Atlético Nacional

The 35-year-old has signed a contract that runs until June 2027.

Atlético Nacional will be the 14th club of a career that has taken Rodriguez to 12 countries.

So, Matt, would you like to thank James again for everything he's done for Minnesota United? Oh, God, you had to.

From Yahoo Sports, Inter-Miami star Lionel Messi has reached a preliminary agreement to become the majority owner of El Dense, a soccer team that plays in Spain's Segunda division.

Yeah, without a doubt.

First and foremost, I'm going to point to the Brazilian teams because they've been dominating South American football since 2018 when River beat Boca in the Copa Libertadores final.

Ever since then...

It's been Brazilian winners.

There's one Ecuadorian team who have ever won it, by the way, which is Liga de Quito.

They're still alive in this year's tournament.

But Colombian teams, Atlético Nacional, they're not in it this time around.

But it's usually between the Brazilians and the Argentines, I would say, that are your powerhouses.

Yeah.

Atletico Nacional.

Then he went to Genk.

Then he went to Crystal Palace.

In particular, Escobar was aware of the value of using sport for his own propaganda purposes.

Beginning in the early 1980s, he had begun offering extensive financial support to Medellín's football team, Atlético Nacional.

In a few short years, the club was transformed from a mid-table performer in the Colombian National League to title contenders.

foreign players were brought in on high-paying contracts, and some of Colombia's best footballers played here in the 1980s.

as the footballing authorities began to crack down on the cartel's influence in Colombian football.

Colombian teams, for instance, were banned from the Copa Libertadores for a time in the early 1990s.

Whatever the vagaries of the cartel's wealth and the sporting success of Atlético Nacional were, Escobar's trafficking operations were having a frightening impact on the city of Medellín itself.

By the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Medellín had become statistically the most dangerous city on earth to live in, when measured according to violent incidents and the number of homicides being committed.

But you mentioned someone there who I really like.

So I'm currently living in Colombia, as all our listeners will know, and I'm a season ticket holder for Atlético Nacional where, uh, Dani Muñoz is a, a bit of a legend.

He's a wonderfully gifted right back and who had a really strong World Cup until his kind of legs run out.

He's very intense in the way he plays.

And then we've got Arojo.

as cover at the back, and Sam Martin as a young kid from Atletico Nacional, who I think may come over next summer as well.

And Guesson, well, Pete.

Sorry? And Guesson as well.

So it's the kind of, the book is the incredible sort of stranger than fiction true story of Pablo Escobar's love of and obsession with football and how he and his friends and rivals in the Colombian cocaine cartel underworld co-opted the beautiful game for their own purposes and how that impacted Colombian football domestically and internationally in that period.

Yeah, to be honest with you, Mark, obviously we've done a lot of different episodes and we've touched upon South America quite a lot, but particularly the story of Atletico Nacional and Pablo Escobar, we seem to circle back to that quite often.

I don't know how, but...

I suppose it's just a really interesting story.

And I think the book is my attempt to kind of make sense of that and try to explain that, I think, to the wider world so that people who might maybe dismiss Colombia as not being quite ready in that tournament and not good enough on the pitch and kind of bottling it under normal footballing pressure understand that actually this is the most extraordinary set of circumstances where they and their families' lives were being threatened and that nobody should have to try and do anything under that kind of pressure, let alone perform at the highest level on the biggest stage.

So I think it's my attempt to explain that.

And then I think in doing that, you get into all of that Atletico Nacional story.

And I think that's a much less well-known story outside of kind of deep dive football circles.