Sergio Aguero: Beijing golden boy to quiet king of goals

He wore the smile of a happy boy.

The date was 23 August 2008 and Sergio Aguero’s arm is thrown over Lionel Messi’s shoulder in a brotherly embrace. Both are stripped to the waist against the heat, having already swapped jerseys – neither of them a No. 10 yet – with the proud but beaten Nigerians. Aguero looks up, his head tilted back. What does he see? The Olympic cauldron, soon to be extinguished on the Beijing Games? Diego Maradona in the grandstand? The podium being erected to award his Argentina a second straight Olympic gold medal in football? Is it themselves that young Messi (21) and Aguero (19) see reflected in the giant screen of the Bird’s Nest Stadium?

We can’t know, of course. But it sure does look like a pair of boys, hair slicked from sweat and worn long, looking off into a limitless sky full of possibilities.

Now, 13 years later and on the eve of the 2021 UEFA Champions League final, we know exactly what awaited Sergio Leonel Aguero del Castillo. This Saturday’s decider will, amazingly, be his first on Europe’s biggest stage. It will also be his last game for Manchester City, the club he joined in 2011 and helped transform from also-rans, what Manchester United’s iconic boss Alex Ferguson called the “noisy neighbours,” into one of the 21st century’s super-teams.

“What a goal. What a player. What a man,” said City’s boss Pep Guardiola, in tears, after Aguero scored a pair in his last league game for the club. “We love him so much,” added the Spaniard – himself an Olympic gold medalist at the Barcelona Games of 1992 – the tensions of a long season finally breaking. “He’s such a special person. He’s helped me so much."

“We cannot replace him,” Guardiola snapped when asked how one does.

Rare Olympic champion in Porto

When the opening whistle sounds at the Estadio do Dragao this weekend, Aguero will be one of only two players involved – either for City or the day’s opponents, Chelsea – who will know the weight of Olympic gold around his neck (Gabriel Jesus won with Brazil in 2016).

The medal he scooped in Beijing, where he scored two to beat Ronaldinho’s Brazil in the semifinal with Kobe Bryant and Diego Maradona watching from the stands, wasn’t Aguero’s first. He twice won the U-20 World Cup, and finished the one in 2007 in Canada, bouncing on the crossbar as champion, top scorer and best player. It was, however, and in great contrast to his club fortunes, the last title he – or Messi – would win for Argentina (both finished runners-up once in the World Cup and twice in the Copa America).

If there’s ever been a better goalscorer than Aguero, what the English like to call a “natural finisher,” there aren’t many. A quiet man, painful in interviews, he only seems to have grown more taciturn as the years passed. Kun, nicknamed after a Japanese cartoon character he resembled as a boy, always preferred to let his feet – one as good as the other inside the penalty area – do the talking.

Aguero began his City career in August 2011, coming off the bench to score twice against Swansea. It was fitting that he scored a pair more, once again off the bench, on the final day of his final season. In between, he’s done about as much as anyone could have asked.

His final goal at the Etihad on 23 May was his 184th for City in the Premier League, eclipsing Wayne Rooney as the player with the most goals for one club in England’s top flight. Aguero sits fourth overall in the league’s scoring charts behind only Alan Shearer, Rooney and Andy Cole. His 12 hat-tricks are a record in the Premier League as is the fact that he’s scored against 32 of 33 opponents he’s met.

He’s City’s all-time top-scorer in top-flight matches by a margin of 116 goals.

Players will always tell you that individual honours don’t matter. Strikers have to say it with a straight face, and you can believe them if you choose. Aguero’s numbers don’t lie. And the silverware he’s brought his club is something no City fan – described as “long-suffering” for so long – could have dreamt before his arrival.

A City title every other year

This year’s Premier League crown is City’s fifth in the space of a decade. Cynics may point to the large sums of overseas money, the suddenly deep pockets, as a major reason for the club’s successes this decade. But someone needs to put the ball in the net. Someone also needs the guts to step up and deliver when it’s all on the line.

Aguero did that. Back in his first season in Manchester in 2011, City – for all the spent money – still hadn’t won a thing. And with just seconds to go, they looked like slipping up on the final day of play. It was Aguero – the man who makes the hardest thing in football, the scoring of goals, look like child’s play – who stepped up to set in motion one of the most astonishing ascents in football history.

A goal down at home, two minutes into stoppage time, City needed to beat Queens Park Rangers to edge rivals United to the title. In the 92nd minute Eden Dzeko headed home from a David Silva corner-kick. With seconds only to go, Aguero grabbed the ball from the back of the net and ran it back to the centre circle. And then it happened, seconds after the kick-off. The enigmatic Mario Balotelli slipped a pass to Aguero who glided by his defender and fired inside the near post to set the city, and the whole of English football, on its ear.

From then on the big team in Manchester wore blue.

In the end, after a decade at the club, Aguero’s trophy haul goes like this: Five times a Premier League winner, once an FA Cup winner, six times a winner of the League Cup (most recently this year) and three Community Shields thrown in for good measure.

And, of course, there’s the chance for one more. The big one. The trophy with the big ears whose holder is known, far and wide, as the best of Europe’s best. And who would be surprised if Aguero, aging at 32, yes, and prone to longer stretches out with injury, sure, was in the starting line-up?

Guardiola, for all his tears, isn’t one for sentimental gestures. But in Aguero he has a known winner who lives for that moment when all is won or lost. And he won’t want to leave the club a loser.

Not one for the limelight

“OK, come on. We’re done, right?” a microphone caught Aguero, wearing a bashful smile, saying after his two-goal day against Everton turned into a celebration of the striker’s ten years. He looked embarrassed when thrown into the air by his teammates – the same as he did walking through a double guard of honour at the start of the game.

It was the same when he was asked about the statue they’re planning of him to guard the main gate at the Etihad. “When the club told me about that I told them I don’t want anything, honestly,” he said of the memorial that will also include teammates David Silva and inspirational captain Vincent Kompany. Aguero insisted that construction not begin until he’s gone. “I’ll play until the end; it’s my job.”

“Kun is a legend,” defender Kyle Walker summed up about his teammate. “There’s no other way to describe the man. Hopefully we can send him off with a Champions League medal around his neck, something I’m sure he’s dreamed about all his life.”

It’s likely he has. But Aguero, at least from a distance, is a hard man to know.

Win or lose on the day in Porto, Aguero’s status in the legend and lore of Manchester City Football Club is safe. And after the final whistle, if rumours are to be believed, he’ll head off to Barcelona for a reunion with his old friend Messi – his Olympic gold medal-winning teammate from all those years ago when the sky was the limit for both.

It should be said that Aguero, same as Messi, is available for Argentina at this summer’s Olympic Games as one of three overage players afforded all the 16 men's teams in Tokyo.

Now, wouldn’t that be something?