Wednesday, February 4, 2009

The Other Barcelona... and it's not in the United States or Spain!


Now that it looks like Barcelona FC along with Brightstar's Marcelo Claure will be awarded an MLS team here in Miami, the word "Barcelona" is no longer just a city in Spain.
But before there was talk of Barcelona in MLS there was another team created some 25 years after the original team was established.

On May 1, 1925 Eutimio Pérez, a Catalan immigrant from Barcelona, Spain founded Barcelona Sporting Club in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Contrary to popular belief Eutimio named the team after the city and not the team. It was years later that the crest which is almost a carbon copy of the one used by Barcelona FC, was adopted.

Barcelona SC is arguably the most successful team in Ecuadorean Soccer history having won the national tournament a record 13 times (Hence the stars around the crest), a distinction it shares with Nacional of Quito. Barcelona has also disputed the final of the Copa Libertadores twice but was unsuccessful each time.

Barcelona S.C is by far the most popular team in Ecuador and in 1987 they inaugurated "El Monumental"stadium playing versus Barcelona FC! This game ended with the home team winning 1-0. Barcelona SC invited many South American football celebrities, such as Pele, to the inauguration. Pelé was so astonished, he compared the stadium to the famous Maracana in Rio de Janeiro. The Estadio Monumental has a capacity of 89,930 spectators, making it at that time the second largest stadium in South America in terms of capacity. Today it remains the largest stadium in the South American West Coast.
For more on Barcelona SC go here: http://www.bsc.ec/
Here is a video of the stadium at almost capacity. I hope to see our Miami Ultras as passionate and numerous as the ones cheering on this Barcelona team!


3 comments:

MLSR said...

Hey Ed, do you mind if we republish this on MLS Rumors? It's very well written/researched. We will link back to the original of course, which should send you a little bit of traffic.

Uncle Ed said...

No prob, go ahead and republish whenever you guys want. I love MLSR! You guys rock!

Unknown said...

i am a very big fan of the ecuadorean barcelona the one mentioned in the article. people dont know that in the last 12 years we havent one a championship due to the bad administrators stealing money from the team. today we have a deficit of almost 17 million dollars thanks to the last team president eduardo maruri who stole money like no other president did and he is spending it like he did nothing.