Luis Suarez Was Always Going to Leave Us

Illustration by Sam Taylor

The writing is on the wall. The “heavy hearted” goodbye statement has been posted on the official Liverpool website, and the sentimental, piano-backed farewell videos have hit YouTube. Liverpool says goodbye and Barcelona says hello.

Expect to see grown men, stricken and bereft of hope, roaming Stanley Park shouting, “Luis, Luis, where are ya boy?” as if calling for their lost puppy. Expect to hear a lot of defiant noise about how Liverpool will be better off without the man Steven Gerrard once called the best footballer he’d played with by “a bit of a distance” (and remember, Steven Gerrard has played with Vladimir Smicer).

The general reaction seems to range from tired acceptance to anger borne out of a sense of betrayal, with most opting for the former. Already, aggrieved Kopites are posting comments like this one: “So fuck you Suarez, fuck you very much… Liverpool isn’t now nor [sic] ever a fucking stepping stone.” It seems unlikely that anyone will be burning Suarez shirts outside Anfield, but a depressed ladle of anger will undoubtedly be sploshed in the direction of a player who Liverpool have doggedly backed through thick and thin.

As a Liverpool fan, I’m with those favouring tired acceptance over incontinent rage. Suarez leaving just feels painfully – but not devastatingly – inevitable. It’s a good example of the way in which fan-player relationships can mimic actual relationships. Essentially, Suarez is the hot girl/boyfriend who's sort of a nightmare, but still – they are smoking hot, and how could you ever really walk away from that? You know that, at some point, they’re going to leave you, and you'll be melancholy and angry and drunk, but you can’t stop yourself trying to keep them with you anyway. They are always just outside your orbit, floating beyond your reach, immune to all your great jokes and romantic gestures.

You ignore their cruelty, like when Liverpool ignored Suarez pimping himself to Arsenal last summer. You believe them when they say they’ll change, as with Suarez and the racism, as with Suarez and the biting. You do everything you can, but the more you bow to their will, the more your fate is sealed. In the end, you can bear it no longer. “The beautiful ones / You always seem to lose,” sang Prince, and he was right. Suarez is a beautiful one. A racist, biting one, but in the amoral world of the football pitch, he’s a beautiful one nonetheless.

And Liverpool have lost him because, for the most talented players, almost every football club in the world is a stepping-stone to somewhere else. Liverpool have history, a bit of money and some prospects, but for someone like Suarez the glamour, culture and riches of Barcelona will always be too much. As has [already been suggested](http:// http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jul/02/luis-suarez-barcelona-liverpool-biting), this big money move – and money is probably the key factor here, as it always is in football – has its origins in Suarez’s attempt to jump the Good Ship Anfield last summer. The confusion over what kind of release clause was in Suarez’s contract led to a new one being signed in December, and it's now becoming clear that this contract has a clause in it that's not open to interpretation. Suarez, then, always had his eyes on the big move. Which is proof, if you really need it, of the sad but inevitable truth that the blind love shown to him by Liverpool fans could never be fully shared by their Uruguayan idol.

Much has been written about the “party going on” in Suarez’s mind, as the singer Tom Rosenthal put it. Wright Thompson’s lauded profile dug into Suarez’s past as a Montevideo street kid, abandoned by his father and then protected by the Uruguayan football authorities, with the help of the mafia. The big reveal for Thompson is that, just like Bryan Adams, everything Suarez has done, he’s done for love. His wife, Sofia, who he met when he was 15, left to live in Spain while Luis was still trying to make it as a professional in Uruguay. It was football that sailed him across the ocean to Europe. It was football that reunited him with his love. And so, when he plays, he plays for her and his children.

It’s a beautiful story and there’s plenty of truth in it. Others have suggested less flattering truths. They’ve suggested that he’s been fiercely protected and over-indulged by all of Uruguay, that he wants to control his opponents sexually, that he’s a Shakespearean villain or a devil from the Bible. Liverpool’s biggest mistake was made under Kenny Dalglish, when the Scottish legend turned wild-eyed and paranoid, fuming at reporters like a late-era Nixon, defending Suarez’s racism and – in a moment that suggested the manager may be suffering from a debilitating variation of Stockholm Syndrome – sending his players out to warm-up in Suarez T-Shirts, as if the Uruguayan was the victim of a grievious miscarriage of justice. As the comprehensive FA report shows, Suarez was guilty of racially abusing Patrice Evra, and there’s no defence for that.

Suarez and Agger during training

The biting, as I’ve written before, has always seemed more hilarious than awful to me. Anything that can inspire a sanctimonious Change.org petition started by a guy who believes FIFA’s decision to ban Suarez was a direct result of his brave online activism has to be quite funny. Anything that gives a gambling company like 888 Poker, who terminated their relationship with Suarez because of the Chiellini bite, the chance to take the moral high ground has to be sort of great. The use of racism to unsettle opponents isn’t hilarious or endearing, though. It’s just shit. Sportsmen may not ask to be role models, but, “Hey Luis, do you think you could not use a football game as an excuse to be racist?” shouldn’t be too demanding.

But despite all the weariness Suarez’s bullshit can inspire there’s just too much to love about the way he plays football. His buck-toothed enthusiasm; the way he scurries around the pitch like a revved-up South American Roadrunner; the way he’d nutmeg opponents or bounce the ball off their shins back into his path; the shots and passes that other players would have to take years to even conceive of; the fact that he never ever stopped running; the way he kissed his wrists when he scored; the way his teammates delighted in his genius; his flailing hand appealing for a free kick or penalty almost before he’d hit the deck.

This is a man who scored on his debut as a substitute before he’d even trained with his teammates. But he doesn’t belong to Liverpool fans any more; he belongs to the rarefied air of global football, the Mount Olympus of football superstars. Just as when your favourite band hits the big time and loses some of their charm, so too Suarez has been, for a while, the Liverpool player who’s just a bit too big to love properly. A number of players will leave Anfield this summer, and while Suarez is obviously by far the best, it’s cult classics like Lucas Leiva or Daniel Agger I’ll mourn in a more straightforward way.

Agger’s been our guy for years, a classy defender appreciated by his own – a man who's given it all for Liverpool, who has a tattoo of a Viking graveyard on his back. For over a hundred games we watched the inexplicably longhaired Lucas flounder around on the pitch like a half-dead trout struggling for life at the bottom of a boat. Then he got good and we loved him that much more for the fight he’d shown. Now, Rodgers is listening to offers for both these Liverpool stalwarts, reminding us that perhaps we feel sadder about the ones we let go. Agger and Lucas’ departures, if they come this summer, will be laced with guilt as well as sadness. Liverpool kept them till they thought they didn’t need them, and then they shunted them out the door. Liverpool, in this scenario – as in most scenarios involving the sale of a player – plays the role of Suarez.

In the end, it's better to have loved a man renowned for biting than to never have loved him at all. Soon, those forlorn Liverpool fans howling into the night will be sitting in the pub reading about Luis’ exploits in Barcelona, shaking their heads in an amused but profound way, no longer bereft. Either that or we’ll be stabbing little Suarez voodoo dolls as we watch Iago Aspas using the ball to trip himself up.

@oscarrickettnow

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