PARIS'24

This summer's Olympic Games marks the 100th anniversary of Uruguay's football victory at the 1924 Olympics, a tournament where the beginning of the sport's globalisation can be traced

- Tim Vickery

There was great regret in Uruguay earlier this year when the nation’s Under-23 side failed to qualify for the Paris Olympics. It meant that Marcelo Bielsa’s men had missed out on the chance to celebrate a centenary of huge significance – the Paris Olympics of 1924, when little Uruguay arrived unknown and unheralded and swept their way to the gold medal.

It is a key moment in the history of this little country, established in the 19th century as a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina. As Ondino Viera, coach in the 1966 World Cup, put it: “Other nations have their history. Uruguay has its football.”

But even in Uruguay’s absence, the celebration of the centenary of 1924 should go ahead in Paris. That year’s Olympic tournament is important to everyone; Uruguay’s gold medal is effectively the birth of the modern globalised game. It is when football showed its potential as the world’s number one spectator sport, and the moment when a World Cup became inevitable.

Initially the Olympic football tournament was contested by club sides. After it was taken over by national teams in 1908, Egypt in 1920 became the first participant from outside Europe. The North Africans were back again in 1924, along with the United States, but it was Uruguay who went off with the glory and captured the public imagination.