El Dorado – The Original Superleague

To understand why football has become a $55 billion industry, you have to understand the people who are responsible for making it happen. The sport that spawned from the working class of industrial England, has become a global financial powerhouse for the world's elite to invest in. The evolution has been marked by significant flashpoints along the way, which have seen new stakeholders emerge in the game, shaping its landscape.

 

The most important of these stakeholders are football’s most valuable assets — the players. Strip the sport back from its men in suits, multi-purpose stadiums and cross-continental competition, and you will see twenty-two people playing the sport as it was always intended to be. Football without players would make obsolete the bells and whistles that now customarily accompany the game, and so the way in which they are looked after is crucial.

 

Cue agents. It wasn't until representatives started looking after players that the game did too. The  importance of such has evolved into an industry in itself, to the point where nowadays, agents across Europe are bringing in a total of €800 million per year in commission fees.

 

The Origins of Player Power series from The Playbook aims to highlight the moments in history that saw how agents, lawyers and unions changed football’s balance of power. In this first edition, we take a look at how an unlikely event forever shifted perceptions of player value.

El Dorado: The Original Superleague

 

On April 9th 1948, a political assassination took place in post-Second World War Colombia that would start a horrific ten-year civil war in the country, known as la violencia (the violence). Jorge Gaitán was the leader of the liberal opposition party at the time, and on course to win power in the upcoming elections when he was shot dead on his way to lunch in Bogotá. The immediate impact of his murder was stark; his alleged assassin was brutally killed by an angry mob barely a few hours later, and the country rapidly plummeted towards internal turmoil.

 

What was less clear at the time was how this act of political violence would trigger a series of events that would lead to the overhaul of how football players around the world were being paid. It may sound far-fetched, but in an era of social-sporting uncertainty in the continent of South America, the dramatic increase of global football player wages and the emergence of what can be considered the world's first “superleague”, all stemmed from this shocking event.

 

You see, when a nation like Colombia enters a period of civil unrest, those in power have one get-out-of-jail card to use which can bring everyone back onto the same page: football. At the time, the beautiful game in the country was nothing more than a few regional leagues made up of mostly amateur players. However, as fine as chance may , even before Gaitán's assassination, there were two men already plotting the formation of Dimayor - La División Mayor del Fútbol Profesional Colombiano (roughly translating as “the top division of Colombian professional football”). This went on to be known as El Dorado, after the mythical lake in Colombia said to be full of gold.

 

The man who benefited from the murder of Gaitán, President Mariano Ospina Pérez, saw an opportunity to accelerate the formation of this league as a way of distracting the public from his biggest political threat’s termination. A huge government injection of cash saw the league ready to kick off on August 15th 1948, barely four months after the unrest began. Alfonso Senior, one of the two founders of Dimayor, was quoted to have said that “if it wasn't for the death of Gaitan, the start of professional football in Colombia would have been delayed by years”.

 

To say that the league had a few teething problems in its early days would be an understatement. The relationship it had formed with the country's football federation was initially very poor and it would only worsen over time. The nail in the coffin would be when the Dimayor league refused to release its players to play for the national team in the 1949 Copa America. The federations reaction to this would be to disassociate from Dimayor, branding it an unofficial competition — a crucial moment in this story.

 Elsewhere on the continent, player power was already starting to make noise. Strikes had occurred in Uruguay in 1939 and Argentina had its first players union by 1944 (football had been professional in both countries since the early 1930s). In 1948, the situation was so bad in Argentina — “a disgrace!”, as Alfredo Di Stefano described it — that by November, a third player's strike of the year caused football to come to a complete halt.

 

Luckily for our friends over in Colombia, this coincided with the Dimayor’s banishment from official competition, meaning they were free to act however they pleased when it came to attracting talent. Without FIFA regulations to adhere to, and a pool of unhappy superstars in Argentina at their disposal, the rich government-backed clubs of Colombia began to offer lucrative deals that blew existing player wages out of the water.

 

One of the most sought-after of those Argentines, Adolfo Pedenera, was offered a $200/month package with a $5,000 signing fee by one of the league’s teams. To put it into context, that monthly fee was over double of what the average player in Argentina was receiving, and a signing bonus (around five times the average yearly salary) was something completely novel in itself. Although the Dimayor clubs could afford these figures thanks to Ospina Pérez’s government, it was still a financial gamble to throw that much money at one person. However, thanks to a spike in ticket sales from a newly-enthused Colombian population who went to see Pedenera’s debut, his yearly wage plus signing fee was all paid off on day one.

 

Once the talents of Argentina were exhausted (including the addition of Di Stefano), attention swiftly turned towards Europe, and in particular, England. Football was considered to be at its individual best in South America, but there was still an understanding that the English were the founding fathers of the game. No other country played with a more organised structure, and with players who were capable of much more than the flair that was on show south of the equator. But in England, players were capped with how much they could earn — just £10/week their maximum.

 

Players such as Neil Franklin of Stoke City and Charlie Mitten of Manchester United took the leap of faith as they followed the waft of irresistible money to an unfamiliar land where football was as outlawed as it was lucrative. On the surface, it was a no-brainer and the process was simple: say goodbye to your current employer, head to Colombia, and sign a deal to give you numbers in your bank account unheard of in your profession. Without the need to negotiate a transfer fee, all of the available money could be directed towards the players in question, creating the first batch of wealthy footballers the world had seen.

Scratch away at the surface even slightly, and the holes of Ospina Pérez’s conservative government were beginning to appear in his great public distraction. As players from all over the world kept descending on Colombian shores, la violencia raged on in the background — football its only respite. Doubts began to arise about the legitimacy of some of the contracts that were being loosely agreed, and players were unprotected as their own negotiators. They were being thrust into a volatile landscape amidst a backdrop of civil unrest, dealing with large sums of money far beyond their business capabilities, and their families’ livelihoods depended on the success of the gamble.

 

The lack of player representation and independent regulation caused the Colombians to take advantage of their new players, often disguising the wealth in the form of luxury apartments, fancy dinners and a lavish lifestyle laid out without any real substance. Most players lasted a season, two at best. Payments became irregular (some reported never being paid a dime), and the league’s credibility was being questioned with some Englishmen frustrated with the lack of level on the pitch from their boozed-up, unmotivated colleagues only interested in showing off.

 

Back in their home countries, clubs and federations were calling for bans to be handed to all players deemed to have “illegally” breached their contracts to head to El Dorado. A modern day comparison would be how players were initially frowned upon for heading to the Saudi Pro League, but this time with legal arguments attached. FIFA eventually responded by expelling Colombia as a nation entirely as the rest of the football world lost patience. The continuing exodus of talent and the refusal of Dimayor to resort back to proper procedure produced years of diplomatic warfare.

 

Eventually, a deal was struck in 1951 to put an end to this rebel Superleague; El Pacto de Lima (the Lima pact) was signed by FIFA, Dimayor and several federations. They agreed that Colombia was to be reinstated to FIFA on the basis that all foreign players signed during the outlaw years would return to their original clubs by October 1954. That gave Dimayor three more years to pull in as much revenue as possible, and the players three years to plot their reintegration to footballing normality.

 

As was a common theme throughout, the players were never consulted. They didn't need to be. Once they had been sucked in by the lure of El Dorado, they were at the mercy of those who paid them; made to dance to the rhythm of the claps of the crooked hands that pulled the strings of this sportswashing pioneering. At the time, no-one existed to sit across from a player and lay out the contingencies of decision making, or speak on their behalf when negotiating their livelihoods. The absence of agents, lawyers and unions was the ultimate downfall of the El Dorado era, and a big reason as to why something similar has failed to emerge since (see European Superleague, 2021).

 

What did come from this fever dream-like period was the realisation of player worth. The call for wages to increase was now stronger than ever, and English football was an example of player power beating the national body under which it worked, implying a shift in the balance within the game. By 1958, the maximum wage rose to £20/week and by 1961, it was abolished all together thanks to the efforts of Jimmy Hill.

 

With money flowing like never before, players understood the importance of having someone with more business knowledge to do the talking for them. The year 1957 saw the first recorded instance of a British player hiring an agent to negotiate a transfer. Welshman John Charles was the subject of a high-profile transfer from Leeds United to Juventus, with the British transfer record nearly doubling to a cool £65,000 paid for the talents of one of the greatest all-rounders of all time. Charles employed the services of Terry Sommerfield who acted as his representative and worked closely with an Italian counterpart to facilitate the deal. While the method didn't immediately catch on in England, once the maximum wage was abolished, it was common practice to have an agent do the talking for all domestic and international transfers.

 

Flash forward to 2025 and there are over 7,000 FIFA-licensed agents operating in one of the world's most competitive markets. The role they fulfill in the football ecosystem is crucial to how clubs, fans and the game's investors view their players. Without the events of 1940s Colombia, the path to players gaining initial financial recognition might have looked very different. Perhaps it never would've happened at all.

The El Dorado story started out as an act of political terrorism, and eventually resulted in the fast-tracking of the football transfer industry’s worth, as well as the emergence of the role of agents as permanent fixtures within the game. A series of megalomaniacal sporting events were to fill the gap between the beginning and end of this tale, which has a place in football history as one of the forgotten catalysts of its global commercialisation.