Angione's 627 Goals Were Never the Whole Story
Three summers after Eduardo Angione played his last competitive match, the numbers still sit there on the page like a monument, and still say less than the man did.
The boots are dry now, and have been for three years. That is the first contrast, and the plainest: the game goes on without him, the summer transfer columns fill with other names, and somewhere in Madrid a squad trains for a season Eduardo Angione will not touch. The second contrast is harder to hold in the mind. Between 2038 and 2060 a footballer scored six hundred and twenty-seven goals in eight hundred and sixty-three club matches, gathered fifty-three trophies, and did it all with a plainness that made the extraordinary look like weather.
The Early Roads
He began at Chelsea in 2039/40 and stayed, on and off, for a decade, though the seasons do not sit neatly in a row. There were one hundred and seven games in blue and forty-five goals, and in the middle of that a single year at Club Athletico Paranaense, forty-nine games and twenty-one goals, and then two seasons at Cardiff City, forty-three games and twenty-four goals. A career that reads like a list of ports of call was in truth a young man learning the trade in different weathers. Nobody watching him in those years would have predicted the shape of what came after. They might have predicted the calm of it.
What the Years Built
From 2045/46 the story settles, and the settling is the point. At Athletico Madrid he played five hundred and sixty-nine games and scored four hundred and eighty-eight goals, and the trophies came in a tide: eight Spanish First Division titles, six UEFA Champions Leagues, six Spanish Super Cups, five English Community Shields, five UEFA Super Cups, five English FA Cups. Fifty-three in all. The individual honours gather in the same years, and the 2052 and 2053 seasons stand out even among them, when he was named UEFA Champions League Player of the Season in both, took the Golden Boot in both, and was Forward of the Season in both. The Spanish First Division Top Goalscorer award came to him in 2046, 2051 and 2052, and the European Golden Shoe in 2046. For his country there were ninety games and fifty-one goals.
But a list of honours is a poor portrait. What the men who played with him remember is the way he occupied a pitch: not loud, not hurried, always in the place where the next thing would happen. He was a forward who made the game feel slower for everyone else and faster for himself. The goals were numerous but they were not identical; some were the last touch of a long patience, others the first flash of an idea. He scored in finals and he scored in the rain on a Tuesday, and the expression afterwards was much the same.
"He made you feel calm," one old teammate said to me once, and then corrected himself. "No. He made you feel that the game was already decided, and that you only had to wait for it to be confirmed."
The Game Without Him
He stopped after 2059/60, and the years since have not been empty ones at Athletico Madrid. This summer the club has been busy, spending £32.1m on Krzysztof Dziedzic from FC CFR 1907 Cluj, and Hüseyin Göktepe has just been named Spanish League Player of the Year for 2063. The old names still gather there, too: Henrique Araújo, with three hundred and eighty-two goals in six hundred and seventy-nine club games, now assistant manager; Javier Belmonte, two hundred and sixty-eight in five hundred and ninety-four, now fitness coach. The place keeps its history close, which is one way of saying it has not quite let go of it.
That is the real contrast, in the end. Not then and now, not them and us, but the man and the absence of him. For twenty-one seasons Eduardo Angione was the fixed point around which the game turned, and the numbers were only the shadow he cast. Three summers on, the shadow is still there on the grass, long and quiet, and the boots are dry in the hall.