Club Atlético Independiente
Club Atlético Independiente is an Argentine professional sports club, which has its headquarters and stadium in Avellaneda, a city of the Buenos Aires Province. The club is best known for its football team, which plays in the Primera División and is considered one of Argentina's Big Five football clubs.
Independiente was officially founded on 1 January 1905 as Independiente Foot-Ball Club, although the institution had been formed on 4 August 1904. Originally from Monserrat, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires city, the club moved to Crucecita in 1907 and then to Avellaneda in 1928. The football team achieved promotion to the Argentine Primera División for the first time in 1911, and has participated there ever since, except for the 2013–14 season, when they were relegated.
Inaugurated in 2009, the Estadio Libertadores de América serves as homeground for the men's football team and, on special occasions, for the women's team. It has a capacity of 49,500. Their fanbase is the third largest in the country.
Over time Independiente has won 16 Primera División titles and 9 first-tier and one second-tier National cups, being the fourth most decorated club on the national stage. They also have the most victories at the Avellaneda derby, the second most important derby in the country behind the Superclásico.
Despite the national success, Independiente is mainly recognized for its continental titles, having won a record seven Copa Libertadores, two Intercontinental Cups, two Copa Sudamericana and the 1995 Recopa Sudamericana.
They also achieved success in now-defunct competitions such as two Copa Aldao, a record three Copa Interamericana, two Supercopa Libertadores and the 2018 Suruga Bank Championship. Over time these achievements made Independiente win the nicknames of "Rey de Copas" and "Orgullo Nacional", the latter after the team won, at the 1984 Intercontinental, the first encounter between an Argentine and British teams after the Falklands War. With 18 FIFA-recognized international titles, Independiente is the most successful club at this category in the Americas, alongside Boca Juniors, and third in the world.
Apart from football, other activities practised at the club are athletics, basketball, boxing, chess, field hockey, futsal, handball, gymnastics, martial arts, Pilates, roller skating, scuba diving, swimming, tennis, volleyball, water polo, and yoga.
Also, the club has its own school, with Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, Elementary, Secondary school levels and Tertiary education.
History
Early years in Buenos Aires
Independiente was founded in 1904 by a group of employees from a luxury fashion store called "A la Ciudad de Londres", located in the Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires. These employees, the youngest and most affected by precarious work in the store, despite paying the club fee, were marginalized from the 1903-founded team Maipo-Banfield Football Club. They were only allowed to attend as spectators.On 4 August of that year, they met in a bar on Perú Street, there they made the decision to reject an invitation to be part of Atlanta and proclaimed the creation of the "Independiente Foot-Ball Club", symbolizing their independence ideals. Rosendo Degiorgi was the one who gave the club its name and was elected as its first president, opening the club's headquarters in his own house. The team's first shirts were white, reused from a Barracas team called Plate United, which ceased to exist in 1903. These shirts featured a blue emblem with white details, very similar to St. Andrew's Athletic Club's emblem. It is unknown whether this similarity was intentional or coincidental.
Fifteen days after the first meeting, on 19 August, they played the first game in their history, a 2–2 tie with Atlanta, on a field located in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
During its short stay in the Argentine capital, Independiente wandered in various improvised fields in the neighborhoods of Flores and La Paternal. They also acted as hosts in Recoleta, where they rented a very expensive field belonging to the National School of Buenos Aires for five months.
The club competed in 1905 in zonal tournaments like the Villalobos Cup, where they faced for the first time Boca Juniors on 27 August, being victorious 4–1 in Flores.
The club joined the AFA in 1906 and was registered to begin competing that year, like neighbors Atlanta, but was disqualified at the last moment for not complying with the strict stadium rules demanded by the then English-directed AFA. Therefore, they registered to compete in the Central Football League. At this championship they faced short-lived teams like Highland Forest, Gutemberg, Presidente Roca, Imperio, Mariano Moreno, General Arenales, La Prensa, Primero de Mayo and others. Among them, the only team that survived over that time is Platense.
Crucecita period
While the team competed at the Central League, a committee composed by club president Arístides Langone and secretaries Carlos Degiorgi, Antonio Díez, Severo Rodríguez and Juan Darnay was seeking to relocate the club at a new field where they could build a stadium. By recommendation from Juan Irigoyen they found an available field in Crucecita East, near Dock Sud. Consequently, they began playing the Central League in Buenos Aires and finished it in Crucecita.In 1907 they left the local tournaments being champions of the CFL summer tournament, ahead of Platense, as that year they were finally accepted to compete in AFA. They were about to be rejected again as the field still didn't comply with all the strict requirements, but they made it by insistence from Carlos Degiorgi.
Starting from the Second Division, their first official match in the AFA leagues was a 1–3 defeat to Comercio in Crucecita. In June of that year, they met Racing for the first time, a match that from the first moment was a derby since their new neighbors were not happy sharing the city. The derby was won by Independiente 3–2, with a goal from Rosendo Degiorgi close to the hour mark. They also met River Plate in a friendly match, where the white IFBC won 3–1 with goals from Julio Mantecón, Juan Irigoyen and Miguel Peluffo.
There was a clear difference in level between the AFA's Second Division and the Central League to which they were accustomed. Their first participation in AFA culminated in the second-to-last place, which relegated them to the 1908 Third Division and led to the departure of some original players, such as Rosendo Degiorgi. With a bad performance at the league, poor stadium condition and the members having to travel on horse to a field far away from their houses, it was a matter of discussion whether Independiente should have continued existing, but passion for football won and further efforts were made.
Soon after, thanks to the incorporation of twelve champion footballers with Racing, who "crossed the street" after an internal conflict of that club, Independiente radically changed its face and once again gained access to the Second Division after being runner-up in the only season of the club's history in Third Division, with an impressive record of 14 victories out of 14 games played, but, unfortunately, they failed to finish the season with a title as they lost the championship final to Banfield 0–3 at the Estadio GEBA. The newcomers also helped to improve the stadium condition.
Independiente adopted, also in 1908, its distinctive red color, about which there are two theories; the "traditional" one is that it was the idea of the president and goalkeeper Aristides Langone, due to his fanaticism for the English team Nottingham Forest, who toured Argentina against local teams and left the Argentine public amazed. On the other hand, it is also true that Julio Mantecón, an important member of the Socialist Party, was the general secretary and forward, for whom bright red symbolized the workers' struggle. The red shirts where accompanied by the club's first red "emblem", and the acronym continued to be IFBC.
In 1909 arrived José Buruca Laforia, the club's first "professional" incorporation, with whom Independiente won its first official title as champions of the Bullrich Cup, beating important teams of the time such as GEBA, Ferro Carril Oeste, Estudiantil Porteño and the second teams of Alumni and San Isidro. The final game against San Isidro was played on 8 September at the Ferro Stadium, and the winning goal was scored by Francisco Viegas. In the league, after playing two more years in the Second Division, in 1911 they were transferred to the newly created Intermediate Division.
During the Intermedia season the club continued its institutional grow, as they settled in another field in the Mitre Avenue, centre of Crucecita. There they built the Estadio Crucecita, made up completely in wood for around 4,000 spectators, and inaugurated with a victory over Estudiantil Porteño. That year the red team fought for the championship until the end along Estudiantes, losing to them at the last date and finishing as runners-up. However, due to the leagues being reorganized again, Independiente was promoted to the Primera División, seven years after its foundation.
On 4 February 1912 the red team won its first friendly international cup, the Anglo-Argentine Association Trophy, by 3–0 over Uruguayan side Universal, with a brace from Enrique Colla and one from Francisco Roldán.
In 14 July, 1912, Independiente debuted in the Primera División against Kimberley, finishing the tournament as runners-up after the red squad decided to withdraw the final versus Porteño claiming an unfairly disallowed goal. Enrique Colla of Independiente was the top scorer of the tournament, with 12 goals. In October, the Reds traveled to Montevideo to play a match abroad for the first time, which resulted in a 2-0 victory for the Uruguayan team River Plate.
In 1914, Julio Mantecón proposed to Spanishize the club name from the original IFBC to "Club Atlético Independiente", since the English language had already fallen into disuse. The motion was approved by club president Juan Mignaburu. Later, other sports began to be added, the first being basketball.
In 1916 Independiente reached the Copa Jockey Club final, which they lost to Rosario Central 1–2. The following year, they reached the final again, beating Estudiantes 2–1 and winning its first title under its current name with goals from Juan Cánepa and Guillermo Ronzoni, thus also achieving its first first-tier title and its first classification to an international tournament; the 1917 Tie Cup. There they lost to Montevideo Wanderers, Uruguayan champions, 0-4.
In relation to the previous achievement, Independiente had reached the final of the 1914 La Nación Cup, but it was cancelled because its rivals Argentino de Quilmes were disaffiliated from the AFA before the final, leaving Independiente "champions by desk".
The Avellaneda team managed to become champions of the Argentine Primera División for the first time in 1922, a tough championship where Independiente finished ahead of River Plate, San Lorenzo and Racing, who finished second, third and fourth respectively, with an impressive record of 97 goals in that season, of which Manuel Seoane scored 55 of them, keeping a record of most goals in a single Primera División championship by one player. In 1923, Independiente finished as runners-up, in part as a result of Seoane and Ronzoni being banned for one year due to an incident with a referee.
In the 1920s, international tours of British teams to Argentina were common, with which Independiente faced for the first team a European club in 1923, beating Scottish team Third Lanark 2–1 at the River Plate Stadium with a Raimundo Orsi brace.
Manuel Seoane returned to the team in 1926 and led Independiente to win its second Primera División title, being nicknamed "Diablos Rojos" since this moment among the football public, after the journalist Hugo Marini of the Crítica journal described as "devilish" the forward line starring Manuel Seoane, Alberto Lalín, Raimundo Orsi, Luis Ravaschino and Zoilo Canavery.
Raimundo Orsi went on to become Independiente's first globally recognized figure, having won the 1927 Copa América and an Olympic medal for Argentina and then moving to Juventus, before winning the 1934 World Cup with the Italian national team, scoring in the Final against Czechoslovakia. Being world champion, in 1935 he returned to Independiente, possibly escaping from the Fascist regime; prior to the World Cup final, Benito Mussolini met the Italian team and demanded them to "win or die".