Ian Herbert: English football, to its own loss, will not allow a rapport like Jorge Lopez's with Lionel Messi

COMMENT: When the communication between journalists and players breaks down both sides suffer, writes Ian Herbert

Lionel Messi is interviewed by his friend, the late Argentine sportswriter Jorge Lopez

Jorge Lopez would have grinned, and no doubt winced, at the knowledge that Pep Guardiola, the man he came to call a good friend, had been reprimanded by the authorities for wearing a T-shirt which called for justice in his name.

In his short life, Lopez’s journalism let him soar above the realm of those faceless time-servers who have made an industry out of stunting truth and relationships in football and built an edifice out of rules and bureaucracy. God knows, that building keeps growing.

Our hopes to cover a non-league team from a different angle this weekend came to nothing because the middlemen said that necessary access could not be granted.

And then there is the story of Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish, told so well by The Telegraph’s Jonathan Liew last week, about attempts to speak to the boy after his soaring performance in last weekend’s FA Cup semi-final. “Quick word, Jack?” the question was put. “I’m not allowed,” he said, and walked by.

Lopez was worlds away from such numbing realities as these. The players and the managers wanted to talk to him.

Not because he would write pretty things about them, or tell his readers that the world belonged to them, but because he brooked no compromise, never stopped digging and yet never breached their trust.

“He was like a dog running, trying to get the cat,” one of his colleagues, Ezequiel Fernandez Moores, tells me of his indefatigable reporting. They called Lopez el Topo – the mole – because he would burrow to the bottom of the earth to find what needed to be found.

It’s also why they mourned him when he died – killed, at the age of 38, by a hit-and-run driver in Sao Paulo on 9 July last year – and why they want criminal accountability for the perpetrators: #JusticiaParaTopo, in the words of the T-shirt which has earned Guardiola his Uefa reprimand.

Lopez did not grow rich on journalism. There were no fat contracts for him and no largesse, as his last great football journey, made two days before he died, only went to show.

It was a 10-hour drive across central Brazil in a beaten-up, two-door Volkswagen Gol with no air conditioning, in which he and four other journalists – Moores, Alejandro Wall, Andres Burgo and Jonathan Wiktor – left behind the searing heat of Brasilia, where Argentina had beaten Belgium 1-0 in the quarter-final, for Sao Paulo, where the team would play the Netherlands.

They travelled more than 4,000 miles together that way during the tournament and Lopez’s preoccupations on that last leg were much the same as those of his companions. “Well, Messi, of course, was one,” says Moores.

“At that moment there was a great debate about whether he and [manager] Alex Sabella were or not in a good connection. And there were a lot of conversations about the freelance’s life, because we were five journalists in a very similar situation…”

They dropped Lopez at his hotel and would never see him again. He was dead within 48 hours, flung from a taxi when it was hit by a speeding, stolen vehicle in Sao Paulo’s east side. He left a wife, Veronica Brunati, who is also an accomplished sportswriter, and children Lara, from another marriage, Agustin and Lucia. They’d just celebrated Lucia’s fifth birthday when Jorge died.

Small comfort that he died pursuing his passion and life’s work. He started out covering the team he always supported – Tigre, a small Buenos Aires side who have never won the league – and from there began working for Ole, covering River Plate in the era when they were coached by Ramon Diaz and won five league titles.

Pablo Angel was in the team, as was a kid by the name of Saviola. Lopez struck up a good relationship with him and, when he went to play for Barcelona, Jorge went too to cover it. He ended up working as a trainee for the local paper Sport.

They talk of his humour and mischief – rapier-like at times, with interns sometimes recipients of some legendary wind-up calls – but the wife he left behind also reflects on the value of relationships he always built, and that unspoken contract between journalists and managers or players which is present in Argentina and Spain and so absent in England. (I owe my communication with Veronica to my friend Pete Jenson, another journalist in this tradition.)

“There is an unspoken agreement between players and journalists,” she says. “You have a close relationship and you end up getting far more information than you will ever make public. Their private lives are also completely off-limits.

That is easier when [as is the case in Argentina and Spain] the gossip press is another part of the media with separate publications.

“But when the communication between journalists and players breaks down both sides suffer. Journalists are less likely to check facts because they can’t. And I don’t see how it helps sponsors either.

A good interview in which a player’s personality comes out benefits everyone. Who wants to see the sanitised stuff that some of the club channels produce?”

But it was more than the absence of the stultifying controls of English football that made Lopez the individual he was. His focus was people – knowing them, understanding them – and not recycling the internet’s vast, largely hollow reservoir of football information.

There was a teenager coming through the Barcelona ranks called Lionel Messi when Lopez had followed Saviola there.

Lopez visited him in hospital when he was injured. He would go to his house. He ended up being the man who first convinced sceptical Argentines that this boy across the planet from them was going to be the best player in the world.

He put the work in when Messi had no voice and the rewards included the interview when he first wore the No 10, and the interview when he first captained Argentina.

Messi was devastated to hear the lawless chaos of Sao Paulo had taken the life of his friend. He dedicated the Sao Paulo semi-final triumph over the Netherlands to him. “This victory is especially for you, my friend.”

So who will be here to know, understand and gently press the values of the young English Premier League player, seeking to break through amid a wall of scepticism? No one – because that kind of access would never be tolerated. In the words of Jack Grealish: “I’m not allowed.”