South American Championship Of Champions

Hosted and organized by Chilean club Colo Colo with the aid of then president of CONMEBOL Luis Valenzuela, it was played between February 11 and March 17. Brazil's Vasco da Gama won the competition after earning the most points in the round-robin tournament.

South American Championship
of Champions

Official poster
Founded	1948
Abolished	1948; 76 years ago (1948)
Region	South America
Number of teams	7
Related competitions	Copa Libertadores
Last champions	Vasco da Gama
Most successful club(s)	Vasco da Gama (1 title)

The tournament was the first tournament ever played to determine the South American club champion, and thus is seen as the precursor to the Copa Libertadores and is considered, along with the Copa Aldao (also named "Copa Río de La Plata"), as an important stepping stone towards its creation.

Since the early 1910s, Argentine and Uruguayan clubs disputed the Copa Aldao, a tournament played between the national champions of each nation's top national leagues. The great success of this tournament gave birth to the idea of a continental competition.

In 1929, the head executives of Nacional, Roberto Espil and José Usera Bermúdez, idealized a competition between the national champions of each CONMEBOL member. After analyzing the geographical distributions and distances, Espil devised a project in 1946 which also included the runners-up of every national league. However, it was in 1948 that Colo-Colo's head executive, Robinson Alvarez Marín, and CONMEBOL president, Luis Valenzuela, finally set into motion the precursor to the Copa Libertadores: the "South American Championship of Champions", the first ever tournament played in order to determine the champion club of South America.

 

The Vasco da Gama team, called Expresso da Vitória, led by figures such as Augusto, Barbosa, Danilo, Friaça, Ademir and Chico, came away with the trophy after a deciding 0–0 draw against River Plate on the last round of matches. The Argentine squad had arrived in Santiago with most of players of legendary team La Máquina such as José Manuel Moreno, Ángel Labruna and Félix Loustau, with the addition of rising star Alfredo Di Stéfano.

Vasco da Gama had already defeated Lítoral and Emelec 1–0 each, thumped Nacional 3–1, trashed Municipal 4–0 and tied 1–1 with the host club Colo-Colo. The competition was as successful financially as it was on the field: the average public attendance per game was 39,549 spectators and the tournament generated a gross of CLP 9,493,483.

The tournament was the first ever continent-wide club football competition based on the "champions cup" model and intended to determine the club champion of a continental area, and thus was the inspiration for the creation of the European Cup in Europe. In interviews to the Brazilian sports TV programme Globo Esporte in 2015 and Chilean newspaper El Mercúrio in 2018, French journalist Jacques Ferran (recognised by UEFA as one of the founding fathers of the UEFA Champions League, together with Gabriel Hanot) said that the South American Championship of Champions was the inspiration for the European Cup: "How could Europe, which wanted to be ahead of the rest of the world, not be able to accomplish a competition of the same kind of the South American one? We needed to follow that example."

 

Vasco da Gama, though always considered themselves as the first South American club champions, had never asked CONMEBOL for recognition of that honor. However, in 1996 a CONMEBOL book, 30 Años de Pclub asión y Fiesta (30 Years of Passion and Party) was discovered by Vasco da Gama executives. This book told the story of the Copa Libertadores (played from 1960 on), stating that the tournament of 1948 was its antecedente (predecessor). According to the CONMEBOL Press Release of April 29th, 1996, Vasco da Gama's executives asked CONMEBOL's Executive Committee for the recognition of the aforementioned honor, and the acceptance of Vasco da Gama as a participant at Supercopa Libertadores, then a CONMEBOL competition to which were admitted only the previous Copa Libertadores champions (with Supercopa Libertadores not admitting the participation of winners of other official CONMEBOL competitions, such as Copa CONMEBOL, but only the winners of Copa Libertadores, so that Vasco da Gama participation in Supercopa based on its 1948 conquest would result, in practice, in an equalisation between the 1948 championship and the Copa Libertadores.).

In April 1996, CONMEBOL's Executive Committee recognised the meaning and importance of the 1948 competition as the precursor to the Copa Libertadores (though CONMEBOL has not come to regard it as an official CONMEBOL competition), thus Vasco da Gama participated at the 1997 Supercopa Libertadores. As stated by the CONMEBOL Executive Committee, Vasco da Gama's request for Supercopa participation was accepted "in recognition of the sporting achievement and its historical truth" (as written in the 1996 CONMEBOL press release on the aforementioned recognition). In 2014, CONMEBOL website congratulated Vasco da Gama on the club's 116th anniversary, stating: "Vasco won the first tournament of clubs at a continental level in 1948, which would 12 years later become the Copa Libertadores which they won in 1998, coinciding with the centenary of their founding". The 1948 South American Club Championship has been regarded as a precursor to Copa Libertadores also at the FIFA website.

The aim of the organizers was to invite the champion of the most important competition of each South American country. Most notable in the competition were the host Colo-Colo, the Di Stéfano-inspired River Plate (La Máquina), the Atilio García-inspired Nacional, and Vasco da Gama, the respective representatives of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, four countries whose clubs would go on to become the dominant powers of South American football, aggregately winning all Copa Libertadores from 1960 to 1978 and over 90% of the Copa Libertadores from 1960 to the present day.

Country	Team	Qualification
Argentina	River Plate	1947 Primera División champion
Bolivia	Litoral	1947 La Paz champion
Brazil	Vasco da Gama	1947 Campeonato Carioca champion
Chile	Colo-Colo	Host and 1947 Primera División champion
Ecuador	Emelec	1946 Guayaquil Championship champion
Peru	Deportivo Municipal	1947 Primera División runner-up
Uruguay	Nacional	1947 Primera División champion

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