Pope’s club on the verge of a double miracle

Most pontiffs wait until the next life before they start performing miracles but Pope Francis just might be about to carry out one while he is still with us.

Tomorrow, in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, Club Atlético San Lorenzo de Almagro will play the first leg of the final of the Copa Libertadores, South America's version of the Champions League.

After decades of financial ruin and relegation struggles many fans of the Buenos Aires club thought it was a day they would not live to see. Of the traditional "Big Five" teams in Argentina, San Lorenzo is the only one never to have won the continent's most prestigious trophy and few in this football mad city let them forget it.

For decades they have had to endure the taunts of rivals that the club’s initials actually stand for Club Atlético Sin Libertadores de America (Club Atlético Without a Libertadores of America).

But this season divine intervention looks set to deliver what had for so long seemed unobtainable.

“This is the pope’s doing,” says a smiling Roberto Moreno, who like many fans at the club’s headquarters believes having a San Lorenzo supporter in the Vatican – and one who never misses a chance to be photographed with the club’s colours – must explain this season’s historic run to the final.

"The pope was always a San Lorenzo fanatico," says Roberto's father Leonardo as they stand by the clubhouse entrance which is decorated with a large mural of a smiling Francis. "His father played basketball for the club so he grew up here."

American coronation

Now only Paraguayan minnows Nacional stand between the side and its coronation as American champions. But even if divine help is not enough to end their Libertadores jinx, Saints fans are still set to witness a miracle, but one that is all of their own doing.

Today the clubhouse where they play a wide range of sports is on a city block in the traditional Boedo neighbourhood alongside an enormous Carrefour.

But despite being neighbours, many San Lorenzo fans refuse to set foot in the supermarket which is located on the site of the club’s legendary Gasómetro stadium.

In the 1970s the country’s military dictatorship orchestrated San Lorenzo’s eviction from the ground where its football teams had played since 1916 and several dodgy deals later flipped it to the French chain for a large profit.

It was a grievous blow that ripped the heart out of Boedo, once a haunt of tangueros and poets that explains San Lorenzo fans' reputation as the bohemians among the city's football supporters.

For more than a decade the club’s football team was homeless until in 1993 its new stadium opened in the Baja Flores neighbourhood. Far away from their spiritual home, built on a disused rubbish dump and alongside a large shantytown, it is fair to say fans never took to the new ground.

“It is like eating in your aunt’s house,” says Jorge Rodríguez, who remembers going to his first football match at the Gasómetro with his grandfather. “You just don’t feel at home. Playing there is not the same. The old Gasómetro was legendary, a mystical place, all made out of wood and very beautiful. You would never say that about the current stadium.”

For decades, fans’ hopes of bringing football back to Boedo seemed an impossible dream facing as they did a giant multinational and a string of governments uninterested in their plight. But despite the odds stacked against them some never gave up hope of a return and over the years their campaign gathered strength.

In 2012 an estimated 100,000 fans crowded into the Plaza de Mayo to demand that a city law that restores property illegally appropriated during the dictatorship apply to them. The city’s legislature duly ordered Carrefour to negotiate.

Earlier this year an agreement was signed that will see the club build a new stadium on the site of the original one with a smaller supermarket included as part of the project. For many fans the return of football to Boedo is an even more emotional prospect than a possible Libertadores.

“The Libertadores, you win it and it would be great but then it is part of history,” says Jorge. “But we will be coming back here for ever. It seemed impossible but we have managed it.”