South America’s attacking talents shaped by footballing culture, and economic reality

The superiority of South American strikers has lately become a much-discussed theme on this side of the Atlantic. Dennis Bergkamp suggests that European football academies are too cosseted and rule-bound to develop a maverick creative intelligence such as Luis Suarez. Arsene Wenger reckons that European society itself has become too "soft" to produce "fighters" such as Alexis Sanchez.

Fortunately for Europe, two of the best South American strikers have recently published autobiographies that might give some insight into their continent’s edge in the striking department.

It’s currently popular to believe that children’s football should be all about fun: that results are irrelevant, competition unhealthy, and the only thing that matters is the development of technique. That doesn’t tally with the experiences of Aguero and Suarez. They’ve both been playing to win since they were old enough to grasp the concept.

Both grew up playing both organised and unorganised football. The unorganised football went on everywhere, all the time. The organised football was usually in the Baby Football leagues which are big in Uruguay and Argentina — five- or six-a-side games on small pitches.

As Suarez says: “At first this model looks similar to that used around the world, but in Europe they encourage an almost no-contact sport at that age. Baby Football in Uruguay is physical and it’s aggressive . . . some mothers and fathers keep their children away from it because they believe some of the fun is lost due to the intensity. Some even consider it dangerous . . . it reinforced the message I had already learned from the street – that you play to win at any cost.”

Playing for money

Aguero, meanwhile, has been playing for money since the age of five. When the local kids got together to play on the

potrero

by his house they’d scrape together whatever change they had and the winners would keep the pot. We’re not talking about big sums, but the point is that winning always mattered.

For Suarez, success is a question of character. He says he wasn’t even the best player in his own family: his brother Maxi was “the technically gifted one”. “He knows, and all the family knows, that he was better than me,” Suarez says. “If he’d been more focused and wanted it more then he would have progressed. Instead he preferred to go out to discos.” No doubt Maxi loves being reminded of the self-inflicted nature of his failure by his multimillionaire brother.

Aguero, by contrast, was pure talent – a genuine prodigy.

“Already, at only five years of age, he had that something extra that sets the chosen ones apart,” says the coach of one of his kid teams, Jorge Ariza. “He was touched by a magic wand. It wasn’t just talent. It was intelligence.” In fact, if anything Aguero was too good, too young.

Goalscoring is one of the world’s most lucrative skills and these brilliant young strikers soon attract the interest of “investors”, would-be “benefactors” and other such characters. Suarez’s book takes a dispassionate view: “In Latin America as a young player your biggest dilemma is whether or not to sell your registration rights to an agent. It’s the ultimate get-rich- quick scheme but in the long term you have waived your rights to unilaterally decide your destiny or profit solely from future moves.”

When he was 17 and earning about $150 a month, an agent offered him $25,000 for 20 per cent of his economic rights. His father urged him to take the money, but his girlfriend (now wife) talked him out of it. Within a year he was sold to Groningen for €800,000. His agent still screwed him on that deal, but at least he retained control over his future transfers and earnings.

“Parents try to do the best by their children by grabbing the money when they can, but they are often actually doing a lot more damage to their child’s ability to earn more in the future,” Suarez writes. “I dodged most of the potentially damaging deals.”

Aguero’s book tells a different story. It employs an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person perspective found in most footballers’ books. At first this makes the narrative seem merely cheesy, as though Aguero was chronicling his football career in the heroic style of Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaign.

But the device gradually begins to make a terrible kind of sense, as it dawns on you that the voice you’re listening to belongs not to Aguero, but to the “representatives” who have, in one form or another, been running his life since he was a boy.

Economic exchange

When the prodigy was just 10 years old, a pair of agents offered his parents, Leo and Adriana, a monthly payment and the promise of a move to a bigger house in exchange for 100 per cent of their son’s economic rights. The description of this remarkable deal in “Aguero’s” book is chilling in its euphemistic opacity.

“What really mattered was the boy’s wellbeing,” says the narrator. “We said to ourselves that . . . we would be helping out a family in need,” says the agent. When the agent saw what good people Aguero’s parents were, “the reservations [he] had about dealing with a boy of that age were left to one side.” Leo and Adriana signed the deal.

Years later, several big European clubs want to sign the 17-year-old Aguero. Atletico Madrid are not the best of these clubs, but they make the most persuasive offer to the selling parties. The problem is that Independiente are disputing Aguero’s agents’ right to a cut of the transfer fee. This seems like “a terrible betrayal” to the agents. Luckily, Aguero’s parents decided “to honour the commitment they had made”. They say they will block their son’s sale unless the agents get their cut.

“The gesture made by Leo and Adriana . . . was indicative of their tremendous moral stature,” the agent says. No wonder he’s grateful: his company received $400,000 and a 15 per cent slice of the €23 million transfer fee. “I was always thankful for all the help [the agents] had given us,” Aguero’s mother is quoted as saying. “Not just anyone would have opened doors like they did for us.”

Of course, it was Aguero's talent that opened all the doors. You feel sure his mother must know that, so quotes like this help make Born to Rise feel like one of the most sinister football books ever written.