South American Championship of Champions


The South American Championship of Champions was a football competition played in Santiago, Chile in 1948 and the first continental-wide clubs football tournament in South America. Hosted and organized by Chilean club Colo Colo with the aid of then president of CONMEBOL Luis Valenzuela, it was played between February 11 and March 17. Brazil's Vasco da Gama won the competition after earning the most points in the round-robin tournament.
The tournament was the first tournament ever played to determine the South American club champion, and thus is seen as the precursor to the Copa Libertadores and is considered, along with the Copa Aldao, as an important stepping stone towards its creation.

Overview

Since the early 1910s, Argentine and Uruguayan clubs disputed the Copa Aldao, a tournament played between the national champions of each nation's top national leagues. The great success of this tournament gave birth to the idea of a continental competition.
In 1929, the head executives of Nacional de Football|Nacional], Roberto Espil and José Usera Bermúdez, idealized a competition between the national champions of each CONMEBOL member. After analyzing the geographical distributions and distances, Espil devised a project in 1946 which also included the runners-up of every national league. However, it was in 1948 that Colo-Colo's head executive, Robinson Alvarez Marín, and CONMEBOL president, Luis Valenzuela, finally set into motion the precursor to the Copa Libertadores: the "South American Championship of Champions", the first ever tournament played in order to determine the champion club of South America.
The Vasco da Gama team, called Expresso da Vitória, led by figures such as Augusto, Barbosa, Danilo, Friaça, Ademir and Chico, came away with the trophy after a deciding 0–0 draw against River Plate on the last round of matches. The Argentine squad had arrived in Santiago with most of players of legendary team La Máquina such as José Manuel Moreno, Ángel Labruna and Félix Loustau, with the addition of rising star Alfredo Di Stéfano.
Vasco da Gama had already defeated Lítoral and Emelec 1–0 each, thumped Nacional 3–1, trashed Municipal 4–0 and tied 1–1 with the host club Colo-Colo. The competition was as successful financially as it was on the field: the average public attendance per game was 39,549 spectators and the tournament generated a gross of CLP 9,493,483.

Participants

The aim of the organizers was to invite the reigning champion club of the most important competition of each South American country. The tournament aimed at featuring only one club, the reigning champion one, from each country, a model that would be followed in the early editions of "champions cup" tournaments such as the European Cup and the Copa Libertadores. The 1948 tournament featured 7 clubs/countries, the same number of Copa Libertadores inaugural edition. Most notable in the 1948 competition were the host Colo-Colo, the Di Stéfano-inspired River Plate, the Atilio García-inspired Nacional, and Vasco da Gama, the respective representatives of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, four countries whose clubs would go on to become the dominant powers of South American football, aggregately winning all Copa Libertadores from 1960 to 1978 and over 90% of the Copa Libertadores from 1960 to the present day.
CountryTeamQualification
River PlateArgentine Primera División|1947 Primera División] champion
Litoral1947 La Paz champion
Brazil|1889refn|No national club championship existed then in Brazil so the champion of Rio de Janeiro Federal District, Vasco da Gama represented the country. They were given preference over Palmeiras, the São Paulo state champion, since Rio won the 1946 Championship of State Teams and thus was considered the champion of the stronger league.|group=note|name=nochampbraCHIECUrefn|No national club championship existed then in Ecuador so Emelec, the Guayaquil Championship champion of 1946 was given preference over the Pichincha Championship champion as the 1947 South American Championship matches were held all at Emelec's stadium and having Emelec's as the cornerstone of Ecuador's national team squad.|group=note|name=nochampecu

Notable players

Players who were considered big names at the time participated in the tournament: Labruna, Loustau, Norberto Yácono, Di Stefano, Moreno and Nestor Rossi for River Plate; Ademir Menezes, Chico and Moacir Barbosa for Vasco da Gama; José Santamaría at the age of 19 was part of the Nacional squad, which Luis Volpi had joined a year earlier after a short spell with Inter Milan.

Match results

Complete list of matches played in the tournament:
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Top scorers

List of the competition top scorers:
RankPlayerClubGoals
1

Legacy

Inspiration for the creation of the UEFA Champions League

The tournament was the first ever continent-wide club football competition based on the "champions cup" model and intended to determine the club champion of a continental area, and thus was the inspiration for the creation of the European Cup in Europe. In interviews to the Brazilian sports TV programme Globo Esporte in 2015 and Chilean newspaper El Mercúrio in 2018, French journalist Jacques Ferran said that the South American Championship of Champions was the inspiration for the European Cup: "How could Europe, which wanted to be ahead of the rest of the world, not be able to accomplish a competition of the same kind of the South American one? We needed to follow that example."

Recognition by CONMEBOL as a precursor to Copa Libertadores

Vasco da Gama, though always considered themselves as the first South American club champions, had never asked CONMEBOL for recognition of that honor. However, in 1996 a CONMEBOL book, 30 Años de Pasión y Fiesta was discovered by Vasco da Gama executives. This book told the story of the Copa Libertadores, stating that the tournament of 1948 was its antecedente. According to the CONMEBOL Press Release of April 29th, 1996, Vasco da Gama's executives asked CONMEBOL's Executive Committee for the recognition of the aforementioned honor, and the acceptance of Vasco da Gama as a participant at Supercopa Libertadores, then a CONMEBOL competition to which were admitted only the previous Copa Libertadores champions. Supercopa Libertadores' rules, set by CONMEBOL, did not admit the participation of winners of other official CONMEBOL competitions, such as Copa CONMEBOL, but only the winners of Copa Libertadores, so that Vasco da Gama participation in Supercopa, based on its 1948 conquest, would result, in practice, in CONMEBOL entitling equal status to the 1948 championship and the Copa Libertadores.
In April 1996, CONMEBOL's Executive Committee recognised the meaning and importance of the 1948 competition as the precursor to the Copa Libertadores, or a "Libertadores in illo tempore", thus Vasco da Gama participated at the 1997 Supercopa Libertadores. As stated by the CONMEBOL Executive Committee, Vasco da Gama's request for Supercopa participation was accepted "in recognition of the sporting achievement and its historical truth". In 2014, CONMEBOL website congratulated Vasco da Gama on the club's 116th anniversary, stating: "Vasco won the first tournament of clubs at a continental level in 1948, which would 12 years later become the Copa Libertadores which they won in 1998, coinciding with the centenary of their founding". The 1948 South American Club Championship has been regarded as a precursor to Copa Libertadores, and Vasco da Gama regarded as the 1948 South American club champions, also at the FIFA website.