The story is told of Mateo Retegui, who this week became the summer’s costliest new arrival in Saudi Arabia’s Pro League, that, but for a chance encounter with a persistent coach, he might never have become a footballer. Retegui had, well into his teens, turned his back on the game that would make him a superstar.
To do so was perfectly logical, even if Retegui was an outstanding athlete, strong, fast and mobile and a young man with all the genetic gifts to pursue a life in sport. But his question was: Which sport? His background was steering him firmly in a particular direction, unavoidably for a kid whose family name, Retegui, is to field hockey in his native Argentina as the surname Maradona is to football.
And not just the paternal name, either. Mateo's mother Maria was a junior national champion at hockey. Mateo’s father, Carlos, meanwhile represented the country as a hockey player in three successive Olympics and went on to coach Argentina’s men to a gold medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.
He also oversaw the Argentinian women’s silver medals at the 2012 and 2020 Olympics. Mateo’s sister, Micaela, was part of the squad in Tokyo.
And so it was that the male heir to this sporting dynasty – one that stretches even further back, to Juan Jose Retegui, Mateo’s grandfather, an international at rowing and at rugby union – seemed set on a career with a curved stick and a hard ball.
He had been good enough at football to have attracted the attention of the Buenos Aires superclub, Boca Juniors, as a schoolboy but at the moment he felt compelled to dedicate himself to one sporting code, the family game – hockey – seemed to be winning out. He started to be called up by national age-group teams.
According to the former Boca Juniors scout, Diego Mazzilli, a chance encounter drew him back to football at 17, and although the journey from there would sometimes be tough – Retegui had spells at Boca and River Plate without making a significant impression – he says his loved ones’ sporting expertise helped him persist.
Another aspect of the family lineage turned out to be important, too – his mother’s Italian ancestry. It meant he had an Italian passport as well as his Argentinian citizenship. While his native country never reached out to him to play up front for their world champions, Italy did.
So he moved to Serie A, and after finishing last season as the division’s top goalscorer with Atalanta, and taking his total caps as Italy's centre-forward up to 20, Al Qadsiah of the Saudi Pro League were persuaded to spend close to €70m on the 26-year-old.
It has been a significant week for young footballers with great sporting forebears. About the same time the Retegui deal was being agreed, Italy’s Roma were celebrating the capture of Moroccan midfielder Neil El Aynaoui, signed from France’s Lens.
Tennis fans will recognise the name. El Aynaoui also comes from a sporting dynasty which, like the Retegui line, follows an unusual zig-zag across different codes. Younes El Aynaoui was a pioneer for professional tennis in Africa and the Arab world in the 1990s and early 2000s, reaching a global ranking of 14th in the men’s game.
His son showed an aptitude on court as a boy. But, as Neil tells it, an influential period of his childhood spent living just outside Barcelona with his parents drew him to football.
“I was a great fan of Barca and especially of Andres Iniesta,” he said at his Roma presentation, explaining why he has chosen the Italian club’s number eight jersey, Iniesta’s number, for this chapter of his career.
He thanked his family influences, too, for giving him the tools to thrive in professional sport, where having the right support, developing a strong armour to survive the fierce spotlight and the inevitable setbacks are essential.
This is an era in which the elite tier of football is heavily populated with stars who come from footballing families – like Erling Haaland, whose father Alfie was a seasoned, much-travelled international, or the Thuram brothers, Marcus and Kephren, sons of World Cup winner Lilian – but it is also, seemingly, a peak time for the multi-sport dynasty.
In this, Neil El Aynaoui will find he is not unique even in Serie A, nor in a likely Morocco midfield of the near future. Al Aynaoui, who is on the cusp of turning his national under-23 status into a senior call-up for the Atlas Lions, will in October come up against Fiorentina’s Amir Richardson, the much admired Morocco international whose father is the former NBA basketball star Michael Ray Richardson.
This weekend, meanwhile Moroccan football will be focused on another story of sporting excellence across generations, across disciplines, across gender, hoping for a fairytale ending.
On Saturday in Rabat, the host country take on Nigeria in the final of the women’s Africa Cup of Nations, aiming for an unprecedented first title in the competition, a maiden triumph for any North African side in a Wafcon, and to go one better than the silver medal Morocco achieved two years ago.
Leading them on to the field will be the tournament’s leading scorer, Ghizlane Chebbak, a pioneer for a sport that, in her 35-year lifetime has sometimes struggled to match the attention, the resource base of men’s football.
For Ghizlane, the distinctions between the men’s game and the women’s were viewed through a particular lens for as long as she can remember. Her father, Larbi, was a distinguished Morocco international.
“The first thing I learnt from my dad was a love of football,” she said just before leading Morocco into their first appearance at a World Cup finals, in 2023.
“The first present he gave me was a ball.” After Larbi’s death, aged 73, five years ago, Ghizlane appreciated all the more that every success of hers would honour Larbi, too: “Each time that our family name is mentioned, he’s also being mentioned,” she noted.
The echoes will be louder, more resonant than ever should Morocco’s Lionesses win in Rabat. For all the aura that surrounds the national men’s team, with its current stars like Achraf Hakimi and Yassine Bounou, Morocco have only ever won the men’s Africa Cup of Nations once in their history.
That was in 1976, when Larbi was running the Atlas Lions midfield. Almost half a century later, his daughter is 90 minutes from mounting the same podium.
