## Chapecoense Rises Again: A Symbol of Rebirth in Brazilian Football
Friday November 28, 2025
The Chapecoense football club in Brazil has just moved up to the first division this week. Quite a symbol for this club affected in 2016 by a plane crash in Colombia which decimated its team and left 71 dead. This accession to the elite is experienced as a rebirth by this damaged Brazilian city.
In Chapecó, the horns sounded as if time had finally started to turn again this Sunday, November 23, 2025. By dominating Atlético Goianense 1-0, Chapecoense returned to the Brazilian Serie A, validating a 3e place in the ranking, synonymous with a rise in the elite, five years after a relegation experienced as a second pain. Because for this club from the South of Brazil, this return to the first division is akin to a rebirth, nine years after a night that shook up world football.
WAS 🅰️WASH! pic.twitter.com/P2vUTPS1ED
– Chapecoense (@ChapecoenseReal) November 23, 2025
Chapecoense, this name will forever be associated with the memory of a terrible plane crash which decimated a football team among 71 dead. it was November 25, 2016. LaMia Airlines flight 2933 crashed among the Colombian hills near the Bolivian border, while the team, its staff and many accompanying journalists were heading to Medellin in Colombia, where the club was to play in the final of the copa Sudamericana, the South American equivalent of the Europa League. Only six passengers survived the tragedy. Three players, including Alan Ruschel, the captain at the time, who delivered a moving testimony to our Spanish colleagues from the newspaper Marca.
Thrown out of the plane, seriously injured, he offered the rescuers his wedding ring and his father’s number. “I was in a daze he tells Mark. They explained to me that I said I was very cold, very sore in my back and my arm.I had a stick stuck in my arm, several fractured vertebrae…”
One doctor even thought he would never walk again. ruschel defied all predictions: “Normally, it takes two months to walk again. I was up after ten days. »
A few days before the crash, Ruschel also evokes this memory of having missed the semi-final return… because of an untraceable passport.A strange sign,which he understood only too late.And this presentiment from his wife before the last match in São Paulo: “She told me something wonderful was going to happen to me. I thought I would play the final. It wasn’t what we imagined…”
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