How Sergio Agüero is blowing up old stereotypes
The Manchester City star is more than your typical little South American striker
Footballers are stereotyped with regularity; their style of play and technical attributes are assumed based on their physical appearance. It's probably a phenomenon that applies to strikers more than anyone else on the field, and is reinforced by the duopoly of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi at the peak of their respective games. The former is quick, powerful and muscular; a player whose sheer brilliance is achieved through brute force. Meanwhile, what the latter lacks in physique, he makes up by being quick of mind and feet: rather than a master of nature, he's a master of the ball.
It's not just supporters and the media who have had a hand in reinforcing these stereotypes, but managers, too. Harry Redknapp in particular is famed for his preference for playing with a "big man, little man" combination in attack, designed to blend the former's physical attributes with the latter's greater technique. Indeed, Redknapp helped to coin one of football's most famous clichés after expressing his surprise at the technical skill of one of his favorite strikers, Peter Crouch. "He's got one of the loveliest touches I've seen in a big man," he exclaimed, doing an inadvertent disservice to other "big men" everywhere.
Thus, Redknapp would no doubt be deeply confused by the performance of Manchester City's star striker Sergio Agüero this season. The 26-year-old is currently the Premier League's top scorer thanks to his incredible assortment of attributes, which arguably makes him the league's best all-round footballer. In fact, we probably could have tied Chelsea's blue ribbons around the league's championship trophy already had he not carried City through their first 13 games of the season.
So, what is it that makes Agüero so entertaining to watch? He's as capable of beating an opponent for pace as he is embarrassing him with a stepover or flick. He's as good at shrugging off the incursions of a big center-back as he is at making a darting run in behind. And perhaps most impressively, he's as brilliant at pulling wide and creating chances for his teammates as he is at putting the ball into the back of the net himself. That makes him a manager's dream, as he's as capable of playing alongside a more creative, mobile attacker like Stevan Jovetić as he is a more static, aerial presence like Edin Džeko.
More broadly, Agüero is also part of an increasing trend of Premier League teams looking to South American players. Despite hailing from a continent in which the rudimentary and stereotypically English "kick and rush" game of blood, sweat, and certainly no tears reigns supreme in domestic football, Latin footballers have long been treated with a strange wariness in England. "They can't expect to come here and play like fancy flickers," spat Liverpool's resident hardman Tommy Smith (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, went on to make some appalling racist remarks about his former teammate Howard Gayle) after a thundering tackle on Tottenham Hotspur's then-new arrival Ossie Ardiles in 1978.
As it was, the Argentine Ardiles went on to spend a decade at White Hart Lane, and alongside his compatriot Ricky Villa, is regarded as one of the greatest players in the club's history. That'll teach them for their fancy flicking. The implication of Smith's quote was that the Latin players spent their time jogging around the field daintily caressing the ball; lacking the necessary physicality -- and, more pointedly, masculinity -- to succeed in the English game.
Even today such attitudes persist, albeit in a reduced, backhanded form. One obvious example is the regular suggestion that the effeminate, cunning Johnny Foreigner is more likely to go down in the penalty area. In actual fact, an analysis over the past eight years of Premier League football has shown that players from the British Isles are "almost exactly twice as likely to be booked for diving as their Latin American counterparts in any given match." If reputation went before Agüero when he was booked for being obviously tripped in the box by Southampton defender José Fonte, then it shouldn't have.
Just as he's defying Redknapp's old view of the classic small, silky, but ultimately weak striker, Agüero -- alongside the likes of Diego Costa and Alexis Sánchez -- is forcing a revision of the Tommy Smithsonian view of Latin footballers. Nowadays, even West Ham, one of the spiritual homes of English football's jingoism, have an Ecuadorian and an Argentine in their ranks. The globalization of football is smashing its old stereotypes, and that can only be a good thing.
