“The game is more than goals”

The café near the Place Jean-Jaurès is quiet, the autumn light soft on the terrasse. Agustín Paredes orders a café allongé, his hands still, his eyes calm. At forty, he carries the stillness of a man who has made peace with the game.

We are here because his playing days ended after the 2062/63 season, after twenty-four years and five hundred and three club appearances. He never scored a goal. Not one. For a striker, that would be a tragedy; for Paredes, it was a philosophy.

How do you explain a career without goals?

I never saw the goal as my purpose. Football is a conversation—passes, movement, space. The goal is only the last word, and not always the most interesting one. I wanted to be the comma, the pause, the silence between the notes. My father used to say that a player who only thinks of scoring is like a poet who only thinks of the last line.

But at Boca Juniors, you won trophies. Did the fans accept you?

Boca is a temple of passion, and they love those who suffer for the shirt. I played only eight games, but I trained every day as if it were a final. The Argentine Supercup, the League Cups—I was part of something bigger than myself. When I left, some said I had failed, but I felt I had learned how to serve.

Then you went to Independiente Rivadavia, a smaller club.

Yes, and there I played one hundred and nineteen games. It was a different world—more dust, more heart. I learned that the ball doesn’t care about your reputation. It only asks that you treat it well. I tried to be a good host to the ball.

You came to France with Olympique Lyonnais and won the Ligue 1 title, though you played only twice.

Two games, yes. But I was there every day, in the cold, in the rain. The title belongs to everyone who pushed the group. I have the medal, and I know I earned it not with my feet but with my patience. That is something you cannot buy.

AS Monaco, then Nice, and finally Saint-Étienne, where you became a legend of a different kind.

Saint-Étienne was my home. Two hundred and twenty games. The Chaudron, the noise, the green. I gave them my best years, and they gave me their trust. We didn’t win titles, but we created something—a style, a resistance. In a world obsessed with numbers, we proved that zero can be beautiful.

You later played for Ajaccio, Toulouse, Bastia. Why keep going?

Because the game still had things to teach me. Each club was a new dialect, a new rhythm. Ajaccio, the sea; Toulouse, the river; Bastia, the mountain. I collected landscapes, not goals. My legs were tired, but my curiosity was not.

What do you do now, out of the game?

I read. I walk. I watch matches in silence, sometimes without the sound. I see players running faster, shooting harder, celebrating louder. And I think: they have forgotten the comma. The game is more than goals. It is a way of being in the world.

Do you regret anything?

I regret nothing, not even the zero. It is my signature. When they write my name in the history books, it will be next to a blank space. And that blank space, for me, is full of meaning. Full of passes, full of runs, full of love for the ball. Full of football.

He finishes his coffee and looks out at the square, where a child in a green scarf is imitating a stepover. Paredes smiles, and for a moment, the years fall away. He was never a scorer, but he was always a player. And in the end, that is enough.