Edwin Cardona lives a sweet moment in his career. At 32 he is captain and creative axis of Atlético Nacional, league champion, Cup and Super League.
It is like a second youth, a rebirth after having a bad time in América de Cali and not shine in its last stage in Argentina.
Always in the midst of controversies, he learned to speak on the court with his fantastic stuck, his leadership and his ingenuity at the time of the pass, which make him the player with the most influences for goal in Colombian football today. Today adds 7 goals and 6 assists in 14 games of the Betplay I-2025 League.
Will your revenge arrive in the Colombian National Team?
Since last semester we talk about Cardona as a creative solution for a team that lives a pothole of results such as the Colombian National Team. Experience, good entry into the group and solution in attack, it certainly offers. But the past seems to condemn it.
According to him, he does not play thinking obsessively on that possible return to the tricolor, he works daily for his team and his own, but he knows that football always reveals.
“I fulfilled the dream of playing U-17, U15, Sub-20, elders. Play Copa América, the only one, suddenly, was the World Cup that still did not even rule it out because I know that God can do big things and can take me …,” he said in an interview with the long serve of Win Sports.
🟢⚽ ”I believe that I fulfilled the dream of playing in the U15, Sub 17 and the only thing that was missing was the World Cup and I do not rule it out because God can do great things, which left me out for extra things” Edwin Cardona, a national Atlético flyer.#SaqueLargoWIN pic.twitter.com/YAkG3NkkdN
– Win Sports (@winsportStv) May 2, 2025
Even when it was one of the team's figures, the creative was surprisingly outside the final call of José Pékerman.
“It's the only thing about my career that I could have lacked. They left me out for extra things, my life I'm going to keep that, that secret, I'm going to take my tomb,” he said.
The inconvenient gesture that left him without a World Cup
It must be remembered that at the moment, the months before the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Cardona starred in a gesture of mockery in a friendly against South Korea, which was interpreted as discriminatory and racist and caused a sanction of FIFA.
Cardona, having entered the list, would lose two of the first three games in Russia and that is why the coach preferred Juan Fernando Quintero, who had not been part of that process in qualifiers, and James Rodríguez, although he dragged serious physical problems, before the man who had been a figure in the World Cup classification.
“The hardest thing was that they left me outside the World Cup. I think I have never said this, but it was very hard because when I met with the person in Argentina, I was in the call and they had told me that I was going. Moreover, they gave us a week of vacation in Boca Juniors so that it can be,” Cardona said in an advertising campaign after his return to Atlético Nacional.
The impact of looking outside was, according to him, about to cause an accident when I was behind the wheel with his family: “When they called me, not even from his number, they called me from another number, it was something very hard, because I almost chocated.
