An amazing goal from Barcelona's South Korea starlet Lee Seung-woo against Japan in the quarterfinals of Asia's U16 championships in September made quite an impact online. It's no surprise. As long as there is football and the Internet, watching a player run from inside his own half past a fair proportion of the opposition's XI to finish in style is going to be worth a click and a minute of anyone's time.
Lee's been bubbling under the radar for some time. As well as being inevitable that he has been named the "Korean Messi" (slight, skillful and seriously into skipping past defenders), it is also a little ironic. If things, if the era, had been different, perhaps a teenage Messi would have been called the "Argentine Alcantara."
That's because Lee is not the first to travel west from the world's largest continent to play for the Catalan giants. Long before Lee, Paulino Alcantara made a similar move from the Philippines. Good luck, though, trying to find more than a handful of the 369 goals (according to Barcelona, though some reports have it at a mere 357) he scored for the Blaugrana on the Internet or even preserved in pictures. His first goal came in 1911, the last in 1927.
There can't be many alive today who saw the Philippine goal machine in action. Yet, there should be a reasonably large number in Asia who know the intimate details of his career. Until relatively recently, however, Alcantara was not even that well-known in the land of his birth. Another sport and he probably would have been a legend. The Philippines loves its sporting heroes -- Manny Pacquiao is proof of that. But for a long time, it has been more about boxing, billiards and basketball in the archipelago that was a Spanish colony from the 16th to the late 19th century and an American one until midway through the 20th.
Football is not as ubiquitous here as in other parts of Southeast Asia, though recent signs are encouraging in that respect. The national team, the Azkals, are no longer ASEAN easy-beats, reaching the semifinal of the 2010 AFF Suzuki Cup, the biennial tournament that is a very big deal in the region. The relative success was a genuine surprise after finishing dead last in 2008, so much so that, after the group stage played on neutral ground, there was no suitable venue ready in Manila, or elsewhere, for the semifinal first leg match against Indonesia. Both games were played in Jakarta.
If the Philippines is not a football country, the province of Iloilo, a few hundred kilometres to the south of the capital Manila, is as close as it gets. Here, Spanish influence ran deep. Following defeats at the hands of revolutionaries and then the Americans at the battle of Manila Bay in 1898, Iloilo City became the last Spanish colonial capital of the country and indeed the world. It was here, in 1896, where Paulino Alcantara was born to a Spanish father, an officer in the military, and a Filipino mother.
Three years later, the trio left and went to Spain. Not much more than a decade after that, Alcantara was discovered by Joan Gamper, the Swiss-born founder of Barcelona. Following a short stint in the youth team, he made his full start at the age of 15. It was quite a debut as he scored a hat trick, hinting at the nickname that was to come: "El Romperedes," which means the net buster. One can only imagine what the reaction would be like if something similar happened now. He remains the youngest ever player to score for Barcelona in an official game. The season after, he helped the club to the Catalan double and the Copa Del Rey. A star was well and truly born.
Such goalscoring prowess didn't prevent a father's desire for his son to have a non-football profession to fall back on and he was soon back in the Philippines to study medicine. It is said that such knowledge helped this slight striker possess a shot of fearsome power. In 1919, as the story goes, a policeman got in the way of a ball heading for the Real Sociedad goal and both ended up in the back of the net.
There was still time for football, however, and in the 1917 Far Eastern Championship Games held in Tokyo, the striker led the men from Manila to an amazing 15-2 win over hosts Japan. Even those at home who don't follow the game know that such a scoreline is unimaginable these days.
But it was in Spain where Alcantara spent most of his time and scored most of his goals. Perhaps if he hadn't, as some reports claim, played a few games at centre-back, his record of 369 goals would have been even higher and have taken even longer to be broken by Lionel Messi. As it was, the Argentine did so in March courtesy of a hat trick against Osasuna. That, at least, saw the name of Alcantara in articles around the world and introduced him to a new generation.
The internet has already made something of a star of Lee, who has yet to play a competitive game for the club. The web has also made a difference for the net buster. In 2007, the Philippine Football Federation unveiled a full-size wooden statue of the striker in their offices and in 2012, the organisation asked the local museum in Iloilo to dedicate a section to their increasingly famous son -- not much perhaps but a start. There has even been talk that Barcelona may open an academy there.
There will always be a special place in the history of one of the world's biggest clubs for this young boy from Iloilo. And if the Philippines has been slow to honour this talent in the past, signs that this could be slowly changing are welcome.
Paulino Alcantara's greatest legacy could still be yet to come.