Union La Calera

The Estadio Municipal Nicolás Chahuán Nazar holds 8,353. It sits in La Calera in the Valparaíso region, and it has been the home ground of a club whose nickname came off the factory floor: the Cement Men.

The club that plays there was assembled rather than founded in the ordinary sense. On 26 January 1954 three sides from the town — Cóndor, Calera Comercio and Tifón — were folded into one, Club de Deportes La Calera. Fifteen months later, in April 1955, Deportes Melón came in as well, and the merged side took the name it still carries, Unión La Calera. The red shirt with white shorts dates from that period, and the second nickname, Rojos, follows from it.

Most of what followed happened below the top flight. The club won the second division three times — 1961, 1984, then a long gap before 2017 — and twice had to climb out of the third, in 1990 and again in 2000. That second promotion from the third tier says more about the two decades before it than any of the titles do: a club that had been in Primera B in 1984 was, six years later, playing its way back up from the level beneath.

The 2017 promotion is the one that led somewhere. Three seasons after it, in 2020, Unión La Calera finished second in the Primera División — the highest the club has ever placed, and the first time an 8,000-seat ground in a cement town had a title race running through it in the closing weeks.