Passion for a player or a team is, by definition, irrational. And the corollaries of this irrationality — blind, unwavering faith and sheer adoration — often bring us trouble or embarrassment, as they tend to weaken the consistency of our evaluations.
In some cases, however, we can overlook logic and surrender to pure passion. So allow me this indulgence: Salvadoran Jorge Alberto González Barillas was a marvelous and, above all, infallible player. If I analyze his career through a critic's lens, I see a sky filled with question marks, doubts, and uncertainties. And yet.
What makes the Central American fantasista feel almost like an exile — a vestige of a world that had already been discarded by football history — is the pure joy that emanates from every single technical gesture he performed. A perpetual fugitive, a man out of time, yet eternally unforgettable.
There is something profoundly anachronistic and Latin American about Mágico's relationship with the ball — a kind of primordial, irrational, and anti-functionalist creativity that seems to belong exclusively to those from that part of the world.
Mágico's football evokes a very specific lineage of players — those who played not to win in the conventional sense, but because it was beautiful to do so. Those for whom the beauty of a move was, in itself, its effectiveness.
In Italy, a player like Mágico González would have quickly become a target. I can already imagine him being mocked by the Brera school for his lack of fighting spirit, misunderstood by pragmatists and defensive-minded tacticians. He would have been despised by Sacchi's rigid disciples, who would brand him lazy and shameless in prioritizing beauty over effectiveness.
With Arrigo Sacchi, a player like him wouldn't have lasted longer than a glass of water. But luckily, the Salvadoran Magician found refuge in Andalusia — perhaps the only place in Europe that could have truly embraced and celebrated him the way he deserved.
A player like Mágico González shatters all the usual oppositions between idealists and pragmatists, between those who worship beauty and those who worship results. He discards those debates with the arrogance of someone who soars at stratospheric heights — proving that the eternal gratitude of an Andalusian city or a struggling Central American nation can fill the heart far more than a trophy or a place in the history books.
And if we're being honest, he did achieve results. His Cádiz lived its greatest moments thanks to his unpredictable brilliance. His decisive goals against Mexico propelled El Salvador to the 1982 World Cup. There, despite playing for a weak semi-professional squad, Mágico still earned mentions in some "best XI" selections of the tournament.
Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, is secondary.