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About 5 years ago, the Ecuadorian men's football team had a brief intersection with the Chinese men's football team: both national teams reached the FIFA ranking of 70th place. At that time, the situation of the Ecuadorian men's football team was somewhat similar to that of the national football team. The cheering slogan of their fans is "We have a dream"; the slogan played by national football fans on the sidelines is "If the heart is there, the dream is there" - also expressing their expectations for the national team with self-deprecation.
However, in 2022, everything has changed. The national football team is still implementing the "protective reception" tactic, "with face" to bid farewell to the Top 12 in Asia; and Ecuador has given birth to the most expensive national team in history, and successfully overpowered South American football powers such as Colombia, Chile and Paraguay, successfully advanced to the Qatar World Cup, and began to focus on becoming a first-class team in South America.
To explain the sudden rise of Ecuadorian football, you can certainly simply and crudely paraphrase the "great man theory", that is, one or more heroes single-handedly achieve an era. It is simple to name in Capier and Moises Kesedo, two stars who play in Europe's top five leagues, but in fact, the progress of Ecuadorian football is largely a product of the times.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Ecuadorian football began to undergo drastic changes.
Ecuador's most famous star, former Manchester United star Antonio Valencia, is the beneficiary of this wave of reforms. His mother was a hawker of takeaway drinks at the stadium, and his father was responsible for selling the bottles to a waste recycling station in downtown Quito. Valencia's job was to collect these drink bottles for his father and, in his spare time, play barefoot in the open spaces around the stadium.
One day in 1996, a scout who was buying drinks from Valencia's mother outside the stadium stumbled upon Valencia's unusual football talent and took him to a new training base funded by the Football Association, where Ecuador's most famous star in history was born.
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Also in 1996, COMOS made a major administrative change.
Take the World Cup qualifiers as an example: before that, the ten member states of South America were divided into 2 to 3 groups, and according to the number of groups, the first and second places in the group directly advanced. Such a format has a small number of competitions, high promotion efficiency, and rough and simple. Beginning in 1996, the format suddenly changed to the marathon home-and-away two-legged points system between the ten member states today.
It turns out that such a marathon home-and-away format is more in line with the distribution characteristics of THE MEMBER STATES OF COMOFA. The South American Football Association has only 10 teams in total, which makes the original national team have a short play cycle and a long interval - such as Brazil, Argentina and other traditional giants can maintain their status through high-quality international friendly matches and practice instead of competitions; but in a small country like Ecuador, there is no high-quality game to play for a long time, and the level is naturally difficult to improve.
In 1996, COMOS began to follow Europe's lead, arranging international friendly matches for its member states in a packaged format, so that the member states could not only play high-quality matches frequently, but also stabilize their incomes. Due to the increase in the number of games, the frequency of national team training has also been improved, and the run-in and combat effectiveness of the natural national team have also been improved. The income brought by the adult national team can help the Football Association hire better coaches and develop youth training.
This shift in management has been effective in raising the bar for small football countries like Ecuador. Before 1996, Ecuador had won only five games in its long World Cup qualifier history. Since then, they have improved rapidly: in 2002, like China, they qualified for the world cup for the first time in history; four years later, in Germany, they successfully reached the world cup knockout round; now they have participated in the World Cup for the fourth time.
They have progressed so fast that many people have the impression that Ecuador is still the kind of weak team that competes purely to make up numbers and avoid fiasco. Even the rest of THEMAS is not ready for their rise. In 2004, Ecuador withdrew from that year's Copa America for a bizarre reason: the host hotel they had originally booked refused to stay at them on the grounds that they were hosting the Argentine team. "If even the hotel doesn't respect our booking, then do we still have to compete?" The president of the Ecuadorian Football Association at the time sighed – to be honest, in South American football, respect is a luxury.
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At the same time, the country's economy has undergone great changes since the mid-1990s. In the eight years from 1999 to 2007, Ecuador's GDP doubled, and has since maintained an average annual growth rate of 4%. The strong economic performance was quickly revealed at the football level: those talented Ecuadorian talents no longer needed to cash in their talents by staying abroad, while Ecuador's local leagues began to attract foreign aid from other countries in South America, especially for Argentina. In 2008, Ecuadorian club Quito Sport University won the Copa Libertadores, ushering in the highlight of national football.
That year's victory plunged all of Ecuador into a carnival, and even the originally unrelated league rivals such as Valley Independence expressed congratulations to the sports university team - all of which was like the historian Tony Bergeron. As Judt wrote in the book – football unites the nation. Many of today's new generation of Ecuadorian players are motivated by the trophy to embark on a career path – as were Incapier and Moises Kesedo, who played for Valley Independence at the time.
It is worth mentioning that the winning Quito Sports University team, with local players as the team, proved that Ecuador's youth training began to gain. The collective gush of a new generation of Ecuadorian players began to attract attention from the traditional football powers. Taking valley independence as an example, since 2008, the club has gradually established contacts and cooperation with German, Belgian and Argentine clubs, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent delivery of high-quality young players.
The famous British football writer Tom Watt once said: "Football is a straightforward sport, as long as you continue to invest, you will definitely have gains." But he also added: If you don't get the harvest for a long time, then it's very likely that you invested in the wrong direction from the beginning.
Obviously, this sentence vividly depicts the difference between the national football team and the Ecuadorian men's football team.
The End