Paraguay's Cabbage Growers Arrive at the Continental Table

Somewhere in the Las Mercedes neighbourhood of Asunción, someone's grandmother once sewed a football kit by hand. That detail, documented and passed down, tells you most of what you need to know about Club Libertad. Founded in 1905 by young students who had just watched the Liberal Party overthrow a government, they borrowed their name from the revolutionary slogan in the air — Libertad, freedom — and built a football club on land that smelled of turned earth and vegetable plots. The locals started calling them the Repolleros, the Cabbage Growers, and the name stuck with the affectionate permanence of a nickname that nobody ever bothered to be ashamed of.

Their home ground is called La Huerta. The Garden. In a continent where stadiums wear the names of politicians and corporate benefactors, there is something quietly stubborn about a club that keeps calling its pitch an allotment. The ground sits in Asunción's northern reaches, modest in scale, loyal in atmosphere. On matchdays, the smell of grilled meat drifts in from the roadside stalls on the surrounding streets, and the drumlines start well before kickoff.

For a club with dynastic ambitions, Libertad have had their share of humiliation. The 1998 relegation arrived like a cold front in a Paraguayan winter — sudden, disorienting, and hard to explain to anyone who had not watched the slow collapse from inside. It was the club's first-ever demotion, confirmed on the 4th of October that year. But the supporters did not scatter. The the relegation, in the long view of it, became a founding myth of the modern club: the moment that proved who truly belonged to the badge.

What followed was one of the more remarkable rebuilds in South American football. Libertad climbed back and kept climbing, gathering league titles across the 2000s and 2010s in a country long assumed to belong to Olimpia and Cerro Porteño. Twenty-five national championships in total, a haul that earns them the second nickname El Más Ganador Del Siglo XXI — the Most Winning Club of the 21st Century. The two grandes of Paraguayan football have older pedigrees and louder history books, but the silverware shelf in Las Mercedes has grown crowded on its own terms.

Now they travel to Rosario, to the Gigante de Arroyito beside the Paraná River, a stadium opened in November 1926 and rebuilt and expanded for the 1978 World Cup. The streets outside wear blue and yellow in paint and graffiti, the signage of a different kind of local loyalty. It is Argentine football's way of marking territory. Libertad arrive as the team that Paraguayan neutrals quietly root for — the Cabbage Growers who refused to stay in the ground.