A night that does not exist in Europe
You had to be at the Maracanã on the fourth of November, 2023, to understand what kind of competition the Copa Libertadores actually is. Boca Juniors against Fluminense. A final played in Rio, in front of a crowd that arrived in the morning and was already hoarse by mid-afternoon. Germán Cano scored for Fluminense in the 36th minute. Luis Advíncula equalised in the 72nd, a long-range strike that, in any other competition, would have been the moment. Then extra time. Then John Kennedy, a substitute for Fluminense, hammered a volley past Sergio Romero in the ninth minute of extra time and was sent off for a second yellow during his celebration — booked while still half-naked, half-crying, half-disbelieving.
Fluminense won 2-1. Their first ever Copa Libertadores. Both sides finished with ten men. The Maracanã did not stop shaking until the buses left.
That game tells you almost everything you need to know about this tournament. Two former champions of the world. One of them — Boca — among the most decorated clubs in continental football, with six Libertadores titles, second only to Independiente’s record seven. And yet the contest looked nothing like a European final. It looked like guerra. A war of attrition fought on tired legs at the end of an eight-month campaign that had begun in the Andes and ended on the Atlantic.
Galeano wrote that football is, above all else, a question of geography. He was right. And nowhere is geography more decisive — more cruel — than in the Copa Libertadores.
The format that creates the pressure
The Libertadores is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is one of those mountain stages of the Vuelta where the gradient changes every kilometre and somebody is going to crack.
Thirty-two clubs make the group stage. They are split into eight groups of four, home and away, twelve fixtures across the continent before the knockout brackets even open. The top two from each group go through to a Round of 16 played in two legs. Quarter-finals: two legs. Semi-finals: two legs. Then a single-match final at a neutral venue, chosen by CONMEBOL.
Since the 2022 edition, CONMEBOL abolished the away-goals rule. If two teams are level on aggregate after the second leg, you go to extra time and, if necessary, penalties. No mathematical comforts. No counting backwards. You either win the tie or you do not.
I prefer the new rule. Galeano would have preferred it. The away-goals rule was always a piece of European bureaucracy pretending to be a tactical principle.
What this format produces, more than the Champions League produces it, is fatigue as a structural condition. A Brazilian club fighting on three fronts — Brasileirão, Copa do Brasil, Libertadores — will play more than seventy matches a year. An Argentine club doing the same in the Liga Profesional and the Copa Argentina will play similarly. Add to that the international travel and you understand why the survivors of a Libertadores campaign emerge with a different kind of leg in them. A leg that has been to La Paz at altitude on a Wednesday and to Porto Alegre in the rain on a Sunday and to Quito in between.
Why it is structurally harder than Europe
Here is the heresy. By certain measures — not by quality of football, not by stadium revenues, not by salaries — the Copa Libertadores is a harder tournament to win than the Champions League.
Start with travel. A round trip from Buenos Aires to Lima is roughly 6,400 kilometres. Quito to Asunción, similar. Bogotá to Montevideo, more. The Champions League’s longest fixtures — Lisbon to Istanbul, say — cover ground but with chartered comfort and time-zone forgiveness. CONMEBOL fixtures cross five time zones and four climate systems in the space of a fortnight. From the heat-and-humidity of Manaus to the thin air of La Paz to the coastal cold of Montevideo. There is no European equivalent.
Then altitude. Estadio Hernando Siles in La Paz sits at roughly 3,600 metres above sea level — the home of both Bolívar and The Strongest, two of CONMEBOL’s regular Libertadores qualifiers. FIFA tried, in 2007, to ban international fixtures above 2,500 metres, before being shouted down. CONMEBOL kept the doors open. Anyone who has watched a Brazilian forward, lungs blown after twenty minutes, walking back to a goal kick at El Alto knows what this means tactically. You cannot press at altitude. You cannot run a high line. You cannot do many of the things modern European football is built on. So you adapt — or you lose.
Then refereeing. CONMEBOL referees are inconsistent in a way UEFA referees, for all their faults, are not. Every Libertadores knockout produces three or four moments where the discipline of the match dissolves. Sendings-off after 30 seconds — Botafogo’s Gregore in the 2024 final against Atlético Mineiro, dismissed for a high boot to the face of Fausto Vera with the game barely begun. Yet Botafogo went on to win 3-1 with ten men, their first ever continental title. That is not a Champions League moment. The Champions League protects you from those.
And finally the cultural intensity. A Libertadores away leg in front of an Argentine barra or a Brazilian torcida is not the same animal as an away leg in Munich or Manchester. The pressure is older. It is woven through dictatorships and economic collapses and grandfathers’ funerals. Es otra cosa.
The Brazilian decade
Now to the uncomfortable part, for someone writing this from Boedo. Brazilian clubs have won every Copa Libertadores since 2019. Seven in a row.
- 2019: Flamengo
- 2020: Palmeiras
- 2021: Palmeiras
- 2022: Flamengo
- 2023: Fluminense
- 2024: Botafogo
- 2025: Flamengo (a 1-0 win over Palmeiras at the Monumental in Lima, Danilo’s header in the 67th minute, their fourth title and the most by any Brazilian club in the tournament’s history)
This is not a coincidence. It is structural. Brazil’s top-flight clubs operate on a different financial plane to almost everyone else in CONMEBOL. The Brasileirão champion banks roughly ten million dollars in prize money; the Argentine league champion, around five hundred thousand. The 2024 Paulista state champion alone earned more than the Argentine top flight winner. Between 2010 and 2020, top-tier Brazilian clubs spent roughly twice what Argentine clubs spent in the transfer market.
Add to this the SAF law — Brazil’s 2021 sociedade anônima framework, which let clubs convert into private companies and absorb investor capital — and the gap has widened further. Botafogo’s John Textor era was a direct product of this regime. The 2024 Libertadores, won by Botafogo over Atlético Mineiro in Buenos Aires of all places, was in some sense the Brazilian financial revolution showing up in the trophy cabinet.
Argentina, meanwhile, runs on inflation, broken television deals and the residual genius of academies that still produce more good footballers than the country can afford to keep.
The Argentine response — and it is coming
I will not write off Argentine football. I am from Boedo. San Lorenzo won this tournament in 2014 against Nacional of Paraguay, after eighty-six years of waiting. I have seen what this country does when its back is against the wall.
Boca remain Boca. River remain River. Racing won the Sudamericana in 2024, a smaller trophy but a signal of intent. Estudiantes still produce. The new generation of coaches working in the country — many of them students of the school Bielsa built and Simeone refined into something even more elemental at Atlético Madrid — are doing serious work on small budgets. Whatever you say about Diego Cholo Simeone, and people in Europe say a great deal of it without watching enough of his football, he is the proof that an Argentine coach with conviction can build a culture that survives any market. Atlético’s defensive shape, their refusal to be lectured to about possession orthodoxy, is in some sense a Libertadores idea exported.
The structural problem is real. But Argentine clubs in the Libertadores still travel with something Brazilian clubs sometimes do not have, which is the inherited memory of how to lose three goals down at altitude and somehow get a result back home.
The recruitment trail
Here is what European scouting departments have understood in the last five years, and what mainstream European coverage has not yet caught up to. The Copa Libertadores is now a primary recruitment trail.
Vinícius Júnior left Flamengo for Real Madrid in 2018. He was sixteen when the deal was agreed, eighteen when he arrived. He had already played in the Libertadores. Endrick left Palmeiras for Real Madrid in 2024, having scored in the Brasileirão and featured in continental fixtures. Estêvão — already being called “the next Vinícius” before he turned eighteen — moved from Palmeiras to Chelsea in 2025 in a deal worth a reported £29 million plus add-ons. He scored in the Libertadores against Liverpool of Uruguay in April. Lucas Paqueta returned to Flamengo from Europe in 2026, a sign that the recruitment trail now flows in both directions.
Everyone moves through the Libertadores. Everyone the European clubs care about gets watched there. The scouting argument is straightforward — a player who can hold up the ball at 3,600 metres in La Paz, who can run channels in 35-degree humidity in Manaus, who can survive a barra-brava away leg at the Bombonera in midweek, has been tested in ways the Eredivisie and the Bundesliga simply do not test players. He has been tested as a footballer, the whole footballer. Not just the technical one.
The tactical fingerprints
What does South American football still teach the world?
First, vertical transitions. The Libertadores rewards directness. The pitches are uneven, the press is irregular, the defensive structures are less zonal than European observers assume. A clever forward who runs in behind on the second pass after winning possession will, in a Libertadores game, get more clean looks than he would in La Liga. This is why Brazilian forwards — Vinícius, Endrick, Estêvão, Rodrygo before them — translate so quickly to European football. They have learned to attack space that has not yet been closed. European football, increasingly compressed, increasingly mid-block, has space that hasn’t been closed too — but you have to know how to find it.
Second, individual technical depth in tight areas. Brazilian and Argentine academies still teach the gambeta, the close dribble, the body shape that buys an extra half-yard in a phone box. European academies, for all their excellence, have drifted toward decision-making and combinations. Both are necessary. But it is striking how often the players who break European leagues open in the final third are the ones who came up through South American academies — players who treat a one-versus-one as a problem with three or four solutions, not one or two.
Third, zone-marking with attitude. The traditional South American defensive line, particularly the Argentine version, mixes zonal principles with extreme physical and verbal aggression. It is not the calm geometry of Italian catenaccio and it is not the rigid line of pep-influenced European football. It is something more chaotic and more personal. You see its echoes in Simeone’s Atlético, in Bielsa’s Uruguay, in the way Marcelo Gallardo’s River sides defended in their best years. It is a defensive culture that assumes the ball is going to arrive and the question is what you do with the man who is bringing it.
A view from the south
So is the Libertadores tougher than the Champions League?
Not in absolute footballing quality. The best Champions League teams — Real Madrid, City when they are Manchester City, Bayern when they are functioning — would beat any Libertadores side over two legs in a vacuum. The salary gap alone makes this true. The Champions League is the richest football product on earth. Eso es lo que es.
But by other measures — travel, altitude, refereeing, scheduling, cultural pressure — the Libertadores is a more brutal proving ground. It is harder to survive. It is harder to come through eight months of it without losing somebody to suspension, injury, exhaustion, nervous collapse. The European tournament is a competition. The South American tournament is, still, an ordeal.
European scouts already know this. They have known it for a decade. That is why they are at the Maracanã and the Bombonera and the Monumental in Buenos Aires, week after week, watching the survivors. Not the glamour. The survivors.
The Brazilian clubs are richer now, and that gap is going to keep widening for at least another cycle. The Argentine clubs are wounded, but Argentine football is wounded most often in the years just before it produces something that none of us saw coming. We have been here before. The 1986 Gráficos, in my father’s stack of old magazines, are full of articles about how Argentine football was finished. Six months later, Diego Maradona did what Diego Maradona did at the Azteca.
I do not predict. I only watch. And what I watch, every Wednesday and Thursday between February and November, is the only continental tournament in world football that still feels — to use Galeano’s word — like fútbol. With everything that means. The dust, the mountains, the bus journeys, the floodlights coming on in La Paz, the night the Maracanã shook for John Kennedy.
The Champions League is a beautiful tournament. It is also a tournament that has been carefully engineered to remove almost everything inconvenient about the game.
The Libertadores has not been engineered. That is the whole point.
— Carlos Mendez, Boedo