The formative years of Colombian football have seen the national sport leap through some of the most eclectic set of hurdles imaginable. Peter J. Watson writes an origin story unlike any other in football.

If you think of Colombia, you probably first think of drugs, and then you might think of violence. You might well have seen Narcos, or you might at least be aware of the notorious Pablo Escobar and the campaign of terror he waged against the Colombian state in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You might be less familiar perhaps with the 60-year internal conflict between the state, left-wing guerrillas such as the FARC, the EPL, the ELN and the M-19, and murderous right-wing paramilitary death squads, a conflict that has led to over 5 million displacements in the country, countless murders and disappearances, and a variety of human rights abuses. You probably won’t know about La Violencia, The Violence, a period of political barbarity between Liberal and Conservative following the assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April 1948 that led to over 2,00,000 deaths in around a decade.

Colombia is a country with a history of violence, a culture of experiencing the aftermath of trauma and tragedy, a country that has been deeply divided since independence, whether due to politics, class, religion or race, or, of course, by its own geography. Football, since La Violencia, has been a counterpoint to the other national sport of bloodletting. Colombia is a country that has struggled to become a united nation. But, somehow, football manages to bring them together, particularly when the Selección, the men’s national team, come together to play.

‘Football is the only thing that unites us’. I heard this phrase, or a version of it, from everyone I interviewed during my fieldwork trip to Colombia last year. I heard it from politicians, academics, leaders of NGOs, football fans and sports coaches working in the camps where the FARC guerrillas have demobilised to following the historic peace deal in the country signed between President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC leader Timochenko. I even heard it from the FARC sports spokesperson, alias Walter Mendoza. People who don’t even like football still think it matters.