. Some reports say two minutes; some go as high as four. Either way, Hansi Flick is nothing if not a coach of fine margins, and by such fine margins was Peña summarily dropped for the Supercopa semi‑final against Athletic Club in January. His replacement: Barcelona’s third goalkeeper, a 34‑year‑old smoker by the name of Wojciech Szczesny.
I think it matters that Szczesny smokes. Not because smoking is cool, which any eye-rolling Gen Z will tell you is no longer actually true, but because there is the idea here of competing motivations: of instant versus delayed gratification, of compromise in a sport that brooks none. The bible of modern football reads: your body is your work. Hone it. Optimise every detail. Squeeze out every last drop of capital it has to offer. Szczesny responds by blowing a cloud of Marlboro Light right in your passive face.
And of course at the start of this season Szczesny was nobody’s idea of a comeback story. There is a photo doing the rounds online of Szczesny, recently retired, pushing a trolley around a Marbella supermarket. This was the start of the rest of his life: a life of golf and beaches, family time and browsing the juice aisle. The body was still willing; the heart, as he put it, “not there anymore”. It was around this point that Szczesny’s phone rang with a call from Robert Lewandowski.
It wasn’t as if Szczesny was regretting his early retirement. He had barely been retired long enough to get bored. “I was happy,” he would later say, “but being happy is not enough in life.” And it is this, perhaps, that gives a sense of wider meaning to his return this season: a fleeting but profound insight into why these deeply strange, deeply talented people do the things they do.
Signed originally as emergency cover for …
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