Ecuador

Alberto Spencer never played a World Cup for Ecuador. He scored for nearly twenty years, from 1953 to 1972. Ecuador reached a World Cup in 2002, and 2006 before La Tri got past the group stage, finishing top of a pool that included Poland and Costa Rica before losing in the round of sixteen. Enner Valencia has since overtaken everyone on the scoresheet, and Iván Hurtado set the appearance mark at 168 caps.

Continental football has been harder to crack. Ecuador's only real run at the Copa América came at home, finishing fourth in 1959 and again in 1993, both times with the crowd behind them rather than against. Matches against Peru, the Clásico del Pacífico, carry a weight the results alone don't explain.

Home advantage in Quito is not a figure of speech. The Estadio Olímpico Atahualpa held the team for generations at altitude that visiting sides never got used to, before Ecuador shifted its games to the Estadio Rodrigo Paz Delgado, La Casa Blanca, from 2020, and increasingly to Guayaquil's Estadio Monumental for the qualifiers that matter most. The Atahualpa itself is being phased out.

The federation behind all of it, founded in Guayaquil in 1925, joined FIFA the following year and CONMEBOL the year after that — paperwork that came together before there was much of a team to speak of, and long before there was a Spencer to wear the shirt.