What Is The World’s Most Famous Outlaw Football League?
Because football is such a global sport, with almost every country in the world having a professional football league and team kits to match, its organisational structure is one of the most unusual of any sport on Earth.
Most football league championships are affiliated with their football association or federation, which in turn is registered with FIFA, but an unusual dispute led to a very brief period where Columbia was the city of gold at the centre of world football.
What became known as the El Dorado period began with the professionalisation of the Columbian Football League under the auspices of DIMAYOR, but a series of internal disputes led to it breaking away from FIFA.
This meant that, from 1949 until 1954, it was operating effectively as an outlaw organisation unbound by the need to pay transfer fees to players.
Taking advantage of a very fortunate strike against the Argentine Football Association, Millonarios FC signed many Argentine stars with the promise of wages orders of magnitude higher than many football associations were allowed to pay players.
Millonarios became known as the Ballet Azul and featured some of the greatest players of that era, most famously including Alfredo Di Stefano and Nestor Rossi.
This led to a massive spending spree of players not only from Argentina and South America but also from Europe. Most notably, Manchester United’s Charlie Mitten and Stoke City’s Neil Franklin moved over from the English First Division.
Neil Franklin’s move to Independiente Santa Fe was by far the most infamous, as he was paid four times the maximum wage in the English game, only played six matches and was effectively blacklisted for the rest of his career.
As early as 1950, El Dorado was ended through the Pacto de Lima, which allowed DIMAYOR to rejoin the Columbian Football Federation and the CFF to rejoin FIFA on the condition that hundreds of foreign players returned to their home countries.
This led to the strange situation where Alfredo Di Stefano was transferred to both Real Madrid and Barcelona at the same time, leading to an alternate-year agreement that changed the course of Spanish football history.