Waiting for the first call

With the World Cup looming, Diego Costa is in demand in Spain as well as in Brazil but the striker is still undecided

He is tall, mean, provocative and a big-game winner. And now, Diego da Silva Costa is waiting for a call that could make him a World Cup-winning striker. He has two options for which national team he might represent next year during soccer’s showcase event. One is Brazil, where he was born. The other is Spain, where he plays professionally and where he was recently granted citizenship.

That is some option. Brazil has home-field advantage at the 2014 World Cup finals, and it must be considered a favourite to win the tournament.

But Spain is the reigning champion and has young playmakers itching to help defend the trophy.

 Costa, anyone?

Put it this way, he is 24, almost middle-aged in sporting terms. Until seven months ago he was nobody’s must-have center forward. He bristled, he brooded, he played between the lines of chief striker and midfield, always in the service of Radamel Falcao, the No. 1 goal scorer for Atlético Madrid.

 But when Atlético sold Falcao for $81 million to Monaco, it was Costa’s cue to be the main man. He was ready, and many people knew it.  Among his suitors was Liverpool. The English club’s own tasty but often-suspended Uruguayan, Luis Suárez, was haggling to get out of his contract, and so Liverpool bid 25 million, the release clause in Costa’s employment arrangement in Madrid. Atlético needed the player more than the money at that particular time, so it doubled Costa’s salary and wrote a fresh three-year deal.

 The red and whites of Madrid have long been prescient in finding and then cashing in on strikers. Raúl was born to that half of the city until a previous Atlético president abandoned the youth academy and let Raúl go to Real Madrid.

 Fernando Torres blossomed there, was sold to Liverpool and is now a Chelsea player. Sergio Agüero, the utterly brilliant Manchester City forward, was once in harness with Diego Forlán but, again, both had their price, and Atlético had others in the wings.

 Atlético deals in multiple or part-ownership of its playing talents. Agents, or other clubs in countries even less well off than Spain, sell players like Falcao or Costa piecemeal, which is to say a part of them belongs to the Madrid team, and a third or maybe two-thirds to others.

 Maybe that explains why Costa simmered in the background, overlooked and often lent out by Atlético, which had other strikers to love and to fatten for the market. Maybe that is why he came through as a brooding athlete, uncertain of his place, and with something of a chip on both shoulders.

 That chip became known for its wayward temper before anyone fully trusted the obvious, sometimes uncanny and instinctive way he could find spaces in even the most crowded of areas. Costa is now under the tutelage of Diego Simeone, the abrasive and cunning Argentine who became Atlético’s coach two years ago and has transformed the team. It is now, unquestionably, the third force in Spanish soccer.

 The club finds, uses and then sells players, particularly strikers, as few others do. Yet by getting inside his players, by cajoling, bullying and persuading them, Simeone meshes them to become winners. The essence of it is that they run until the opponents drop, but in this day and age, there will always be questions about how one side can outrun and outlast another when both clubs field top professionals.

 Twice now, Atlético has beaten Real Madrid in Real’s Bernabéu stronghold, in the King’s Cup final last May and a Liga game recently, when Costa scored the winner. He didn’t simply score, with a fine run onto a pass from the young Spaniard Koke, Costa engaged in 90 minutes of surly, sly aggressiveness with Real’s two most brutish defenders, Sergio Ramos and Pepe.

 Very few mix it with that pair and emerge victorious. Costa, the truly ugly-beautiful Brazilian, did it with a smile on his face, with eye-poking, rib-punching relish. Luiz Felipe Scolari, who has coached Brazil to the World Cup on 2002 and is back trying to do the same again next year, makes no bones about his relish of violence coated by the kind of touch, control and movement that Costa possesses.

 Vicente Del Bosque, the Spanish coach who won the 2010 World Cup in South Africa without an out-and-out central striker, has often deployed the Barcelona variation on an attacking theme, a deep-lying or “false” No 9.

Right now, Del Bosque is waiting for FIFA to reply to Spain’s request to be allowed to field Costa in this month’s two World Cup qualifiers, against Belarus and Georgia. Scolari, who selected Costa for two friendly games against Italy and Russia last March, has since preferred Fred, Jô, Pato or Damião.

But when Scolari heard that Spain was moving in on his discarded player, the Brazilian scoffed that FIFA was moving back to the days when Alfredo Di Stéfano converted from Argentina to Spain, and when Ferenc Puskas played for both Hungary and Spain.

“In a year or two,” Scolari jibed, “a country will probably contract 20 players and make a national team. They can play 5, 10, a hundred friendlies, and in the 101st play an official game and FIFA will recognise it.”

Indeed, it might. FIFA’s regulations regarding citizenship are, like so many of FIFA’s rules, made on the fly. Diego Costa holds two passports, and Brazil hasn’t capped him in a competitive senior game, so Spain is within its rights to ask the question.

“If Del Bosque calls me up, how could I say no?” Costa responded when the Brazilian publication Lance! asked whether he might wear the red of Spain rather than the yellow of Brazil.

 “Nobody has yet contacted me,” he said in a television interview in Spain last weekend. “But I won’t say no to whoever calls me up first.”

 The opportunist in waiting. There is a delightful short video of Costa engaged in the dark arts against Madrid’s bad boys, Ramos and Pepe, last May. Finally, game and spite over, they embrace.

 “Es fútbol,” says the female commentator over the video. “No hay problema!”