ARGENTINA
Ceferin on Dibu Martínez and the World Cup final: “It was disgusting”
“Messi should have told him to show respect,” the UEFA president says.
Emiliano Martínez’s behaviour during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar has been questioned by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, as mentioned in the book ‘Messiánico’, written by journalists Sebastián Fest and Alexandre Juillard.
“If you see how he reacted during the penalties? Making fun of Mbappé, the puppet thing and things like that. That’s not sportsmanship, it was primitive and I didn’t like it,” he says of the goalkeeper’s behaviour as extra time approached, where he brought out his personality to unsettle the French as tension erupted. After that foot save in the one-on-one with Kolo Muani that sent the game to a penalty shoot-out, Dibu began his circus show, putting a further twist on the psychological game with which he forced Van Dijk and Berghuis to miss in the quarter-finals, and Yerry Mina in the Copa America final.
The mental game full of superiority, confidence and dominance, on which Dibu relied, has even been studied by psychologists. There was an exacerbated dance after saving the first penalty from Coman, the constant ruckus to the Argentinian stand behind the goal, and kicking the ball away to put Tchouaméni off. “I knew he was going to be nervous; he shat all over himself,” the Argentine revealed days later about the episode with the Madrid man.
Ceferin not impressed with Martínez
“You don’t do that. You won the World Cup! You can be a perfect goalkeeper, but if you are not a good person...”, Ceferin adds when discussing how Martínez mocked Mbappé at the Albiceleste’s celebration in Buenos Aires by showing a dummy with the PSG player’s face.
“In the end, Messi plays with Mbappé all year round,” says Ceferin, who underlined the Argentina captain’s “humility” and paid tribute to his performance in Qatar: “Without him, Argentina would not even have reached the quarter-finals. When you don’t know what to do on the pitch, you pass the ball to Messi. I was sure that the final, which was fantastic, was over, that the cup already belonged to Messi. And in the end it was deserved, Argentina were better than France,” he continues.
Despite highlighting the goalkeeper’s good performance in the World Cup, Ceferin feels that his unsporting actions after the full-time whistle tarnished it. “When he took the podium to receive the trophy for the best goalkeeper of the tournament, which he put on his genitals in front of the organisers of the competition, with the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, among others... it was disgusting.”