Nickname: La Roja (The Red One)
Manager: Marcelo Bielsa
Previous World Cup apps: Eight
Best finish: Third place, 1962
Key players:
Claudio Bravo (captain)
Jorge Valdivia
Humberto Suazo
Claudio Maldonado
Chile booked their place at their first World Cup in 12 years by finishing second in the South American qualifiers, just a single point behind Brazil.
Coach Marcelo Bielsa has succeeded in moulding a young and inexperienced pool of players – only two or three of the regular squad is over the age of 30 – into the strongest side that Chile have had since the late Nineties, when Marcelo Salas and Ivan Zamorano terrorised defences the world over.
Bielsa’s achievement is all the more amazing for the fact that, when he took over the job, six of Chile’s top stars, including captain Jorge Valdivia, had just been banned for 20 matches each for going on a boozy bender during the 2007 Copa America.
Five of the six culprits later had their bans commuted to 10 matches after signing a letter of apology and most have been reintegrated into the squad, but the episode provided Bielsa with an ideal opportunity to blood a younger generation of players.
Chile finished third in the 2007 Under-20 World Cup, and the likes of Arturo Vidal, Carlos Carmona and Mauricio Isla have all progressed from that youth side to the senior set-up under Bielsa’s watch.
The results have been spectacular. A team that finished seventh out of 10 sides in qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup has been transformed into one of South America’s most feared attacking sides. No team won more games in the 2010 qualification campaign and only Brazil notched more goals.
To top it all, Monterrey forward Humberto Suazo’s tally of 10 strikes made him the continent’s top scorer, ahead of more celebrated stars like Brazilian Luis Fabiano, Diego Forlan of Uruguay and Argentina’s Sergio Aguero.
All this success has turned Bielsa into one of the most popular men in the country – an almost unthinkable honour for an Argentinian. When he was spotted in a Santiago theatre recently, he received a spontaneous round of applause from the rest of the audience that drowned out the actors’ curtain call.
The 54-year-old will be hoping for more success at South Africa 2010 than he enjoyed in his only previous visit to the World Cup finals. He took his native Argentina to the 2002 tournament as one of the favourites, only for them to be eliminated at the group stage.
Chile’s World Cup history is even less glorious. Although they finished third when they hosted the tournament in 1962, the achievement was overshadowed by their participation in the infamous Battle of Santiago, a group match against Italy which is regarded as perhaps the most violent game in football history.
But the most shameful incident in Chilean football history came in qualifying for the 1990 World Cup, when goalkeeper Roberto Rojas claimed to have been hit by a firework thrown from the crowd in order to get a match against Brazil called off.
The keeper even went to the lengths of cutting himself with a razor blade hidden in his glove to make the incident more convincing. When FIFA later uncovered the truth behind the episode, Chile were disqualified from both the 1990 and 1994 tournaments.
The exciting 1998 side of Zamorano and Salas went some way to atoning for that scandal. The Chilean people are now looking to Bielsa and his exciting young side to create a legacy which consigns it to history for good.
