The Little Magician Still Enchants: We Fear This Career End | OneFootball

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.

Feelings of loss often set in even before the actual farewell. On a grand scale, it's the impending loss of a person, whose looming absence one has to confront in advance, on a small scale, it's the bottom of the plastic cup that you can already sense, even though the yogurt is not yet fully eaten. Somewhere in between lies probably the greatest loss that can befall a football fan: The impending end of the career of your favorite player.

In this format, we want to look at players we already miss, even though they are still active. Because just like each of us has to die someday and every yogurt is eventually finished, there is this certainty with professional footballers: Unless your name is Kazuyoshi Miura, it's over somewhere in your mid-thirties. Some squeeze out a few more years, but apart from such exceptions like the eternal Miura from Japan, 20 years of professional football is the absolute limit for most.

In this respect, our candidate today is a small miracle. He is 40 years old, not a goalkeeper (!) and is currently playing his 21st season in professional football. Oh yes: And he can do magic.

Santiago Cazorla González, who was aptly introduced years ago on his return to FC Villarreal, is a magician. In so many ways.

First, there is the obvious: All the dream goals, of which there were plenty during his time at FC Arsenal. Long-range shots, which he - of course, why should a magician limit himself - could place just as well with his right and left foot behind baffled goalkeepers.

But dream goals alone do not capture the magic of Santi Cazorla. Even away from his own goal success, sleepwalking dribbling or other actions for which footballers are often attributed magical abilities, his game has a certain magic. Because what you mostly get when you watch highlight clips from Cazorla's time in top football obscures a little the true value he had during his six years in England. For Arsène Wenger's Arsenal, he was often both the deepest and the highest midfielder. And that within one attack.

In the build-up, he got the ball himself from the central defenders, but then a few textbook one-twos later, he was also the last passer before the goal. Between ball recovery and shot on goal, Arsenal essentially consisted of Santi Cazorla and players who received the ball from him and returned it. A correspondingly large gap therefore gaped in the center of the Gunners when the little magician was out. And that happened far too often. Alone during his six years in North London, the Spaniard accumulated an incredible 800 days of absence.

But Cazorla and his dream goals and passes kept coming back until today. Which brings us to another essential element of his magic: Dealing with setbacks. For those who still don't find all the previous magic enough, they can look at the story of how Santi Cazorla came back from an injury that almost cost him the ability to walk.

After a seemingly harmless ankle injury in September 2013, followed by a seemingly just as harmless routine operation, Cazorla contracted highly resistant germs in the hospital through the surgical wound. But nobody knew this at first, so the germs were eating away at his foot from the inside for years until the pain became increasingly severe and it was no longer possible in 2016. "Bacteria ate eight centimeters of my Achilles tendon," he explained to the 'BBC' in 2018 after a nearly two-year injury break.

The amazing thing: Until he could hardly walk in October 2016, he had simply continued to play under increasing pain, even though his right foot was hardly usable anymore. The ability to score dream goals just as well with his left foot came in handy.

Today, the wound, for which his doctors had even suggested a foot amputation at one point, is covered with a piece of tattooed forearm skin. The foot, which with a bit more bad luck might not even be there anymore, continues to kick professionally in the second Spanish league, where the now 40-year-old plays for a minimum wage at his youth club Real Oviedo. Again, something that contains a certain magic.

But we still haven't quite captured the true Cazorla magic. Because it lies in the result of all these magical abilities and stories. A result that is always the same. The beautiful goals, the elegant style of play, his inspiring comeback story or the selfless return to the small home club; all this conjures up the same goal: A smile on the faces of football fans.

And to achieve this smile, Santi Cazorla not only has his equally well-functioning feet or his life story as a tool, but also himself as a person who you just have to love. The following video makes this a little more understandable.

He doesn't even need feet, all he needs is a moderately English-speaking Lukas Podolski sitting next to him to entertain people and force a smile on their faces with his charm.

All those monster long-range dream goals? In comparison, they are almost only bycatch. And yet we will soak up every one that comes before the impending end of his career, as if we were scraping out the cup of the most delicious yogurt in the world.