Carlos 'El Pibe' Valderrama

The book has closed on the illustrious playing career of Colombia’s most famous footballer, Carlos Valderrama, and all for the lack of an alarm clock. Rainbow Blue Nelson traces the history of the Afro from Pescaito.

“The meeting was at six thirty and I woke up at eight. I understood that when this happens to a footballer it’s best to retire,” in his inimitable laid-back style this was Carlos Valderrama’s way of calling it a day.
With that Zen-like logic, a trademark flick of the Afro and a gentle shrug of the shoulders, a line was drawn under the playing career of Colombia’s most-capped player. The greatest hair in football has officially left the stadium. The date was January 6, 2004.
The dawn meeting had been scheduled to take place the previous day with doctors of Union Magdalena, the hometown club where he had made his professional debut as a precocious teenager in 1981. It was hoped by club officials, that it was also where he would also finish his career. They were wrong. They should have bought him an alarm clock for Christmas.
A week earlier, Valderrama’s hometown, Santa Marta, a sleepy Caribbean city made famous in the 1970s for exporting ‘Santa Marta Gold’, the best marijuana in the western hemisphere, had been awoken from the haze that hangs over the city by the news that “the kid” (El Pibe in Spanish) as he is known was making a comeback.
One of the most talented footballers to come out of South America in the last three decades was set to fulfil his long-standing dream and end his prestigious career where it had all started 23 years ago. At 42 years old, the prodigal son ‘El Pibe’ as he has been known since he was a small child, was coming home.
Adoring fans that had shared that dream for 20 years, celebrated by flocking to the 15 ft statue of Valderrama that stands at the entrance to the team’s dishevelled stadium.
Unfortunately for the fans, while the rest of the Union players were being put through their paces early that Monday morning, Valderrama was at home dreaming of something else.
“I felt the itch to return, but when you are on holiday you lose all sense of time,” he said.
“Normally I would arrive at training an hour beforehand, this time I remembered two hours late and that means I can’t go back.”
Being late has never been a problem for Valderrama before. Punctuality has been one of the cornerstones of the professionalism that has led to his enduring success.
In 1994, in the prologue of ‘El Pibe’s’ biography, Francisco Maturana, close friend and former national team manager, wrote. “You could arrange a meeting with him in Istanbul on February 1999 at 10 in the morning and he would be there, without fail. But if you haven’t arrived by two minutes past ten then he would have gone and he would never believe in you again.”
In a country filled with abundant tales of degenerate footballers whose careers have been cut short after being dragged into the mire of the drugs trade that dominate the county, ‘El Pibe’ has remained a paragon of virtue.
Following my seven-year love affair with this spirited, ingenious and resilient country it is easy to understand why the average Colombian has grown tired of the types of scandals that the British media would relish.
Of footballers murdered leaving bars, found carrying kilos of cocaine in their kitbags, trapped carrying ransoms to pay child kidnappers, caught match-rigging, of corruption, needless violence and more needless violence.
In a battle-weary community, fed a daily diet of misery for 40 years and with no chance of escape – Colombians need a visa for all but 17 countries in the world and more than 60% live in poverty – what the Colombian people have always screamed out for was a world-class export to be proud of. An ambassador that could demonstrate that cocaine and bad news are not the only things come out of Colombia. For almost 20 years, Carlos Valderrama has been fighting that battle almost single-handedly.
“He is the best footballer that Colombia has produced in its history,” says Edgar Perea, the colourful football commentator. “It was an honour for us that he presented us around the world. Unfortunately he has to go but we will have him with us forever because he did so much for the prestige of Colombian football.”
Far from the stereotype of the lazy, unreliable, beer-swilling ‘costeño’, as those from the coast are labelled by the ‘cachacos’ from the interior, Valderrama has maintained his long career by living up to the highest professional standards laid down by the biggest influence in his life: his father and manager, Carlos Valderrama Sr.
It is a tribute to his father, known simply as ‘Jaricho’, that in Valderrama’s long career, he has never been caught up in any of the scandals that have plagued, or killed, some of his best friends and colleagues.
As the first son of ‘Jaricho’ Valderrama and Juana Palacios, ‘El Pibe’ was always destined to play football. Born on September 2 1961 into a Colombian football dynasty there was never much risk that he would be anything else.
The Valderrama Palacios clan has produced 14 professional footballers, a record in Colombia, if not the world.
Jaricho played centre-back for Union Magdalena in the side that turned professional after winning the national amateur championship in 1968.
El Pibe’s uncles Justo, Aurelio and Pablo, also wore the colours of Magdalena. Since then, El Pibe’s cousins, Didi and Pablo Valderrama, Julian and Miguel Gonzalez Palacio and his brothers Alan and Ronald have all made it into the professional ranks.
His youngest son is on trial with Argentine giant Boca Juniors, his other plays for the junior team in Tampa Bay Mutiny and his nephew Ronaldo is already dreaming of emulating the feats of his uncle. If you don’t make it as a footballer in this family you better have a good excuse.
Being born into such a football pedigree, certainly gave him a head start but it was only one part of the story.
The other vital ingredient – one that he would carry with him around the world – was his barrio, Pescaito.
It was in Pescaito – a shanty-town trapped between the port and the railroad was used to unload bananas from the plantations of the United Fruit Company made famous by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ nobel peace prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude – where Valderrama developed his unmistakable style as a footballer.
Languid at times but sharp as a box of knives in and around the box, “El Pibe” developed his exquisite control and a football brain that always put him one step ahead of those around him with endless football games in the streets of his beloved Pescaito.
Used to the scorching heat of the Caribbean his game is about simplicity, expending the minimum of effort to achieve devastating and at the same time beautiful results.
“Santa Marta was like total freedom,” he recalls of his life playing football with his brothers, cousins and friends in the Castellana, the dusty pitch at the heart of Pescaito where he was first spotted as a gangly teenager.
Jaricho and his family have never left the barrio, they still run a bar, called Paisandu, on the same spot where they arrived more than forty years ago. Located directly in front of the Valderrama family home, the bar has grown over the years in line with the stature of its most famous patron.
Named after the place where the “best” of the Valderrama’s, Didi, made his debut for the Colombian national side scoring the winner against Brazil in a youth tournament almost 30 years ago, the bar has been the heart of Pescaito’s nightlife for the best part of two decades.
During Carnival its thunderous sound system acts as the pulse for the entire barrio, ensuring that nobody sleeps until the Valderrama’s go to bed. Two life-size posters of ‘El Pibe’ in his full splendour are proudly emblazoned across the 18 ft high stack of speakers.
Valderrama refers to his beloved barrio as ‘Piso Alto’, which translates into High Floor or Higher Ground.
Literally the phrase is used to describe the custom of building houses two feet above street level to prevent flooding in the rainy season, but the words took on a deeper significance later in his career.
As well as keeping the house dry, the famous ‘Piso Alto’ has served to keep Valderrama’s feet firmly on the ground – albeit always slightly higher than those around him – when things were going well and acted as an island retreat when they weren’t.
When he secured his greatest triumph in 1989, guiding the national team to their first World Cup in 28 years, his first thoughts were for his friends and family in Pescaito.
The shirt from the second leg of that victorious playoff was kept for Jaricho, whose only chance to play in a World Cup in 1966 ended in disappointment with a 7-2 drubbing by Chile in the qualifiers.
Three weeks before the game with Israel, it had been a different story. Valderrama had been substituted in a game that Colombia needed to win to have any chance of qualifying for Italia ’90. It was the first time in his international career that he had been taken off. His replacement went on to save the game taking the team from 1-0 down to win 2-1. The Colombian media, not for the last time, were prophesising the end of an era for Carlos Valderrama. He was not playing well at the time, due to a drop in form that saw him spending most of his time on the bench at his club in France, Montpellier. It was the Higher Ground of ‘Piso Alto’ that acted as his salvation.
“I knew that what I needed was football and more football. So I stayed in Santa Marta with the boys in the Castellana. Football from six in the morning until nine o’clock and again in the afternoon from four until six, I went back to nutmegging Ronald and Alan and started to do what my dad told me. He made me think. When I went back to the national team everyone could see the ‘Kid’ Valderrama was back,” Valderrama told his close friend and journalist, Fabio Poveda in an interview shortly after the game.
Despite repeated attempts to move Jaricho and his family to a more luxurious neck of the woods the family is not budging.
“We are a simple bunch, why would we want to move from here, from the barrio,” says Jaricho. There is a suspicion amongst his friends that he would die if he moved anywhere else.
“My father taught me that humility is the most important thing in life,” he says.
Everyone on the Caribbean coast has a story that is testament to Valderrama’s humility.
He did not own a car or even know how to drive until he was 27 and Montpellier bought him a car as part of his move to France. He trains regularly in the gym in the building below my modest flat in Barranquilla, no private country club for ‘El Pibe’ he pays £10 a month for his spinning classes like everyone else. He spurns the gold jewellery in favour of the more artisan style bracelets and necklaces. He is, like his father, a humble man.
The second time I had the chance to meet and interview Valderrama in January last year, he was in his bank in Barranquilla waiting in a queue as long as the Chinese wall. The manageress offered him the VIP treatment. “Relax, I’ll wait in line with the rest of the people,” was his response.
Shortly after he had finished his banking chores, I interviewed him on how it felt to be voted the best player in Colombian history. Footballers can be difficult to interview at the best of times, normally because they lack the intelligence to say anything other than the tried and tested clichés.
With Valderrama a cliché or two would be a godsend. He, like Alan Shearer, has perfected the art of the anti-interview.
“Content,” was his first response. And to have a statue unveiled in your honour in your hometown? “Tranquil, happy.”
What was it like stepping out at Wembley for the first time? “All good, all good.” He is, you could say a man of very few words.
His remarkable humility and lack of ego are reflected in his style of play. He gets more pleasure from delivering the killer pass to a striker than in scoring the goal himself. His style has certainly made him a lot of friends who make their money scoring goals. If goals, as they say, pay the rent it is always a good idea to have Valderrama as a lodger.
One of the strikers who gained most from Valderrama’s probing passes was Ivan Valenciano, the highest goalscorer in Colombian league football.
“He was a player who played things simple,” he says. “A person that makes a lot of key passes to create goal-scoring opportunities but more than anything you enjoy yourself.” Half of his record 215 league goals, he estimates, were laid on by Valderrama.
Jaricho says he always knew his son would be good but never realised the significance he would hold for the country’s fortunes and the pride he would get from seeing his eldest son lead Colombia to three World Cups.
“I thought that my children were going to be footballers because they were all born here. I was a footballer and all my brothers and my children were footballers. But I never knew that he would go as far as he has,” says Jaricho.
It was his cousin, Didi Valderrama, a year older than “El Pibe” that everyone believed would be the star of the family. Both Carlos and Jaricho’s eyes light up when they talk about Didi.
As a youngster he emerged at the same time as another talented tyke from the barrio, Diego Armando Maradona.
It was Didi, not Carlos that established the record for a Colombian transfer in 1982 when Atletico Junior paid $250,000 to take him from Santa Marta an hour up the coast to Barranquilla. By contrast, a year later, El Pibe was transferred from Union to Millonarios for $100,000. But it was to be El Pibe, not Didi that would eventually put Colombian on the football map.
The two of them, however, would some seven years later show England how the game should be played at Wembley leaving Bobby Robson’s boys spellbound with their passing and movement in a warm-up to Italia ’90. Wembley may have been a dream come true for the boys from Pescaito, but they made it look like another stroll in the park.
The effortless joy way with which he played football has made him many friends along the way. Most of them were present to say farewell at his testimonial on February 1. The long list of participants read like the who’s who of footballing eccentrics.
A collection of some of the most temperamental and controversial misfits to have played in the last twenty years, flanked neatly by some of the finest mullets to have graced the field since soul-glo hit the shops in the 1970s.
Diego Maradona, Enzo Francescoli, Faustino Asprilla, Luis Chilavert, Jorge Campos, Ivan “Bam Bam” Zamorano, Bolivian mullet master, Marco Etcheverry, Leonel Alvarez - Colombia’s mullet of steel in the 1990, 1994 and 1998 World Cups and veteran Ecuadorian mulleteer, Alex Aguinaga.
In such prestigious company Valderrama has always been able to hold his own. Even though he has often lacked some of their propensity to grab the front-page as well as the back-page headlines.
Maradona who refers affectionately to Valderrama as the ‘Golden Kid’, ‘blondie’ or ‘fluffy’, was first to greet the great man at a lunch held in “fluffy’s” honour a day before the testimonial.
Refreshed by a few glasses of wine on the plane from Cuba and delighted to be in Colombia and reunited with old friends, a rotund Maradona was only too pleased to get the ‘homage’ rolling.
“I remember Pibe for his intelligence and that he was so quick. If you are fast mentally, like El Pibe, you can play and enjoy yourself. Running he could compete with Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis and they never had to play with a ball.”
Valderrama has always revelled in pitting himself against the greats of his time and it was in two famous victories over his great friend and rival that established Valderrama and Colombia.
The first was July 11 1987, the second, six years later on September 5 1993.
The two games were to act as bookmarks for the best era in Valderrama’s career. In the first game in the Copa America, reigning World Champions’ Argentina were strong favourites to win competition before Valderrama’s men demolished them with a near flawless performance in River Plate’s ‘Monumental’ stadium in Buenos Aires.
That Colombian team should have won the championship but as has become characteristic it self-destructed. After conceding a stupid goal against Chile they had to settle with third place.
Valderrama was voted best player, Francisco Maturana voted best manager and Arnaldo Iguaran won the golden boot. Besides the honours it was the victory over Maradona’s World Champions in Argentina that placed Colombia on the map. The golden era for the national team and Valderrama had started.
That year Valderrama was voted best player in South America and shortly after he secured his dream move to Europe to the French club Montpellier.
At his previous club, Deportivo Cali he had been earning less than $20,000 a year, overnight his salary increased to $250,000. Peanuts in today’s over-inflated market but in its day, the $2.2m transfer was a sum commanded by very few. A year earlier, Ruud Gullit had moved from PSV Eindhoven to AC Milan for $6m to become the world’s most expensive player.
Despite a poor start in France, Valderrama triumphed in the play-off against Israel and followed with Colombia’s best ever performance in a World Cup in Italy.
Valderrama scored the first goal in the country’s first World Cup victory against the United Arab Emirates. He also inspired the team to a last-gasp equalizer in the final group game with Germany that took them to the second round for the only time in the country’s history. They lost to England’s quarter-final opponents Cameroon after a blunder by Rene ‘el loco’ Higuita.
He returned to France and won the French cup alongside Eric Cantona and Laurent Blanc and later added a league championship medal in Colombia in the 1993/1994 season with Junior after joining them for a Colombian record transfer of $1m. But it was the second monumental victory over Argentina that won him the heart of the nation.
On a memorable night in Buenos Aires, a team inspired by Valderrama showed everyone the beauty and the power of Colombian and Latin football at its finest.
Needing only a draw to book their place on the plane to the US, they beat Maradona’s team 5-0 with Faustino Asprilla and Freddy Rincon profiting from Valderrama’s deft and intelligent passing to score twice each.
The Argentine crowd, tired of an over-defensive team built on the sublime skills of one man, finished the game screaming for their own ‘blondie’. Even the best player ever, ended applauding the Colombians.
“I applauded Colombia because they gave a lesson on how you should play football,” says Maradona. “I envy them because they remember this game but I have to remind them of some of the other games which they have forgotten. You have to remember that this game was like a lesson for Argentina but one game does not determine anything and those players learnt that after the World Cup in the USA.”
Following the intoxicating highs of Buenos Aires, the Colombian bandwagon came to a shuddering halt. Colombia arrived in the USA with high expectations. People should have realised what would happen the moment the world’s worst pundit, Pele, tipped them to win the competition.
The players started to believe the hype and indiscipline crept in leading to unsubstantiated rumours of match-rigging involving Colombia’s drug cartels.
Death threats against Gabriel ‘Barrabas’ Gomez, the brother of assistant manager, Hernan Dario Gomez forced him to be sent home. He was followed shortly after by Wilson Perez sent home for ‘disciplinary reasons’. There were unsubstantiated reports that $20,000 had been found in his room. Asprilla did not play after the first game following a petulant response to being substituted against Romania and a drunken night out with Perez. It was a disaster. Colombia had once again pressed the self-destruct button. They lost all three games and were on the plane straight home. Soon after things got worse. The young centre-half, Andres Escobar was murdered outside a Medellin nightclub. The reasons for his death have never been established but many believe the bodyguard of a drug dealer shot him for scoring an own-goal against the USA. The drug dealer, the theory goes, had bet on Colombia to win.
It was the hardest blow of Valderrama’s career. “I never thought that he would go that way,” he said recently in a TV interview. “That they were going to snatch him away from us like that. That hit me harder than any injury, than any elimination, because their will never be another like Andres.”
Following USA ’94, hostile crowds turned on the players. Accusations of match rigging echoed around the terraces and even if the defeats were more a result of indiscipline and disruptions the fans were not easily prepared to forgive for their shattered dreams. For the first time Valderrama was booed by those that had worshipped him.
“At the start it hurt a lot,” he says. “But I understood that the boos were normal that they demonstrated the discontent and as captain I had to stick my chest out in all the stadiums. I wasn’t going to hide, the only thing I could do was play well to win over the crowds and accept the criticism. Afterwards I turned those boos into cheers again.”
He won another championship with Junior in 1995 but his powers were starting to wane. In 1996, he moved to Major League Soccer in the US playing for Tampa Bay Mutiny, Miami Fusion and finally ended his career with the Colorado Rapids.
In his World Cup swansong in 1998 at the age of 37 with all the skills intact but even less inclination to cover the ground required of a modern day midfielder, he failed to leave any marked impression. Colombia, once again failed to get to the second round losing to Romania and England – in his last ever World Cup game his shirt went to a young David Beckham.
Following his failure to wake up on time for his meeting with Union, he is now dedicated to becoming a coach and travels frequently to Chile for his coaching badge.
Those that know him say his experience professionalism and football intelligence will enable him to overcome the tendency for great players to turn into terrible managers. Perfecto Rodriguez, the man who gave him his first game 23 years ago says: “He will have no problem.”
Hernan Dario Gomez, manager of Ecuador and Colombian manager in 1998 says the qualities he possessed as captain will stand him in good stead: “Everyone can talk about football, but the problem is to find a leader, the example, the character, the personality, charisma and the way you carry yourself.” Even with the Afro, I ask. “There are coaches that do it in a tie which to me is impossible.”
With the Colombian team floundering at the bottom of the qualifying league for Germany 2006, his influence once again may be needed.
Alexis Mendoza, assistant to newly appointed Colombian coach Reynaldo Rueda says: “It is a good moment for the National team for a person to collaborate who could give a lot of responsibility, to give a criteria that this is how to do things well. All the people that can help the National team are welcomed, especially those people who were in the national team in this moment when it is suffering.”
Many would argue that Valderrama was one of life’s great nearly men. His time abroad at Montpellier, Valladolid, Tampa, Colorado and Miami, brought him neither the extreme riches nor the glory of contemporaries such as Diego Maradona, Ruud Gullit or Enzo Francescoli.
He never won the Copa de Libertadores, the South American equivalent of the European Cup, nor the Copa America with Colombia and his three World Cup campaigns ended in bitter disappointment.
But what Valderrama achieved cannot be measured solely in silverware or plaudits. What he achieved was to momentarily drag Colombia out of its depression with some sublime and wonderful moments. As the terrorised people of Colombia hit new lows, the kid from ‘Piso Alto’ took them to higher ground. For that he will be eternally loved.
Who knows, as future manager of Colombia he and his clan may well take them even higher.
*This article was written for Observer Sport Monthly (February 2004)