Running each day until the new season begins, The Premier League 60 is designed to reflect and honour the greatest players to have graced and illuminated the English top flight in the modern era, as voted for by our writers.
You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order (they didn’t), but we hope you’ll enjoy their stories. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to the series here.
Enough has been written about Sergio Aguero’s winning goal against QPR in May 2012. Take it in isolation and it is the most dramatic and important goal in Premier League history. But look at it in a different context, the body of work Aguero has put together in nine years in England, and it is just one among many.
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It has the hallmarks of the classic Aguero goal: taking a touch, quickly steadying himself, minimal backlift, hitting it hard and early to the near post. But there have been mountains of other goals just like it. Like his first, hit first time, at Carrow Road in April 2012, the game that launched City’s sprint to the finish line. Or against Aston Villa, November 2012. Or like when he burst past Phil Jones and won the game at Old Trafford in April 2013. Or against Chelsea, West Bromwich Albion, Tottenham and most importantly at Everton, on the way to that second Premier League title under Manuel Pellegrini. Or in the Champions League quarter-final against Tottenham last year. Or in the crucial 2-1 win over Liverpool that helped to swing the 2018-19 title to City. You could do this all day.
Which is not to diminish the importance of the QPR goal, merely to say that Aguero’s contribution to English football is about more than just delivering that one immortal moment. It is about a player who, better than anyone else in his generation, has mastered the traditional art of goalscoring. There is not an awful lot of range or depth or complexity to what Aguero does. You don’t need to meticulously analyse the footage, or run the data through an algorithm, or invent some new metric to evaluate his worth. He trades in the oldest and simplest currency of the game, which is scoring goals.
Aguero on the way to scoring ‘that’ goal against QPR (Photo: Ed Garvey/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
Aguero has been at City for nine years and has scored 254 goals, 180 of them in the Premier League. Only three players have more Premier League goals than him. He will surely overtake Andy Cole (187) this season and probably Wayne Rooney (208) next year if he is still at City. Alan Shearer (260) could be beyond him. But for a player who arrived in England aged 23, it is a phenomenal return.
It is also a tribute to his ruthlessness and longevity, to do it year after year after year. Some players burn bright and then fade, but Aguero has been consistent throughout his time here. In eight of his nine seasons he has scored at least 16 league goals, and broken 20 in six of them, five of those in a row.
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But despite Aguero’s mountain of goals, he does leave some neutrals rather cold. Even among the best foreign strikers ever to play in the Premier League, Aguero will elicit less emotion than most. Aguero will never have the same charisma or cultural cachet of Eric Cantona, the man who changed English football forever, and who had the media and the public hanging off his every word. Aguero’s post-match interviews rarely get beyond a boyish smile at how happy he is to have scored, and a quick reminder of how really the victory belongs to the team.
Aguero has at times been compared to Thierry Henry but he has never quite had that same style or grace or capacity to surprise people that Henry had. He has far less profile outside the ultimately narrow world of football itself. Aguero is the marketable face of plenty of products but has never had his own ‘va-va-voom’ moment.
Even players who shone for much shorter spells — Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Torres, Robin van Persie, Luis Suarez — were each the subject of their own moments of national obsession and fervour in a way that Aguero never quite has been. Part of this is the fact that he has never played for any of the biggest-supported clubs in the country — Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal.
But it is also because of the life Aguero leads and his own priorities. For a player who has excelled at the top end of the Premier League for the last nine years, he has never been involved in a single controversy. The closest he has come was getting sent off for a dreadful tackle on David Luiz when City lost 3-1 to Chelsea in December 2016, but there is almost nothing more than that.
Not much is known about Aguero’s life away from the game, but then there is not much to know. When Amazon’s All or Nothing documentary went into Aguero’s home during the 2017-18 season they found a man living a lonely existence, surrounded by framed shirts and match balls from every hat-trick he has scored. He admitted that except for when his son comes to visit him once a month, or when he is hanging out with Nicolas Otamendi or David De Gea, he spends most of his spare time watching action or mafia films on his home cinema system (he doesn’t like watching horror films because he lives by himself.)
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But then that is really the whole point about Aguero. For him, it has always been about scoring goals.
The other great argument he has on his side is longevity. Other comparable players — Henry, Ronaldo, Suarez — have been more exciting than Aguero, but they have done their time in the Premier League and then moved on to Real Madrid or Barcelona. When Aguero first arrived in England in 2011, it felt as if City might be his stepping stone from Atletico Madrid to Real or Barca (people thought the same thing about David Silva when he arrived the season before), and yet Aguero is still here, as important to City as ever before.
Even when Pep Guardiola arrived in 2016 many felt that Aguero’s days were numbered, that Guardiola would want a more mobile, more selfless modern frontman. People pointed to Guardiola’s first days in charge of Barcelona in 2008 when he sold Ronaldinho and Deco to make clear that it was a break with the past. There were rumblings about whether Guardiola approved of Aguero’s lax approach to training. And when Gabriel Jesus arrived from Palmeiras six months into the Guardiola era, it felt like the Aguero era at City was drawing to a close.
(Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Almost four years on, that sentiment feels almost laughable. There have been games where Guardiola has preferred Jesus to Aguero, but there is no question who is the better finisher or the more dangerous threat. Since Jesus arrived at City in 2017, he has scored 41 Premier League goals. In the same time-span, Aguero has scored 67. There had always been a sense that Aguero was coming into his last year or two at City — that he would go in 2018, or in 2020 — but those deadlines have always been pushed back.
The fact that Aguero is still at City, and as important as ever, is partially testament to his adaptability, and the way he has learned to play as a Guardiola front-man, harassing opposition centre-backs to win the ball back. But Jesus will always be better at that than him.
#OTD in 2011… 💙
Sergio Aguero made his Manchester City debut… scoring the first of his 254 City goals ⚽️ pic.twitter.com/dwwROJOxo3
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) August 15, 2020
Ultimately it speaks more to the irreplaceable value of what Aguero does best. His movement in the box, his nose for goal, his ability to dart to the near post, or pull off deeper into the box, wherever gives him the best chance to score. And of course his ability to put the chances away with that trademark finish of his: minimal backlift, hit it early, aim for the near post. Watching City go out of the Champions League to Lyon in Lisbon on August 15, dominating possession but unable to create enough good chances or convert the ones they did, it was impossible not to wonder how City might have done had Aguero been fit.
And that is the resilience and power of Aguero. Football is changing faster than ever at the top level. It is becoming faster, more coordinated, more driven by the ideas of the coaches rather than the skill of the players themselves. The game is more about winning the ball back and fast transitions than it was before. The way that City and Liverpool play is unrecognisable from the way that the top teams of even 10 years would play. So by rights a player like Aguero, born in 1988, schooled in the chaotic Argentine leagues as a teenager, first introduced to European football 14 years ago, should have been phased out by now.
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But the weight and value of Aguero’s goalscoring has protected him from the churn of the changing game. In an era where players are expected to be more versatile and athletic and multi-faceted, each one a mechanism that can be deployed to various scenarios, Aguero’s simple mastery of one skill sets him apart. Football is evolving, but Aguero is always there, in the box, at the near post, putting the ball in the back of the net. When he eventually stops the 21st-century game will not find anyone remotely similar to replace him.
(Main image created for The Athletic by Tom Slator)
