Cerrito

Joel Burgueño started out at Cerrito, and before he left for the wider world of Uruguayan football he had already given the club its most productive spell: top scorer of the Segunda División in 2010-11, four years into a career that began there in 2007. Two decades earlier, a boy growing up around the Cerrito de la Victoria district of Montevideo would have known nothing else — the club was founded on 28 October 1929, though it took until 1934 to formalise itself, competing first in the amateur Centenario and Comercial leagues before joining the Uruguayan Football Association in 1945 and starting, as clubs from the neighbourhood do, at the bottom, in the fourth tier.

It climbed steadily rather than quickly: the third division by 1948, the second by 1951, professional status the year after. The real turn came from 1998, a run that carried Cerrito to the Segunda División title in 2003, won in the final against Rentistas at the Centenario, and with it a first-ever place in the Primera División the following season. The club built its own ground during that climb, opening Parque Maracaná in 2008, a stadium holding 8,000 that has been home ever since. Top-flight football returned in 2009 and again in 2011, then vanished after relegation in 2015, all the way down to the amateur third tier. Cerrito won its way back up in 2020, only to drop out of the Primera once more in 2022; it currently plays in the Segunda División Profesional.

The players who wear yellow and green for Cerrito tend to be its own — Mario Larramendi came through the same years as Burgueño before moving on to Brazil — but the club's best-known face today never kicked a ball for it. Maxi Araújo, the Uruguay international, grew up idolising Burgueño and Héctor "Bam-Bam" Foletti from the stands rather than the academy; he came through Montevideo Wanderers instead, yet it is Cerrito he is known to support.