by Luca Caioli
El Niño heard the good news about the return to the first division in the drawing room of his home. Following a frantic round of calls between team-mates, the idea was to go up to the Neptune fountain to join the celebrations. But Paolo Futre, the sporting director, thinks it’s better to wait. They opt for an informal dinner in a city centre restaurant. It’s not until the early hours that the players arrive in the presence of the god with the trident in his hand, in the Piazza Cánovas del Castillo, not far from the buildings of the Spanish Parliament. Diego Alonso climbs the statue and shouts ‘Atléti, volvemos a primera.’ (‘Atléti, we’re coming back to the first division.’)
Fernando Torres, in jean jacket and red-and-white scarf, is grinning from ear-to-ear. Finally, a real pleasure. Because even if lots of people that night can be seen wearing shirts with his name on, it hasn’t all been good during his second year with the senior team. Far from it.
At the beginning of the season, at just seventeen years of age, ‘they made me into an idol and now they are trying to knock down the tower that they created. The manager told me: “The higher they put you, the harder you fall.” That’s to say, try to learn to be like one of the others,’ he confesses in an interview and adds: ‘In any case, I’ve been at a much lower level than I thought, I’ve not had the season that I was hoping for. I’ve encountered more difficulties than I thought I would.’
What difficulties has the young promise of Spanish football encountered? A lot, beginning with the manager. Luis Aragonés, an Atlético midfielder in the 1960s and 70s with 123 goals to his name, a legend to the fans, has returned for the fifth time as manager to take the team back to the first division. But the Sabio de Hortaleza (Wise Man of Hortaleza), as they call him, doesn’t have much faith in the youngster. As often as not, he sends him directly to the stand or leaves him for entire matches to warm the substitutes’ bench. On the rare occasions he does start a match, he is substituted without fail. Changes that drive El Niño crazy even if, after thinking things over, he ends up admitting the gruff manager was right. The Wise Man corrects him continuously: ‘Torres, not like that!’ ‘Torres, do it well, not beautifully, well!’ Torres this, Torres that. He takes him off the pitch to put on a defender or the Uruguayan, Diego Alonso, an honest worker of the ball. With the lad from Fuenlabrada, he uses all the old football conventions. Or to be more exact, the brilliant, celebrated youngster must be treated harshly – he needs to be taught how to behave on the pitch and in the dressing room. He must be the first to arrive and the last to leave, to talk little and listen a lot, to be humble, he must never get cocky, he must respect his team-mates and not dare to contradict the gaffer. Training – or rather, commandments – that years later Torres will consider valuable, but at seventeen, leave him baffled.
The continuous put-downs and the constant substitutions to a competitive and fiercely proud young man like Fernando, do him damage. And there’s also the fact that Luis cannot stomach the youngster’s media exposure. The more they talk about him in the press, the less he plays. A popularity that even attracts the jealousy of his team-mates, who, in some cases, are twelve years older than him, and who find this callow youth hogging the headlines hard to handle. So much fame also brings with it a special attention on the part of opposing defenders. ‘I can confirm that if they think you are a “name”, it’s worse. You have to suffer much more marking,’ comments Torres.
The truth is that, on many occasions, in order to respect the famous conventions of football, his rivals gave him a rough time. As do the press. Many had given him their backing and feel betrayed by a performance that is not up to expectations. They talk of the crisis in his second year, of how the Under-17 World Cup at the beginning of the season didn’t allow him to start the league campaign on a good footing, pointing to his goal tally (only six) as evidence of this.
The only thing in his defence: he plays some really tremendous games. But they don’t count for much, seeing that even he comes to doubt the faith placed in him. Fernando’s reply, or rather revenge, comes first with the victory in the Under-19 European championship in Norway and then in the first division.
He makes his top-flight debut on 1 September 2002 in the Camp Nou against Louis Van Gaal’s Barcelona. Ten months after he’s scored thirteen goals in the championship and one in the Copa del Rey. He has become the star of the side – one that everyone expects to see shining. He has assumed big responsibilities and has become, without doubt, one of the best in the team. On two occasions he brought the entire Vicente Calderón stadium to its feet.
On 12 January 2003, against Deportivo La Coruña, he creates two spectacular moves. The first, he controls in the penalty area using his chest, gets round defender Noureddine Nybet with a lob and does a half-turn to score with a devastating left-foot shot. The second, he nutmegs Nybet, which dumbfounds Donato, leaving him to make a winning assist for Correa to score. The crowd gives him an ovation and his name rings out across the nearby Manzanares river and echoes through the surrounding neighbourhood.
On 24 May, in the same stadium, he puts on another show. It’s the last minute of the second half when Torres begins warming up on the edge of the pitch. The fans have been demanding his appearance for some time and Atlético is losing 1-2 against Villarreal. Only he can save the situation. It’s true.
On 70 minutes he shoots from outside the area, the ball just inside the angle between post and crossbar. Four minutes later, he scores the winning goal, a great left-foot shot, after a pass from Luis Garcia (who moved to Liverpool in 2004, returning to Atlético in 2007, the same year that Fernando went in the opposite direction). Poor Pepe Reina, then keeper with Villarreal and a future team-mate of his at Liverpool, has one of the worst afternoons of his career. ‘Imposing’, ‘formidable’, ‘marvellous’, are just some of the adjectives used to describe the 19-year-old’s display. They talk of the emergence in La Liga of a shining young talent. They cannot recall anything of its kind since the arrival of Raúl at Real Madrid. But El Niño has learned from Aragonés to avoid any kind of vanity like the plague, replying to all the praise saying:
‘People get carried away making comparisons but that’s a waste of time. I don’t know how one gets to be a star. But however one does, I still need to do it. I’ve only just started and we’ll see where I am when, like Raúl, I am 26 and playing international matches.’
But the positive opinions don’t only come from the public. They are also being voiced by his team-mates. Demetrio Albertini, the midfielder who, with the Milan of Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello, has won everything and more, explains: ‘He’s still a boy and has to mature, but he has talent. He’s going to be very big. In Italy he’s liked by Milan and Juventus. They talk a lot about him.’ And Fernando talks a lot with Demetrio, Atlético’s new signing: ‘He was talking about Milan, about Marco van Basten, who was my idol, he lent me tapes to watch him in action to explain to me his style of playing. And he always recommended me to learn everything I could before leaving.’
The year 2003 is Atlético’s centenary. On 26 April 1903, a group of Basque students at a mine engineering college in Madrid founded a new football club as a branch of the Basque side, Atlético Bilbao. They initially played in blue and white strips, similar to those of Blackburn Rovers. But eight years later the main team in Bilbao and the Madrid branch had changed to red and white (similar to Southampton), one theory being that the new colours were cheaper because this combination was used to make mattresses and the leftovers could be converted into football shirts. It also helps explain why the club became known as los colchoneros (the mattress-makers). It’s those same stripes that earn an entry in the Guinness book of records when a flag measuring about 1 mile long by 8 yards wide is paraded through the streets of Madrid from the Neptune fountain to the Vicente Calderón stadium. It’s the main party for the centenary with lots of paella, fireworks and skydivers, together with leading local figures and even royalty in the form of Prince Felipe, the heir to the Spanish throne. It�
�s a pity that Atlético then go and lose 0-1 against Osasuna.
Fernando, who comes 19th in a supporters’ survey to choose the best players in the club’s history, is not on the pitch. He’s taking part in the celebrations of a proud Atlético as an ordinary fan. ‘I have come up through the ranks, I know what it is to wear the red and white, what it means to be in this team,’ he says. Unfortunately, a tear in the fibres of a leg muscle is keeping him off the pitch for around a month.
When he comes back, the club’s situation has changed and become even more difficult. Jesús Gil, the godfather figure of Atlético, resigns as president after sixteen years. During his time in charge, the club has had 31 managers, almost double what Liverpool or Manchester United have had in 100 years. With Gil, Atlético have one league title and three Copas del Rey and finished in the second division for two years. With Gil, the ex-mayor of Marbella, the club has often teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and been the focus of numerous legal investigations. Gil ends up in prison. When he leaves, fed up with being insulted and accused of being the one responsible for all the club’s failings, he hands over the reins to his son, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín and film producer Enrique Cerezo … The club shares held by Jesús Gil are seized in connection with an investigation into fraud and falsification. Financially, the club is in ruins but he does not want to be singled out as the president who sells Fernando Torres or the Calderón to put things right.
Jesús Gil had been like a father to El Niño: ‘I remember him with affection, his family treated me as if I was one of their own.’ Gil, who died on 14 May 2004, goes and so does Luis Aragonés. Just six matches from the end of the league, he says he can’t work as he would like to and has no intention of respecting his contract, which expires at the end of the season. Before going, has he changed his opinion of El Niño? Not at all: ‘Fernando Torres could be a very good footballer, who still has to correct some flaws,’ he says in the club magazine. ‘Right now, he’s performing well in the Primera Liga but, paradoxically, in almost all the matches where he hasn’t played, we’ve won. Irreplaceable? It’s very difficult for a player in a team to be like that but Fernando is certainly a very important element in front of the opposition goal.’ The warring between the two continues and it will resurface some years later in the national side.
Gregorio Manzano arrives for the 2003–04 season from Mallorca, where he won the Copa del Rey. He declares immediately that he wants to put his priorities into the attack because that’s what the fans are demanding. He counts on a midfield notable for the presence of Cholo Simeone, who, after several years in Italy (Inter and Lazio), returns to Atlético, and on a left wing, where Musampa is expected to perform well. In attack, to support El Niño, there is the Greek, Nikolaidis:
‘Our objective was to consolidate our status and after that, fight to get as high up the table as possible. We had a good season and we surpassed our initial expectations, relative to our sporting and economic resources. The only thing that was missing was Europe. In the last game against Zaragoza, the team couldn’t manage a win and we missed out on the UEFA Cup through a lower goal average than Sevilla,’ as Gregorio Manzano, or ‘The Teacher’ as he was known, recalls today. He boasts ten years of Spanish first division management with more than 300 matches under his belt. Manzano, now back with Mallorca, hasn’t forgotten that year in Atlético, just as he hasn’t forgotten Fernando, with whom he maintains good relations.
Going back to the beginning of that season, one should say that Torres avoided a goalscoring crisis thanks, above all, to the confidence of the manager, who has given him a starting place when neither his dribbling nor his shooting is working. It’s a situation from which he escapes only at the end of October. Against Manzano’s former side, El Niño finally unleashes himself and doesn’t stop hitting the net – so much so that halfway through the season, he is the first division’s top goalscorer with eleven goals. And at the end of the season – won by the Valencia of Rafa Benítez – Torres is the club’s top-scorer, only four less than league top-scorer Ronaldo.
One of those goals is a masterpiece: ‘It is without a shadow of a doubt that great goal at Betis that gave us our 1-2 victory,’ explains Manzano. A move worth a slow-motion replay. It’s 2 November 2003 in the old Benito Villamarín stadium in the 40th minute. Atlético midfielder Jorge crosses the ball towards the centre. Torres, in a yellow ‘away’ strip, runs, loses his marker, neutralises the defender and lets fly. It’s an artistic action, harmonious and elegant, filled more with agility than energy. It compares to a cat lazily stretching its paws one in front of the other, like an exhibition performance of karate. Thanks to his soaring leap, Fernando touches the ball with the tip of his foot and directs it between the opposite post and crossbar. A goal of cinematic quality.
Unfortunately, in February 2004, El Niño is again injured and the second part of the season isn’t as productive as the first.
Meanwhile, Torres has extended his contract up until the end of 2008. It’s somewhat less than what the board had wanted. It would have liked to renew it up until 2010 or even 2014. El Niño is one of the team captains: ‘It was difficult because of his age and because there were other players older than him in the dressing room but they helped him to be a good captain. They respected him and everyone listened to what he thought. He was the emblematic player and symbol of Atléti but he still didn’t consider himself a star and nor was he,’ recalls Manzano. ‘He was beginning to grow and mature a lot during the season. He’s always been someone who’s open to everything with an extraordinary human quality. If you had to pick out some things, I would choose his ability to surmount difficulties, his humility, his unselfishness and his ambition. The only bad point was his lack of experience and not pacing himself during matches.’
Despite the good results, Gregorio Manzano lasted for just one season and in 2004–05, César Ferrando arrives. The manager changes but the club’s institutional crisis means there is no money to reinforce the squad. The key element in all this for Atlético is, once more, Fernando, who is twenty and a star. He is one of the most sought-after Number 9s in Europe and the idol of teenagers, mothers, and of the younger fans, who believe he will be bigger than all the club’s previous glories. He is a marketing man’s dream, selling everything from watches to footwear, from video games to beer, from breakfast cereals to jeans. One example is Pepe Jeans. Thanks to the Torres effect – charismatic, charming and dynamic – it increased its Spanish sales by 25 per cent. Torres is a model for fashion and women’s magazines. The rates for use of his image rise 75 per cent in three years.
And he is the driving force behind Atlético’s commercial operations – 70 per cent of the replica shirts sold have his name on them. He earns 3½ million Euros a year, drives a metallic grey Porsche Carrera 4S (his first capricious buy) and is superstitious – so much so that every time things don’t go well, he changes his hairstyle. He goes to Olman, his hairdresser, who invents a style. From shaved head to punk look-alike, from spikey to coloured highlights. He likes to dress up in the latest fashions and, sometimes, when he can, he even goes to watch a fashion show. An elegant champion who does good business with his image to such an extent that they’ve started comparing him to David Beckham, the football pop star who arrived in 2004 on the other side of Madrid. But he wants to clarify that ‘Beckham sells a huge amount all over the world but if he stopped playing, his advertising income would also go down. Basically, the image of a footballer is built up starting with what he does on the pitch. For this reason, I would never not go to a training session because of a photographic shoot.’
He doesn’t like politics but is fascinated by the people who go out into the street to protest against the war in Iraq or to condemn the Atocha bombings of 11 March 2004. He hopes they succeed in changing things. He’s a modern type, who believes in God but sees no problem with homosexual marriages, which the Spanish church vehemently condemns. As an adult, if he wasn’t a footballer he would have liked to be the singer
of a rock group: ‘Someone capable of moving a lot of people, like footballers, only a rock star doesn’t have opponents.’
In an interview with the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, he even describes how he doesn’t like football: ‘I say it in all seriousness. It bores me to watch a match on TV. I’ve never seen one all the way through. I like to play. I love the match and the fans but everything that goes on behind the scenes – from the little I know about it – I don’t want to know. The television companies, which impose their own rules and economic interests, which overload the (sporting) calendar. At the end of the day, it’s only business and nothing to do with watching sport.’ A surprising response for someone who lives thanks to football and who enjoys a huge popularity.
Fame continues to surprise him. ‘All the time. Above all, outside Spain. But football is now almost like a worldwide commercial.’ Difficult to live with? ‘At first I found it difficult. I was shy, I was embarrassed. I was blushing. Now, a little at a time, I’m getting used to it even if it’s difficult. I miss the times when I was able to go for a walk with my dog without anyone stopping me in the street. But that’s the price you have to pay.’ What does he make of the millions he’s earned? ‘The first thing I did was buy a house for my parents, a car for my father and my sister and help my brother Israel with his mortgage. I’ve become what I am thanks to them. I will never forget that if it wasn’t for my mother (several times she arrived late at work to take me to training sessions) I would not be here. It seems right and proper to give back to them everything that they’ve given me.’