Paraguayan fans build stadium for beloved club

Asuncion (AFP) – Fans of Paraguayan football club Cerro Porteno have taken up tools to help build a new stadium for their beloved team in a project seeking to destigmatize hardcore supporters’ groups.

“I’m not doing it for the money. I just want my name to be recorded as a Cerro fan who built the stadium,” one of them, Rodrigo Millan, told AFP.

He is one of a group of 70 members of an organized fan club working as unskilled day laborers on the site of the new $15 million, 43,000-seat venue in Asuncion.

While other workers were busy laying the turf on the pitch during a recent visit by AFP, a group of worker-fans lined up there to sing the team’s anthem.

“When I die, let my casket be painted blue and red,” they sang.

“They bring a lot of joy,” said the project’s chief architect, Alfredo Angulo, who trained the fans so they could join the 500 workers on the site.

“They lift the spirits of the staff and they infect even the ordinary laborers with their love of the club.”

They work for a daily wage, dressed in the team’s colors, as assistant builders, cleaners, security guards or even tending the turf.

The initiative “seeks to break the often negative view that society has of the fans’ organizations,” said the club’s general manager Fabian Bruzzone.

“I know many football stadiums in the world,” said Paraguay international Nelson Haedo Valdez. “But I have never seen one where the fans take part in the building like this.”

Cerro Porteno was founded in 1912 and has won 31 Paraguayan league titles.

One of the fans working on the site, Julio Aguero, said their workers’ group includes members of two rival fan clubs.

Members of the rival bands, “Comando” and “La Plaza,” have previously come to blows on the terraces.

“We have got to know each other in this job,” Aguero said. “Here we are friends.”