Football and the Metro in Medellin

Medellin is an easy city to love: the Paisa are kind and generous, the parks safe and well manicured, the food cheap and delicious, and the city is surrounded by gorgeous hills strewn with settlements. After some recent turbulent decades the city is open for business and a fantastic destination no matter your budget. ‘Social Urbanism’ has turned Medellin around and two things define the city and its rejuvenation: the Metro de Medellín and Atletico Nacional FC.

The metro system spreads to all corners of this vast city and is a source of great pride to the one million who ride it each day. The stations and trains are spotlessly clean and in a city where graffiti is an accepted art form, the metro remains a blank canvas. Nobody drops litter and if they do, look out! Gondolas branch off from several stations, climbing high into the hills to feed the needs of the less affluent. It is a remarkable system. A single ride costs COP2,550 on most lines but I recommend getting a personalized Civica card as not only does it make the fare slightly cheaper, you won’t have to queue at the ticket booth to get on. Rush hour queues are long and painful. Trains run on a very regular schedule and the gondolas never stop. Literally! It’s jump on/jump off.

Buying tickets for football matches is complicated in many parts of the world and it’s no different in Colombia. Ticketmaster and the like are redundant and there is no way to purchase online. The schedule is generally fixed a week before game-time and so it’s hard to plan too far ahead. As well, tickets only go on sale a few days before. I went to the stadium looking to buy tickets on Tuesday prior to the season opener at the weekend and was told that they wouldn’t be on sale until Friday, two days before the game. I did have some great banter with a couple of municipal workers while I was there. I had gone to Pereira to trek in the Valle de Corcora and so asked a friend in Medellin to purchase a ticket for me while I was out of town. This involved her having to go to a shopping mall where there was an outlet of ‘Gane’, the official vendor of sports and entertainment tickets. I paid COP59,000.

There are two main areas in each of the stadiums I visited in Colombia and Ecuador: Occidental (west) and Oriental (east). I was always pushed into the Occidental section of each ground, in part because it’s slightly more expensive, but also because ‘the lads’ usually go in the Oriental section and they mistakenly thought I wouldn’t want to be there. They obviously had no idea that I’d spent my youth in the early 80s standing in The Shed End at Stamford Bridge!

I met a young English guy at Hostal Kiwi (from COP35,000 in a dorm) in Poblado, where I was staying, who was also going to the match and so we jumped on the Metro to make our way to the stadium, giving ourselves enough time to have a few drinks in a bar nearby in order to soak up the energy. We felt the energy as soon as we stepped out of the train at Estacion Estadio. We stood at a hole-in-the-wall bar drinking 75c cerveza and watched the excitement as fans arrived for the start of the new season. Atletico Nacional FC is Colombia’s biggest football team and the pride and joy of half of the city's residents.

The other half root for Deportivo de Medellin and the rivalry is intense. It is the ‘El Classico’ of Colombia. We were watching Nacional vs Deportivo de Pereira, another local team and it looked like 1000+ fans had driven the six hours from Pereira. In all the years I’ve been attending football matches, including the English ‘naughty’ years of the early 80s, I've never experienced an atmosphere like this. And then the Ultras arrived………… bus loads of flag-waving ‘El Verde Paisa’ fans brought regular traffic to a standstill, horns blaring, hypnotic chanting and green smoke bombs detonating. Men and women hanging off the buses or standing on the roofs. It was a spectacular sight.

Security was tight and the queues to enter the stadium were long and disorganized. Patted down at the gate, the police even took away cigarettes and lighters from those who had them. The view of the surrounding hills from our seats was spectacular and the noise was deafening. Green and white streamers littered the Nacional end and I found it hard to take my eyes off the Ultras as they sang and bounced their way through the 90 minutes. A couple of times there was some police activity below us but for the most part it was just crazy exuberance and a proper football atmosphere. The football was good to watch and the home team won 2-0.

I watched three matches in Colombia in January 2019. As well as the game in Medellin I saw a fairly turgid 0-0 in Manizales between Once Caldas and Independiente Santa Fe and a home team thumping (4-0) in Pasto between Deportivo Pasto and Atletico Bucaramanga. Three very unique stadiums in three vastly different areas of Colombia.

Manizales - Once Caldas

Having spent a few days in Salento in central Colombia and a wonderful day hiking in the Valle de Cocora I took a bus via Pereira to Manizales, the capital of Department de Caldas. Manizales has competitive basketball and their football team is Once Caldas, winner of four Colombian Primera A titles. They also won the Copa Libertadores in 2004, beating Boca Juniors in the final. Estadio Polagrande sits on a hill in the heart of the city from where there are views across the city to the countryside beyond. The stadium was built in 1936 and current capacity is 36,000, although it was barely one-third full for the home opener.

I bought my ticket at the stadium on the day of the match and it cost COP$53,636 (approx C$15). As with Medellin I was sold a ticket in the Occidental area. There was a block of ultra fans but it was mostly a low key atmosphere and terrible game of football.

Pasto - Deportivo Pasto

As I worked my way through southern Colombia I was aware that there was a match scheduled in Pasto, just north of where I eventually crossed from Colombia into Ecuador. I visited the UNESCO World Heritage site of San Agustin, the largest collection of religious statues and monuments in South America before making my way to Mocoa. This dusty rundown town is the starting point of the infamous Trampolin del Muerte (trampoline of death) which runs through the mountains towards Pasto. It’s supposedly the most dangerous road in South America due to it being just one lane clinging to the mountain with huge drops below.

Pasto feels like a wild west outpost and there’s very little of interest in the town. And anyway I was here to watch football. Deportivo Pasto were founded in 1949 and have won the Colombia league once, in 1986. The Estadio Departamental Libertad Pasto has a capacity of 19,000 and is in the center of the city. As with all the stadiums I went to, it was completely open-air and fully exposed. As mentioned earlier, buying tickets to games is complicated and takes some work and I got wind that only one hotel in town was selling tickets for this evening's game. A bit of a queue but relatively straightforward in the end. After the match in Medellin the atmosphere was a bit more subdued but the crowd soon woke up as the home team ran away with a very one sided contest.

The Colombian Football League

The ‘Categoria Primera A’ season typically runs from late January to early December and is contested by 20 teams in 16 cities. It’s a 3-round competition whereby each team plays 19 games in round 1 with the top 8 advancing to a two group format playing 6 games each in round 2. The winners of the two groups then play in the Championship game. The Covid-19 affected 2020 season was won by America de Cali who beat Santa Fe in the final.