Paraguay’s Red Earth Warriors Knocked Out Germany and Earned a National Holiday

In the moments after Paraguay knocked four time world champions Germany out of the World Cup, Gustavo Alfaro reached for a line that will follow this team for years. His players, he said, had been told all week that the men in the other dressing room were products of the finest academies in the world. “They were trained in top academies,” Alfaro said. “We come from the red earth.” Then his players, the ones from the red earth, went out and won a penalty shootout against Germany that no team had ever won before.

Paraguay beat Germany 4-3 on penalties on 29 June after a 1-1 draw across 120 minutes, becoming the first nation in history to eliminate Germany from a World Cup in a shootout. Back home, President Santiago Peña declared the following day a public holiday. A country that had waited sixteen years just to return to a World Cup found itself in the last 16, and the man who took them there is a 63 year old Argentine who never played a single minute of top flight football.

The coach who came from nowhere

Gustavo Alfaro was never a star. Born in 1962 in Rafaela, an industrial town in Argentina’s Santa Fe province, he spent his modest playing career in the lower divisions with his hometown club, Atlético de Rafaela, before retiring in 1992 to concentrate on coaching. He was not a great footballer turned manager. He was a grafter who learned the game from the bottom, building competitive teams in Argentina’s provincial leagues long before anyone outside the country knew his name.

His breakthrough came slowly. A first league title with Arsenal de Sarandí in 2012. Spells at bigger Argentine clubs. Then an international education that took him to Ecuador, whom he led to the 2022 World Cup, followed by a stint with Costa Rica. When Paraguay appointed him in August 2024, they were a nation adrift, absent from the previous three World Cups, searching for an identity. Alfaro gave them one built on the only thing he has ever really coached, which is resilience.

A team assembled from grit

The players Alfaro inherited were not household names in Europe, and that suited his message. Paraguay do not overwhelm opponents with talent. They frustrate them, defend for their lives, and strike when the chance comes. Against Germany they did exactly that, taking the lead through Julio Enciso in the 42nd minute before Kai Havertz levelled after the break. When Germany thought they had won it in extra time, Nico Tah’s header was ruled out by VAR for a foul on the goalkeeper. Paraguay survived, and then they held their nerve.

Enciso is the closest thing this side has to a marquee name, and even his story runs through struggle. Born in 2004 in Caaguazú, he started at a local club before Libertad recruited him at twelve and handed him a senior debut at fifteen. Brighton signed him for a modest fee in 2022, and his first full Premier League season produced a long range strike against Manchester City that won Goal of the Season. He moved on to Strasbourg, and now he scores in World Cup knockouts. His goal against Germany was the work of a player who has spent his life outrunning his circumstances.

The goalkeeper who sold clothes

If one man embodied Alfaro’s red earth line, it was the goalkeeper. Orlando Gill made six saves across 120 minutes to force the shootout, then saved two more penalties to win it. His backstory reads like the invention of a screenwriter. Before he was keeping Germany at bay on the biggest stage in football, Gill was selling clothes to make ends meet, a young keeper on the fringes of the professional game with no guarantee of ever reaching it.

Born in 2000, Gill worked his way through Paraguayan football before earning a move to San Lorenzo in Argentina, where he finally established himself. He made his senior international debut only in September 2025, during World Cup qualifying. Nine months later he was the hero of the greatest night in Paraguayan football for a generation, a player who had known real hardship standing tallest when his country needed it most. Alfaro did not have to explain what he meant by the red earth. Gill was standing in his goal.

The dressing room speech

Alfaro is a talker, a motivator in the old South American tradition, and his words before and after the Germany game have already entered Paraguayan folklore. “I want to see 26 warriors sing the anthem and leave the field as legends,” he told his players. They sang, they fought, and they left as legends. Afterwards he called the win the greatest victory of his life and described his squad, over and over, as “26 legends,” refusing to single out any individual.

That refusal is the point. Alfaro has built a team, not a collection of players, and the distinction runs through everything Paraguay do. They defend as a unit, attack in numbers and celebrate together. “We have thousands of flaws,” Alfaro admitted, “but we have a heart that never gives up.” It is the sort of line that can sound like a cliché until a team actually lives it, and Paraguay lived it against a Germany side that had every technical advantage and still could not put them away.

What it means back home

The public holiday tells you how much this means in Asunción. Paraguay is a football country that had spent sixteen years watching World Cups from the outside, its golden era of 2010, when it reached the quarter finals, fading into memory. A whole generation grew up without seeing their nation at the sport’s greatest tournament. Alfaro ended that drought simply by qualifying. Beating Germany turned a feel good return into a national event.

There is a wider resonance too. This World Cup has been defined by teams like Paraguay, sides from outside the traditional elite who arrived at an expanded 48 team tournament and refused to play the part of extras. Cape Verde stunned Spain. DR Congo reached their first knockout round. Now Paraguay have eliminated Germany. The gap between the game’s aristocrats and everyone else, long treated as unbridgeable, keeps narrowing in front of a global audience.

For Germany the result is a humbling, another chapter in a decade of tournament disappointments for a nation accustomed to going deep. For Paraguay it is pure joy, the reward for a project built on humility and hard work rather than star names and expensive academies. Alfaro would tell you those are not disadvantages. They are the whole idea.

The road ahead

Paraguay are into the last 16 now, further than most predicted and playing with the freedom of a team that has already exceeded every expectation. Whoever they face next will know what awaits, a side that defends without ego, runs without pause and believes, without a flicker of doubt, that it belongs. Alfaro has spent his whole career proving that resources are not the same as results, and his Paraguay team has become the loudest argument yet for that idea.

The red earth line will endure because it captures something true about this group. They were not supposed to be here, and they do not care. They sang the anthem, they beat Germany, and a country back home took the day off to celebrate a team of legends who came from the ground up.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.

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