Like the cult writers who launch themselves to direct a publishing house, or like the famous surgeons who change operating theaters for the direction of a clinic, Juan Román Riquelme goes through the adventure and the crossroads of having left his soccer career to recycle himself into a sports leader. .
They changed his abilities but not his personality: already in the box -although only occasionally dressed in a suit-, the idol maintains the attention of when he carried the ball under his sole.
Indifference crosses paths with Riquelme and becomes disoriented, flees.
King of charisma for some and patriarch of antipathy for others, Riquelme generates tons of love and contempt.
Those who do not extol him as a "brilliant strategist", capable of drawing the same "master plays" in the club's administration as when he was a footballer, execrate him - often from powerful microphones or keyboards - as a "superb" who "is He thinks he is a player but he no longer solves on the pitch”.
His aura transcends football: even without having talked about national politics in public, he maintains a direct confrontation with Mauricio Macri, the former president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019 and of Boca from 1995 to 2007, from which Riquelme comes out the winner for now and probably remain so for the foreseeable future.
If when he was a player his admirers placed him above Diego Maradona on the club's scale of idolatry, now as a leader there are no rivals for him either, even despite a team under permanent construction, which only offers coins for good football.
With positive results in the local tournament but still waiting for a joy in the Copa Libertadores -his true objective-, the Boca that Riquelme directs does not play like the Boca in which Riquelme played.
The Vice President of Boca Juniors looks at the camera before a visitors match against Banfield, July 24, 2021. Marcelo Endelli (Getty Images)
With a mandate until the end of 2023, when he will try for re-election until 2027, Riquelme began to occupy the first vice presidency of Boca in December 2019, the moment in which his magnetism among the
bosteros
and the wear of the previous leadership, in check after the defeat against River in the final of the Copa Libertadores 2018, concluded to end 24 years of the macrista government in Boca.
Macri, boss from birth, would not have been president of Argentina without the club he managed with great sporting success between 1995 and 2007, precisely in the years of Riquelme's greatest brilliance: the businessman took advantage of that sporting profitability and began his political candidacy towards the future presidency of Argentina, which would last between 2015 and 2019. Macri and the dolphins of his party (PRO) continued to command Boca between 2011 and 2019 through President Daniel Angelici, a leader who knows media, political and judicial procedures, but who fell to the idol at the end of 2019.
Two years and five months later, already in the second half of his first term, Riquelme's power is greater than his vice position: the figure of President Jorge Amor Ameal was diluted behind the former 10, who manages the so-called Football Council also made up of former players Jorge Bermúdez, Raúl Cascini and Marcelo Delgado, all world champions -like Román- with Boca at the beginning of the century.
Those who follow the day-to-day life of the club describe Ameal as a palace figure, a prime minister relegated to institutional issues and satellite sports, always below Riquelme, lord and master of football.
The winning formula was broken after a year of management, when the second vice president, businessman Mario Pergolini, in charge of the communication area,
Román's fire illuminates or melts, also his own, and the team's coach, Sebastián Battaglia, must show signs of permanent authority in an unusual scenario.
Riquelme took his atypicality to Boca: it is not easy to find other clubs in which the greatest football reference is not the coach but a leader.
A fake $100 bill with the face of Juan Román Riquelme on the Bombonera lawn. Marcelo Endelli (Getty Images)
"How Riquelme, with everything he knows, is not going to talk to the coach?
Every time I talked to him in my life it was about football.
He is always watching games”, a leader puts forward, although he accepts that a debate can arise from the outside: Can that hierarchy invade Battaglia's land, a glory of Boca as a player -the most successful player in the club's history, with 17 titles- , but still in training as a coach, the target of the loud criticism of journalism and the silent doubts of the fans?
Last October, after a loss to Gimnasia at La Bombonera, Riquelme got on the bus with the players, who were leaving the stadium for their homes, and ordered them to return to the locker room for a chat.
"He didn't do it to a coach with a longer career, it was undermining his authority," accepts a club employee.
Even more: would Roman himself have liked that a leader, making use and abuse of his power, would get them off a bus in full view of the cameras?
Soccer players from other teams, who expected the members of the Soccer Council to keep their "player codes" even in their new role as leaders, comment among themselves on a supposed "lack of sensitivity" in their dealings with the Boca squad: they point to press releases against and little clarity in the renewal of contracts.
It is a Boca shaped by the decisions of Riquelme, the soccer ones and also the subcutaneous ones: with Carlos Tevez, the last idol of the club as a player and at the same time a sports reference for macrismo -a partner in various millionaire businesses, in fact-, he never had an affinity.
The Football Council also surrounded the former Juventus and Manchester United star until causing his removal last June.
Already retired, the question is whether the former striker will try to return to Boca as a leader and will present himself as Riquelme's rival in next year's elections.
It would be risky: the specialists assure that Roman is invincible for now.
In the thick line, however, if it were not for the fact that it is an incandescent figure, with its own weight, the mandate of the managerial Riquelme would not attract attention, at least for the results: Boca 2019-2022 maintains the trail of the last club years.
The triumphs in the local tournament contrast with the international frustrations that the club has dragged on since 2007, the year in which it lifted its last cup across borders.
The setbacks that Boca suffered at the start of the current edition of the Copa Libertadores led Riquelme himself to make an unusual decision: last week he traveled with the squad for an away game, against Always Ready in Bolivia, as a gesture of support in a key match.
Boca won 1-0, was well placed to advance to the round of 16 and the same media that punishes him in the event of a defeat, as if he were still playing, celebrated it as his triumph: "Román's influence".
Juan Román Riquelme drinks mate in a box during a match. Marcelo Endelli (Getty Images)
If the Riquelme with a brush on his right leg was a fertile artist in titles (he won three Copa Libertadores and one Intercontinental, against Real Madrid, in 2000), the Boca that presides over for now presses a single button, that of effectiveness.
In his management, which still has 19 months to go, the team plays football that the impartial do not want to see, although enough to have taken three Olympic laps.
Between the technical directions of Miguel Ángel Russo - fired last August - and Battaglia, Boca won the 2019/20 league - with the symbolic addition of having achieved it in a final heads-up against River - and the Maradona 2020 and Argentina 2021 cups, both by definition of penalties.
In the middle he also stayed with the two series he played against River de Gallardo, also on penalties,
Already qualified for the quarterfinals of the 2022 League Cup, and outlined to go to the round of 16 of the Libertadores after his triumph last Wednesday in Bolivia, the third year of Riquelme's management will be evaluated by his international performance .
In 2015, when he began to emerge as an opposition leader and Boca de Angelici stumbled again and again in the Cup, Riquelme disqualified the domestic tournaments.
"A Cup (Libertadores) is worth ten local championships," he said without knowing that this phrase could become a boomerang for him.
The transfer markets also alternated successes and errors in Riquelme's management, but the hallmark of his management is Boca Predio, a training camp paradoxically built by the previous leadership, the place where 20 former Boca players -many of them champions of America and the world between 1998 and 2007 - train the lower divisions of the club.
It is a job whose results, as occurs with the training of young people, will only be able to be evaluated in a few years, but in the meantime it shows the DNA and pride of the
bostero
.
Much of the underlying issue, however, that love and hate that it generates, will remain up in the air.
“It was never easy when he played: he was not accessible to the media and he beat Macri.
The two things are the same type and that is very powerful”, says journalist Diego Tomasi, author of
The Most Beautiful Pipe in the World
, a book that has a hypothesis: the existence of a Riquelmean soccer philosophy.
“I have never seen a permanent operation in the media like now, and deep down it is not against Boca but against Román.
I think he is even classist: for many journalists it is unacceptable that a guy who left the village makes you look like an idiot, which is what Riquelme achieves 90% of the times he speaks in the media.
The guy has an origin that doesn't change, it's an ethic of life, 'I don't belong to this'.
He never loves you and he will never love you,” he adds.
CONMEBOL President Alejandro Domínguez and Juan Román Riquelme at a Copa Libertadores ceremony in 2019. Luis Vera (Getty Images)
Sergio Olguín, writer and Boca fan, deepens that line: “The sports journalism establishment has a strong link with what is now the opposition in Boca, the macrismo led by Angelici.
So it points to the failure of Riquelme.
And since the sports results have not yet been given, those criticisms increase, but Riquelme supports the boster mystique, and that supports Riquelme.
Macri barricaded himself against Riquelme last March, after a defeat against Huracán in La Bombonera, the only one in Boca's first 12 dates in the League Cup.
“Don't you realize that he's ruining us?
It is one thing to know how to put the ball and another to manage a club”, said the former president, to whom the idol dedicated his best-known goal celebration, that of putting his hands to his ears, in 2000, amid his usual tensions .
Riquelme never clarified who he is voting for in the national elections (when asked if he sympathized with Peronism, a rival of macrismo, he replied "no, I don't understand anything about politics"), but he does not miss the opportunity to mark the field for the allies of Macri at the club: “The previous ones were there for 20 years and they used it for what they had to use it for.
I am a fan of Boca, not of a political party.
According to Olguín, “Roman has a continuity between sports and politics.
He was already a political actor when he gave Macri that Topo Gigio celebration (holding his hands against his ears), and now he does it as a leader.”
For the author of
The fragility of bodies
and
Dark monotonous blood
, Riquelme "is a very strong figure, difficult to ignore", the confirmation of someone unique, as a player and as a leader, at the crossroads of repeating from the offices what he did on the playing field, perhaps his latest utopia.
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