Football for romantics: Conmebol club tournaments

Alongside Javi Martínez, Fernando Amorebieta had formed a bullet-proof duo of central defenders at Athletic Club de Bilbao back in 2012. Martínez was the good cop; Amorebieta, the mean one: intimidating, aggressive, diehard. The Basque side reached the final of the Europa League that year against Atlético de Madrid, but that well-gained image of Amorebieta was tore down by Radamel Falcao's ruthlessness at one-on-ones.

The Basque-Venezuelan defender never was the same. Got sidelined from Athletic Club during Marcelo Bielsa's last season and was promptly traded to Fulham and Middlesbrough in the second tier of the English league. Even got close to gain promotion to the Premier but, again, individual mistakes prevented a return to his golden years and ended up in Sporting Gijón, where he faced relegation last season.

"This is very important for me because I had never won anything in my life" said Amorebieta after winning the 2017 Copa Sudamericana with Independiente de Avellaneda against Flamengo in Maracaná.

¡Grande, vasco! (Well done, Basque man!), shouted his Argentine teammates and some Argentine reporters who took sides for Independiente after the blatant hostility, typical of South American football, shown by the torçedores of Flamengo before and during the final's second leg in Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, the concept of Vasco in Argentine football is legendary: after all, it was another Basque man, Andoni Goikoetxea, who broke Maradona's leg. 

You always want a Vasco in your camp.

Stained with corruption scandals and diminished by its economic inferiority to Europe's billionaire football, the South American game still has that simple magic that makes football the sport in which anything is possible: the fairy tale, the underdog defeating all odds, the unsung hero.

Besides Amorebieta, this Independiente team is comprised by a bunch of outcasts and forgotten players. Uruguayan left-back Gastón Silva never made much of an impact either with Torino or with Granada and snubbed the chance to gain a juicy wage in Mexico's Liga MX in order to join El Rojo. Playing for Peñarol de Montevideo, Nicolás Domingo even lost the 2011 Copa Libertadores to Neymar's Santos. Independiente's coach himself, Ariel Holan, started out his career in field hockey and had been fairly, (and also unfairly), criticized for Independiente's poor form in the first part of the year.

In sum, Independiente are a group of mortals playing for a club whose relegation to Argentina's second tier had not been portrayed in the same dramatic proportions in which River Plate's descent into the underworld was. The lifting of this Copa Sudamericana is indeed a required feel-good story that vindicates football in times when winners elsewhere are always the same.

Sometimes, just sometimes, a Conmebol title represents much more than a Uefa title. It happens when football remembers its unpredictable essence and hands players like Fernando Amorebieta a second chance to win something.