On Saturday night, Cali will stop for the Clásico Vallecaucano. América de Cali host Deportivo Cali at the Pascual Guerrero on Saturday, November 7 at 8:15 p.m. ET, live on Win Sports — second against third in the Liga BetPlay Dimayor, with the number two seed in the upcoming finals series on the line. The top two seeds carry an “invisible point” into the cuadrangulares, a tiebreaker that could decide a group in the finals series.
Three months ago, the ground underneath this city shook hard enough to kill 154 people and damage homes, businesses and infrastructure across the Valle del Cauca. That this match matters at all, let alone this much, is the story of one of Colombian football’s strangest and most moving seasons.
The Clasico Vallecaucano Defines Cali
The clásico is Colombia’s oldest regional derby, and it has always been divided by social class. América de Cali, founded in 1927, are la pasión de un pueblo, a team of the least favoured classes, historically made up of working-class players — bricklayers and construction workers among them. Deportivo Cali, founded in 1912, are considered the club of the establishment: the azucareros, the sugar men of the Valle del Cauca. Nearly 310 league meetings in, Cali hold the edge, 112 wins to 100. Both fanbases wear the city and the region with a pride that borders on the territorial. This year, the city needed them both.
The history is heavy on both sides. América have won 15 league titles, five in a row in the 1980s, and lost three consecutive Copa Libertadores finals between 1985 and 1987 — the glamour years, aided by drug cartel money — and later survived 14 years on the US Treasury’s Clinton List and five seasons in the second division, something their rivals never stop reminding them about. Deportivo Cali have ten titles, the most recent in 2021, and after some years in the wilderness, are coming back and making a serious title challenge.
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Neither club is a stranger to suffering. But neither had lived a season like this one.
The Morning the Ground Shook
The night before the earthquake, América beat Atlético Nacional 1-0 at the Pascual Guerrero — Yeison Guzmán 40 seconds into the second half, and a 93rd-minute Nacional equaliser ruled out by VAR for handball. It felt like the start of a glorious, normal season. At 7:34 the next morning, football stopped mattering.
On the morning of August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake off the Chocó coast devastated the region. Cali counted 154 dead and more than 1,500 injured; as late as September, some 20,000 families were still out of their homes.
Dimayor suspended football briefly, and clubs, supporter groups, and players across the country threw themselves into relief efforts. When the league returned, the two clubs’ disasters diverged. Deportivo Cali’s stadium in Palmira was inspected and cleared; their first home match back doubled as a relief drive. América’s Pascual Guerrero was structurally sound but scarred — lighting, masonry, the western stand closed — and the club went into exile.
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A plan to host matches in Bogotá collapsed when their own fans fought their way onto the El Campín pitch; city after city refused them; they played “home” games in Palmira, in front of their own supporters only, and did not have every stand of the Pascual open again until October.
The Football Has Risen When Cali Needed It Most
A city that has buried its dead needs somewhere to put its hope, and Cali put it in football. The remarkable thing is that the football has risen to the level that supporters demanded. This is not just a nostalgic, feelgood story; the results are real and stellar. With two rounds left in the regular season, América sit second on 35 points with 31 goals scored, Deportivo Cali third on 33 with the league’s meanest defence — ten conceded in 17 matches — and Cali are unbeaten in 11. Both are already qualified for the cuadrangulares, the league finals. Atlético Nacional lead the table, because Nacional almost always loom. But they loom over a season being authored in Cali.
The players have earned it. América’s Yeison Guzmán, a number ten on loan from Brazil’s Fortaleza whose goals — ten in the Clausura, 22 in all competitions — triggered the clause that made América buy him, is the league’s top scorer. Behind him, 21-year-old Jhon Tilman Palacios scores winners and José Cavadía, also 21, starts in midfield. Their manager, David González, once kept goal for Deportivo Cali.
Across town, Rafael Dudamel — the coach who won Cali’s last title in 2021 — refused to resign during a September crisis and has built the run of the season: Peruvian Pedro Gallese commanding the league’s best defence, Eduard Bello, cast off by Atlético Nacional, scoring six, and, last Sunday, 40-year-old Carlos Bacca, signed as a free agent after Junior let him go, scoring his first Cali goal on his first start. “All of Colombian football celebrated Bacca’s goal,” Dudamel said. He was not wrong.
América de Cali’s Money Crunch
And yet. América’s season is also being played against a backdrop of debts unpaid. Juan Fernando Quintero said publicly that América did not pay his full salary in his first six months; he left for River Plate, and these days is back at Independiente Medellín. Duván Vergara, sold to Racing, spent September claiming the club still owed him his percentage of the transfer. In September the current squad’s August wages went unpaid; the players’ association issued an ultimatum, the sporting director admitted on the radio that “it is not a lie, América owe the month of August,” and the squad has since skipped a pre-match concentration in protest — and kept winning anyway. The club blamed the earthquake, and no doubt it harmed their finances, but it’s also part of a larger pattern of being a club on the brink, yet still they are winning.
Will a Club from Cali Win a Title This Year?
Which leaves December, and the possibility that has the whole Valle del Cauca dreaming. In the Copa Colombia, América — who have never won the competition — are in the semifinals, against Internacional de Bogotá, with the return leg at the Pascual. In the league, if the cuadrangular draw is kind and puts Cali in Nacional’s group rather than América’s, both Cali clubs can win their groups and meet in the final: a Clásico Vallecaucano for the title, finals football played in Cali. This moment is now in frame, but Atletico Nacional, who knocked Cali out of the Copa and lead the league, will have their say, because they always do, and the rest of the contending teams are capable of rising to the occasion, such as Santa Fe and Millonarios from Bogota.
Whatever December brings, Cali has already had a great season of football. A city struck by tragedy in August will argue about football in December, loudly, in red and in green, in a stadium that shook and stood. Unpaid, exiled, and still standing. That is not a bad definition of the place itself.
Extra Time Notes
Cali’s impossible seasons reach a hinge point this week. On Saturday, November 7 under the lights, América de Cali host Deportivo Cali at the Pascual Guerrero, live on Win Sports, with the Liga BetPlay’s top two seeds and the punto invisible on the line — América second on 35 points, Cali third on 33 and unbeaten in 11 matches, both chasing Atlético Nacional’s 36. On Tuesday, América visit Internacional de Bogotá in the first leg of the Copa Colombia semifinals, a competition they have never won. The cuadrangular draw follows the regular season’s close on November 12; a kind draw could yet set up the first Clásico Vallecaucano league final, in the city the earthquake could not stop.
Main Photo Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck via Soccerfest Daytona/USA TODAY NETWORK and Reuters Connect
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