In 1966, the Estudiantes de la Plata soccer team and the Colombian economy were similar. A small team, in a country where championships were reserved for the greats; A small country, in a world where economic success seems to favor only the few.
Osvaldo Zubeldia arrived at Estudiantes de la Plata as technical director. I am certain that over the past fifty years, Rodrigo Botero Montoya has played a custodial role for the Colombian economy similar to the role Zubeldia played in football.
“When I came to football, everything was invented,” says Zubeldia. “The only thing I did was organize the experiences gathered, work hard, live for football seven days a week, demand, be an example every day of the year, and apply it all to the benefit of my players.” Estudiantes has never been characterized by crowding inside the penalty area. Just: There are Estudiantes players everywhere on the pitch.”
This modest team in terms of budget and team was enshrined in a column by Julio Cesar Pasquato The drawing On 8/8/1967: “The victory of Estudiantes was a victory for the new mentality, served by strong, disciplined, dynamic young people, strong spiritually and physically. People ready to work for a common goal. Osvaldo was a self-taught man and from him we learned a lot about football and also about life. He told us: “You have to prove that there are no weak or strong people in football, and that everything can be achieved with work and dedication.” That final against Racing said, “We faced it knowing that we would change history with victory.”
But for Zubeldia, this was all just the beginning. When they asked him in the winning dressing room if he was satisfied, he answered frankly: “Not quite.” “I always want more. This same team did not stop until it won the Copa Libertadores de America three times (1968, 1969 and 1970), once the Inter-American Cup and the Intercontinental Cup (1968).
In the 1970s, he came to live in Colombia and play football, which, in my opinion, has not stopped happening to this day. Which is largely what has the national team in good shape to face the 2026 World Championship. A succession of leaders, over 50 years, implemented lessons that meant a rise and a transformative philosophy for the Colombian player and for national football.
Zubeldia inherited Francisco “Pacho” Maturana. That’s why José Nestor Pekerman; And now Nestor Lorenzo. Having one leader is not enough, as Luis Carlos Galán said. There is a need for a consistent series of leaders with a unified vision of mental, cultural and productive transformation, and hard work, which must be promoted among Colombians.
In those same 50 years, something similar to what we described about football happened in the Colombian economy. From the end of the 1960s, people like Carlos Lleras Restrepo and Rodrigo Botero Montoya initiated transformations and learnings that brought great benefits, such as stabilizing exchange management. Then, in the 1970s, Lauchlin Currie used housing to absorb the urban workforce, revitalize many local industries, and help the urban middle and lower classes, which were growing like foam.
Soon after, Eduardo del Hierro and Jaime García Parra were the architects of the change from concession contracts to partnership contracts, which transformed the oil industry, the external sector and the national economy, when the country turned from an exporter to an importer of oil, in the midst of the global energy crisis of 1973-1974.
Then Rodrigo Botero, Eduardo Wiesner and Jaime García Parra tried to liberalize the economy and the financial sector. A few years later, Roberto Junguito, Francisco Ortega, Luis Jorge Garay, Oscar Marulanda, and Carlos Caballero, among others, succeeded in rescuing the economy from a deep crisis and steering it toward a long period of prosperity, supported by coffee and oil.
At the end of the 1980s, Luis Fernando Alarcón and María Mercedes Cuellar, inspired by Rodrigo Botero, pioneered trade liberalization. President Cesar Gaviria and a group of economists led by Rudolf Humes, Armando Montenegro, and Juan Luis Londoño took up the baton and expanded it into a profound and comprehensive reform agenda. Together with Francisco “Pacho” Ortega and Miguel Urrutia, they achieved independence for that entity, which brought many benefits to the country.
At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, Juan Camilo Restrepo and Juan Manuel Santos, in the Ministry of Finance, and the DNP team, carried out a deep sanitation of the economy. Jaime Ruiz and Luis Alberto Moreno conceived and implemented the Plan Colombia, which gave excellent results in the first decade of this century.
Roberto Junguito, Alberto Carrasquilla, and Oscar Iván Zuloaga took advantage of the 2000s and international tailwinds to enhance financial viability and further grow the oil export boom. By 2012, with the implementation of the fiscal rule, property reform, and fiscal sustainability in the Constitution, we completed the serious and prudent constitutional and legal framework that took fifteen years and four presidential administrations to build.
In the past decade, it has been acceptable to spend beyond means, and public debt has multiplied to the point of jeopardizing Colombia’s financial and economic sustainability. We need to get back on track.
In the same way that for decades we have fueled football and the potter of economics, a new generation of politicians and economists must restore good pedagogy, seriousness and imagination, to cover all spaces of the productive field, to stop losing and to win again.