Independiente, Boca Juniors and Nacional built their reputations on the Copa Libertadores, a competition that has never much cared for reputations. A wry look at how three clubs from the River Plate became powerhouses, with a 2026 final in Montevideo to remind us the story isn’t finished.
On 28 November 2026, Estudiantes de La Plata and Palmeiras will play the Copa Libertadores final in Montevideo. Estudiantes got there by beating Flamengo 3-2 on penalties at the Maracanã after two goalless legs, a result the Argentine FA’s own site described, with no visible embarrassment, as “otro maracanazo argentino”. A week earlier, in Barranquilla, Boca Juniors will play Atlético Mineiro in the final of the Sudamericana, the continent’s second competition. So in the autumn of 2026 two of the old Argentine names are back at the business end of South American football, and the final itself is in the city of Nacional and Peñarol. If you wanted a peg for a piece about how the River Plate clubs became powerhouses, you couldn’t ask for a better one, and I didn’t have to.
The older version of this article treated Independiente, Boca and Nacional the way a brochure treats a cathedral. They were “cultural institutions”, they were “the heartbeat of a continent”, and they had all, apparently, been founded on principles of teamwork and resilience. Some of it was wrong, too. It credited Independiente’s great 1970s run to Osvaldo Zubeldía, and the one detailed account I’ve been able to read of that side says the opposite: their dominance came “without one singular figure in the dugout, rather a revolving door of managers”. What follows is shorter on adjectives and longer on what actually happened, with the sources in the text so you can check me.
The King of Cups
Start with the number, because Independiente’s supporters certainly do. The club from Avellaneda have won the Copa Libertadores seven times. Guinness World Records, which has an entry for everything, lists them as the holders of the record for consecutive wins, four, in 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975, and adds that they won every final they ever reached. The fourth came with a 2-0 win over Chile’s Unión Española on 29 June 1975. When Flamengo won their fourth title in Lima in November 2025, Al Jazeera’s report noted that it put them level with Estudiantes and still three behind Independiente. That is the gap between being very good and being Rey de Copas, the King of Cups.
The best account of that era I know is Dan Williamson’s piece for These Football Times on Ricardo Bochini, and it’s worth following his route through the finals, because the run was a lot less tidy than “four in a row” makes it sound. In 1972 Independiente beat Universitario of Lima over two legs, their third title and their first for seven years. In 1973 they met Colo-Colo; the tie was level at 1-1 after two legs, and as there were no penalties and no away goals, the sides went to a playoff at the Centenario in Montevideo. Mario Mendoza scored, Carlos Caszely equalised “with a sublime lob”, and the winner came in the 107th minute from a substitute, Miguel Ángel Giachello, after another substitute, the teenage Bochini, had changed the game. Williamson works out that Independiente and Colo-Colo played each other in three countries and shared a pitch for more than five hours before anybody won. In 1974 they lost the first leg 2-1 to São Paulo at the Pacaembu, won the second 2-0 in Avellaneda with Bochini scoring, and then won a third match in Santiago 1-0. In 1975 they nearly fell at the first hurdle, scraped through on goal difference, lost the first leg of the final in Santiago, then beat Unión Española 3-1 at home and 2-0 in Asunción.
That’s four titles, and three of them needed a third match on neutral ground. It’s tempting to treat the old Libertadores as a gentler competition, and Williamson concedes that the path to the later finals was short, with only three opponents each time. The finals themselves were not gentle. They were endurance tests that happened to have a trophy at the end.
Bochini, and a one-two with God
Bochini is the reason most people outside Argentina have heard of Independiente at all, and the reason he’s less famous than he ought to be. He was born in Zárate in 1954, failed trials at San Lorenzo and Boca, and joined Independiente at 17. He made his full debut a month after the 1972 final, off the bench in a 1-0 defeat to River Plate at the Monumental. In November 1973, in a one-off Intercontinental Cup against Juventus in Rome, he and Daniel Bertoni played a string of one-twos through the Juventus defence ten minutes from time, and Bochini scooped the ball over Dino Zoff. Juventus were only there because Ajax, the European champions, declined to play. Williamson says the official reason was money and suspects the real reason was the kicking Independiente had given Ajax the year before. Either way, the Argentines won, and in Rome.
What made Bochini special wasn’t goals. He scored 105 in his career, which Williamson thinks rather beside the point. His passes were so particular that Argentine football gave them their own adjective, the pase bochinesco. He spent his whole career at Independiente, won nine major trophies there in 19 years, and ended with more than 600 league appearances, a total beaten only by Hugo Gatti, the eccentric Boca goalkeeper. His international career was a disappointment. He was left out of the 1978 and 1982 World Cup squads, then went to Mexico in 1986 at 32 and played five minutes, against Belgium in the quarter-final. Maradona, who had idolised him as a boy, wrote in his autobiography that the first thing he did when Bochini came on was look for him and give him the ball: “it was like playing a one-two with God.” It’s a lovely line, and given who wrote it, the theology is a bit confused.
There was one more Libertadores in him. In 1984 Independiente beat Grêmio with the only goal of the tie, in Porto Alegre, after Bochini held the ball, waited (Argentines call it la pausa), and rolled it into the path of Jorge Burruchaga. Then they went to Tokyo and beat Liverpool 1-0 in the Intercontinental Cup, the first meeting of English and Argentine club sides since the Falklands war. José Percudani scored after six minutes. Independiente now have a stand named after Bochini and a street leading up to the stadium, which is more than most gods get.
Boca, Bianchi and seven o’clock in the morning
Boca Juniors have had more noise than almost anyone, but the period that made them a continental power in the modern sense belongs to one coach. Carlos Bianchi took Boca to the Libertadores in 2000, 2001 and 2003, and the Guardian reports from Tokyo and Yokohama show what that looked like at the end of a season.
In November 2000, against Real Madrid at Tokyo’s National Stadium, Martín Palermo scored twice in the first six minutes, Roberto Carlos pulled one back, and Boca held on to win 2-1 on “a freezing, windswept night”. The Guardian’s report says nearly 3,000 Boca fans had made the trip, that it was South America’s first win in the fixture for six years, and that the game started at 7am Argentine time, which tells you something about the people who were celebrating in central Buenos Aires before breakfast. Palermo admitted that “no one prepares for that”. Vicente del Bosque called the first few minutes “the tragedy”. Bianchi, who had also won the last South American Intercontinental with Vélez Sarsfield in 1994, said: “We were able to prove tonight that Argentine football is the best in the world.” Look down the Boca team sheet in that report and you’ll find Riquelme in midfield and Córdoba in goal; on the other side, Casillas, Hierro, Figo, Raúl and Steve McManaman, who might have been the most surprised man in Tokyo.
Three years later Boca did it again, beating Milan 3-1 on penalties after a 1-1 draw in Yokohama in front of 66,000. Raúl Cascini scored the last kick. The Guardian round-up notes that the win made Bianchi the first coach to win the cup three times, and quotes him being proud that his side “kept attacking” and were “even more aggressive with our penalties”, which is a new one on me. In the same few paragraphs the paper finds room for Lothar Matthäus becoming Hungary’s manager and six red cards in a Barcelona derby, so the achievement was given exactly as much space as a slow Monday allowed.
What I take from Bianchi’s Boca is that a powerhouse in South America is not the same thing as a rich club, or a popular one. Boca were both already. What Bianchi added was the habit of winning the matches that decide things, against the clubs that are supposed to win them. In 2026 they’re trying to rediscover that in the Sudamericana. After knocking out Vasco da Gama at the Maracanã they play Atlético Mineiro in Barranquilla on 21 November, a fixture the AFA site gives in one sentence, as though Boca in a final were the most ordinary thing in the world. For most of the club’s history it has been.
Nacional, and a plaque that was sent back
Nacional’s claim to be a powerhouse rests partly on the Libertadores and partly on a quarrel that has lasted more than 125 years. They were founded in Montevideo on 14 May 1899. FourFourTwo, in a countdown of the world’s biggest derbies, explains why the name matters: Peñarol began as the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club, founded by and largely for English railway workers, while Nacional were the first South American club founded without any Old World involvement. The magazine also describes the derby as the oldest between club rivals outside the UK, and points out that Peñarol were neither cricketers nor, given their location, particularly central.
The first meeting came on 15 July 1900 at the Gran Parque Central, a friendly that CURCC won 2-0 with two goals from Aniceto Camacho. El Observador gives both line-ups. The CURCC side is full of Wards, Jacksons, Davies and Lewises; Nacional’s has Daglios, Vallarinos and a Carve Urioste. It also tells the story of what happened in July 2021, when the two clubs played a clásico at the Gran Parque Central for the first time in 92 years. Nacional presented Peñarol’s president, Ignacio Ruglio, with a commemorative plaque welcoming the club on its return to the ground for “clásico No 38”. Nacional do not accept that Peñarol are the same club as CURCC, so the numbering left out the early history, and Peñarol sent the plaque back. Then they played the next clásico in replica CURCC shirts marked “Primer clásico de la historia. 15 de julio de 1900. Peñarol 2-0”. I can’t think of a better illustration of how a rivalry becomes a powerhouse: each club is partly built out of its refusal to agree with the other.
On the continent, Nacional have won the Libertadores three times, according to FourFourTwo, the last time in 1988, the year after Peñarol, “just to keep them quiet”. The first came in 1971, and it came at the expense of the Estudiantes side that had won the previous three. Williamson says that team “would’ve added a fourth had they not lost the 1971 final”; RSSSF’s record of that final shows each side won 1-0 at home, Estudiantes in La Plata and Nacional in Montevideo, before Nacional won a playoff 2-0 at the Estadio Nacional in Lima on 9 June 1971. FourFourTwo also claims the Gran Parque Central, built in 1900, as the oldest stadium in South America, and the Centenario, where the derbies are played, hosted the first World Cup final in 1930. For the 2026 final Montevideo will be home to two foreign clubs and to the old argument between its own two.
Why the River Plate, and why then
There’s a sentence in the old article that says football was “brought by British immigrants and sailors” to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. That’s roughly true, and the CURCC line-up shows what it looked like on the pitch. But the more interesting question is why clubs in two cities either side of one estuary dominated a continental competition for so long. Part of the answer is in Williamson’s piece. He suggests Argentine football is “nowhere near as strong now as it was then”, tracking the country’s economy, which “virtually rules out” anyone repeating Independiente’s four in a row. The other part is in the Al Jazeera report from Lima: the 2025 final was the fifth in six seasons between two Brazilian clubs. The power hasn’t vanished from South American club football. It has moved north, to the clubs with the biggest television deals and the deepest squads.
That’s why Estudiantes in Montevideo matters to this story. They’re the club whose three-in-a-row Nacional ended in 1971, and they have four titles. Win on 28 November and they’ll have five, moving ahead of Flamengo’s four and second only to Independiente’s seven. They’ll also have done it by holding out at the Maracanã for 180 minutes, which is a very River Plate way of winning a Libertadores, and the AFA match notes are full of the stats to prove it: Flamengo averaged 59 per cent possession and 19.6 shots at home in the tournament, and still went out. The Racing Club side of the 1940s, the other great Avellaneda team, would have understood. So would Obdulio Varela, who silenced the same stadium in 1950.
What a powerhouse is
The trouble with the word “powerhouse” is that it suggests something permanent, a building with the lights always on. The River Plate clubs have been nothing like that. Independiente’s seven titles came in three bursts, and they haven’t won the Libertadores since 1984. Boca’s great modern run was more or less one coach. Nacional’s three wins are spread over 17 years and are always discussed in relation to Peñarol’s, by both sides, often in the same breath. What these clubs share isn’t a philosophy. It’s a set of habits: winning third matches on neutral grounds, holding out away from home, scoring twice in six minutes in a freezing Tokyo stadium at seven in the morning back home, and arguing for a century about whether a 1900 friendly counts.
If you want to see how those habits spread, there’s a case to be made that the clubs who built them have shaped the game well beyond South America. The founding of FIFA in 1904 happened a long way from Montevideo, but the first World Cup final was played at the Centenario, a few miles from where Nacional and CURCC had first met. And when you look at Los Angeles’ El Tráfico, or the noise inside Marseille’s Vélodrome, you’re seeing the same ideas, imported and repackaged: the derby as civic quarrel, the stand as an instrument, the cup run as a story a city tells itself. The River Plate clubs didn’t invent those things, but they perfected them early, and on a continent that has never been short of rivals.
On 28 November an Argentine club will walk out in Montevideo, in a final against the richest kind of Brazilian opposition, quite possibly with the possession figures against it. That has been happening, in one form or another, for most of the competition’s life. Sometimes Nacional and Peñarol are the hosts and sometimes they’re the problem, and in the 1970s Independiente were the problem for everyone. The names change and the lights don’t stay on, but the habits the old clubs built are still being used in a stadium on the River Plate, a long way from a sailors’ kickabout and a long way from any kind of cathedral.
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