There should be no prouder place in the sporting world this summer than Spain. Its national soccer team reigns over Europe with a style that flows as only the Latin game can. Rafael Nadal wins Wimbledon with the force of a bull and the manners of a gent.
Who would not want to play in Spain? What gifted athlete would resist, all other things being equal, the opportunity to perform in a land that seems to have recaptured not just the trick of winning, but the habits that went with it many years ago? It might be fleeting, because that is the nature of sport. Yet the presence at Wimbledon of Manola Santana, the last Spaniard to win the crown there 42 years ago, was more significant than that of the prince and princess of the Asturias, or of the king and queen in Vienna's Prater Stadium when the soccer team won there last month.
For sport, in the Spanish soul, is a form of royalty.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Cristiano Ronaldo and Andrei Arshavin, two of the most coveted soccer players of the moment, appear to be hoping that their next career move takes them to Spain.
Ronaldo left a hospital Tuesday morning after surgery on an ankle that has troubled him even in his finest season. A sportsman laid low through injury, with time on his mind, is a vulnerable person, especially when Real Madrid is his suitor and when his own mentor at Manchester United, the assistant coach Carlos Queiroz, is about to go home to manage the Portuguese national side.Ronaldo is 23, at the top of his game and with a club at the pinnacle of Europe. But Madrid, closer to his roots and, he says, a club whose grandeur forged his boyhood dreams, might never come knocking on his door as it clearly is doing now.
Arshavin, the Russian playmaker, is four years older - and four years is a long time in the prime years of an athlete, physically and mentally.
The team that Arshavin says he grew up longing to play for is Barcelona. And Barca just happens to be reconstructing its squad - fervently looking for a new creator after becoming disillusioned with the Brazilian partygoer Ronaldinho, and looking toward St. Petersburg, where Arshavin has grown, man and boy, with both the Zenit side that won the UEFA Cup and the Russian team that attracted praise at Euro 2008.
Indeed, although it was twice eclipsed by the Spanish feast of football in June, Russia completely confounded the Netherlands - and Arshavin was the pivotal player, through his innate ability to suddenly switch the play and both beguile the opposition and finish it off.
Soccer, of course, is not simply a sport that can put grown-up boys in touch with their childhood dreams. It is business, ruthless and selfish and completely fickle in its loyalties.
Andrei Arshavin might be sincere in his desire to wear the claret and blue of Barcelona, but his club Zenit, bankrolled by Gazprom, one of the world's most powerful energy companies, will not let him go cheaply. Nor will Arshavin's agent let his man go for sentiment's sake to a lower bidder.
The agent, Dennis Lachter, is briefing newspapers on the deal. Zenit, he says, will not accept a cent less than €30 million, and his player is looking for €4 million per year, net of taxes. The transfer would thus pan out at €52 million, or over $80 million, over a three-to-four-year contract.
And there are deals within deals. Barcelona has made an offer, but not one that Zenit will accept - and meantime, Barca is negotiating to hire Alexander Hleb from the London club Arsenal. It would also like to sign Arsenal's striker Emmanuel Adebayor, but so would AC Milan.
The summer transfer market is only now gathering pace. Lachter is in the position of many a middleman, wanting to push his client to the highest bidder, yet dependent on Zenit's president, Alexander Dyukov, to make the call on which buyer meets his terms before the agent can start earning his percentage on the wages.
"Its not about money," insists Lachter. "It's about the team and professional ambition." Something tells us we have heard those lines before, and that many a star from Hollywood to the Bernabéu or the Camp Nou has been persuaded to take the money route ahead of these childhood wishes.
Consider, again, Cristiano Ronaldo. At 7, he's a boy turning heads in Madeira. At 12, he leaves home to become a recruit of the Alcochete, the soccer kindergarten of Sporting Club in Lisbon. The head coach there is Carlos Queiroz, the very same Queiroz who formed the Golden Generation of Portuguese youth, and who is about to defect from Manchester United to regain control of Portugal's national team.At the start of the Euro, when Ronaldo's head was in the clouds because of Madrid's constantly reported overtures, Queiroz, who was fired after an unhappy year as Real's coach, was counseling the player to stay true to his United contract. However, Luiz Felipe Scolari, then the Portuguese national coach but about to accept an offer he could not refuse to move to Chelsea, told Ronaldo that offers from Real Madrid come once in a lifetime. He should take it.
A cynic might say that Scolari, with one foot outside his own camp, should not have been stoking disloyalty to his star player. Another cynic might argue that Queiroz, with Portugal rather than Manchester his future, was not the best preacher to a United player.
Not surprisingly, we did not see Ronaldo in all his peacock finery at the Euro. He tried, I am sure, to play for his country as imperiously well as he had done for his club. But his ankle was sore, and his head, maybe even his heart, was divided.
If any of us had the casting vote on the most decisive, as well as most eye- catching, individual in soccer today, it would be Ronaldo.
If I were Alex Ferguson, the United coach, or his American paymasters, I would sell Ronaldo. The contradiction might appear glaring, but so is the situation in which Ronaldo, unlikely to surpass his 42 goals for United last season, toys with the European champion club.
Real Madrid, as usual, shamelessly exploits the Spanish media. Its president, Ramon Calderon, makes Ferguson's blood boil with his comments.
Madrid talks constantly of a transfer that would make United between €80 million and €100 million and make Ronaldo the highest-paid player on earth. "We cannot be blamed if nearly every player wants to come to Real Madrid," says Calderon, a lawyer. "If I were Manchester United, I'd be happy and proud to be able to negotiate such a transfer for one of my players. Everything would be a lot easier if United realized that they could pull off the transfer of the century." Ronaldo begins his recuperation knowing he will miss the start of the English season in August, but could just make the Spanish kick off.
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