Tevez back to where he belongs

Football

The world is full of expatriates, who might best understand Carlos Tevez. Over the past 11 years -- almost a lifetime when it comes to professional sports -- Tevez has worked outside of his native Argentina, wherever the money has taken him. He has represented clubs in Brazil, England and Italy, and his dynamic running helped propel Juventus to the Champions League final in Berlin less than three weeks ago.

But the soul of Carlitos, as he is known in Argentina, never left Buenos Aires. Tevez is still on the road and still running, albeit now in the shadows of Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero, as the Argentine national team tries to win the Copa America in Chile.

While he is there, however, the agents who have sold him so often across the globe have successfully ensured his return to the Argentine club where it all started for him, Boca Juniors.

You can take the boy out of Buenos Aires, but you cannot take Buenos Aires out of this boy. Tevez is 31, and his wife and his two daughters returned to Argentina over three years ago -- and he then played truant from his club, Manchester City, and missed three months to stay with them back home. He argued then that he had enough money to stay where he belonged and that he would get his highs from his other favourite game, golf.

The deal that would take him home was still being finalised when a television reporter thrust a microphone toward Tevez at the Copa last weekend and asked if the transfer were complete. The player gave a huge, enigmatic grin.

It was right after the game, and all that he knew was that Boca Juniors were negotiating, hard, to extract him from Juventus. Meanwhile, the Italian club -- where he was a catalyst in two straight seasons of dominance in Serie A -- was busy signing his replacement.

Or rather, replacements. On Monday, Juve signed Mario Mandzukic, the powerful Croatian striker, from Atletico Madrid. Mandzukic, two years younger than Tevez, has something of the same whole-hearted desire that drives the Argentine.

The Croatian, too, is well travelled, having played for Bayern Munich before his one season in Madrid. But as much as Mandzukic can run and run and be selfless in providing opportunities for others, he lacks the instinctive guile of the Argentine.

Tevez scored 39 goals in league play over his two seasons with Juventus, and his darting runs, sharp passes and cunning awareness of how to unsettle defenders set up 14 other goals for his colleagues, plus plenty of opportunities they missed.

The Old Lady, Juventus, still has Alvaro Morata, the former Real Madrid striker who fed off Tevez last season. It now has Mandzukic to act as a bludgeon in the attack. And earlier this month it signed Paulo Dybala, a 21-year-old Argentine who has been making a name for himself with another Italian club, Palermo.

Maybe all three of them will make up for the loss of Tevez. And maybe that puts him on too high a pedestal because, after all, soccer is a team sport.

So it is, and one does not envy Massimiliano Allegri, the Juventus coach who this off-season must attempt to rebuild the core of the only Italian club that has been able to go any distance in the Champions League in recent years.

While he loses Tevez, Andrea Pirlo, the marvelously creative midfielder, is also leaving for New York City FC of Major League Soccer. And Paul Pogba, the forceful midfielder, is looking for a move, perhaps to a club in England or to Barcelona.

But Tevez will be the biggest loss for Juventus. He has never stayed very long at any place, in part because Media Sports Investment, the agency that owned a third of his rights, took to extremes the idea that moving a talent from club to club, from contract to contract, was the best way for him, and them, to cash in on his market value.

The pity is that we might never have seen what the Tevez of 2004 could have become.
That year, Tevez shot Argentina to a gold-medal victory at the Olympic Games in Athens. He was the top scorer, with eight goals in that tournament and thrilled everyone who saw him. Many saw in him the second coming of Diego Maradona.

In some ways, that was prescient. Messi emerged to overtake Tevez when it came to emulating the skills that Maradona once had, but Tevez is closer in terms of Maradona’s temperament, mischief and nomadic wanderings.

They come, Maradona and Tevez, from a similar place. Messi is from Rosario, Argentina, but was taken to Barcelona when he was 13. Tevez, like Maradona, is from the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and both kicked their way out of poverty.

After starting with Boca Juniors, Tevez travelled to Sao Paulo, Brazil (with Corinthians), to London (West Ham United), Manchester (United and then City) and Turin, Italy (Juventus).

But always a part of him remained in Buenos Aires. His career is about to come full circle at the same Boca club where Maradona ended his career in 1997.


New York Times News Service