Results between South American national teams vs European national teams from WC 1998 onwards Summary: Peru lost to Denmark, France (Peru has 0 win vs a European team) Paraguay lost to Sweden, England, France, Spain twice, Germany, drew 0-0 with Bulgaria and Spain, drew 1-1 with Italy, beat Slovenia & Slovakia (Paraguay has 2 wins against small Eastern European teams) Ecuador lost to England, Germany, drew with 0-0 with France, drew 1-1 with Netherlands, beat Poland & Croatia (in 2002 before Croatia had its golden generation) (Ecuador has 2 wins against Eastern European teams) Colombia lost to Romania, England twice, beat Poland & Greece (Colombia has a win against an Eastern European team & a win against a small Western European team) Chile lost to Netherlands, Spain, drew 1-1 with Austria, drew 2-2 with Italy, beat Switzerland & Spain (Chile has a win against a small Western European team and a win against a major Western European team) Uruguay lost to Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, France, Germany, drew 0-0 with France twice, beat Russia, Portugal, (during Brazil WC) England & Italy (Ururguay has a win against an Eastern European team & a win against a small but good Western European team and 2 wins against major Western European teams)
Currently im focusing on creating a global rankings of leagues and thus managed to come up an incomplete rankings of leagues in South America. Here is the rankings. Still have some trouble ranking the mid-tiers in South America but the top 4 and bottom 3 are easy to categorize. The days where the likes of Uruguay club can win Copa Libretadoras are over. Why? Because there is such thing called "TV money". No big TV audience = no financial power. its the same in Europe where clubs from Portugal & Netherlands can make a deep run in UCL but to retain their best players if they are proven at the big stage? Thats not gonna happen. And dont get me started on the financial gap between South American leagues. Brazil & Argentina duopoly. The best of the rest (Colombia) has a league revenue that is 5 times smaller than Argentina's league revenue. But i still commend Colombia, Chile & Ecuador for being transparent. Then there are those who dont want to reveal their league revenue numbers.
Here are GDP rankings. From this, you can deduce that the league revenue from Venezuela / Uruguay / Bolivia / Paraguay is less than that from Ecuador (meaning less than 25 mil euros per season).
In terms of population density, Netherlands and Belgium are in the top 6 of Europe. Therefore we can see why these 2 nations are better than most other small nations in terms of spotting & developing talents in their homesoil.
For those who want to become a pro & international footballer In short, only 1 out of 2000 active soccer players becomes a professional footballer What are the odds for a professional footballer to get selected for their national team & get to play in the World Cup? Lets look at Denmark - with a population of 6 mil people and reported by FIFA to have 390 pros, selecting the best 11 out of those 390 is equal to selecting the top 2.8% of all the pros in that nation. This means that even if you become a pro, you still have less than 3% chance to become a starter for your national team. https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/a59132e138824c1c/original/jlr5corccbsef4n4brde.pdf However the number looks a bit more opstimistic for those who want to be included in the squad of a national team with 5.6% chance for a Danish pro to get called up for international duty. The negative interpretation from this 5.6% number is that being top 6% of all the pros in your nation does not guarantee you a spot in the national team. Overall, a soccer player would have about 0.000026% chance of getting selected for World Cup duty. So to phrase it in another way, only 1 out of 34000 active soccer players becomes an international footballer