Chacarita · History

Club Atlético Chacarita Juniors play their football in Villa Maipú, in the General San Martín district of Buenos Aires Province, and have competed in the second tier of Argentine football, the Primera Nacional, since 2018. The club was founded in Buenos Aires on 1 May 1906. It won the 1969 Metropolitano and has spent 61 seasons in the Argentine top flight.

Founding and name

The club was founded by a group of friends from the Chacarita neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Its name combines the neighbourhood with “Juniors”, a reference to how young the founders were. Máximo Lema was its first president. The colours are red, white and black, and the black is behind the nickname “El Funebrero” (the undertaker), because the Chacarita Cemetery was nearby. After an institutional crisis, the club was refounded in 1919. It won the División Intermedia in 1924 and played its first Primera División season in 1925, finishing fourth.

Between the top flight and the second tier

Chacarita were relegated for the first time in 1940 and won promotion back in 1941 as Primera B champions. They went down again in the late 1950s and returned on 5 December 1959, when a win over Talleres de Remedios de Escalada also brought another Primera B title. Renato Cesarini and Ernesto Duchini played for the club in the 1930s. Goalkeeper Isaac López, who played until 1941, made 343 appearances, the most by any Chacarita player in the professional era.

The 1969 Metropolitano

The club’s only top-flight title came in the 1969 Metropolitano. On 6 July that year, at Racing’s stadium, Chacarita beat River Plate 4-1 in the final. Horacio Neumann scored twice and Ángel Alberto Marcos was captain. The same year the team reached the quarter-finals of the Copa Argentina. In August 1971 they played the Joan Gamper Trophy in Barcelona, beating Bayern Munich 2-0 in the semi-final and losing the final 1-0 to FC Barcelona.

Relegations and returns

Chacarita went down again in 1979, played in Primera C in 1981 and won promotion back to the top flight in 1983. In 1986 they dropped into the newly created Primera B Nacional, and in 1989 into Primera B. They won that division in 1993-94 and went back up to the B Nacional in 1994. Promotion to the top flight came in 1999, followed by five straight seasons there until relegation in 2004. They went up again in 2009 but were relegated a year later, in 2010. In 2012, after 18 years out of the third tier, they fell to Primera B Metropolitana. Ramón Lentini was the team’s top scorer in 2013-14 with 18 goals.

Grounds and the move to San Martín

The club’s first ground was at Lacroze and Álvarez Thomas, in 1907. In 1932 it opened its stadium at Humboldt and Padilla, in Villa Crespo, which it left in 1944-45 to move to San Martín. The Villa Maipú stadium opened on 8 July 1945 and was used until 21 October 2005, when it closed for rebuilding. The new stadium, at 351 Gutiérrez Street, was partially reopened on 30 January 2011. The club’s headquarters remain in Villa Crespo.

Rivalries

The club’s oldest derby is against Atlanta, its Villa Crespo neighbour. The first official match between them was played on 13 November 1927, and Chacarita won it 2-0. Chacarita first met Tigre on 3 April 1927, and that rivalry grew sharper after crowd incidents in 1983. There is also a derby with Nueva Chicago, with more than 50 meetings across the top flight and lower divisions, and lesser rivalries with Platense, Quilmes, Almirante Brown, Los Andes and Morón.

Last spell in the top flight

In 2015 a 1-0 win over Villa Dálmine on the final matchday took Chacarita back to the Primera B Nacional. Rodrigo Salinas scored 30 goals in 42 games during that promotion campaign. The club played in the B Nacional in 2015 and 2016-17, went up for the 2017-18 top-flight season and, after being relegated at the end of it, returned to the second tier in 2018.