know about the approach and the signing, they didn’t receive any recompense for a player signed by another club when still under contract with them.
Ironically, Millonarios not paying a transfer fee allowed them to play their players more. Something Pederna was on strike for back in Argentina.
He was greeted by hordes of supporters when he touched down in Bogota. Meanwhile, the move was a huge scandal back home.
15,000 turned up just to see him unveiled as the new signing. He wasn’t fit enough to play but Millonarios won 6-0 as the money taken at the turnstiles was enough to cover his salary for the next year.
His debut came a week later when he was like an artist at work, orchestrating everything as his side won 3-0. But the gulf in class between him and his teammates was stark.
He asked Senior to sign some strikers as goals were going to be hard to come by with the players they had at the time.
Senior sent him back home with the task of finding the players he wanted. He returned to River and immediately tapped up Néstor Rossi and one of the most exciting talents in the world game at the time, Alfredo Di Stefano.
Both were still under the same employment constraints Pederna had been, and both saw the sense in playing football for anyone rather than sit at home losing fitness.
Again their employers knew nothing of the approach and as with Huracán, never received a transfer fee.
Di Stefano, ‘the blond arrow’ hit it off immediately in his new country. He scored a hat-trick on his debut in a 5-0 win. The three helped Millonarios average almost four goals a game as they romped away with the league title.
Inevitably, there were other Argentinian players who were interested in moving to a league where the grounds were packed full and many of the continent’s top talent were assembling.
The exodus wasn’t restricted to Argentina, or Millonarios alone. Deportivo Cali’s directors sent a plane to Peru and it picked up 14 players, many of who were Peruvian internationals.
Cali finished the season runners-up to Millonarios, with Valentino López scoring in every game he played.
Independiente Medellin then pounced on the rest of the Peru national team.
The poaching was now at epidemic levels. By the time of the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, practically the whole Paraguay national team was playing in Colombia.
Eventually, Brazil began to find they were losing some of their best players. Elba de Pádua Lima (Tim) and Heleno de Freitas signed for Junior de Barranquilla. Many still talk about Heleno as being the greatest player to ever play in Colombia. Off the field, he was a troubled soul, more akin to George Best.
It wouldn’t be long before the talons of Colombian football and cash would stretch across the Atlantic to Europe. What they had as a massive lure was the ability to pay players far more than their, more well-known, employers were currently doing.
English football was still under the vice-like grip of the maximum wage. No matter what the clubs earned, players could not be paid more than £12pw. For years this was tolerated as players, largely having an amateur outlook on things, were just happy to play. But since the War, football was beginning to understand the financial attraction of the sport.
The 1950 World Cup was a turning point for the game in England. The national side, with luminaries such as Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen, Billy Wright, Jackie Milburn and Tom Finney set sail for Rio in what would be England’s first foray in the tournament.
England hadn’t bothered with the World Cup before the War, believing they had the British International Championships as a tournament to provide the quality of competition rivalling anything the rest of the world could come up with.
The finest names in world football were humbled on a June afternoon in Belo Horizonte by a team of part-timers from the United States. They were soon on their way back home as the tournament moved on to the final round.
But two of the best players England could’ve chosen weren’t anywhere near the action. Neil Franklin, who Tom Finney described as the finest centre-half he’d played against, and Charlie Mitten were both left out of the squad.
You probably thought clubs not releasing players for the national team was a recent thing? Well, Mitten was being hauled around the States by his club, Manchester United who considered him a necessary draw on the turnstiles and therefore far more valuable to them, than if he was in some ‘gimmicky’ tournament in Brazil.
Mitten was a clever man. He understood how United playing 12 matches to packed-out crowds was bringing in plenty of cash for his employer, yet he could never earn more than £12pw. Plus, his employer had him under contract and could decide when and where he played, and who he could and couldn’t play for. Naturally, he became rather disillusioned with this.
Franklin was a different case. He’d represented his country 27 times, each one alongside his captain, Billy Wright. He’d only been on the losing side four times and Wright and Franklin were a great partnership at the back, possibly the best around.
He wasn’t in Brazil having asked to be left out as his wife was due to give birth. However, the truth was slightly different. At the time of one of English football’s greatest embarrassments the Stoke City centre-half was actually in South America negotiating a deal with Independiente Santa Fé.
Santa Fé was run by a guy called Luis Robledo. He’d been in England studying at Cambridge when he fell in love with Arsenal. When he went back to Colombia he ploughed his money into setting up a football club, which played in the red and white of Arsenal.
With Franklin on his trip to Colombia was his Stoke City teammate George Mountford. The pair were seduced by Robledo as they were offered £5,000 per year and a £5,000 signing-on fee. Almost 10 times the maximum wage in England.
Robledo then asked the players to recommend the best left-winger they could think of. That’s where Mitten came into the story.
Franklin called Mitten and told him of the offer. The player had an agonising night wondering if he should give up on his career in England for the promise of riches he was never going to earn at home. Unlike many of the other players involved in the great ‘gold rush’ to Colombia, Mitten spoke to his boss, Matt Busby.
Busby considered the pros and cons and then said to the player;
“You’d better go, or you’ll die wondering.”
Mitten had joined United just before the outbreak of the Second World War but because football was suspended during that period he didn’t make his debut until it resumed in 1946.
Matt Busby had put together a side featuring a forward line known as the ‘famous five’. Mitten was a talented left-winger alongside Jimmy Delaney, Stan Pearson, Jack Rowley and Johnny Morris. In the four years he was at Old Trafford they finished runners-up in the league three times and won the 1948 FA Cup, beating a Blackpool side containing Matthews and Mortensen.
This was huge news for the Bogota press. They were ecstatic. It was one thing attracting other South Americans, but English players? Nothing was bigger at the time.
The press in England predictably weren’t as positive about it all. They took the view of footballers the clubs did and labelled them working-class mercenaries and greedy. Funny how those with money looked down on others wishing to better themselves to earn similar wealth.
Franklin didn’t last in the country. He played six times but returned to England never getting over the culture shock.
Mitten became labelled as ‘the Bogota Bandit’. A book of the same title was written in 2009 and in it, he gives his views on his first days in Colombia.
“We found that the country had a huge social divide: there was the great mass of poor people and above them a tremendously wealthy millionaire elite, mostly descended from the Spanish conquistadors, who in fact owned the country. And here we were, English footballers, pioneers — that’s how we regarded ourselves — the first rebels against a restrictive and archaic system which treated its principal characters as second-class citizens, mixing freely with this upper class.
“We very quickly found that we were accepted into the inner circles of Colombian social life. As a professional footballer, I rubbed shoulders with oil barons, wealthy landowners and cattle ranchers and their cohorts.”
This began well for Mitten. He scored 15 goals in his first season at Santa Fé and even got to play alongside Di Stefano when the Colombian FA organised a match against newly crowned world champions, Uruguay.
But after a year it all turned sour. The promise of gold in El Dorado was merely a promise. He was rewarded financially for his time but with a young family, the place was rapidly becoming scary for the outsiders.
Colombia rejoined FIFA and were then subject to FIFA regulations, which meant he was still effectively a United player. One of the conditions of rejoining FIFA meant they had to get rid of all their overseas players.
With Franklin gone Mountford also followed and Mitten felt very much on his own. He decided to return home. Of course, Di Stefano was in the same boat as him and Santiago Bernabéu of Real Madrid came calling.
Di Stefano jumped at the chance to become a huge star in Europe, although his was a very complicated transfer which I have written about recently. Mitten too was offered a contract with Real but in the end, he turned it down, perhaps believing United would take him back given the circumstances in which he’d left them.
But when he returned to Old Trafford he found Busby’s mood had changed. The FA too weren’t enamoured with the player and banned him for six months. Busby then sold him to Fulham in December 1951.
The United manager could feel vindicated to continue without his once-talented winger as he picked up his first league title the following May.
Mitten’s time at Fulham wasn’t as auspicious as it had been up north as the club were relegated. He was never really the same player again and possibly spent the rest of his life wondering about his decisions.
The Colombians who remained in the league now found there was less anger towards them from the rest of the world, once El Dorado was over as a concept. The country made its World Cup debut in Chile 1962 and soon discovered how international football could give them much more than El Dorado ever did.
Domestic football took a while to recover though. After the end of El Dorado in 1954 there was an increase in violence and murders in the country. Many clubs fell into a financial mess and attendance fell alarmingly. It wouldn’t really be until the 1980s that the country would rise again as a football force.
For Mitten, Franklin and Mountford their careers were ruined by the experience. It would be another decade before the maximum wage structure would be crushed. By then Mitten was managing Newcastle and the man credited with breaking the structure, George Eastham, named Mitten as one of those holding players’ wages back.
