Football players, tattoos and earrings

Asked during the World Cup by the newspaper ABC about his simple image and the fact that he didn't have tattoos, Pau Cubarsí replied that he didn't have them now and probably wouldn't in the future, that he felt “comfortable with my hair combed forward like the rest of the guys my age, and that's enough,” and added: “You can be a footballer without having tattoos,” a phrase that went straight to the interview's headline and which, four weeks later, could have been improved with “you can be the best young player in the World Cup without having tattoos.”

 The first person I heard use as an example of a normal footballer a player “who doesn't wear earrings or dye his hair” was Pep Guardiola talking about Andrés Iniesta in 2009, when the perfect treble-winning season was being forged. Years later he repeated it, saying practically the same about Bernardo Silva, and even added “he has a normal car.” I imagine Guardiola was speaking, breathless, from the festival of eccentricities he saw in the millionaire dressing rooms he managed, with footballers tempted by the game of building a personal brand beyond football.

 Things have changed now, and judging by the number of tattoos seen in the summer, the threshold of normality or personal simplicity has shifted to the point where the question to a footballer (and to people in general, especially the younger ones) is no longer why they have tattoos but why they don't. And for that very reason, the prejudice against tattoos as an attention-grabbing element is fading. And with all that, there is a coherence in the calm demeanor, playing cleanly on the field, the precocious global success, and the biography of the son of a carpenter from Estanyol, and the phrase that you can be a footballer without having tattoos.