This article is part of The Athletic’s series celebrating memorable debuts. To view the whole collection, click here.
Massimo Moratti always had a weakness for Alvaro Recoba. He indulged him as if he were his own son. So when the oil man reflected on the €1.2 billion he spent on players during his time as owner of Inter Milan it came as no surprise that he picked the ingenious Uruguayan as his favourite.
“Who did I love most out of Recoba and Ronaldo?” Moratti mused, presumably stroking his chin. “Ronaldo was the best player in the world.” The player Inter broke the world transfer record to sign in 1997. “We admired him for that. Alvaro, on the other hand, we didn’t expect him to be so good and because he was the bigger surprise, you maybe love him more.
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“On that basis, I’ll say El Chino.”
The son of a salesman who used to deal in used car parts, Recoba was one of the spares when the 1997-98 season began on a sweltering hot day at the end of August. San Siro was sold out for Ronaldo’s debut and La Repubblica thought the atmosphere bore greater resemblance to a Champions League final than a curtain-raiser against newly promoted Brescia, then coached by Marco Materazzi’s father, Giuseppe.
Growing more and more impatient to win the Scudetto 18 months after bringing Inter back into the family’s hands, Moratti — whose father Angelo was at the helm of the Grande Inter in the 1960s — did what Paris Saint-Germain would later do for Neymar and meet the buy-out clause in Ronaldo’s contract at Barcelona to make him the most expensive player of all time.
Recoba, by contrast, was loose change to Moratti, costing around 10 per cent of what he invested in O Fenomeno, who journalists had already marked their card as the winner of France Football’s Ballon d’Or, which was to be awarded that winter. The world was at Ronaldo’s feet and not just in that iconic Pirelli poster of him posing as Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, kitted out in Inter colours, the No 10 shirt on his back because Ivan Zamorano stubbornly refused to let R9 have the squad number he so desired.
On the pitch that glorious day under the Meazza’s Golden Gate-style red girders, the playmaker entrusted with setting up chances for Serie A’s new star was a player Ronaldo would encounter in the World Cup final at the end of that season, a player whose bicycle kick against Roma almost led a young James Horncastle to break my back attempting a poor imitation. But it was to be a frustrating afternoon for Youri Djorkaeff and the rest of the Inter starting line-up put out by Gigi Simoni, who Moratti chose as Roy Hodgson’s successor after the Englishman — renowned in these parts for selling Roberto Carlos and angering the otherwise unflappable Javier Zanetti towards the end of the previous season’s UEFA Cup final — headed back home to take charge of Blackburn Rovers.
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Materazzi rolled out the razor wire in front of his penalty area, playing a back five. But Inter did not snag on it as much as he had hoped. The problem for Simoni was goalkeeper Giovanni Cervone — nicknamed Manone (Big Hands) when at Roma, because it sometimes felt like he had two of those giant ‘We’re No 1’ foam fingers on instead of gloves. While Recoba knelt on the sidelines watching the action beneath a bowl cut and curtains that have suddenly become fashionable again, Cervone denied Diego Simeone, then the handsome Fabio Galante, as well as Djorkaeff and Maurizio Ganz. Brescia’s crossbar throbbed on impact from a Ronaldo free kick and when referee Pasquale Rodomonti disallowed his eagerly-anticipated debut goal, the tension mounted.
Nerves frayed even more when, as Gazzetta dello Sport put it at the time, “an 18-year-old who seems on his way to becoming a fine trequartista” came on for his hometown club and found Dario Hubner in the penalty area. The trequartista in question was Andrea Pirlo and Hubner, with his back to goal, turned and half-volleyed his pass into the roof of the net to give Brescia a shock lead.
Playing in Serie A for the first time, the 30-year-old grappa-swigging Hubner thought he had stolen the show. Only he hadn’t reckoned on the unknown Uruguayan coming on for Ganz whose chant — El Segna Semper Lu (He Always Scores) — did not apply that Sunday. “I would never have expected a debut like that,” Recoba later said, still in astonishment. “How could anyone have imagined coming on for their first game in Italy with their team 1-0 down and winning it with a couple of goals?”
Who would have thought a no-name 21-year-old from Montevideo club Nacional would upstage Ronaldo?
Simoni would later liken Recoba’s brace to playing a pair of wildcards in an Italian card game. In those days, he joked, Inter’s squad was like having “a deck” of them. Recoba’s equaliser came with 10 minutes remaining. “We knew how talented the kid was,” Inter’s captain Beppe Bergomi said. “We’d seen it in training, how easy he made shots like that look.” A shot from so far out it kept rising and rising and rising. “With no run-up, he let go with his left foot and it flew into the top corner,” Bergomi puffed out his cheeks, incredulous. The papers predictably described it as a missile and when asked how fast the ball travelled, Recoba joked: “Maybe 340kph.”
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The winner arrived five minutes from time. Awarded a free kick even further out, Recoba’s new team-mates were in no doubt who should take it. Not even Ronaldo begrudged him the chance. “Unlike the first goal, I tried to place this one, hitting it with my instep,” Recoba explained. “I always put the ball half a yard back from where the referee placed it, because I knew the wall would creep forward a bit. I’d worked on free kicks all week in training. All of them went over the bar.”
Not this one. This one got Moratti up off his seat and Inter winger Francesco Moriero down to kneel before Recoba and perform a sciuscia — or shoeshine — on his left boot. “It only seemed right to give it a polish after those two splendid goals,” Moriero said.
Recoba never scored a dull one in his Inter career. The red string bracelets he used to wear on his wrist, a souvenir from a pilgrimage to Lourdes, seemed to imbue him with a knack for the miraculous.
🔛 | ESORDIO
Cominciamo così! L'indimenticabile esordio di @Chino_Recoba20 ⚽🌈https://t.co/dL3LrLATjz pic.twitter.com/PeWpPX2tIP
— Inter 🏆🇮🇹 (@Inter) April 21, 2020
As the fans wound their way down San Siro’s unmistakable towers after the game, Recoba tried to downplay what he had just done. “I got a bit lucky,” he admitted. “It can’t always be like this. Don’t go around saying I’m better than Ronaldo. He’s a great player and I dream of being like him.”
And yet the player who visited Moratti most in his dreams was Recoba.
“Alvaro is not just a footballer,” Moratti would later say. “Alvaro is football.”
(Photos: Allsport UK /Allsport)
