500 Peruvian Footballers Resign From National Team

July 29th, 2009 | by: Daryl |

José del Solar’s job just got a lot lot harder. The Peru national team coach will be struggling to pick a first XI after 500 players sent letters of resignation to the Peruvian Football Federation over the weekend.

The players will apparently refuse or ignore all callups to the Peruvian national team, in protest at the way Peruvian football is being run.

And they’ve got a point. Peru is a two time Copa America winner, but now arguably (or maybe inarguably) the worst team in South America. They haven’t made it to a World Cup since 1982.

The Peruvian Football Federation are apparently willing to talk and make some changes, but there’s a deadline for all involved. Peru’s next World Cup qualifier is at home to Uruguay on September 5th, which means the players will have to be appeased well before that date for the game to go ahead.

However, looking at the current CONMEBOL qualifying table for World Cup 2010…

…things really couldn’t be much worse. Maybe members of the Peruvian Football Federation could put together a staff XI to face Uruguay?

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http://manu.theoffside.com/ Taylor Rockwell

Anybody else wanna try to become a Peruvian citizen really, really fast?
Jose

Peru is already eliminated, but that doesn’t mean this wouldn’t have disastrous effects on South American qualifying.

Peru’s four remaining opponents (Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia, in that order) would automatically get three points from any match Peru misses. As you can see from the table, the first three teams are all competing for the last two qualifying spots. Peru, while not a great team, still has the ability to play spoiler for any of them. If they miss even the first game against Uruguay, it will be extremely unfair to the other teams if they then had to actually play Peru.
Ernie

In some ways this is good for Peruvian football.It puts pressure on those making the rules to start changing. I dont know much much about Peruvian football but I do follow the Mexican league alot and I wish Mexican footballers would grow some balls like the Peruvuians and stick it up to all those working in the Mexican Federation whos only goal is to make more money rather than improving the game.