Some of the footballing talents we love most contain a streak of inherent frailty. Players with a light build like their race, who seem to be able to break at any contrast. Players who, through technique, come to think of a different football, made up of unique gestures that are born and die the instant they make them.
Players who bring the creativity of street football back to the field by bending it to the rules of the game, without depriving themselves of the possibility of surprising themselves first of all. They are players who always promise something new.
My favorite among them was Pablo Aimar.
I discovered his talent the moment I started watching football. His actions reminded me every time because it was a game worth watching and not just playing.
Jorge Valdano to describe the talent of Pablo Aimar said: «it makes difficult things easy». He had the misfortune to play in the post-Maradona and therefore to have his talent pigeonholed in a street that was not his own, that of yet another “New Diego”. A path that he never tried to take anyway. Aimar has dedicated his career to two great reasons: having fun and making those who saw him play happy. A taste for entertainment that convinced the journalist Quique Gastañaga to nickname him the “payaso” since he was a boy .
The River of the fine palate
Pablo Aimar is the son of Argentine football on the pitches, the one where he begins to play like many other kids who grew up in the 80s. At the pitch he alternates games as semi-pro for the team of his hometown Estudiantes of Río Cuarto, the second city of the province of Cordoba, in the center of the country. To discover his talent, so far from the capital, was José Pekerman, who in 1994 was responsible for the Argentine youth selections and in the middle of a tour of the country to understand the general level of the under 17s.
While he sees Aimar playing without even knowing his name, he tells another youth team coach who had accompanied him that that boy with two legs that look like two poles seems to float rather than run, which reminds him of a small gazelle. Few times had he seen such a young player already have such a vertical instinct for the game. He had the means to try to reach or send the ball into the penalty area, practically with every action.
Pekerman approaches him at the end of the game and invites him to an internship in Buenos Aires together with other national talents. Aimar replies that maybe he is wrong, after all he is not that good.
After the internship, however, he is called up for the national team despite not having a professional club behind him. The observers of the River Plate give him an audition and, of course, are electrocuted.
The management wants to put him under contract but his father, with a past as a player, refuses the offer. He considers the leap from the province to the capital too hard; from semi-professionalism to the richest team in the country. Aimar is 14 years old, he is frail, he is used to playing mostly on the street with friends. For Aimar, professionalism is a distant and feared dream: will they reproach him at the first attempted tunnel?
It takes a whole year and the intervention of Daniel Passerella, a former legend of Argentine football and at that time coach of the River, to convince them that they will have an eye for his son. They do not want to distort football and in fact they are already planning to be promoted to the first team soon.
Aimar will make his debut in 1996, just sixteen, in a Libertadores champion River Plate. The set of names sounds impossible now: Enzo Francescoli, Ariel Ortega, Marcelo Gallardo, Matias Almeyda, Santiago Solari, Hernan Crespo. In the midst of these champions or future ones, everyone recognizes that the little boy has something special. Francescoli thinks, for example, that he is a unique player because he manages to do things with a second advantage over the other players on the pitch.
Ortega took him under his wing from day one: «I have good memories of my time with Ariel: when they came to look for me at the River residence to make me debut in Primera, I still didn’t even have football boots. Arrived in the locker room Ariel took a pair and gave them to me, I still remember those shoes given as a gift ».
It was immediately adopted in the River of the ” paladar negro ” (fine palate), the vision of football desired by its fans since the early 1900s that pushes the team to aim not only to win, but to do so with a style that rewards technique and the imagination, the idea of always playing in an elegant and therefore pleasing to the eye.
And Aimar is the personification of the ” Negro Paladar “. Her elegance is innate: she is never satisfied with the effectiveness of the gesture, she always wants to bring out the beauty. In the River where Francescoli’s career is winding down, Crespo, Ortega and Gallardo are ready to leave for Europe, it does not seem true that such a player has appeared like this, like another fruit of a generous land.
Pekerman summons him with the under 20 team for the World Championship in 1997 (later won by Argentina). They are players who will form the backbone of the future Argentine national team at the beginning of 2000 and with whom he will form a strong friendship: Walter Samuel, Esteban Cambiasso, Lionel Scaloni, Diego Placious, Leandro Cufré, Leo Franco and above all Juan Román Riquelme. Recently in the first team of the eternal rivals of Boca Juniors and who theoretically plays in the same role on the frontline , both are riddles . Instead of competing in the days of the World Cup, they develop a friendship born of mutual respect. To unite them the immense talent, but above all the profound conception of the game of football.
Pekerman is part of that current of Argentine coaches that puts technique above everything. A follower of Menotti, who contrasts with that of Bilardo’s tactical balance first of all. The talent against the always sweaty jersey. Argentina won the World Cup riding both currents and perhaps for this reason they live in a continuous tension between these two visions of football.
To understand how influential Menotti’s vision of football was in the 1970s, just think that Aimar’s full name is Pablo César Aimar Giordano, where César was given by his father in honor of César Luis Menotti who had led Argentina. to win the World Cup one year before the birth of his son.
There is an anecdote from Valdano that I think conveys the idea of Argentine football at the time when technical precision was idolized: “In one of my first matches I passed the ball slightly inaccurately to attacking mate Oberti, a very veteran technical and a little chubby, which he didn’t even try to reach. He let it pass with contempt and said to me “Boy, the ball on your feet, otherwise dedicate yourself to something else”.
Aimar makes Menotti fall in love, who compares him to Michael Laudrup. He and Riquelme are in Pekerman’s eyes the two talents closest to that vision of football and he decides that there must be no competition between the two: they must play together, one as number 10 and the other as number 8. They must exchange functions of finisher and playmaker depending on where they receive the ball.
In this action against England there is Samuel who reaches the half court after a stolen ball, the discharge for Aimar who had approached to help, the 10 protects the ball and makes it filter for Riquelme, ready immediately to verticalize for the attacker.
Aimar doesn’t have thick curls yet, but he already wears the smile of someone who enjoys playing. He trusts his instincts, always points to the man and knows that his technique can get him out of any thorny situation. It seems to come from the words of Valdano: “I believe in the autonomy of the foot in thinking, in the face of an immediate situation in which there is no time to consult the brain”. He is the perfect companion for someone like Riquelme who is called “the dumb”: shy and shy off the pitch and hyper cerebral inside. Riquelme of Aimar says: «This one runs differently».
We don’t know if football comes from the feet or from the head, this is the Socratic debate we have been carrying on since its invention. The two, however, all agree that both players play better. Argentina wins in Malaysia, and Aimar and Riquelme end up in the spotlight, in a culture frantically searching for an heir to Maradona.
Aimar is a dynamic player, he moves along the entire attack front almost on tiptoe, he seems to only touch the ground. The baggy shirts of the time give it an ethereal image when checking on the fly.
Aimar’s matches are practically an exercise in style: there is no action equal to the previous one and there is nothing he cannot do with a ball at his feet. The synecdoche of Aimar is the gambeta, a type of feint based on the precision and speed in the movements typical of the clay fields in Argentina, as famous there as the double step in the Brazilian ones. It is said that the gambeta opens the world to you, that it is pure instinct and cannot be taught but only learned by yourself by playing not to lose the ball on the uneven playing field.
Street football formed him and he goes back to that on the pitch: the tunnel is his favorite gesture, but it is in the first check that he makes the commentators of the time squirt. At times it almost seems to always look for the nearby opponent to be able to overtake him with a single gesture. Nobody dares to mention Maradona yet, with Pablo they prefer to use Cruyff, less sacred.
When Marcelo Gallardo moves to Monaco, number 10, with all that means, is free. Coach Ramón Díaz asks Pablo if he feels like taking it at the age of 19. The player takes it as a challenge and accepts: despite the offers from Europe that are already coming to him, before leaving Argentina he must establish himself as the designated star of the River. And if Riquelme hasn’t moved yet, he can’t either.
With the other young boy prodigy of the youth academies, Javier Saviola, and with the striker Juan Pablo Ángel, he challenges Riquelme’s Boca Juniors, Walter Samuel, Gustavo Schelotto and Martín Palermo in a head-to-head succession in the league. The two teams share the titles and bring the challenges of the Superclasicos to a historic level.
When asked if he wanted to put her in the center in the famous lob goal against Boca in 1999, he replies that he obviously didn’t want to cross. On the other side of the cross there would have been Saviola and no one would think of putting her in Saviola’s head.
Valencia
In the summer of 2000 he won enough as a star to be ready for Europe. Overwhelmed by offers, he chooses that of Barcelona. But it is only a bite of a presidential candidate, Bassat, who will lose the elections in favor of Gaspart, who will be replaced by Marc Overmars.
He then decides to stay at the River until the end of the year. The final reached in the Champions League by the Valencia of Argentina’s Héctor Cúper, and the consequent sales of Gerard, Farinós and Claudio Lopez allow the team to have the prestige and the money to try the coup. After months, an agreement is reached for the transfer to the January market for 24 million euros (with 15% going to the player) together with a 7-year contract. On his arrival he says he hopes to do at least as well as Mario Kempes and Claudio Lopez, the two best Argentines in the history of Valencia and, coincidentally, they too were born in the province of Cordoba.
He arrives in January and is catapulted into a group still obsessed with defeat in the Champions League the previous year. One of the best teams in La Liga, in a historical period in which there is a lot of talent distribution, with 4 greats: Real Madrid who just bought Figo starting the era of the Galacticos, Rivaldo’s Barcelona, Deportivo la Coruña of Djalminha and Mendieta’s Valencia.
But there are also teams like Mallorca, Celta and Villarreal who play almost evenly if not. For a 20-year-old who has changed his life, this is a very complicated moment. As soon as they arrived, Valencia lost three consecutive direct matches against Deportivo, Barcelona and Real Madrid; comes out of the title race and puts all the eggs in the basket of the Champions League dream.
Cúper does not intend to give Aimar time to adapt because he considers him ready and his debut comes with Manchester United in the second round of the Champions League. Cúper does not use the attacking midfielder, preferring to leave that area to the incursions of the star Mendieta; so he prefers to use Aimar as a second striker next to the Carew tower. Aimar barely knows his teammates but he drives Manchester United crazy who cannot read where he will receive.
In short, Cúper’s intuition works. The English defenses are not used to facing such a technical and slippery player. And in fact he also proposes it in the second leg, in the quarterfinals against Arsenal, and in the historic semi-final won 3-0 against Leeds in which he also makes an assist.
He also plays the first half of the final, going out for Albelda in a change that Cúper will then regret given the defeat on penalties without having created almost anything in the minutes without him. A final that leads to Cúper’s farewell to Inter and the arrival of the young Rafa Benitez, the first European coach with whom he can have an entire pre-season retreat to get used to the new context.
Losing the naivety The new coach has clear ideas and with the sale of Mendieta to Lazio decides that all the creative weight of the team must fall on Aimar, who will be the playmaker of his 4-2-3-1, the only one with freedom of movement. A team built first of all not to concede a goal, with the Argentine central Pellegrino and Ayala and the pair of central midfielders Albelda and Baraja always in line a few meters ahead. A team that in a Liga of technical teams chooses to be the difficult one to beat, the most aggressive in tackling and attentive to tactical balance.
Benitez’s work on Aimar is meticulous, he teaches him the importance of tactical balance, of movements without the ball, of doing things for the offensive maneuver by touching fewer balls: “He always repeats to me that it is better to touch 1 ball in the area than 6 outside . I always try to be seen to give my teammates an option. You have to learn when it is better to approach for a triangulation or when to move away to receive close to the area ».
He is an excellent student, but he does not hide a bitter note, because in addition to feeling all the creative weight he understands that he is playing a football that is not his: “Maybe I have to be more rational and even if I enjoy less because I touch fewer balls, this can help the team maneuver. In Argentina I touched a lot of balls, here you have to get used to playing first. I don’t know where I went home happier after the matches, I think in Argentina ».
To show how much Benitez’s football influenced him by taking away some of the naivety he brought with him from Argentina, he will say some time later that for him playing well means making the right decisions: “playing well equals choosing well: choosing when to touch the ball, when to try dribbling, when you have to pass it, when you have to shoot, when you have to attack. Choosing well is the most difficult thing ».
With an out-of-scale talent he succeeds in an apparently simple way of things of great complexity. He is not afraid of making mistakes by trying complicated plays also because Benitez asks him to try to surprise the opposing defenses.
Valencia suffer only 27 goals, 7 fewer than Betis second best defense. Loses 5 games, half of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Deportivo. In 2002 he won his first title in 31 years. But from a personal point of view Aimar does even better the following season, in which the defense of Valencia does not offer the same security, but he now knows the opposing defenses. Score 8 goals in La Liga becoming the best scorer of the team.
After a victory with Liverpool in the Champions League where he scores a goal while mocking the entire defense, Maradona, interviewed by the Sun, says: “He is my legitimate successor as the best player in the world, Pablo enjoys playing as I did and for this he will give a lot of joy to Valencia . He makes sure that the life of the opponents is not a bed of rose petals “and concludes with a sentence that will remain forever attached to Aimar:” I would pay any amount to see him play “, something already said in other interviews also with the variant ” the only player I would pay for ”.
Even today this sentence and that of Messi about him have remained stuck to him as if this were his legacy in the world of football: Maradona’s favorite player and Messi’s idol.
Be the idol of the best
Before a game against Koeman’s Ajax in the spring of 2003, an interview with his assistant Toni Bruins Slot comes out who compares Aimar’s game with Cruyff’s, Cruyff himself speaks enthusiastically as one of the best players in La Liga despite age.
Pressed on the subject, Aimar shields himself : «it seems to me an enormous exaggeration that I compare with Cruyff. I am happy that Cruyff has spoken about me a few times, but we must remember that in the history of football there have been four greats and one of them is him. This is why the comparison seems inconceivable to me ».
Speaking of comparisons. These are the years in which even a young Leo Messi, just arrived from Argentina, ends up dreaming one day of being like Pablito Aimar. Going to fish from the archive of when Messi was still in the youth teams in 2002, Aimar is actually the player he talks about when they ask him who he looks like : “I think everyone is different, but I have a bit of Aimar’s style of play, playing in the same position and all. As when he receives in the race and touches it at speed he already knows what he must do ».
Messi later said that at the beginning of his career he only asked two players for the jersey: from Zidane after his first Clásico and from Aimar after his first Valencia-Barcelona. But the history of the relationship between the two is as important for Messi as it is for Aimar, especially with the progress of Messi’s career, which was already clear at the age of 19 would be legendary: “With Lionel we exchanged the jersey 3 or 4 times. Once he asked me, I said “What are you asking me? This is how the world looks upside down ”». And for a decade now there hasn’t been an interview with Aimar in which Messi’s words of appreciation do not appear: «They often ask me about Leo’s words about me. Obviously I think Leo doesn’t look like anyone else, he skipped us all from Maradona onwards, including the name you want to put in between.
Valencia will only finish fifth, but the following season is that of the apotheosis of Rafa Benitez’s team. Despite a series of annoying injuries that for the first time take away his continuity, around Aimar the level has risen again: the pair of central Ayala-Marchena is the starting point for a Valencia that suffers only 27 goals and asks how the best defense of the tournament.
Forward the team discovers the talent in jumping the winger grown in the Vicente house and finds the season of life from the mixed tip (19 goals in Liga). With a great comeback against Real Madrid in the spring, Benitez’s side win La Liga and then lift the UEFA Cup in the final against Olympique of Marseille. They are the last team not from Madrid or Barcelona to win La Liga.
Pekerman’s unfinished generation At a time when things are going well with Valencia, there is the disappointing reality of the Argentina national team. The 2002 World Cup is the biggest disappointment of that generation, who started to win it, with probably the best squad available together with France and instead left the group just like France.
Aimar plays in all three games, in the first victorious against Nigeria and in the second, lost against England, he enters the second half again for Veron, the director and captain chosen by Bielsa in his 3-4-3.
In the last one, absolutely to win against Sweden, he plays from the first minute. He takes the place of Veron, criticized by the media for his performances in the match against England, and despite playing better than his teammate, he is not able to find the goal in the blocked attack of Argentina, which comes out of the World Cup by drawing 1-1. Although it was the biggest disappointment of Aimar’s career, I don’t think it is useful to go into further details here since he wrote an article about everything that Fabrizio Gabrielli psychodrama has meant for Argentina.
Four years later, at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the generation raised by Pekerman is at the theoretical peak of his career, and the federation chooses him as coach. Since the qualifications, Argentina is put back on the field with a diamond in midfield dear to the coach who had discovered Aimar. In the World Cup, however, Aimar enters from the bench as a change in midfield, in the rhombus Riquelme is the attacking midfielder and alongside he has balanced players like Mascherano, Maxi Rodríguez and Lucho González or Cambiasso. No more 8 and 10 from the start as at the youth level, and there is no space in front either because the attacking couple is made up of a combination of Crespo, Saviola, Tevez and a very young but already famous Messi.
However, he finds his minutes in the group and in the round of 16, against Mexico. The World Cup seems to be developing in a promising way for Argentina, but in the quarterfinals against Germany the crime that marks Pekerman’s career happens: with the team ahead and with two changes still available, in the 72nd minute he decides that it is better to keep the advantage by removing Riquelme and inserting Cambiasso in midfield. A defensive move, which in addition to removing the director from the team pushes his teammates to lower the center of gravity.
Realizing this thing a few minutes later, instead of inserting Aimar on the trocar or Messi in attack to try to play football as he had always preached, he decides to put the Julio Cruz tower for the Crespo tip. A minute later, Germany equalized and will end up eliminating Argentina on penalties: Cruz, Ayala, Maxi Roríguez and Cambiasso will appear on the spot, who will miss the decisive one. No really technical player then.
Although it is said that the federation still wants to continue, for Pekerman the disappointment is too much and pushes him to resign.
The group remains the same even under Alfio Basile for the 2007 Copa América, another tournament that Aimar faces as a resource from the bench. The bad 3-0 defeat against Brazil in the final represents the bitter end point for the experience of practically the entire Pekerman generation.
Paradoxically, the arrival of Maradona as technical commissioner for the 2010 World Cup leads to the dismissal of Aimar and Riquelme from the summons for their theoretical last World Cup (Veron plays it instead, at 35).
Bilardo’s influence must have been felt in Maradona, who decides to center the game around Messi as an attacking midfielder (perhaps to make him responsible as it was for him in 1986) by building a system of running players to balance everything. Every great player of a great national team generally has three World Cups available in his career: that of a rising star, that of an established star and that of an expert star. At Aimar and Riquelme, the two greatest talents born in pre-Messi Argentina were given only two and were betrayed by their master in exactly what they could shine as established stars.
In the summer of 2006 World Cup disappointment, Aimar’s career at Valencia comes to an end. It all actually begins with the 2004/05 season, the one that begins as the strongest player in the reigning champion team.
Valencia has undergone the enormous change of the farewell of Rafa Benitez and the return of Claudio Ranieri, already successful coach of Valencia in the 90s, who brings with him three attacking players from Serie A in Marco Di Vaio, Stefano Fiore and Bernardo Corradi for about 40 million (the last two are sold by Lazio to balance old accounts of the Mendieta deal).
Benitez is more than happy to take Aimar to Liverpool and probably Ranieri to let him go, but Valencia are not selling. The Roman coach immediately finds himself wedged between Benitez’s legacy and the newcomers and ends up never finding a stable system, he changes between 4-4-2 and 4-2-3-1 without continuity.
The whole team is struggling, obviously Aimar in the lead, who starts the season even on the bench, and then returns to the starting field tossed between the trocar and the wing, without having regular companions next to him, therefore without being able to form stable companies. The senators end up disheartening the coach after two consecutive defeats in February, leading to the sacking.
Interim manager Antonio Lopez immediately puts the title team back on the field with Aimar in the center and there comes the team’s best performances, with a draw with Real Madrid in the middle with one of his goals. But it is too late to save the season and Valencia closes seventh.
«The feeling that scoring a goal gives is not comparable, it cannot be found in other situations. I’m not talking about it being better or worse than other things, it’s just that there are no comparisons ».
With small and large muscle injuries that return after a groin pain accused in the national team in the spring, he struggles to have the continuity of performance to end the season well and carries the problem also into the next one. Where, however, with Quique Sanchez Flores on the bench and the immediate sale of the three Italians – and the arrival in their place from Zaragoza of the tip David Villa – gives a last season made of brilliant flashes.
Flores maintains Benitez’s system, to which Villa adds: that is enough to make the team return to the top of the Liga. Pamper Aimar: “you have to leave him calm”, putting the inseparable Albelda-Baraja to cover him, on the sides two wings as well as Vicente and Rufete to give him space to move and in front of one of the best players in Europe in attacking the depth on his filtering in the Villa. The team plays vertical football that aims to exploit the speed of the attacking front and the safety of the central block, with Aimar as the nerve center of creativity.
The team finishes third in the standings, but at the end of the season Aimar decides that after more than five years in Valencia it is time to try something new.
Of those years he will remember that first of all it is the city where his two children were born and raised and then that with the team they succeeded in something enormous: “What we managed to do is impressive, we must always remember what it means to go against the two greats. in Spain. Playing on a par with them for five years was great ».
Dusk Among the offers, he chooses that of Zaragoza, a mid-ranking team in La Liga that however has bigger ambitions. Zaragoza thinks of climbing the hierarchies by taking South American talents discarded by the big teams. He takes 4 Argentines: the brothers Milito, Andrés D’Alessandro from Wolfsburg and Pablito Aimar.
Perhaps the presence of so many high-level Argentines convinces Aimar to follow them. For 11 million at the time he became the second most expensive player in the history of Zaragoza.
In the ambitious team of Víctor Fernández he was placed on the left wing of the 4-4-2 with the possibility of centralizing. On the other side there is D’Alessandro and in front of two very good players in the clearances, that is Diego Milito and one between Sergio García and Ewerthon.
Víctor Fernández says of him: “It must be the reference of the offensive maneuver, open spaces in the opposing defense, pause or accelerate the action, make a difference”. The team plays nice football and is ranked sixth in La Liga, qualifying for the UEFA Cup.
The second, however, in a totally unexpected way, is a nightmare season: Aimar gets hurt several times, there are 4 coach changes, a split locker room with skyrocketing tension that also brings a hint of brawl in training between him and D’Alessandro. A team with European ambitions finishes eighteenth in La Liga and relegates to Segunda.
The shock follows the immediate diaspora of the best players: Diego Milito returns to Genoa for the season that will then lead him to Inter, Sergio García goes to Betis, Matuzalem goes to Lazio, D’Alessandro returns to South America. Aimar also decides he wants to change league, among the teams he refuses is Newcastle in the Premier League of manager Kevin Keegan who dotes on him and especially Lazio in Serie A, desperate for a playmaker to work alongside Goran Pandev and Tommaso Rocchi to relaunch European ambitions after a mid-table season.
Instead of Aimar, Lazio will take Mauro Zarate, but President Lotito will continue to follow him also in subsequent markets, when asked in the autumn of 2009 if he will ever be the coveted Pablo Aimar replies: “The ways of the Lord are infinite”.
Happiness regained Aimar is 28 years old, he finally feels physically well and wants to return to playing the European Cups as a protagonist. This is why the choice of Benfica, who play every year in Europe, has its own logic. To convince him to accept the Benfica offer there is also the legend Rui Costa, who has just retired and who with him as the icing on the transfer market cake wants to start his career as Benfica’s own ds: Rui Costa flies to his house to talk to us and he tells him that given his retirement he would like him to inherit his 10.
As is clear by now, Aimar is a person who lets himself be carried away by this type of talk, loves football and respects its legends, for him the confidence in his talent of someone like Rui Costa is worth more than all the economic reassurances of the sports director of Europe. Among the things that help him choose, Benfica is also the fact that there he finds Quique Sanchez Flores.
Aimar is presented as the star of the new project that must make us forget the humiliating fourth place of the past season. Despite the high-level players available such as José Antonio Reyes, Ángel Di María and David Luiz, Flores’ Benfica cannot find continuity and go beyond third place and the Portuguese Cup victory, leaving the European groups League.
Even individually for Aimar it is not an unforgettable season, but he gives David Suazo an assist from rabona from his half of the pitch that Benfica fans still talk about today.
The real coach who changes his prospects arrives the following year and is Jorge Jesus. According to Aimar, the one who gave him the idea of becoming one in turn: Di Jesus loves the relationship he establishes with the players and the way he wants the team to play, the same type of football based on the technique he wants to play Aimar. Jesus falls in love with it : «For me football is made up of two very important components: the scientific and the artistic. Aimar is art, which is what makes the difference in all human activities, not just in football ».
The player is considered by the coach to be his assistant on the pitch and in the locker room. David Luiz said that he owes his ability to distribute the ball. Aimar in retreat asked him to follow him into the room, put him in front of a video and began to explain to him how to set up a central, when and how he must distribute in the short and when in the long.
On the advice of Aimar, Rui Costa takes his friend and former partner at River Javier Saviola to join the mighty Óscar Cardozo in attack. The real protagonist, however, is the diamond-shaped midfield, with Javi García in front of the defense, Ángel Di María and Ramires on the sides and Aimar on the front. With technical players around, always with his back covered, a phenomenal player in forays from the second line in Ramires, a perfect partner to play with in the short in Di María and Saviola to be able to throw deep, Aimar’s football returns to shine. He moves all over the pitch and ends the season with 13 assists and 5 goals, Jorge Jesus’ first Benfica returns to win the title after 4 years, thrilling the fans on the pitch.
As said by Jorge Jesus in a recent interview with Zico in Brazil, according to him Aimar is the best player he has coached in his career.
In matches the fans have a dedicated choirto Aimar, nicknamed “the Magician”, in which he is compared to Eusebio and Rui Costa for having brought back the glory to Benfica as “another 10 immortal”. At the time of the title celebrations, Aimar is interviewed from a stage that opens onto a huge crowd of moving red shirts, flags and smoke bombs spanning the entire screen. He says they had told him that Benfica’s return to title celebrations would be impressive, but he couldn’t imagine it would be such an incredible thing. At that moment he falls in love with the team and the city, says that Benfica is a bigger club than you think from the outside and still today declares himself a fan 12000 km away as much as the River Plate, occasionally showing up at the stadium .
He then decides to stay until the end of the contract, in another three seasons in which each time the best teammates are sold on the market, while he is loved and pampered by fans and the press, becoming in effect the heir of Rui Costa. It continues at its level for two full seasons. In the last one, his contribution is that of a super-reserve who enters to try to turn complicated games with one play.
Benfica can no longer win the championship in these three seasons, but stands out in Europe, reaching the Europa League semi-final (he loses the second leg in which Benfica will lose the round), then the quarter-finals of the Champions League (eliminated from Chelsea di Di Matteo then champion) and in the final of the Europa League his last season.
The search for the perfect ending The last match in the Champions League was against Messi’s Barcelona in the 2012/13 season (two weeks after the last one with the Benfica armband, in the hour of the game against Celtic). In a match dominated by Vilanova’s team from the first minute, he enters with half an hour at his disposal and still manages to do better than all his attacking teammates in the rest of the game with very few balls touched.
Aimar and Messi only touch each other in moments of contested ball in midfield, the first trots around the field waiting for a ball that never arrives, while the second is the absolute protagonist with the assist for Fàbregas’ goal at the end of a personal action overwhelming that closes the game, but at the final whistle there is the hug and the exchange of shirts between the two.
The latest in Europe is the first leg of the Europa League semi-final against Fenerbahçe in the spring. Play only the first half and will not play the second leg and the final lost with Sevilla at the Juventus Stadium, the last European final that Benfica lose, yet another from the curse of Béla Guttman. Benfica will also lose the Portuguese Cup final, this time with Aimar making a 3-minute cameo, and will finish second in the league by a point over Porto having lost the direct match on the penultimate day with a goal in the 92nd minute. , shortly after Aimar entered the field without practically touching the ball. A team that is beautiful to watch but which at the end of the season reaping less than what is sown is coincidentally the last of Pablo Aimar in Europe.
Determined not to stop, he plans to make some more money by going to Asia; he becomes the highest paid player in the Malaysian league where he signs a two-year contract with Johor, but after a season in which he plays just 8 games due to many injuries the contract is terminated. Curiously, he only finds out from the team’s statement on Facebook.
Realizing that he has almost reached the end of his physique, he decides to treat himself to one last season at the River Plate almost 15 years later: «My dream was that my children would still see me in the River. Well maybe it was more my dream than them, maybe they didn’t care too much about it. ” As soon as he arrived in the River, however, he seriously injured his ankle and returned to the field only 4 months later to play a single last game entering the last 15 minutes. Coach Gallardo kisses him before letting him in while the whole stadium is standing to applaud him. He leaves the River in a quarter of an hour totally without match rhythm, which is however a distillation of pure technique . He decides to retire because: “I don’t like playing football while walking.”
At the time of his retirement announcement, a bitter whatsapp audio sounded around Argentina with his voice : “I got tired of taking anti-inflammatories, pills, protectors, syringes, infiltrations, to limp in training and then be also what remains out of the list for the Copa Libertadores ».
He is so dissatisfied with his last spell at River that he organizes another farewell to football, two years later he returns to the pitch for one last game, with Río Cuarto’s Estudiantes in the Argentine Cup, so as to officially play with them a game for the first time in his career. He does it at the age of 38, next to his brother Andrés, with the armband, the 10 behind his back and under the inscription: “The end is where I started”. He has a thick beard and at the moment of the change he comes out with sad eyes, he smiles only at his teammates whom he greets on the bench. Marcelo Bielsa is also framed in the stands during the general applause at the time of the change. A few months later he announced that he will be a coach.
Building the future With his last match he stopped playing professional football, but he didn’t stop playing: «I pay every week, every Tuesday, to play football at 5, 9, 7, what we are. Friends, some former players, we meet again and play, we have fun. In order not to let me play, they shouldn’t have invented football ».
As he had decided at the time of Benfica, in 2017 he began his coaching career remaining in the federal sphere immediately after receiving his license. His career as a footballer began with the Argentina national team under 17 and he wanted to return there to also start that of coach. He chose to coach the new generation in order to instill his vision of football as Pekerman did with him. Pekerman, Bielsa and Jesus are all influential coaches of his career and are all football masters. This also appears to be Aimar’s fate.
According to him, the way young players think about football is changing. The way they see it has changed, rarely sitting down to watch a game in its entirety, but preferring instead to watch the highlights of the most important actions.
He sees his role as that of educator rather than just a youth recruiter: «The result is not important. I think we have helped the kids improve from what they were 4 months ago. They created unforgettable memories, they made friends, they enjoyed playing and training ». He talks about his boys, but he also seems to be talking about his experience in the 90s. He seems to want to prepare the generation that will then have to train among the professionals. But Aimar has also started a controversy about the way South American football has taken, increasingly the prerogative of coaches who want teams where the main talent is athletics: «it is becoming difficult to make a triangulation. I don’t think there are 5 consecutive passes, this makes me a bit sad because there are very good players in all the teams.
He tried to work on simple concepts to develop a clean maneuver with which he won the last South American tournament in the category: “We want the team to attack, we like the more technical players to be close to each other and to be able to do this you need to have tactical order and the predisposition to recover the ball immediately after the loss because there is one ».
For this reason among the generation of 2002 he is working on he found a central with good feet that he will surely have put in front of a video as he did with David Luiz in Francisco Flores of San Lorenzo, a technical and calm director with the ball in Juan Sforza of Newell’s , a dribbling winger like Di María in Alan Velasco of the Independent and a striker who always seeks depth as Saviola in his time, that is Matías Godoy, now at Dinamo Zagreb. And above all, he seems to have also found a player to model in his likeness: Matías Palacios del San Lorenzo. A player with the purest technique, able to make plays that are worth the game.
Faithful to his playful idea, in his first experience he is therefore trying to let the players go back to seeing football as a game, to have fun together: “We try to make them continue to think that football is a game and we constantly repeat that they have to train as if they were working… also because if you see the great players, you realize that on the pitch they think about playing football, not that they are working ».
Upon delivery of the 2015 Ballon d’Or to Messi, they send a video message from Aimar to the screen. He congratulates him, of course, but he also asks a question that I think collects so much of Aimar’s vision of the world of football as coach: «How do you maintain the same ability to enjoy playing football with this feeling of freedom as when you were a child? “. Football for Aimar is a game that allows you to relive the same joy every time you touch the ball as when you were a child. He demonstrated this by playing, and now he wants to pass this vision on to future generations as well.
