La Liga: Colombian football, kick it!… (Meluk tells him)

In the imagination of Colombian soccer is that here we play exquisite soccer, of the highest technical quality, with fantasy players who should have us in the final of a World Cup, with what is “required” to be champions of the America Cup.

More data

In the League you see many rather bad games, rather regular ones and many very short ones, in which you play not to play.

On Saturday they faced Junior de Barranquillathe leader of the semi-final quadrangular A and of his group in the Libertadores, and the Atlético Bucaramangathe revelation team of the League, the first of the all against all.

The match, quite poor, ended 0-0. Stingy in football and wide in fouls: 36! Bucaramanga committed 17 and Junior, 19. A real exaggeration. I asked Sofascore, a statistical portal associated with Sports of TIME, the average number of fouls per game in the five major European leagues in the current season that is about to end.

Look: in Spain’s ‘LaLiga’ 13.1 fouls are committed per game. In the French Ligue the average is 12.5. In the Italian Serie A, the country of old catenaccio and iron tactics, an average of 12 fouls are committed per game.

The German Bundesliga has a record of 11.3 and, of course, in the Premier League English is the one in which the fewest fouls are sanctioned: 11.1 per game. It seems obvious: teams hit less, pretend less, want to play more, players know how to score without committing an infraction and referees do not blow the whistle for any contact in the game. I already told you that the 36 fouls committed in Bucaramanga-Junior on Saturday are a true and terrifying exaggeration.

In our League, which today is in full semi-final home runs, 4,488 fouls have been committed in 196 games played, according to official data from the League. Dimayor and in the absence of last night’s game between Tolima and Once Caldas.

The average is alarming: 22.7 fouls per game!, very high even compared to other mirrors such as the Brazilian League, with 13.2 average fouls per game, and the Argentine League, with 12, 1.

These two data were also provided by Sofascore. In the semi-final home runs they continue to hit just as evenly in general.

Look: the Junior 2, Millionaires 1 on the first date had 21 fouls (10 from Junior, 11 from Millos), Pereira 1, Bucaramanga 0, totaled 25 fouls (14 from Pereira, 11 from Bucaramanga) and Millos 1, Pereira 0 on Saturday recorded another 21 fouls (14 from Millos, 8 from Pereira). In the group B matches, there were 22 fouls in Santa Fe 1, Tolima 0 (14 from Santa Fe, 8 from Tolima), and 23 fouls were called in Once Caldas 2, La Equidad 0 (9 from Once Caldas and 14 of La Equidad).

On Sunday, there were 21 fouls in Equity 0 (11), Santa Fe 2 (10). More than 22 fouls per game on average is a fact that makes the beaten Colombian League hurt, which they sell the idea that it has games full of great technique, full of skillful players, with the neural marrow of a carousel of passes. But not so much: it is playing kicks.