Venezuela 2

 

Salomón Rondón (West Bromwich Albion, ENG)
vs. Paraguay (1:2) | WC Qualifiers | 2016 in Paraguay

 

Venezuela is one of those teams that are very unlucky to be located in a continent bursting with strong national teams - South America. They are not terrible and have never been, but never did manage to qualify for a World Cup. The current qualification campain is quite exemplatory for that. They just drew against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and still are probably missing out again, currently being placed 8 in the 10 team league format South America is typically using. Even for the blown up World Cup, only 6 teams directly qualify, while the seventh placed team has to go into an intercontinental play-off.

Otherwise, Venezuela is of course a bit of a special country on the continent, too. Full of natural wonders and incredibly beautiful, it is suffering from an autocratic regime under Maduro for absolute ages now. While having one of the largest oil exports in the world, they are also by far the poorest country in South America, giving a hint that the money is not exactly even distributed in the country that Madura claims to be socialist. Internationally, they are so isolated that their national airline today only has a handful of international flights, including some terribly long hauls to Moscow or Tehran, both capitals of close allies of Venezuela.

But back to football. Venezuela quite frequently has quite boring template shirts. It got a bit better recently, but until 2020 or so, they basically had a deep red template as a home shirt and a random second colour template as an away. For the 2018 World Cup qualifier campaign, that random colour was hi-visibility vest yellow. While the shirt is quite boring, it does work quite well with the deep red number print, at least. That said, I snapped up this matchworn shirt from the World Cup qualifiers for 80€ when I had the chance, adding an away shirt to the home matchworn shirt i previously owned.