Juan Gabriel Valverde Rivera

Juan Gabriel Valverde Rivera has spent most of his career shuttling between Bolivia's biggest clubs, and 2016 marked the pivotal move: leaving Bolívar, where he had already won three domestic titles, for The Strongest, where he added a fourth. He was still there six years later, which says something about how a defender earns trust at that level.

Valverde broke through at Bolívar between 2008 and 2013, part of squads that won the 2009 Apertura, the 2011 Adecuación and the 2012/13 Clausura. A brief spell away — a year at Blooming, then a season and a half at San José — was followed by a return to Bolívar in 2015, before the switch to The Strongest the following year brought a fifth championship, the 2016/17 Apertura, and later the 2020 title as well.

His time at The Strongest ran until 2022, interrupted by a loan to Royal Pari that overlapped his final two seasons there. He won his first cap for Bolivia on 9 June 2012 and has since been capped between fifteen and seventeen times.

In January 2023, Valverde returned to Blooming, the club where he had had only a brief stint a decade earlier. Since rejoining, he has made sixteen appearances without scoring, while picking up three red cards along the way — a detail that stands out against an otherwise steady career built more on winning dressing rooms than headlines.