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If ever there was a player destined for cult status, Massimo Maccarone fits that bill.
A man fondly remembered in Middlesbrough for that diving header to power the club into the 2006 UEFA Cup final. A man who Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink proclaimed he “loved” and who Boro chairman Steve Gibson branded “a fool” following his free transfer to Siena. A man who made international headlines for celebrating scoring by swigging a fan’s pint while playing for Empoli.
A man who, at the age of 37, is aiming for one last shot at cult glory this season as the Brisbane Roar’s marquee signing.
Yet the word cult can also be a byword for masking a number of failings. For every Besart Berisha, there’s a Mario Jardel. Maccarone may be a cult figure on Teeside, but so is Alfonso Alves, who barely scraped into double figures during his spell at the Riverside.
Maccarone fared a little better, netting 18 league goals, albeit across five years, plus a couple of memorable cup tie winners, but to this day you’d have a hard job finding any Boro fan who could definitively tell you if the Italian was any good or not.
As the living embodiment of an internet forum debate lands in Queensland, Brisbane Roar fans have picked up where Italy and England left off. Maccarone may not have started a competitive game yet but he’s alternatively a vastly experienced former international who brings Italian know how in beating tight defences to the Suncorp Stadium or he’s a shot shy ageing pro looking for one last paycheck before calling it a day, and everything in between.
What is certain is Maccarone’s signing represents something of a risk for the Roar. While he undoubtedly knows how to score in Serie A, his most prolific seasons have both come at Empoli, which have bookended numerous seasons of bench warming and blanks.
(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Big Mac is certainly loved by Azzurri fans for his role in firing them to Serie A and keeping them up – a moderately sized carp in a reasonably volumed pond, if you will – but he’s undoubtedly not Jamie Maclaren, whose goals at Brisbane earned him a move to Germany.
Maclaren’s 20 goals will be hard to replace and while Maccarone undoubtedly brings experience, there’s little in his CV to suggest he will fill the void left by the younger Australian.
The Roar’s risk extends beyond the pitch though. Ever since its creation, it’s been hard to escape the tag of a retirement league for ageing pros and Maccarone’s signing does little to dispel this.
Experienced as he is, he’s unlikely to draw in crowds like his countryman Alessandro del Piero, and if he underperforms in his opening games he has the potential to be a stick with which to beat Australian football as a whole.
For a league still maturing, older or foreign marquees are still important in enticing casual fans into the stadium. The likes of Del Piero, David Villa and Tim Cahill have been qualified successes (and Villa’s success was probably to earn the Melbourne City sales department a nice bonus) but have the star power that can push rival sporting codes off the back pages.
Maccarone’s name will resonate with football fans but unless he repeats his UEFA Cup goalscoring feats, he’s unlikely to elicit much of a response from the casual fan.
For all that, Big Mac may yet prove doubters wrong. Maccarone in 2017 is a different proposition from the young striker who struggled with the physicality of the Premier League, and Australian football isn’t played at quite the same pace as the English top flight. But if it all goes wrong, at least there’s no shortage of pints for the Italian to swig from around the Suncorp Stadium.
Whether Roar fans will want to offer their drinks up to him is another matter.
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