Torres: An Intimate Portrait of the Kid Who Became King

and in the European championships, scoring the winning goal. The main reason, maybe, is the fact that he played for Atlético Madrid. Fernando Torres was the captain, he was the standard-bearer and, to some extent, he was Atlético Madrid. There was a feeling that Atlético Madrid’s underachieving, or their failures, were somehow Fernando Torres’ failures. He was judged according to his team and not according to his own ability. The other reason, the key reason is that Spain – and Spain’s media – are dominated by two clubs, Real Madrid and Barcelona. And that means that a player who has three good games for Real Madrid is a
crack
, he’s the best player in the world, he’s unbelievably good. Wesley Sneijder came to Real Madrid and played three games and they were saying he was as good as Di Stefano, better than Beckham. You don’t get the same respect as an Atlético Madrid player. And if you asked Torres – he would never admit this publicly – I think privately that he knows that one of his problems was the media was always criticising him.’
    GB: ‘The image of Torres, before he went to Liverpool was that of a player-leader of Atlético Madrid and, like Atlético as a whole, inconsistent. He was far from perfect and still needed to improve a lot to reach the level he’d been promising since the age of fourteen. Atlético was a huge weight on his shoulders.’

What kind of criticism did the Spanish media make?
     
    SL: ‘The message was that Fernando Torres is an Atlético Madrid player, therefore the Madrid media – the Real Madrid media, because it’s a Real Madrid media in truth not a Madrid city media – quite enjoyed laughing at Fernando Torres, making fun of him. “Oh he’s never going to beat Real Madrid” – “he’s a comedy character” – “we know he’s talented but ha, ha, ha, he’s never going to score”. Torres’ big problem in Spain was that he played for the wrong club and we’ve seen that to some extent with the Spanish national team. That’s because the Spanish national team, in theory, is everybody’s team, but in reality the judgement is still coloured by which team the papers support. So you’ve got
Marca
(a Spanish sport daily), which says it’s “all for
la selección
” (the national team), but it’s “all for the
Real Madrid
players in
la selección”.
So Torres plays in the national team: “He’s not as good as Raúl” – Raúl doesn’t play in the national team: “It’s a disgrace”.’
    GB: ‘He was criticised because he wasn’t finishing well, he was criticised because he was failing to round off movements, he was criticised because his first touch wasn’t good and he was criticised because, sometimes, he kept hold of the ball too long. But there were also critics making the same kind of comments about Atlético Madrid, that the club never built a good enough team in which Torres could improve. First, there was criticism of the club, which failed to instil any kind of stability while Torres was there, and then of the team. There were a lot of players who avoided their responsibilities and passed them on to Torres instead. And finally, there was criticism of Fernando, above all at the end, when his body language said he was tired and fed up of being there. And he’d been like that for a long time.’

And how is the image of Torres now in the Spanish media?
     
    SL: ‘The image now is that Torres is a wonderful player. Torres is now “our boy” doing wonders over there. He’s “our ambassador”. The Spanish are a very proud nation. They are very aware of their own identity and when a Spanish player goes abroad – let’s take Torres – he becomes “Spain’s Fernando Torres”. On top of that, you’ve got the fact that Fernando Torres scored the winning goal in the European championships, the most important goal in 44 years in Spain. That helps … Suddenly, people in Madrid respect him in a way they didn’t respect him before. Now the media is allowed to like him, but he will always have that barrier and that barrier will be “he’s not Real Madrid”. And I think that’s really important when it comes to judging how the media and some of the public see him.’
    GB: ‘Now it’s that of a player who has exceeded even the most optimistic of predictions. He’s turned himself into a global personality, much more than the Spanish national side, a top player and one of the biggest stars in world football.’

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