Authenticity is everything. Always.
Luis Enrique won the UEFA Champions League with Paris Saint-Germain last weekend, becoming only the sixth man to win the title with two different teams. He’s a true icon of the game.
Eleven years ago I wrote “authenticity is everything” because without it we have nothing. This piece was about Icons.com as a brand and our endless quest to prove that our signed memorabilia products were and are genuinely signed by the world’s best and never faked.
Something else I said recently, when describing how we’ve survived in the shark-infested waters of football memorabilia for 26 years, was that we turn up on time, we pay our bills and we do what we say we will. Sadly, in the world of football, the bar can set very low for such things.
Looking back, I hadn’t appreciated just how much and how often we worry about the authenticity of our products, while striving to be authentic as people in all that we do.
Before our signing with the then one-time UEFA Champions League winner, we’d been told that Luis Enrique was quite a prickly personality and didn’t suffer fools gladly. So, as we climbed a mountain in a minibus in a nature reserve outside of Barcelona, and came upon a set of ornate iron gates, we were worried we were arriving little late.
We needn’t have been concerned as we were met by a handsome young man who helped us into the estate with a smile on his face. Enrique’s son, Pacho, offered us drinks, helped us with our cases and showed us into the office where the signing would take place.
Luis arrived. To say he was friendly and welcoming is to underscore his charisma; he immediately smiled, hugged and welcomed every one of our team to his beautiful home in Finca. He carries a definite energy, a special “fuerza vital” or life force that lights up any room he’s in.
The next two-hour signing session were to become my favourite of all the hundreds we have ever done. We barely talked football. We chatted about how he had completed the Marathon des Sables, the toughest running competition in the world; how he’d competed in ironman triathlons; how he had gone to Australia to clear his head and learn to surf post playing career; and how he had a new obsession: cycling. It was partly why he now lived with his family in a converted farm on a mountaintop. Because, as he put it, “it’s always uphill to get home.”
Luis was out of work at the time, not knowing what the future would hold. But he was truly engaging and genuinely interested in us too. I found a common interest in the architecture of Alvar Aalto who had inspired my own family home built by my architecture parents and how Luis had battled for years to bring his crumbling Finca vision to life. It was a true challenge, he said.
This was not been his greatest challenge, however. Far from it.
His beloved daughter Xana had died after a battle with a rare form of bone cancer aged just nine. He’d quit his job with Spain to be with her and his family in their darkest hour. In a documentary about his life entitled You’ve No ****king Idea it’s remarkable how he reframes the worst possible outcome.
“Can I consider myself lucky or unlucky?” Enrique says. “I consider myself to be lucky, very lucky. My daughter lived nine marvellous years with us. We’ve got a thousand memories of her, videos, incredible things.”
Enrique then continues: “My mother couldn’t keep photos of Xana until I arrived home and asked her “why aren’t there any photos of Xana, Mum?” ‘I can’t, I can’t’. “Mum, you have to put [photos of Xana] up”. Xana is alive. She isn’t in the physical plane, but she is in the spiritual plane. Because every day we talk about her, we laugh and remember.”
Famously he laughed, joked and played with Xana on the pitch after his FC Barcelona side won the UEFA Champions League — and the treble — in 2015. The most iconic image of the night is of Xana planting a massive Barca flag in the turf with his help.
In the press conference leading up to this year’s final he explained again how, while Xana could not be with him in person in Munich, she would be there in spirit. After Luis’s Paris Saint-Germain side won convincingly, the incredible, raucous PSG fans unveiled a massive tifo that moment. As authentic as ever, Luis described after that “my daughter has been with me since she left… I don’t need a win or a defeat in the Champions League: I feel it anyway.”
I wrote to his family the day after the final in Munich to say my own young boys were in tears after PSG beat our favourite team, Liverpool FC, in an earlier UEFA Champions League round. I’d explained to them about Luis, his beautiful family, his home and the journey they’d been on. “We should cheer for him now through the rest of the competition,” I told them. We all cheered when they won — me in the stadium, the boys watching at home. There were more tears.
Authenticity is always everything. Win, lose or draw. Being true to yourself, even when you lose everything, makes you a winner whatever happens.
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