Opinion: Eternal Totti defies conventional wisdom

As the Roma captain closes in on his 40th birthday - and his 25th and final season at the club - our columnist reflects on how even time has struggled to catch up with him.

Francesco Totti will be 40 in September.

He’ll also be playing top-flight football for one of the most ambitious and demanding clubs in Italy.

Accepting both of these sentences together can take some time: if the first is true, how can the second be? It seems hard to believe that a club as forward-thinking as Roma - one embarking on an ambitious stadium plan, while implementing numerous off-the-pitch initiatives - will also be perhaps the only one in Italy that calls upon a player entering his fourth decade next season, when conventional wisdom tells us that is at least five years after most players are still useful.

Therein lies the problem: there is no ‘conventional wisdom’ when it comes to Francesco Totti. Conventional wisdom does not allow for a player to change positions near his 30th birthday … and end up being the second highest goalscorer in league history.

Conventional wisdom says there’s no room for a true trequartista anymore in modern football, and certainly not one that can be easily outrun by a player half of his age (or less), yet there Totti is – seemingly bending games, and time, to his will.

So throw conventional wisdom out the window: Il Capitano deserves that much. His contract renewal has been official for a while but it perhaps got lost in the wealth of football on show throughout the past month, when Lionel Messi’s Argentina narrowly lost to Chile in an unconventional Copa America, or when Antonio Conte’s Italy narrowly lost to Germany, who a little less narrowly lost to France, who then succumbed to Portugal in the European Championship.

That same Italy side could perhaps have used Totti, a player so atypical that he now serves a purpose hard to find anywhere else in the game. In renewing Totti’s contract, Roma have not simply rewarded loyatly, although this should not be merely dismissed.

The kind of love that exists between Totti and Roma – the length and depth of that relationship, that unbelievable and nearly inconceivable bond between a player and a club, a man and a city – is nearly impossible to find anywhere else.

The aforementioned Messi is perhaps nearly there, despite being far younger, thanks to all the success he has brought to Barcelona. But even so he is not a man who grew up in the city where he plays, has not yet represented them for more than two decades, did not lead them to a first league title for nearly as long.

Totti will be with Roma next season precisely because there is still no-one (and, looking around the modern football landscape, might never be again) like him. The range of his passes, the depth of his vision, the aplomb with which he can change a game… and this is not mere nostalgia.

One needs to go back a couple of months - May’s match against Genoa, or April’s game against Torino - to see the impact he still has.

When Totti celebrates his 40th birthday in September, we would all be wise to savour it. It’ll be the final time that Romanisti can celebrate the beginning of the season and birth of their eternal, legendary, brilliant captain at the same time.

When Totti runs out onto the pitch that day, it will not be because of the 39 years that have gone before him. It will be because of what Luciano Spalletti still sees that makes him such a valuable weapon in Roma’s arsenal in the 40th year yet to come.

And that in itself is remarkable.