One of the best things about football has always been the sense that it is above all, a slightly wild activity, a matter of rare human extremes. Even among the captive princes of the modern game this is still a business of frantic, compelling moments, its popularity rooted in something raw and authentic that still manages to peep out through the glaze of corporate inanity.

At which point: enter Carlos Tevez, king of the wild, oddly compelling moment, who on Saturday evening will play in his third Champions League final; and who is arguably the pivotal player in an otherwise slightly one-sided looking collision in Berlin of the great and the merely very good.

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With this in mind it seems an ideal moment to consider what we might call The Tevez Paradox. Here is a player who just keeps on doing terrible, terrible things. Who has been described as a rotten apple, who once refused to come on to the pitch while employed by Manchester City. Here is a man who went on strike in Brazil and has demanded a move at his last three clubs. But who remains beloved by supporters anywhere he has been, a trophy magnet, an ultimate team man, and a player for whom great things, and bad things, and slightly mad things really do seem to be an essential part of the job.

In English football, Tevez’s best wild, compelling, toxic moment was probably his first wild, compelling toxic moment, the winning goal at Old Trafford that kept West Ham United in the Premier League eight years ago.

It is, looking back, a perfect little spritz of pure uncut Tevez. Gobbling up a loose ball Tevez plays a sniping little one-two, barges past a strangely sad and haunted-looking Wes Brown and then clips the ball on the volley past Edwin van der Sar before scuttling off in that familiar frenzy of triumph, a man apparently still immersed in the same all-consuming game of football he seems to have been playing off and on, in between minor inconveniences like sleeping and eating and changing continents, for the last 30 years or so. Never mind the consequences of that goal, not least the £10m in reparations to Sheffield United. By the time West Ham paid up, Tevez had already moved on, won the Champions League, teed up another rancorous transfer and generally stumbled about trampling the rose beds, failing to pay the milk bill, sweeping the crockery into the bin and leaving a gorgeously muddled trail of blood and entrails in his wake.

Tevez is 31 now and in the late bloom of a fascinating career. As Juventus prepare to play the part of hopeful fall guys in Berlin there is a fair case to be made that he is the key to the contest, even more so than Barcelona’s own Argentinian No10. With Lionel Messi and this season’s Champions League there is a sense of some broader destiny in play, a kind of divine will to power. Barcelona are expected to win. Messi has been, quite frankly, on another plane altogether. It would require something remarkable, an act of utter script-shredding refusenik conviction to stop them. Now. Who does that remind you of?

Michael Ballack has spoken this week about the extreme pressures of playing this kind of final. One thing is certain. Tevez will be impervious. He is the ultimate big-game footballer, not just a player with balls, but a player with an excess of balls, balls for everyone, a bolt-on gonad in shorts and shin-pads. Tevez is the kind of player you’d pick to captain a team of earthlings away at the champions of Mars: stepping off the transport, emaciated by six years in deep space travel, you can be pretty sure within 30 seconds or so Tevez would be scuttling about like a malevolent gerbil, squaring up to the nearest giant squid, scoring a disputed equaliser and generally getting on with the business of winning at football. This is as much about craft as temperament. For all his energy Tevez is also a brilliantly certain, brilliantly clever footballer. At Manchester United he provided the balance in that wonderful front three alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney, scoring fewer goals but forming a high-class bridge between the shifting planes in attack.

At Juventus he has been able to thrum through his full range of attacking talents, an excellent passer a tenacious dribbler and a relentless, no-fear finisher. Plus he is in a sense the perfect modern freelance footballer. What Tevez brings is portable passion, transferable conviction, just-add-water instant belief. There has been some talk he may be off to Paris Saint-Germain in the summer and this would be an excellent move, as it would for any megabucks project-club in the market for some high-grade galvanising spirit. Hiring Tevez is like hiring a catalyst, an instant flush of actual football-style passion, like booking the Sex Pistols to swear and snarl obligingly over some stiff-shirted 1970s daytime talk show.

Frankly Manchester City would have been better off keeping him, just as Argentina would surely have won the World Cup if Tevez could have been shoehorned without collateral damage into the team that decelerated its way to the final in Brazil. Never remind the bollocks: here comes Carlos, a gloriously nourishing rotten apple which has to date won the Copa Libertadores, the Brazilian championship, the Champions League, Serie A and the Premier League with two clubs, and who retains even now something pure and compelling, a rare kind of basic footballing rage.

There are so many subplots to this Champions League final, many of them Tevez-facing: the intrigue of Mascherano-Tevez, of Messi-Tevez, and beyond that the wider narrative of Messi-ism itself, a predestined notch on those claims of all-time greatness.

One thing is certain. Tevez won’t listen to any of it but will instead keep on playing that same old game of Carlos-ball in which, win or lose, he remains a brilliantly authentic presence, and an ominously decisive cutting edge.