BarcelonaIt was his first game as a starter with Barça. It was the first and the last. On October 31, 2021, Sergio Agüero jumped with Víctor Laguardia, defender of Alabès, and fell dizzy. He noticed that he was breathing hard, that his heart was racing. The Barça doctors decided that it was best to send him to a hospital to spend the night, while the match continued at Camp Nou. It wasn’t a good time for Barça, where Sergi Barjuan was coaching while waiting for Xavi’s arrival.
Sergio Agüero (Buenos Aires, 1988) had arrived that summer to strengthen the Blaugrana striker after many years scoring goals and winning titles with Manchester City. At 33 years old, he was no longer in the prime of his career, with too many injuries in previous years, but he maintained his goalscoring flair and charisma. In a Barça that had no rally and was licking its wounds from the disaster of the previous seasons, his sense of humor was welcomed by everyone. Joan Laporta, who had recently become president, signed him knowing that he might not be able to play all the games. No one expected him to play just five games and only one as a starter, in which he noticed career-ending heart problems. Wearing Blaugrana, he scored a single goal, against Madrid, in a defeat at Camp Nou when Ronald Koeman had run out of credit. The arrhythmia he was suffering from led to doctors initially giving themselves a three-month period of tests before deciding whether to advise him to retire, which happened in December 2021, just as Xavi had just arrived to manage the Boat.
“The first 15 days I had a really bad time. My heart raced a little and I thought it was silly and that I would be cured. But when they put me in that strange private room with some monitors I realized that things weren’t quite right but they told me it was fine. They couldn’t come to see me and I told myself it was strange. The next day I woke up fine and the hours went by but they didn’t tell me nothing. They didn’t tell me “you can go home”. Then the doctor came and told me I had to stay one more night. I didn’t know what was wrong. Monday morning I got up, the nurse and told me that they had to transfer me to a private clinic for a more in-depth checkup. I could see it coming. At the clinic they did a more in-depth checkup. To test you they put a kind of of hose through your groin to trigger your arrhythmia attacks to see which is the closest to what happened to me. They put plates on my chest and I said to myself: “What am I doing here, they want to stop my heart!”. They gave me the first attack, then the second, and the third was just like what I had heard. I went to my room and all of a sudden I started feeling dizzy and my heart started racing again and I tried to relax so it would come down. They put a chip in my heart. I have a chip that if I speed up my heart jumps”, recalled Kun these days in a live broadcast on Twitch, a platform where it has become very common to see him playing video games.
“I already knew a week or 10 days before the final results that I would probably have to withdraw, but I didn’t assume it and I was preparing for that moment. When I was told that it was the end, that I had to say it, I I went to Abu Dhabi to distract myself a bit, and on the day of the farewell press conference I was calm. I was with Laporta before I left for the press conference at Camp Nou, and when I saw the stairs with my chair there I broke down and started crying. I hugged Laporta. I had to go out and I didn’t want to, because it’s hard for me. I didn’t want them to see me cry and Laporta was telling me that I had to go out and talk,” he recalled the Argentine, who was one of the youngest debutants in the history of his country’s football when, at 15 years old, he already played in Primera with Independiente de Avellaneda. At the age of 12, Agüero had already had heart arrhythmias, but no doctor advised him against playing football, and at the age of 17 he was already signed by Atlético de Madrid, where he would play for five years before leaving for Manchester City.
The great passion of the Kun
Once he retired, a new life began for Kun, who, as Leo Messi himself, one of his best friends, has admitted, is one of the most active in the national team players’ WhatsApp group. “Since he’s retired and has a lot of free time he’s always playing pranks on us,” she said. Agüero aspired to be at the World Cup this November as a player, but will eventually be there as a member of the Argentine delegation. “He is one of those people who make a difference, who add up. He will help us because he knows everyone well,” admitted Lionel Scaloni, the Argentine coach.
Most of his new life, however, he dedicates to one of his passions, the e-sports. If during the last years their live shows became popular stream where he played, he has now created his own team, the KRU, with two physical headquarters, one in Barcelona and the other in Buenos Aires. Agüero has invested more than half a million in this project, which has signed players to compete in different video game tournaments. In fact, in some competitions his players have already reached the final stages of world championships, a fact that fills Kun with pride. “When I started I was ambitious, but I didn’t think it would go so well. The first idea was to compete in FIFA and then we got to Valorant. We have so many people supporting it that we were able to open a training center for players in neighborhood of Palermo in Buenos Aires,” he explains.
Aguero’s other big personal investment has been buying a house valued at $15 million in Miami, where he lives. “I don’t live outside Argentina for a tax issue, I do it for the quality of life. Unfortunately, in Argentina many people go to live in closed neighborhoods out of fear, there is little security,” explained the ex-footballer , who regularly returns to his country to see the son he had with his first wife, Giannina Maradona, daughter of Diego Armando Maradona. Agüero has been seen practicing sport fishing, playing golf and in the areas of vips of Formula 1 races and tennis tournaments: he once went to cheer on the Catalan Paula Badosa when she played in Miami.
The Argentine, a year after that jump with Laguardia in which everything changed, is preparing to go to Qatar to support Lionel Messi’s team in a very different way. He will do this while continuing to follow as the players of his team ofe-sports they give him joy. “Now I’m president. And I remember how heavy I could be, so now I understand the presidents of the clubs I was in,” joked Aguero in one of his live broadcasts, who spends some time every day playing and chatting with the fans. Conversations where, from time to time, he generates controversy, as when he claimed that vaccines against the coronavirus were of no use.
