by Simon Hughes
It was a surprise that Torres agreed to meet me. He does not do many interviews and has never before given his side of the story about his departure from Liverpool to Chelsea. The discussions with Torres’s representatives in order to secure time with him were, however, relatively straightforward. They appreciated this as an opportunity to set the record straight over some issues, particularly those that led to his £50 million-pound sale from Liverpool, a British record. I flew to Madrid sensing that not everything was quite as it seemed.
My brief was to be at the Cerro del Espino from noon, the day after Atlético’s easy win over Sociedad. Set in the town of Majadahonda, the training ground is fifteen miles north-west of Madrid and higher up on the Castile plateau, so the air is cleaner. It is a wealthy area of plush shopping arcades and impressive-looking apartment complexes with gardens. In the distance, the snow-capped mountaintops of the Navacerrada are visible. As Torres finishes his training session, rich smells of fresh bread from a fancy bakery breeze across the car park.
First to arrive is Antonio Sanz, Torres’s long-term adviser. I first met him in the months after Torres joined Liverpool. Football agents tend to be viewed suspiciously but I liked Antonio because of his jolly nature and straight talking. On the day Torres left Liverpool, I spoke to him in the reception area at Melwood and detected some sadness that it had come to this. Before I could ask what was really happening, his mobile phone rang and by the time he had finished his conversation I had been directed somewhere else for another interview with Liverpool’s latest signing, Luis Suárez. It felt like a sliding-doors moment for Liverpool fans – what could have been had both been there at the same time . . .
Until any interview takes place, you never quite know what you are going to get. It is a relief when Antonio tells me that Torres had decided it was a good idea to do this one straight away. ‘Ask him anything you want, anything at all,’ he says. ‘There are some things he would like to say.’
Torres has showered and changed into a jumper, jeans and trainers when he appears soon after. His film-star qualities remain: his thin freckled face and, though it is shorter than it was when he was at his best for Liverpool, there is the striking mop of blond hair. A firm handshake makes you trust him that bit more and, despite being shy, he makes consistent eye contact when introducing himself.
We are led into an anteroom next to a press canteen that serves empanadas and juices. There is a wooden table, two wooden chairs and one tiny window at the top of the dimly painted back wall. Jokes follow about it feeling like a set for interrogations and, though I’d like the conversation to be serious, I don’t want him to feel on the back foot straight away, so I open with a few questions he might find it easier to deal with.
I suggest to Torres that it must have been a big decision to leave Atlético for Liverpool in the first place. He leans on the table, joins his hands and begins to speak slowly in a deep, staid voice.
‘Well, I had offers from different English teams a few years before I moved to Liverpool,’ he says. ‘Manchester United were one of the clubs that came. But I never took the decision because it was very hard for me to leave Atlético. When I was a kid, I did not see further than Atlético. I wanted to get the chance to play for the first team, to score a few goals, stay there and win trophies. It was everything I dreamed about. I never thought I might leave.
‘The situation was difficult for the club at that time [from the moment Torres made his debut in 2001]. We were in the second division and went back to the first division. There were a lot of financial problems. I’d never even played in Europe. So my aim became clear: to help the team qualify for Europe and after that maybe think about leaving. It would be the best for me but especially the best for the club, because I felt like they were building a team around me, which I don’t think is the way to become a stronger team. I was sure if I left, they could use the money to build a side the fans could be proud of, rather than just one individual. With time, I saw that this was the conclusion, so it was a relief that it worked this way. OK, it was good for me but it was especially good for Atlético.
‘We qualified for Europe. Then Benítez called me. At least I was leaving the team in a good situation. Liverpool had played two European finals in three years. Benítez was there, Alonso and Reina. It was a club where I felt it would be quite easy for me to adapt. The relationship between the fans and the team was also something I was looking for. It was difficult to leave Atlético. But it was not difficult to choose Liverpool.’
From his early teens, Torres was projected as the average boy from the average town who became a supremely talented footballer and did not change. That’s why supporters of Atlético love him so much. It was part of his appeal on the terraces of Anfield too.
Torres was raised in Fuenlabrada, half an hour by train from Madrid’s Atocha Station. I have been there before and it is unremarkable, featuring row upon row of identikit housing blocks. It could have been the outskirts of any major European city had the weather not given an idea of the location away. Fuenlabrada is classic Spanish suburbia: an arid place of tall concrete and shadows. The pace of life is slow. In a smoky room in Café Padilla, I was greeted by strange looks from old men who preferred to engage in their brandy glasses rather than conversation. One of them emerged from the miasma to ask me what I was doing there, and when I explained it was for research into Torres’s early life, the man with lips like bloodied hacked meat scoffed. He was a Real Madrid fan and took pride in informing me that Atlético were the second team in Fuenlabrada, like everywhere else near Madrid.
Torres lived in Parque Granada, the type of barrio where everyone knows everyone else’s business. His parents had moved there from Galicia when his father José was relocated as a policeman. During summer holidays, they would return to Spain’s rugged north-west coast and it was there that Torres met Olalla, his childhood sweetheart, to whom he is now married. They have three children named Leo, Nora and Elsa.
The Torres family resided in a flat on Calle de Alemania and his primary school was 150 yards away from the front door. By the age of seven, Torres’s gift was obvious from the number of goals he scored in small-sided fútbol sala games, ‘sometimes fourteen or fifteen,’ remembers Jose Camacho, a family friend who owned the sports shop where Torres bought his first pair of football boots.
When Torres scored his hundredth goal for Atlético in February 2016, he gave the shirt to an 84-year-old man called Manuel Briñas. Torres first met Briñas twenty years earlier when he turned up for a trial on the gravel pitches of the Parque de las Cruces in Carabanchel, the prison town, more Atlético turf than Fuenlabrada. Briñas had been tasked with rebuilding Atlético’s youth system after it had been disbanded by Jesús Gil. Along with around two hundred other kids, Torres played eleven-a-side games split into twenty-minute halves while the coaches gave marks out of ten. ‘Give him ten,’ Briñas said when he saw Torres. ‘In fact, give him ten and a bit.’
Torres was already an Atlético supporter. His induction to the club as a player consecrated the relationship. Offers later came from Real Madrid, and Pedro Calvo, his first coach, can remember approaches being made by sporting directors at Inter Milan and Arsenal. Financially, those moves would have been rewarding but Torres would not depart because he felt aligned to what he describes as the ‘sentimiento de rebeldía’ or a sense of rebellion. His distaste for Atlético’s rivals does not lay hidden.
‘It is difficult sharing a city with one of the most successful clubs in history when you support the other club,’ he says. ‘When I beat Real Madrid with Liverpool, it was my first time, you know? With Atlético we could not beat them. Ever. The satisfaction of going to the Santiago Bernabéu and winning as a Liverpool player was huge. Then the next week they came to Anfield and we beat them for a second time, 4–0. I could not help myself, celebrating a goal in front of their fans. It was special. Beating them with Atlético [as he had done the weekend before our meeting] tastes different. There is a lot of press
ure here in Madrid when you don’t beat Real for eight years, which happened in my first period here as a professional. I was the main man at Atlético and the one getting all of the blame.’
Michael Robinson, the forward who played for Liverpool in the 1980s before emerging as a famous football commentator on Spanish television, described Atlético as ‘the dog with fleas’. ‘You can’t help but love them,’ he said. ‘Atlético can defend well, they can attack well. But they’re not particularly brilliant at anything other than giving everything they’ve got. They’re irresistible.’
Despite the pressure and despite his dubious record against Real before he left for Liverpool, Atlético supporters worship Torres for dragging them out of the second division after they had been relegated for the first time since 1934 in the season before his debut. They love him too because he left to master the world but never forgot them and was true on his promise to return one day.
I ask Torres what Atlético represents to him.
‘Atlético means everything to me,’ he says. ‘When I was a kid, I only watched Atlético games, none of the others. I was the kid going to the stand with my grandparents and my dad and brother. I would go by myself sometimes, getting the train and then the metro for one hour from Fuenlabrada. And then I would travel home by myself.
‘My life and education has been Atlético. Everything that is happening now to me – the records, the games – it’s so emotional because it makes you look back and consider what has happened since the first day I joined. I remember being ten years old and playing the final trial game where the club decided whether I was good enough for Atlético or not. The nerves! That was twenty years ago and I still feel it. It makes me smile. You can see me smiling now . . .
‘From that day, I did not think any of this would happen. To score one hundred goals for the club – it was too much to believe. It was so emotional, especially because of the reaction of the people. They know I am one of them. I was in the stands before and now I am lucky enough to be on the pitch. When I do not play for the club any more, I will be in the stands again.’
In 2007, a 6–0 defeat to Barcelona made Torres think about his future as an Atlético player because Barcelona was usually the one illustrious opponent Atlético found a way to beat. He was walking his two bulldogs in Madrid when the mobile phone in his pocket began to vibrate and a number he did not recognize flashed across the screen. He explains that he wouldn’t usually answer to an unknown caller but, realizing the number was registered in England, he figured it might have been one of his close friends, Pepe Reina or Cesc Fàbregas. Instead, it was Rafael Benítez. Benítez had a list of five targets. They included Internazionale’s Julio Cruz, Palermo’s Amauri, Alberto Gilardino from AC Milan and Lisandro López of Porto. The recruitment of Torres was, however, given priority status.
‘I cannot remember if he said, “Hi, it’s Rafa” or, “Hi, this is Benítez,”’ Torres recalls. The Liverpool manager was on holiday in Portugal a week after the Champions League final defeat to AC Milan, but his focus was already on recruiting a striker that would help propel his team towards the summit of the Premier League. ‘I was surprised but did not realize the dimension of what I was hearing till I hung up. Then I thought, Wow, this club that can get anybody in the world has rung me; they want me.’
Benítez had complained in interviews immediately after the final in Athens in 2007 that Tom Hicks and George Gillett were not helping him move fast enough to finalize deals for new signings. Torres was in Tahiti on holiday with Olalla when another call came several weeks later, instructing him to return to Europe immediately before flying to Merseyside.
‘My medical took two days and nobody knew I was in the city,’ he recalls. ‘The club arranged for me to stay in an apartment in the Albert Dock, supplying me with lots of DVDs and books about Liverpool’s history. I knew Liverpool was one of the great European clubs already. But it is not until you arrive that you realize really what the pressure is like – a good pressure. You are not just signing for a big football club; you are signing for a city. Millions of people across the world are watching you. I was the club’s record transfer.’
If Torres was feeling the weight of expectation, he did not show it. His first goal arrived in his second league game, a 1–1 draw with Chelsea. The way he glided past his marker and the confident execution of the finish made it seem as though a matador was at work, teasing the unfortunate beast, Tal Ben Haim. Over the course of the next three seasons, he would score in all of the biggest games: against Manchester United, against Everton, against Arsenal and in the Champions League fixtures too. In 142 appearances for the club, he registered eighty-one goals, breaking all sorts of records in the process. He reached a half century of goals quicker than Roger Hunt, and the crouching Torres became a familiar sight before kick-offs, lowering himself on to his haunches and staring impassively at the opposition before him, scanning the area and familiarizing himself with the goal he was targeting. It made him look like an assassin, mentally placing his victims inside a trap before the attack.
By watching videos of Premier League matches, he familiarized himself with the opponents he would encounter and would adapt his game accordingly. Quickly, he became the player all of the boys wanted to be like and the player all of the girls wanted to be with. He darted across boxes and twisted past defenders. He became one of the greatest strikers to ever play for Liverpool.
‘I know I am never going to feel the way I felt at Anfield again, even in my dreams,’ he says. ‘Here at Atlético, I am home. It is where I grew up. I was a supporter in the stand, I joined the academy and then I became a player. It is normal that the people love me, because I am one of them. You can do wrong and they forgive you. At Liverpool, there was no reason for this relationship to develop the way it did. How many players have signed for Liverpool, they go there and play and pass the years but nobody remembers what they did? I was lucky. They did not have any reason to love me that way but they made me feel different to any other player.’
It helped Torres that Steven Gerrard was there, someone similarly talented, with similarly introverted personality traits. Someone, indeed, who had the same experience of captaining his local club from a very young age.
‘I admire the player who gives the example by actions, not just with words. We had Carragher with the words, keeping everyone alive, which is so important. In the dressing room, he was the voice. And then on the pitch, he would support those words with actions.
‘Stevie was different and more like me: leading by example. Stevie was always first in training; he could play the ball better than anyone. If he needed to kick someone, he did. When you see both of them working that way, you have to follow. If the main players give everything, you cannot give less than them. They set standards.
‘Yes, Stevie in some ways is similar to me: more reserved and shy. On the pitch, it is different. There is an aura around him. You feel it as a teammate. The opponent feels it because they know what is coming. He understood everything about me. I just needed to move into the space and the first thing he would try to do is find me. And he did, whether it was with a long or a short pass. Stevie was the player that completed my game. I will never find someone like him again.’
Gerrard, Torres says, gave him the confidence to display a creative expression that had lain dormant under the burden of home expectation in Madrid.
‘In 2008, I went to the Ballon d’Or gala in Switzerland. Messi won, Ronaldo came second and I came third. I could not believe I was nominated. Wow, a private jet – I was in shock. Stevie kept telling me, “Don’t worry, you will win it for sure.” He told me that like he really thought it. I thought he was crazy! I never once thought I’d be good enough to get invited to a gala like this. His words expressed how he felt about me at the club and the performance levels I was reaching with the help of the support. He told me I could be the best in the world and I realized this is the feeling everybody in Liverpool had about me. They made me feel anyth
ing was possible, that everything was real.’
The narrative of Torres’s first two seasons at Liverpool is well documented. This was a player who came, who scored, who was adored by the Kop. Liverpool did not win the league title but they came closer than they had in any of the previous nineteen years. There were strong performances in the Champions League as well.
Torres relished life in Woolton, where he would go out for meals and be able to shop without interference. People were respectful enough to give him space. Shouting his name and waving was enough. Merseyside allowed him space to breathe and lead a relatively normal life, one that was not possible in Madrid, where it was difficult to know who to trust because everyone wanted a piece of him, where he wasn’t playing for the strongest team and 80 per cent of the people were Real fans.
The story of his final eighteen months at Anfield, however, is blurred. There is an accepted version of events, especially of the last few weeks, which is that Torres asked the club to consider an offer from Chelsea before verbal and written requests forced it through. When I mention this to Torres, the shutters slowly begin to come down but then the entire window of the period is exposed for all to see, according to his memories.
He begins by telling me he cannot compare the Liverpool he joined in 2007 to the one he left three and a half years later. Torres has previously weighed all of his answers carefully. From herein, probing is unnecessary. He speaks without much interruption.
‘When I decided to move to Liverpool, it was because I was sure Liverpool was very close to becoming the best team in Europe,’ he says. ‘But the situation changed completely . . .’