Translated by Victor Meadowcroft
One must be faithful to one’s favorite players: One must love James Rodríguez unconditionally, the way one loves the protagonists of the most memorable fables, with their Achilles’ heels and their odysseys. He was and will always be the young player who led the joyous and infectious Colombian team that gave us back our faith in football at the 2014 World Cup.
Ever since July 2, 1994, when a hitman for a bunch of drug dealers fired six shots at center-back Andrés Escobar for his mistake at the 1994 World Cup—“Own goal! Own goal! Own goal!” they yelled at him as he left a night club in Medellín—fans from various generations across this country had sworn to never again celebrate wins or cheer on goals in any game. What kind of a culture had engendered the idiots who allowed that murder to happen? I had not only given up my love for the Colombian national team, but also my very obsession with what had been my favorite sport, until Rodríguez took us all back to our childhoods.
Soccer is an eternal present. James Rodríguez, the young number 10 who’d been champion with Envigado FC in Colombia, Club Atlético Banfield in Argentina, and FC Porto in Portugal, remains that extraordinary playmaker for Colombia, forever in the afterglow of his beautiful goal in the 2014 World Cup.
It’s Saturday evening on June 28, 2014 at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The second match of the tournament’s round of sixteen is underway. Rodríguez has yet to turn twenty-three and Carlos “El Pibe” (“The Kid”) Valderrama has already dubbed him as his successor. Faustino “Tino” Asprilla predicts out loud that “he might be better than me: he could be the best Colombian player in history.” It’s midway through the first half when he receives a header from his teammate Abel Aguilar, the box-to-box midfielder; he tunes into every vibrational signal on the pitch, chests the ball forward, and allows it to drop before thumping it in the air with a left-footed shot that no person or thing will intercept on its way into Uruguay’s goal.
It’s a climax, a monumental moment. In a frenzied celebration, he runs to the opposition’s corner flag to dance to the famous “Ras Tas Tas” in front of a stand filled with Colombian supporters. Following his lead, in order of arrival, are his teammates Juan Camilo Zúñiga, Pablo Armero, Abel Aguilar, Jackson Martínez, Carlos Sánchez, Cristián Zapata, Juan Cuadrado, Teófilo Gutiérrez, and their captain, Mario Yepes.
Everyone cries, “Goal!” as if they were crying, “Miracle!” No other mind or body can master the ball like that; no one else can tie it all together on a pitch the way he can.
Twenty years after we surrendered our nervous systems to the brilliance and disaster of that immortal team of El Pibe and Tino, almost exactly twenty years after the murder of Escobar—our shining defensive beacon—it was finally time to rejoice. Was that goal not unrepeatable, improbable, undeniable? Was it not a relief that two weeks earlier the country had elected Juan Manuel Santos, a president who wanted to make peace with the FARC? What if we were no longer condemned to such daily violence?
Since the 2014 World Cup, Rodríguez has become a star dogged by drama in the eye of the storm that is his own devastating fame. Trapped in a tussle with his own psyche, he’s become a frustrated nomad in search of artistic freedom—at Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Everton, Al-Rayyan, Olympiacos, São Paulo, Rayo Vallecano, Club León, and Minnesota United. Some observers have criticized him for clashes with one manager or another and prophesied the expected decline of players approaching the age of thirty-five, so old on the pitch and yet so young off it. Yet he has reemerged in CONMEBOL qualifiers and the latest Copa América as the fantastic playmaker who once again offers his life to this Colombian team.
This was not the case at the 2026 World Cup. Even though the games weren’t resolved in his favor, however, it is no terrible fate to be James Rodríguez, the best player in the world during the twenty-eighth minute of the second match of the round of sixteen at the 2014 World Cup. The same Maracanã Stadium that witnessed Pelé score his thousandth goal applauds Rodríguez’s prodigious performance, and all of Colombia wears a smile.