"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius knows its limits."
Einstein
Since you have just celebrated the UEFA gala in which the Ballon d'Or and other honors are awarded to the greats of European football, let me propose a new award for next year. I would call it the Liz Truss Award, or Balón del Boludo, for the most humiliating failure, for the character who made the most ridicule after trying to exceed the limit of his possibilities.
Several candidates from the recent past come to mind to help define the criteria by which the winner would be chosen. There could even be two categories, one for players and one for coaches.
I remember the ecstatic atmosphere in the corridors of the Bernabeu in the summer of 2005 when Real Madrid signed Robinho, appointed by Pelé as his successor. The Brazilian is remembered for a good game dressed in white, in his debut against Cádiz, but from there his career went downhill, including a season at Guangzhou Evergrande. His time at Milan will go down in history because of the nine-year sentence imposed on him by an Italian court for rape.
Another Brazilian who aroused great emotions was forward Denilson, the most expensive signing in the world in 1998 when he arrived at Betis, where he remained, inexplicably, until 2005, a period in which he accumulated a total of 13 goals. He finished his career at Hai Phong in Vietnam, where he scored a goal, and finally at Kavala in Greece, where he scored none.
Continuing in the Spanish League, Barcelona has had its blunders. Of the players who generated the most expectations and the least yielded, I would highlight the Ukrainian central defender Chygrynskiy, the Belarusian Hleb and the failure whose performance/price ratio was particularly spectacular, Philippe Coutinho.
Coutinho arrived from Liverpool and went to Aston Villa, which is reminiscent of the case of Englishman Joe Cole. In 2010 Steven Gerrard, then captain of Liverpool, said that Cole was better than Messi. Cole ended up playing 26 times in three years for Liverpool, and from there he went down to progressively poorer teams and divisions, including an inglorious spell at Aston Villa, a club that just sacked Gerrard as manager.
Poor Stevie. But she is not alone. Gerrard is one more in a long list of great players who were wrong to think that his resume on the field qualified them to manage from the bench.
To be fair to Gerrard, there are a couple of famous former England players who have done a lot more of a fool than he has. I think of Tony Adams, who was captain of the best Arsenal of the last 70 years. Granada appointed Adams coach in April 2017, lost seven games in a row and went down to Second. Adams left no one knows where.
The one who knows a lot because he gives his opinion with great authority about football on English television is Gary Neville, who won everything with Manchester United, and who had, like Adams, the absurd presumption of thinking that he would succeed as a coach in the Spanish League . Neville was fired after achieving the feat of avoiding Valencia's relegation to Segunda. He has never trained again.
But if there is a figure that deserves above all the Liz Truss award, named in honor of the most catastrophic head of government in English history since Henry VIII, it has to be the Argentine national hero, scourge of England in the World Cup 1986, Diego Armando Maradona. It was assumed that Maradona would be a worse coach than Tony Adams or Gary Neville, but that did not prevent him from being chosen, by acclamation, as the coach of his country in 2008.
He managed to qualify Argentina for the 2010 World Cup, despite losing 6-1 against Bolivia, and fell in the quarterfinals 4-0 against Germany. In his two chaotic years at the helm of the albiceleste he summoned 108 players, including Messi, who never experienced greater frustration. Maradona went on to fail in the Al Wasi and Al Fujairah teams, both in the United Arab Emirates, and then in Dorados de Sinaloa, the state with the highest concentration of drug traffickers in Mexico. Perhaps Maradona deserves the Ballon del Boludo posthumously. Without the ball at his feet he was more unable than anyone in the history of football to recognize the limit of his possibilities.
