So, the hell with 2004, and on we go to all the soccer things that will of course be so much bigger and better in 2005. Right?

Perhaps. There were plenty of good happenings in 2004, I suppose, but not all that much to get excited about. It marked the arrival of Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tevez and Freddy Adu – three much-praised youngsters, none of whom has done very much yet. Arsenal won the Premier League without losing a game, while Real Madrid imploded and won nothing. Greece amazed everyone by winning Euro 2004, but did so with a ponderous defensive style that took tactics back to the bad old days of the 1970s. Diego Maradona, the glory of the game in the 1980s, was rushed to a Buenos Aires clinic in danger of death, the consequences of his cocaine addiction, obviously far from conquered.

While Maradona languished in the clinic, another of soccer’s personalities was fighting for his life in Spain. A minor, yet significant figure, Jesus Gil lost his fight and died age 59 on May 14.This was not a famous player, but a club president, the boss at Atletico Madrid. I’m not about to suggest that his death was the big soccer event of 2004, but his life constitutes an intriguing commentary on the sport.

For sure, no one ever described Gil as a glory of the game. Not this guy, this former car salesman who became a property developer.

Gil went to jail in 1969 after one his buildings collapsed, killing 58 people. After 18 months inside, he was controversially pardoned by Generalisimo Francisco Franco. A comparatively quiet period followed during which Gil became a director of Atletico.

But calm could not be part of Gil’s life for long, and in 1987 he turned up at an Atletico presidential election meeting, along with Portuguese star Paulo Futre, whom he had personally signed for Atletico. Gil was promptly elected president, and there he remained for the next 16 years. During that time Gil also got himself elected mayor of Marbella.

The Marbella adventure ended badly; in 1999 Gil was given another jail sentence – for misuse of public funds – and banned from holding office. This time Gil spent only three nights in jail before being released for health reasons.

All this lurid publicity was far from welcome to soccer’s elite, which also had to grit its teeth as Gil emceed his own television show from a sauna surrounded by lightly clad ladies. He once called a top French referee gay, and he even physically assaulted the director of another club in the very headquarters of the Spanish pro league.

No, he was not an angel. But, in a feverish, distorted way, he represented something of vital importance to soccer: the involved, the colorful club president.

It is the practice nowadays to sneer at such figures. They are held up as soccer know-nothings whose hands-on dabbling makes the coach’s life intolerable and is bound to lead to disaster.

True, up to a point. But the weakness of the argument is to assume that coaches, left alone, will be successful. Gil had plenty of unsuccessful coaches and he had little patience with them. He hired and fired 30 of them in his 16 years at Atletico. Yet during that time Atletico managed to win the Spanish cup three times and the league once.

Much greater success came to another colorful owner, one who also started in property development and later moved into politics: Silvio Berlusconi, currently Italy’s prime minister. When Berlusconi purchased AC Milan in 1986, he quickly made a most unlikely coaching appointment by bringing in the inexperienced Arrigo Sacchi. It worked like a charm and within three years Milan became the top team in the world.

Sacchi got all the credit – but it was Berlusconi’s “meddling,” his insistence on signing the Dutch stars Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, and Ruud Gullit, that underlay the triumphs. Again like Gil, Berlusconi has found himself in legal problems. Last month, after nearly five years of legal wrangling, he was found not guilty in a corruption trial. Just two weeks later, Berlusconi had to resign as president of Milan because of a new conflict-of-interest law passed in April.

Florentino Perez, the president of Real Madrid, is another meddler. Not an owner in the Berlusconi sense, but an elected officer like Gil, Perez has meddled mightily in the Real team over the past four years. He has spent a lot of money, including a world-record fee of $54 million to acquire the Brazilian goal scorer Ronaldo, but his actions – among them the hiring of David Beckham and the firing of coach Vicente Del Bosque – have produced a Real in crisis. Last month, in moves that had an air of desperation about them, Real hired Sacchi as its technical director, then hurriedly signed up Wanderlei Luxemburgo as its fourth coach of the year.

The champion money spender, by far, is the 37-year-old Russian Roman Abramovich, owner of England’s Chelsea. Abramovich’s personal fortune, estimated at $10 billion, comes from his ownership of the Russian oil company Sibneft – purchased for the knock-down price of $240 million in the early 1990s as the Russian government sold off its nationalized companies.

Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 for $110 million, plus another $140 million to pay off the club’s debts. Since then, he has spent over $370 million buying players. The inevitable charges of meddling seem justified, particularly since Abramovich’s early signings were made with little input from then-coach Claudio Ranieri.

Ranieri was already a lame duck, and was replaced at the beginning of the current season by Portugal’s Jose Mourinho. Now, with Chelsea atop the Premier League with a five point lead over Arsenal, Abramovich’s money and his meddling are beginning to look good.

If I look back to 2004 and pick out the death – and the life – of Jesus Gil as something to be remembered, it is because he represented the wilder, earthier side of soccer. Following in Gil’s footsteps, Berlusconi, Perez and Abramovich, in their different ways, have each continued a vital tradition of buccaneers who get things done and bring excitement to the sport. Pro soccer is a diminished activity without those buccaneers, those colorful, meddling owners and presidents.