Sport
Palestino carries the map on its shirt through another Chilean season
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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There is a football club in Santiago that has played under the Palestinian flag for a hundred and six years, and it is not a gesture. It is a first-division club with a wage bill, a stadium and a place in the table.
Club Deportivo Palestino was founded in August 1920 by Palestinian immigrants in the south of Chile, at Osorno, and moved north to the capital. It plays at the Estadio Municipal de La Cisterna, an 8,500-seat ground in the working-class south of Santiago, and it is the only club in world football whose crest, colours and name belong to a people rather than a city.
The record#
Two Chilean championships, in 1955 and 1978. Three Copa Chile trophies, in 1975, 1977 and 2018. The last of those took the club into the 2019 Copa Libertadores, where it met River Plate and Internacional and where, for a few weeks, South America's biggest competition had a Palestinian name in it.
This season Palestino has been in four competitions at once — the Primera División, the Copa Chile, the Copa de la Liga and the Copa Sudamericana — and its league campaign places it eleventh. Guillermo Farré took over as manager on 26 April from Cristián Muñoz. Nelson Da Silva leads the scoring with seven goals across all competitions, five of them in the league.
That is an ordinary mid-table year, and saying so is part of respecting the club. Palestino is not a symbol that occasionally plays football. It is a football team that also happens to carry a country.
The shirt that the federation banned#
In January 2014 the club printed the squad number 1 as the outline of historic Palestine.
The Chilean football federation ordered the design withdrawn and fined the club, saying it opposed any form of political, religious, sexual, ethnic, social or racial discrimination. Palestino's answer was published and has not been retracted since.
For us, free Palestine will always be historical Palestine, nothing less.
Club Deportivo Palestino, January 2014
Why a Santiago club matters from Ramallah#
Chile holds the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, built by families who left Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour in the last Ottoman decades and the years after.
For their great-grandchildren, the club is where an inherited identity became a weekly public act — a stadium in which the flag is normal, sung rather than argued about. Palestinians who cannot travel to Chile and Chileans who have never seen Bethlehem meet each other in the same shirt.
The team plays on. The fixture list is the point: every week the league prints the word Palestino in a country nine thousand miles from Palestine, and nobody has to explain it.
