There are football teams that can only aspire to exceptional players by producing them. I’m talking about those players who leave much more than goals and start building identities, as if the first were not enough.
There’s something fascinating about watching football legends grapple with their own mortality in the sport. It’s like watching an eclipse fading, a sunset receding over the horizon. With Iago Aspas – yet – this does not happen because the guy seems to have stolen Juan Ponce de León’s purpose and to have discovered the secret of eternal youth, possibly hanging from a boat. His longevity as a footballer (37 years and two months) is creating a historic collectible of records. A couple of weeks ago he completed 500 games for Celta (he has been scoring for 15 seasons), and with the goals he has scored this season he has already entered the top 20 all-time scorers in the League, overtaking Aduriz or Puskas.
His degreased physique looks the same as when he debuted with Celta. He continues running the same way: with his chest inflated, frenetic, anxious. It looks like a wild animal just released from its cage, the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland with a watch attached to his ruminant legs. But he is chased by rival defenders, while he chases balls and referees, always mortified by his constant protests (those that have earned him an expulsion this very weekend).
There is a video that has been circulating on the Internet for years of an interview with Iago Aspas when he was a Celta ball boy. He was a kid, but he already had that bulging, hungry look. In the video he says that his dream is “xogar, xogar no Celta dos maiores” (“play, play in the Celta of the elders”). So Iago joined the youth team’s trials at the age of eight, when only nine-year-olds were admitted, and that little trick turned out to be the most lucrative operation in Celta’s history.
Those who shared the youth categories with him in those years say that no other child experienced football like this, that only he could list by heart even the starting goalkeepers in the Uzbekistan League. Elvira Lindo could have written Aspas. And in his script he was given a fishing village from which Vigo could be seen on the other side of the estuary, a shellfish farming family and a way of relating to football embodying the essence of the simple game. Because it was on the street, and not on a field, where he learned that curbs return balls better than some professional players.
The most legendary photograph in his newspaper archive shows him on the shoulders of Dani Abalo, with his arms open, looking ecstatic towards the Marcador stands among a crowd of photographers. It happened on June 7, 2009. That day Aspas managed to avoid the relegation of a Celta drowned by debt to Second B with two goals against Alavés, a direct rival towards the well. It was his first match in Balaídos and it was his first salvation verified by the Vatican. Because Aspas has saved Celta so many times that it could be considered an NGO in itself. Fans should be able to check their box on their tax returns.
This column is something like a letter sent out of nostalgia because a few days ago Iago Aspas wrote on his Instagram that he has little left. How do you have little left? But how dare you imply such a thing? We Celtists’ chests tightened at that moment, with the unbearable shock you feel knowing that an unreasonable part of your soul can leave at any moment. Although in the case of Aspas we know that he would not go very far.
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