this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Chilean football is not actually real at this point. it’s been so poorly handled since we won those Copa Americas that I don’t really see any bright future for us.
I'm not Chilean, (i'm Brazilian) but the decline in the quality of Chilean football over the last decade is terrifying. Even in the Libertadores, it's very noticeable.
In the past, playing against Colo Colo, Universidad Catolica and Universidad de Chile was hell. I remember Atlético Mineiro losing to Colo Colo in 2015 in the Libertadores. Today? Well...
Today the Chilean league is certainly behind Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and even Paraguay. (I haven't mentioned Uruguay because it's unfair. It's a country with 3.5 million habitants, and the fact that they're a football powerhouse is fascinating)... And we're talking about the league of one of South America's most developed countries.
And we look at the new generation of Chilean football, and there's not much prospect of improvement in the short term. If we compare it with Ecuador, for example, they're producing youngster after youngster with good potential.
In the case of Ecuadorian football, all it took was for one team to focus on developing youngsters (Del Valle), and that boosted the whole ecosystem in the country. I remember starting to hear about Del Valle in 2014/2015 as a project to develop young talent... Today, if you look at their infrastructure, it's better than even some big Brazilian clubs that have budgets, I don't know, 10x bigger.
The "golden generation" crop was a leftover of the "sports club", fan-owned era. After "privatization" of most clubs, they didn't bother spending in young divisions and this is the result.