Falcao
COLOMBIAN, FOOTBALL
PLAYER IN ARGENTINA
That morning, in October
of 2005, Radamel Falcao García Zárate was really nervous. The coach of River
Plate, one of the most important football1 teams in Argentina, had just called
him to his room.
This afternoon, you are
starting in the first team, kid. Don’t be nervous, everything will be OK. But
don’t tell anyone. They will find out when the time comes.
It was lunchtime. The
boy was nauseous, he couldn’t eat a thing. His team mates gobbled up the classic
pre-game spaghetti; he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t help thinking about
all the years he had spent preparing himself for this moment: his entire life.
Although, truth to tell, the preparation had begun before he was born, in Santa
Marta, Colombia, in 1986. His father bap- tized him with his own name –Radamel
– and the name of a Brazilian football star whom he admired: Falcao. His father
was a professional football player, though his career had not been brilliant.
He never stayed with one team for very long, and his family travelled with him
to different cities in Colombia and Venezuela, following his contracts. But
when his first son, Radamel, was born, he decided that he would be a great
football player, and gave him the name of his idol. Little Falcao learned to
kick a ball before he could talk. His first memories are connected to football.
His father taught him, encouraged him, took him to his games, to his training
sessions. And Falcao did as expected: nothing mattered to him more than the ball.
When Falcao was ten, his father retired and the family settled in Bogota.
There, Falcao joined a football club and he was soon catching the eye of the
trainers.
That’s when I got
convinced that I could be a real football player. So I decided to give it my
all, that my future lay there.
When was that?
When I was eleven or
twelve. I began to play for the city team first, then for the Colombian team.
That’s when I saw that I had to dedicate all of my time to this. I understood
that I really had to live for football.
In Latin America, most
boys dream about being football players. And thousands of them can hold onto
that dream into their adolescence: they are the best, the ones who get into the
youth divisions of the profes- sional football teams. Falcao was one of many
such kids until, one Saturday when he was 14, his coach told him to get ready
because the next day he was travelling to Buenos Aires: a businessman had
organized a tryout with River Plate. Falcao was overjoyed: Argentina was one of
his goals. He had always followed Argentine football, one of the most powerful
leagues in South America. Besides, his coach had been to Buenos Aires and told
him a lot about it. He liked the idea of it:
An old and beautiful
football-loving city. A city with different seasons, very warm people, whose
way of speaking is so funny. It was always my dream to come here.
Were you scared?
No, I was not scared. My
mind was made up, and I was hungry for success. It was the opportunity of a
lifetime and, with God’s help, I didn’t want to let it go by.
The tryout went well.
They offered him a contract and set him up in a hotel. He had to learn to live
alone in a city that was not his own. At the beginning, he was not homesick.
Only after a year, when an injury put him on the disabled list for months, did
he grow discouraged; there were moments when all he wanted to do was go home
and forget about everything. He was 16 years old. At an age when most young
people are beginning to think about what to study, where to work, the course of
their lives, the football rookies have their fate on the line. Many have to
leave their cities, their studies, their amusements, their friends. They know
that this is their only shot.
It is a very dull life:
training, watching what you eat, going to bed early, seeing everyone else doing
things that you can’t. Sometimes it bothered me a lot, it exasperated me. But
then I told myself that I was here for a reason that I had to sacrifice
everything to make it.
Nine out of ten don’t:
at the age of 18 or 19, they consider themselves failures, people who have
missed the boat. Falcao did not want to be one of those people, and he found
the strength to endure. He trained more and more, learned to be strong and not
to fall into temptation, to convince himself that his goal was the most
important thing. A professional football player must be obsessed with
competition and victory. At the beginning of 2005, Falcao was promoted to the
first team, but he never got a chance to play. Until that October morning, when
his coach told him that his day had come.
That afternoon, when I
was getting dressed, my legs were shaking. But when I hit the field, I was
transformed. The stadium was full, people were shouting, and I realized that I
felt that hunger, that drive to beat anyone who crossed my path, that
adrenalin, that confidence. It is something that you cannot explain, you have
to experience it.
That October afternoon
was perfect: River Plate won and Falcao scored two of the three goals. The next
day, all the news- papers were talking about the great new talent, about the
guy that was going to put an end to his team’s losing streak. In the next six
games, Falcao scored five more goals. He was becoming a star.
It’s an incredible
feeling. Suddenly, from one day to the next, your life changes. You can’t go
anywhere, people recognize you on the street, your team mates look up to you.
And you can even make a
lot of money...
Yes, it’s amazing how
much some players earn. You make a fortune, and they are paying you to do what
you like doing. You just have to play and they pay you, though you do have to
make sacrifices, you miss out on a lot. But today football players are models
for many people. They are in ads for all sorts of things. A lot of people dress
like football players, or get haircuts like football players. It’s strange to
think that maybe someday there will be kids who try to do the things that I do…
On November 22, 2005,
everything seemed to go to pieces: Falcao’s knee was seriously injured, and he
would not be able to play for many months.
At the beginning, I was
really down in the dumps. I asked myself why this had to happen to me now, why
God had done something like this to me. Then I realized that these things
happen for a reason. They help you to grow up and mature. They can be for the
best. I think that helped me to keep it together, to know that I should not
take it so seriously: everything can vanish at any moment. I understood that I
had to be strong and present, to stick with it.
Falcao knows that coming
back is going to be rough. Many promising young players are injured. Some of
them can overcome it; some cannot. He is now eagerly awaiting that moment,
while getting on with his studies. Last year, he enrolled in a journal- ism
programme at a university in Buenos Aires. Though he does not have much time to
study, he says that it is better to do something unrelated to football, to get
an education, to open his mind to other things.
In football, you can be
lucky and become a big star, you can do OK and play as well as many, or you can
be unlucky and not make the big leagues. It’s a lottery. You never know what
will happen. You give it your all, but you have to be prepared to lose.
You depend on too many
factors: luck, teams, injuries…
Falcao lives in an
apartment in a tall modern building in one of the most expensive neighborhoods
in Buenos Aires. From his living room, you can see the river, the River Plate
stadium as well as the most brutal concentration camp of the Argentine
dictatorship in the 1970s. His father, his mother and his sisters live with
him: the boy has become the breadwinner. Throughout South America, fathers and
mothers who twenty or thirty years ago would have scolded their sons if they
saw them “wasting time with a ball,” now encourage them, because football can
offer them a better standard of living than any other profession. The stakes
are high, and Falcao cannot stop imagining his future.
I think about it a lot,
I have a lot of dreams. I want to go to Europe, to play with the best in the
world.
Where would you like to
go?
To Real Madrid, to
Milan, to the big teams.
Do you think that is
possible?
Yes. River sells players
to the best teams in the world. Everything depends on how I do.
For many Latin American
players, Buenos Aires is a stop on the way to Europe: the springboard from
which they can reach, once and for all, the wealth and fame that they have
sought since they were children. Since they were very young, most young players
from Latin America have one goal: performing well on their teams so that they
are “bought” by a European team. Buying is a strong word.
And the idea of moving
from country to country doesn’t bother you?
No. That’s the way a
football player's life is, always moving, going after the best. In this
profession, if you are lucky you can get everything you want, even the greatest
luxuries.
What luxuries would you
like?
Well, mostly a car. A
BMW convertible, that kind of thing …
Falcao emigrated for the
first time when he was 14, and he thinks he will keep doing it. He still has a
close connection to Colombia: his countrymen can admire him on television, he
has played for the Colombian youth league, and he hopes to play for the
national team. But he is no longer certain that he will return to Colombia to
live.
I used to think I would,
but now I am not so sure. I feel more comfortable here, in Argentina. If I go
to Europe, maybe I will want to stay there. Who knows if I will ever live in my
country again, after all this?
FALCAO has since become greater and more famous, moving from River Plate to Fc Porto, to Athletico Madrid and from there to AS Monaco in France. He has been listed in the FIFA best 11, he has the recieved the Globe Footballer of the year Award and several others, and has also been listed 6th in the 100 best footballers in the world by the guardian.
