During a visit to Madrid in 2007, Anatoliy Byshovets, the then head coach of Lokomotiv Moscow, said watching Sergio Agüero was like visiting the Prado. Pep Guardiola said he was a legend. Jorge Valdano said he could invent anything, anywhere, a unique footballer who had lost all fear, although he was wrong on that. Lionel Messi said he did the impossible. Diego Maradona said Agüero reminded him of himself, phoning one day to apologise for not playing him more. “I was a dickhead,” Maradona said.
Sometimes it can feel like the one person who never said Agüero was good was the one person he really wanted to. When the former Manchester City striker announced he was retiring at the age of 33, forced to stop by a heart problem, all the stress accumulated beneath the surface since his debut at 15, his dad called and said he had never seen a better footballer. He had played 786 games and scored 427 goals by then. “You waited until I retired to tell me that?!” Agüero replied. “I was happy and sad at the same time,” he says. “At last, he said something good.”
Weekends are different now. It’s not how Agüero planned it and of course he wishes he could play still. The finish was frightening, that day in October 2022 when the dizziness, blurred vision and suffocation gripped him, his heart racing. But there’s a familiar mischief in his smile, a hint of relief too, when he says: “I can have a gin and tonic in Cannes now.” The kid nicknamed after a Japanese cartoon character is in the French city for the release of a documentary, Kun by Agüero, which was an opportunity to take it all in, almost a therapy. And which, at its core, is the story of a boy and his father.
“People knew the football story already; I wanted to tell them how I lived, my personal journey, to see the sacrifice,” Agüero says. “When I was a kid I thought: ‘Ah, it’s dead easy: these guys never train, they just scratch their balls.’ No. It’s fundamental to have people with you. In my case, my father. He was, let’s say, very strict.”
That’s one way of putting it. Leonel del Castillo had been a better player than his son, or so he kept telling him, but didn’t get the opportunity. The way Agüero tells it, his dad was never satisfied and never, ever, said he had played well. Emotionally the impact was profound and lasting; professionally, perhaps, it was too: there was a determination – a desperation – to win. Economically, there certainly was: a small boy raised in Los Eucaliptus, Quilmes, loaded with responsibility not only for his own salvation but all of theirs. Agüero had effectively been a professional since before he was 10.
Leonel would take his son around Buenos Aires, from team to team, playing four, five games a day. Sometimes he would set a target for first-half goals and, when it was met, Sergio wouldn’t even come out for the second period; he would already be en route to the next match. One day Agüero realised his dad was being paid for each appearance. Later, when he had become a young father himself, he would cut him from managing his money. The day he announced his retirement, Agüero kept looking up. His mother, Adriana, believes he was looking for his father but Leonel didn’t come. “If he had wanted me to, he would have called me,” his father says in the documentary.
Yet if the initial, simple response is to cast his dad as the bad guy, Agüero insists: “In the end if he wasn’t [like that], what would have been of my life?” So he explains, in a quiet, slow voice, a sense of timidity and sensitivity punctured by moments of humour, that cheeky grin. There’s a line in the documentary where Guardiola sums Agüero up: “He is the least crack of the cracks.”
“You have to think about it from the other side. What if he hadn’t pushed me?” Agüero says. “In barrios like mine there is a lot of addiction, a lot of drugs. I would walk down passageways and smell marijuana. I didn’t know what it was, but when I told my dad he went mad: ‘Where?!’ Three people get gunned down and it’s normal. But you think about it and, no, it’s not normal. I was hanging about, playing. All I wanted to do was play football but the trouble you could find yourself in could be very dangerous.
“I found out later that my parents were struggling. It’s not easy finding a way out, the barrio consumes you, takes you. I left at 12 and I remember visiting a year later: the boy who lived next to me was in a bad way, he had been arrested a few times. I couldn’t believe it. We used to play football together.”
“When I was older, I asked my dad why he never said I played well,” Agüero says. “He said he didn’t want me thinking I was the best, getting cocky. He thought he was keeping me from losing my head. He always got angry with me after matches. He didn’t want anyone else to tell me I was good either. He even wanted to control my friends. My old man and me have always got on well then badly, then well again: good, bad, good, bad, good, bad … we pissed each other off but he’s my dad and I’m going to love him the same. The [documentary] series was in part about asking … well, why he said those things. Why did he bring me up like that?”
Has he seen it? Agüero smiles. “No, but he does speak in it, so … He called me. I said: ‘Listen, say whatever you want, freely. I spoke about what I felt; you say what you feel.’ He said: ‘Well, OK’ … He’ll have seen the trailer. Let’s see what his reaction is when he sees it. Maybe he’ll feel it’s exaggerated. For now, he’s fine. If he had really been annoyed, he wouldn’t be sending me messages. He knows roughly what’s in it. My sisters called him and he said: ‘But I didn’t do anything, all I did was tell him he was bad at football.’ He keeps that one going, like a joke.”
“Anyway,” Agüero says, cracking up, “I said to him: ‘It’s thanks to you too that I’m here in Cannes.”
It’s some way from home, another measure of what Agüero achieved with the men he played with. It takes a while, and actually there are six of them because he wants to play too, but he does eventually name his perfect five-a-side team of teammates over the years: Messi first, then him. Emiliano Martínez in goal. Vincent Kompany – “someone has to put the foot in” – David Silva. Kevin De Bruyne. And Pep Guardiola on the bench.
First there was Independiente, then Agüero left for Atlético Madrid the day after his 18th birthday. He didn’t find out he was going alone until the night before, and it hurt. When he tired of Atlético’s inability to compete, he wanted to leave. Real Madrid was the intended destination but Atlético blocked a move; instead, the club’s chief executive, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, called Manchester City, where he would go on to became a legend. Not that he would say so; not that he could say so, either.
“I didn’t know any English at all,” Agüero says, laughing. “Pablo Zabaleta helped me a lot. David Silva was there, Yaya Touré, [Carlos] Tevez. When I sat on the English table, I would be thinking: ‘Shit.’ They would say: ‘Come, sit down.’ I would listen and, bit by bit, without ever picking up a pencil or having a teacher, I would get it. The English boys were very good with me. They treated me well, defended me. My biggest concern anyway was on the pitch. And I ended up quite good.”
Agüero ended up in galvanised steel, a statue outside the ground immortalising him and replicating that goal against QPR to clinch City’s first Premier League title. “I have friends who go to games and they send me pictures of it and I think: ‘This is mad.’ That will always be there,” Agüero says. “With time I appreciated how important that goal was but I find it hard sometimes to hear people talk about it because I think: ‘Che, there are others on the team.’ Look, if Mario Balotelli doesn’t play the pass. It’s the most important goal in my career and City’s most important. I know that. It was Kun Agüero, so OK: I’m happy, proud, that I scored it and it is for ever in the history of the club. But it was everyone.”
He had been at City for a decade when Guardiola decided it was time for him to go. He soon got a call from Messi. The closest of friends since they were 15, roommates in the national team, Messi had an idea: why not come to Barcelona? They’re looking for a No 9. “It was going to be spectacular: a chance to make it to the [2022] World Cup in the best shape, and together,” Agüero remembers.
Instead, within days, a financial crisis meant Messi was forced out of Barcelona and then, that October, in just his second start, Agüero walked off the pitch never to return. He had got into the shape of his life but there was stress, his parents’ split affecting him. That day against Alavés wasn’t the first time that he had heart problems. He had been operated on at 13 and had experienced other episodes, his surgeon describing him as a master of managing stress. This wasn’t so unusual, he thought. But this arrhythmia was different. The doctor told him: if you were my son, I would say don’t play again.
Agüero decided he had a career to be proud of, that it was the right time for him to retire. That said, he resists now. “I haven’t actually had my retirement pay, eh,” he says jumping in, laughing. He has, though, had things to do, investing in hotels and becoming a successful streamer during the pandemic, something playful, accessible about him drawing people in. While, initially, he put on weight – “I wasn’t podgy, I was a barrel” – he then changed his diet, now looks well and says he’s enjoying this new phase. Being at Cannes is fun. There’s a cheerfulness about him here, on the surface at least. Those around him see a man at peace, released. Yet he had been denied the perfect ending.
“The idea was to play with Leo and go the World Cup together,” Agüero says. “But then that thing happened with him. And then the arrhythmia, so …” There’s a pause, quiet.
At the end of the final in Qatar, Agüero carried Messi around the pitch on his shoulders, his friend holding the World Cup trophy 17 years after they won the under-20 title together. “Although I didn’t play, I feel like a champion,” Agüero says. “My last goal was against Real Madrid, which is not bad. And you know what I take with me from Barcelona? How passionate people were about the club. How good they were to me, how they treated me. It was like I was Messi. I said: ‘Look, I’m not Leo.’” No, you’re Sergio Agüero, and you’re good.
Kun by Agüero is streaming on Disney+ from Wednesday
