How One Angry Post-Match Rant Captured Everything About South American Football Fandom
When the final whistle blew in Palmaseca at Estadio Deportivo Cali and the scoreboard read 2–0 for Once Caldas, it was another frustrating night in what has been a rough stretch for El Verde. The team is outside the playoff positions early in the Liga Betplay Dimayor season. Things aren’t working. Everyone knows it, even after the club invested heavily in reinforcing the squad. But one guy made sure everyone felt it.
Santiago, a Cali native who’s been living in Madison, Wisconsin for nearly a decade, became one of the more recognizable faces in Colombian football online seemingly overnight. After the loss, he unloaded in front of a camera outside the stadium in a fiery, unfiltered post-match rant against the club’s manager that spread across social media in a matter of hours. He demanded the manager go. blaming him for the team’s poor results, He said what thousands of Cali supporters were already thinking, except he said it in English, which, in the context of Colombian football, made the whole thing feel somehow even more absurd and perfect at the same time.
The interview was done with Bryan Jaimes of ZPortyZ Colombia, an online multimedia and social media platform that covers Deportivo Cali, Colombian football and the Liga Betplay Dimayor. Shortly after, manager Alberto Gameiro resigned, replaced by former Cali and Venezuelan national team manager Rafael Dudamel.
Santiago didn’t cause that. But in the strange theater of football fandom, the timing was everything. And just like that, a meme was born, going viral on social media with Colombian football fans within Colombia, and in the Colombian diaspora abroad.
This Was Not a Casual Trip
Santiago didn’t stumble into that moment by accident. He had flown in from the United States specifically for this game. Not only that, the original match date got shifted about a week and a half before kickoff, and he changed his flight and paid extra to make it work. He also called in sick to his job. In his words, he played Ferris Bueller. He was texting his boss about a “soccer injury” while boarding a connecting flight from Bogotá to Cali.
He hadn’t been to a Deportivo Cali game in quite some time, despite attending more than 40 in his life.
“Your hometown team isn’t something you choose,” he told me. “You follow your dad’s team, your family’s team. That’s just how it works.”
For Santiago, it goes even deeper than that. His family has supported the club for generations. Relatives are involved with the club. His uncle in Wisconsin owns a collection of roughly 70 Cali jerseys. The team is a constant topic in family group chats and daily calls. He listens to Cali podcasts every day, follows every rumor, and debates tactics with anyone who cares to listen. He grew up going to matches at Palmaseca as a kid, wearing the jersey under his school uniform, and could rattle off the entire starting lineup for you at any given moment. While idolizing the memory of former club stars Rafael Santos Borré and Hárold Preciado.
Somewhere along the way, the family got season tickets. He was at a big win over Millonarios. He was present for both title runs in 2015 and 2021. And then he moved to Wisconsin for work.
A Few Beers, Some Guaro, and a Camera
The viral moment itself had a few contributing factors that Santiago is pretty open about. The first interview he did that day, before the match, in Spanish, with a bit more calm, actually made a lot of sense. He was measured. Reasonable. Less emotional.
The post-match version was something else. A few beers, some shots of guaro (the local drink), and a 2–0 loss to Once Caldas will do that.
When he heard someone speaking English near him outside the stadium after the game, he turned around and locked in. By then, he says, English just came more naturally — After years of daily life and work in Wisconsin, English is often where his brain goes when he’s running hot.
What followed was football fandom in its most unfiltered form. The tactics didn’t make sense (three defensive midfielders at home — why?). The lineup was wrong. The manager needed to go. He said all of it, expletives included, and Bryan Jaimes had the camera rolling. Colombian social media did the rest.
Rival fans roasted him, especially supporters of crosstown rival América de Cali. Cali fans embraced him, even if they didn’t understand his words in English, they understood his passion, and felt it themselves.
Journalists in Colombia referenced the clip. His Wisconsin friends who have never watched a Colombian football match in their lives shared it in their stories. He told his family not to defend him in the comments, which tells you everything you need to know about how it spread.
He takes it all in stride. “I know if Cali loses again, I’m probably still going to be the meme,” he said, laughing about it. He’s not wrong. But he also doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, he seems proud of it — not in an embarrassing way, but in the way that only real supporters understand. He traveled thousands of miles to see a bad performance and cared enough to scream about it. That’s not something that needs defending.
This Is What Football Looks Like in South America
There’s a version of football that gets covered endlessly, the Premier League, the Champions League, the big European clubs with their massive budgets and global audiences. That version of the game is polished. Packaged. Marketed within an inch of its life. And then there’s this.
South American football is a different animal entirely. It’s raw, emotional, and deeply personal in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up with it. It’s also, frequently, completely unhinged in the best possible way. The memes alone are worth following the continent’s football for. Every big loss, every bad refereeing decision, every manager who outstays his welcome, it all becomes content, folklore, something to laugh about even when it hurts. Every team in Colombia has its own content creators, interviewing fans outside the stadium before and after games.
The passion doesn’t stop at the stadium gates. It follows you home, into the group chat, into the comments section, across the ocean. The fans know their teams are not “world class”, they don’t have the budget to build a squad of superstars, but there’s still an expectation of effort, and fans still know wins and losses matter, trophies matter, the Clásico Vallecaucano between América de Cali and Deportivo Cali matters.
And now Santiago is part of that tradition. A Wisconsin resident, thousands of miles from Cali, who flew back to watch his team lose, said exactly what was on his mind in English, and woke up famous. In Colombian football circles, that’s not embarrassing. That’s immortality.
Bleeding Green From 3,000 Miles Away
This is what Colombian and South American football culture actually looks like from the inside.
It’s not just attending the match. It’s the daily podcasts and the WhatsApp arguments with your cousins. It’s the uncle with 70 jerseys in his closet and the grandmother who can sing every club anthem. It’s flying across a continent, changing your flight, lying to your boss, and still going — even when you already suspect the result isn’t going to be good — because that’s what supporters do.
Santiago lives in Madison, Wisconsin. There’s a USL club there, Forward Madison, and he went to one game and wasn’t impressed. Nobody around him follows the Colombian league. Most of the Colombians he has met locally don’t even pay attention to domestic football; they’d rather talk about Real Madrid or Barcelona (Santiago’s other love, having driven 16 hours to see Barcelona play Napoli in a friendly in Michigan) or something else entirely. He gets it. The level of play is different. But he’d rather watch Cali play than almost anything else, even at this point in the season, even from thousands of miles away through an internet stream.
That’s not something you explain rationally. It’s just what it is.
And when you care that much, and you fly all the way there, and the team plays like that, sometimes the camera catches you at exactly the right moment.
What’s Next for Santiago’s fandom, and Deportivo Cali
As for what’s next, Santiago has cautious hope about the new manager and the rest of the season. He believes the players aren’t the problem, they have quality in players like Emanuel Reynoso and Juan Dinenno, and better management of that group should show. He doesn’t want to put himself in the position of another angry interview. He’d rather not have to.
He’s also planning to react to his own viral video on a new page he’s putting together, which honestly sounds like a great idea to capitalize on his sudden fame, in two languages. He will be following Colombia in the World Cup this summer, hoping for at least a quarterfinal for Luis Diaz and company, though he has yet to secure tickets to attend a match in person.
If you’ve never heard of Deportivo Cali, maybe you have now. And if you’re a Colombian football fan who has been following this story, you already know that feeling of watching your team from far away, caring too much, and not being able to help yourself with the emotions. Santiago just happened to have it all captured on camera.
Main Photo Credit: Smartframe Images
