SLIDING DOORS: How Alfredo Di Stéfano nearly joined Barcelona and altered the European Football landscape as we know it
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Off the ball breakfast. Yeah, it's like people put up the today's office on the Monday and they're somewhere unbelievable. It's like I am literally at the corner. The player is right beside me. You don't get that much anymore, do you? No, you don't. The old today's office and you're sitting on the beach. Live every weekday morning from 7.30 on your smart speaker. Just ask Alexa to play OTB Sports Radio.
This is Sliding Doors, a podcast offering you a view of an alternate footballing universe, looking at some of the transfer market's biggest missed opportunities. Down through the decades, newspaper pages, sports news channel broadcasts, Twitter feeds and podcasts have been filled with talk of transfers that never happened. However, this podcast will look at the proposed moves that went beyond mere rumour and tittle-tattle, transfers that almost came to pass – could well have changed the landscape of football at the time. The fanciful that was almost made flesh. Think Frank Worthington to Liverpool, Mikey Johnston to Flamengo and Alfredo Di Stefano to Barcelona. This is Sliding Doors.
And Di Stefano back and notice how he brings the ball under control immediately. This man is a real footballing artist. If we're honest, some of the biggest nearly transfers of all time may ultimately have had little to no impact on the futures of their particular clubs, but the case of Di Stefano's close shave with the Catalonian giants would have changed the face of Spanish football, European football and perhaps beyond. The story centres around 1953, a year in which Barcelona were crowned back-to-back Spanish champions, with Real Madrid having to content themselves with another third-placed finish. Indeed, Madrid had only two championships to their name by that stage, with both coming in a pre-Franco spell in which they were forced to drop the Real from their name.
Things, as you might imagine, were very, very different to the way history would define both clubs. As Sid Lowe wrote in Fear and Loathing in La Liga, Without Di Stefano for Madrid, there would be no Galacticos, no packed stadium, no sense of grandeur or entitlement, and little of the success that makes them what they are. Few moves, if any, in the history of the game have gone such a long way towards defining one club while also plotting the battle lines with their biggest rival. But the genesis of that most famous of schisms begins not in Barcelona, nor in Madrid, but in the El Dorado era of football in Colombia. In 1949, moves were afoot to professionalise the amateur Colombian League. Ten sides, including Millonarios, their Bogotá neighbours Independiente Santa Fe, Deportivo Cali and Independiente Medellín, were picked to compete in a new flight called the Dimeor.
However, a dispute soon arose with Colombia's governing body of amateur football, Adefootball, leading to the Dimeor breaking away from the Colombian Federation and FIFA bestowing upon them rebel status. That move saw the Colombian national team suspended by FIFA during that time.
What is the significance of Alfredo Di Stéfano in football history?
Coinciding with the land grab in Colombian football was a player strike in Argentina. There was a big problem in Argentina. There were lots of clubs in the capital city and obviously there wasn't enough money for everybody. Some clubs paid the players, some others didn't. So there was a demonstration organised by the first team players from the capital and there was a general strike that lasted for eight months. Players, Di Stefano among them, had been vocal about a perceived lack of freedom of contract in the country. The then River Plate striker was quoted at the time as saying, it's not right that neither we nor any professional footballer has signed their contract freely in recent times. Freedom of contract exists in Argentina for all human activities except for professional footballers.
Added to that was a Ministry of Labour diktat that player salaries could not exceed 1,500 pesos a month. At that time, 86 of the 342 players already on maximum wage in Argentina had no room to manoeuvre upwards.
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