Alberto Spencer

Alberto Spencer
Alberto Spencer
Personnel
Surname	Alberto Pedro Spencer Herrera
birthday	December 6, 1937
place of birth	Ancón , Guayas Province ,  Ecuador
date of death	November 3, 2006
Place of death	Cleveland ,  USA
position	attack
Juniors
Years	station
	Club Los Andes
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
	Everest Guayaquil
	Barcelona SC Guayaquil
1960-1970	Club Atlético Peñarol
1971-1972	Barcelona SC Guayaquil
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
	Uruguay	5 (1)
	Ecuador	11 (4)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1979	Liga de Portoviejo
1 Only league games are given.

Alberto Pedro Spencer Herrera (born December 6, 1937 in Ancón , Guayas Province , † November 3, 2006 in Cleveland , USA ) is considered the best Ecuadorian football player in history.

As a striker for Peñarol Montevideo and Barcelona SC Guayaquil , he is still the record scorer of the Copa Libertadores with 54 goals between 1960 and 1972 . His nickname was due to his headball strength Cabeza Mágica (Eng. "Magic Head").

He was born as one of 13 children to a working class family in an oil refinery near Guayaquil . His father Walter Spencer was from Jamaica (his grandfather was English), his mother América Herrera was from Ecuador.

Player career

Club soccer

Spencer first played for the Los Andes club in Ancón. In 1955 he made his debut in Ecuadorian football at the highest level for Everest (Guayaquil) , where his older brother Marcos also played. His achievements as a goalscorer (101 goals in official games for Everest) brought him to the Ecuadorian national team , for which he played at the Copa America in 1959 in his own country (all games took place in the Estadio Modelo Alberto Spencer Herrera , which is now named after Spencer ). In 1960 he moved to Uruguay to Peñarol Montevideo , a top South American club that had become aware of him when Spencer was on loan in 1959 for Barcelona SC Guayaquil against Peñarol. He played for Peñarol until 1971. During this time, during which Spencer had to take a break for around six months due to a meniscus operation in November 1964, the team was Uruguayan champions eight times (1959 - the final was played in March 1960 -, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968). Spencer himself was Uruguay's top scorer in 1961 and 1962, and in 1968 and 1969 . He scored a total of 326 goals in 519 league games.

He won the Copa Libertadores three times in 1960, 1961 and 1966, with Spencer being the top scorer of the competition in 1960 and 62. With 54 goals scored between 1960 and 1972, he is still the top scorer in Copa Libertadores history.

In 1961 and 1966, Spencer and his teammates also won the World Cup against Benfica Lisbon and Real Madrid . In 1960 they lost the final against Real Madrid. In the seven finals in which Spencer took part, he scored six of Peñarol's twelve goals, two against Benfica and four against Real Madrid.

In 1971 he moved back to Ecuador and played for top club Barcelona in Guayaquil for two years. Here he was once Ecuadorian champion and scored six goals in 17 matches of the Copa Libertadores, which together with the already existing 48 (in 70 games) for Peñarol make him the record scorer in this competition.

National teams

Alberto Spencer played more or less simultaneously for the national teams of Uruguay and Ecuador. In 1959 he made his debut in the Ecuadorian national team, since 1962 he played unofficial, since his debut on May 6, 1964 official internationals for Uruguay (he scored the first ever goal for Uruguay against England at Wembley Stadium in 1964 ). In 1965 he played again for Ecuador, in 1967 again for Uruguay, for which he appeared in the Celeste on July 30, 1967, and again until 1972 for Ecuador. In total, he played eleven official internationals for Ecuador (4 goals) and five for Uruguay (1 goal), although he was never a Uruguayan citizen.

Because of his father's English ancestors, he was also traded as a candidate for the English national team, but this never materialized.

Coaching

In 1979 he was the coach of the Ecuadorian club Liga de Portoviejo for around a year .

diplomat

After retiring in 1973, he returned to Montevideo , where he has lived ever since. In 1982 the then Ecuadorian President Osvaldo Hurtado appointed him Consul General of Ecuador in Uruguay, an office that Spencer held until his death.

Spencer was married to a Chilean woman with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He died of heart failure in 2006 while he was recovering from heart surgery that included four bypasses.

Web links

Commons : Alberto Spencer  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Alberto Spencer in the database of National-Football-Teams.com (English)
• Se nos fue la magia de Alberto Spencer ( Memento of January 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), obituary in the daily newspaper El Universo (Guayaquil; Spanish)
• Special supplement ( memento of January 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) of the El Universo newspaper about Alberto Spencer (Spanish; only partially available)
• CONMEBOL article on Alberto Spencer ( Memento of April 8, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (Spanish)
• Article in El Diario / La Prensa New York about Spencer ( Memento from December 30, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (Spanish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Luciano Álvarez: Historia de Peñarol , 1st edition 2005, 527
2. ↑ Statistical data on international appearances in the Uruguayan national team at www.rsssf.com , accessed on December 15, 2012
3. ↑ Best footballers never to play in a World Cup , The Observer, June 4, 2006.
4. ↑ Un Forlán manaba vibró con Uruguay (Spanish), accessed on May 20, 2013