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Accounts differ on just how late Iñaki Peña was to that team meeting in Jeddah. 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 Marc-André ter Stegen, who tore knee ligaments in September, Szczesny took Peña’s place in Jeddah: a decision that felt laden with risk, mad vibes, disruption for disruption’s sake. Why shatter the confidence of a promising cantera keeper for a short‑term contractor, a guy who was literally shoving a supermarket trolley around four months earlier? And if you were trying to build an early case against Szczesny, there was plenty of ammunition. He was sent off against Real Madrid in his second game, albeit with Barcelona already 5-1 up. In his first Champions League runout, a ridiculous 5-4 victory in Lisbon, he was directly responsible for two Benfica goals. OK Wojciech, this has been fun. But maybe save it for Soccer Aid in future.
Of course everyone knows what happened next, although nobody can really pin down why. Barcelona are unbeaten in 15; a 10-point gap to Real has been overhauled. Last week, on the return to Lisbon, Szczesny’s brilliance kept Barça in a game where they were a man down for more than an hour. A club-record eight saves: shuffling and scrambling across his box like a giant green disco worm, throwing shapes and popping moves, issuing beaming thumbs-up to his defence.
Why does this tale feel so unlikely, so suffused with rare magic? Partly because, unlike so many areas of the game that can be measured and digitised, decrypted and systematised, great goalkeeping remains perhaps the last area of football still shrouded in mystique, still more art than science. Mohamed Salah has 1.08 goal drawdowns per 90 fungible minutes, an 18% augment on the average opposition in a simulated present. Alisson: god, he’s just a miracle, isn’t he? How on earth does he get there?
But to a large extent Szczesny’s charm is something innate to Szczesny himself. Insofar as there is just something freakishly novel about a footballer so visibly and patently enjoying the thing they do. This is a quality even rarer in older players, for whom even moments of triumph feel like a sort of vengeance against time. Jamie Vardy celebrates his goals with the tearaway rage of a man who has just punched his way out of a coffin. Ashley Young plods around the pitch like a man trying desperately to earn enough credits for his freedom.
The irony is that for most fans in this country Szczesny remains indelibly associated with mid-2010s Arsenal: surely the unhappiest any club has been in the history of football. These were the Wenger Out years, the years of fiscal discipline and Francis Coquelin, of trying and failing to pass the ball into the net, the years of Robbie and Troopz, an entire era corroded and consumed in toxic posturing.
Naturally Szczesny was jettisoned by Wenger for that most puritanical of offences: having a smoke in the showers after a defeat by Southampton to 2015. David Ospina took his place, Szczesny went on loan to Roma and never returned. Wenger now works for Fifa churning out two boring ideas a year. Troopz has his own YouTube channel and thinks people need to stop making excuses for Mikel Arteta. In hindsight, the loss here was Arsenal’s.
And so it is that Szczesny finds himself with a free role in one of the most exciting teams in world football. Flickball is flawed, dangerous and almost certain to end in a pasting by one of Europe’s more serious outfits. But in the snaking runs of Raphinha and Lamine Yamal, the scheming of Pedri and Marc Casadó, in that daringly high line, lies a kind of unfettered expression, a journey of collective discovery: pushing at the boundaries of the feasible and the sensible, leaning into their imperfections until they become superpowers. Gavi feels quite old these days. Gavi is 20.
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The youngest squad in La Liga – and this with Lewandowski and Szczesny bringing the average up – is a squad operating on the very brink of safety, of tactical prudence, of physical capability, of financial stability, and is all the more thrilling for that. “I feel liberated,” Pedri has said. “Flick tells me to play without pressure.” And at the modern super club this in itself is a kind of profanity, a radical act, a conscious distillation of what really matters in a world where it feels like everything matters all the time, from a defensive lapse to a cheeky tab in the dressing room.
Being happy is not enough in life. And of course the kind of happiness Szczesny is talking about here is the kind we build our lives around, the kind of happiness we wish for our children. The happiness of comfort and security, of self-care and personal boundaries, of actualisation and autonomy and a round of golf whenever you want it.
But this is not the only kind of happiness that exists. “When you sense the challenge, when you feel like you want to push yourself into something that people will remember, then motivation prevails,” Szczesny says.
This is the happiness of the extraordinary, the happiness of danger, the happiness of risking it all for one more shot at something beautiful. The margins are deadly fine, and we are all – in our own way – on the clock.
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