A Farewell to Totti

An estimation: if we take the printed material alone, and dismiss for a second the bottomless ocean of stuff written on the internet, then there must have been an average of two or three newspaper articles per day published about Francesco Totti, continuously for the last 20 years.

If you imagine each article to be at least 300 words long, then it means you could read James Joyce's Ulysses front to back a full 20 times in less time than it would take you to exhaust the literature on the Giallorossi legend. And that's not even considering all the books, websites, blogs, pamphlets, or the tons of correspondence with and from the fans.

Thus, writing a farewell to the greatest player in Roma's past and possibly future history means looking for the full stop to a sentence too long for anyone to read in its entirety. When I say that words escape me, I do not mean that for rhetorical or dramatic effect, but only as a reflection of this simple fact: that everything has already been said.

Others have already noted, for example, that Totti's final Roma game against Genoa sees the sun going down on a particular way of conceiving football. Succinctly, it is that old idea that the 10 on a player's shirt represents a role, and not a number.

The game has changed and there's no arguing that the Pupone, even in his prime, had very little in common with the Olympian freaks of nature who define the laws of the football pitch today. He is as remote physically from Paul Pogba and Gareth Bale as he is distinct philosophically from Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

Look instead to the Number 10s that this current airbrushed generation drove to extinction, and you'll find the company where Totti truly belongs: Zinedine Zidane, Kaka, Ronaldinho, David Beckham. And before them: Romario, Ruud Gullit, Michel Platini, stretching back to the glittering memory of Diego Armando Maradona.

Like all of these players, Totti was the football equivalent of a Herbert von Karajan, a Stanley Kubrick, a Christopher Wren, someone who marshalled his people and conducted play towards a precise aesthetic ideal.

Also like these players, he invented his own way of playing the game. If Kaka had speed, Ronaldinho had flair, and Zidane had authority, then the prodigy from Porta Metronia had vision. I have never seen anyone play first-touch football the way he did. At his best, Totti was a metronomic passing machine that even Andrea Pirlo and Juan Roman Riquelme struggled to emulate.

Personally, I would place him as the third greatest Italian striker – after Roberto Baggio and Giuseppe Meazza, and more or less on par with Silvio Piola (a Lazio icon, fittingly). But this comes down to subjective opinion, and I'm sure that others may rank him quite a bit lower than, say, Gigi Riva, Gianni Rivera or Valentino Mazzola.

Totti comparisons almost always decay into flames, be their object other Number 10s, other Italians, or other iconic captains (and there are quite a few: think Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Del Piero, Javier Zanetti, Franco Baresi...).

This talent to inspire belligerence comes with the character. From his dialect and mannerisms through to the visceral relationship he had with his city, Francesco was always a Roman through and through. His decision not to sell himself to the highest bidder was a declaration that his Roman identity was worth more than the trophies and the money he could have heaped abroad.

This implied turning his back on much of international football, which diminished his status abroad. More importantly, it was a slap in the face to the rest of an Italian society still deeply attached to its pre-unification regional identities.

Totti was therefore never the champion that the football world wanted him to be. This was his downfall even as it was his saving grace. He was not the tanned and sculpted cover-boy, the man's man, the international superstar in sunglasses, the media-friendly captain who always measures out his words, and so for obvious reasons he was never the Ballon D'Or favourite, or the star in the Guy Ritchie ads, the face in videogame cutscenes. He was never – or not fully – an Azzurro.

On the day prior to his last Roma game, I have made my peace with the only thing I never really understood about the Bimbo de Oro: that his glory can never be shared. Francesco Totti is a song in a dying dialect, he is a kiss with someone else's girlfriend, he is your first car accident, he is the Kit-Kat hidden at the bottom of your rucksack, he is something you love and cannot talk about.

As the deluge of tributes pours in from fans, colleagues, celebrities, politicians and every Roman under the sun (even the Lazio ultras, for crying out loud), I will find a street somewhere and take my distance from the mountain of words that make up the Totti legend. I have tasted the golden years and I know my privilege, and that's enough.

Grazie, Capitano, now and forever grazie.

This article originally appeared on Football Italia.