From Vagrants to Referents of Cultural Change: Colombian Professional Footballers in Medellín, 1960s–70s

This paper shows how professional football and professional footballers connected to and propelled cultural changes in the city of Medellín during the 60s and 70s. Rural immigrants arriving in the growing city, political authorities and social elites tended to think of football as “an adventure of vagrants.” Reluctantly, they accepted football as a “wall against the vice” and tried to make of the sporting practice a moral-oriented and harmonizing activity. Also, it was expected that the “industrious character” of people from Antioquia and Medellín benefited from the systematic practice of the sport. During the 1960s and 1970s, some of the sons of those immigrants became professional footballers. The footballers’ new social visibility launched processes of popular self-assertion but also processes of struggle. Footballers had distinct social and racial backgrounds, came from different neighborhoods, and their very presence showed how much the city was changing. Questions about the role of football in the city, the “kind of men” professional footballers were, the responsibilities of these men in relation with their families and neighborhoods, and about professional football as a “respectable” job began to appear in public debates. Involved in those discussions, footballers asserted their social belongings and claimed they enliven Medellín’s urban life.

In exploring how footballers connected with, lived through, and propelled cultural changes in Medellín, the project contributes to the understanding of how football helps to redefine the contents and meanings of urban experience and cultural change in Latin America. By reconstructing footballers’ backgrounds and struggles, the paper sheds light on the diversity among popular urban sectors and their highly distinctive articulation with football and life in the city.