After the celebrations in the national team, the Lega Professionisti is back and two veterans of a thousand battles reach 400 matches

Now that the festive madness of the Argentine national team has passed and local football returns with the dispute of the ninth round, and analyzing the data emerging from the Interactive guide published by Clarin of the Professional League Tournament, there are two veterans of a thousand battles who will complete 400 official matches as professionals. One is Uruguayan, creative, packs a punch and plays for Banfield: Brahian Milton German Athaydes. The other, from Entre Ríos de Crespo, has a great performance in the center and has 151 appearances for Tigre, many of them as captain: Leonardo Sebastian Prediger.

Prediger was born just over two months after Argentina were crowned World Champions in Mexico on 4 September 1986. He trained at Unión de Crespo and lower ranks at Colón, where he made his First Division debut in October 1997, against Gimnasia de Jujuy (0-1) with Leonardo Astrada as coach.

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In his first phase as a footballer, his career had a particularity: he played for four clubs abroad but only played 10 games. In 2007 he was in Millonarios de Colombia but didn’t play officially. The blog Sentimiento Embajador of the newspaper El Espectador, in January 2010, explains why he didn’t count for a minute. “In January 2007, a flyer with the appearance of a model and the face of a child landed in Bogota, excited, with the desire to play, to discover a new city, but everything was different. He was injured, for a time he lived alone and to complete his misfortune he got lost and had to walk a couple of kilometers to reach the Millionaires training camp, in the far north of the city”. He stayed five months and returned to Santa Fe ”.

On May 20, 2009, called up by Diego Maradona, he played his only match for the national team, against Panama (3-1). Two months later, Colón sold him to Porto de Portugal for 3,300,000 euros but he didn’t have a place in the team that played in the Portuguese league and barely added three local cup matches. Then he went on loan to Boca for five months and at Xeneize, at the beginning of 2010, he also played just three games.

At the start of the 2010/11 season, aged 24, he was loaned again by Porto but to Cruzeiro of Brazil, with an option to buy for €2m. He resigned at the end of the year without playing any competitive games and returned to the Colón in early 2011, first on loan and then on a three-year contract which expired in December 2013.

In January 2014, his latest adventure abroad arrives: Baniyas from the United Arab Emirates. There he barely played 7 games and in June he returned to his homeland to wear the Estudiantes de L Plata shirt. Up until then, and at the age of 27, he had barely played 164 games, most of them in Colón.

Since then he had more continuity, first at Estudiantes, then at Belgrano de Córdoba, Newell’s, San Martín de Tucumán (in the B Nacional) until moving to Tigre in mid-2017. In seven years he has become a symbol of the team, he is been champion of the Super League Cup 2019, was relegated and promoted, and recently won the captain’s ribbon. Two dates ago he played 151 games at the Matador and on Saturday against Lanús he will play the 400th game of his career.

Of the 399 matches, Prediger played 279 in the league (11 goals), 31 in domestic cups, 11 international, 67 in the Second Division (3 goals), 10 in foreign clubs and one in the Argentina national team. At 36 he is already a veteran of Argentine football.

German brahian He was born in Montevideo on December 23, 1989. He is three years younger than Prediger but has had more continuity in his career and that is why he is also making 400 games against Platense on Sunday.

The midfielder fell short at the Danube, but made his first division debut at Defensor Sporting. After playing for two years at Parque Rodó, he arrived for the first time in Argentina, where he developed a large part of his career, hired by Unión de Santa Fe. In 2014, he spent six months at Arsenal de Sarandí, where he scored 9 goals in 19 games. Due to his good performance, he was hired by Barcelona of Ecuador.

He played one year in Guayaquil and in 2016 he moved to Liga Deportiva Universitaria de Quito and at the beginning of 2017 he moved to Gimnasia La Plata, a club he stayed with until the end of last year, with a spell at Al-Ettifaq of Saudi Arabia in the 2018/19 season.

After playing 9 games at Banfield this year, 8 in the league and one in the semi-final of the Champions Trophy against River, he was one game away from 400. Of the 399 games, 159 of which in the league (27 goals), 43 in local cups (8 goals), 2 from international cups (with Gimnasia la Sudamericana 2017), 37 in B Nacional (6 goals) and 158 in foreign clubs (37 goals).

With a 33 and a half year career in Argentine football, Aleman has a contract until December 2023 with Drill.

Prediger and Aleman, two who reach round numbers, which are always a good excuse to retrace the history of the players who have been competing until today.