Global Soccer: Luis SuÃ¡rez: From Flashpoint to Fan Favorite

LONDON — Luis Suárez is soccer's redemption story this Christmas season.

He is the Uruguayan who began the season banned for biting an opposing player, a striker who was an outcast and made to train in isolation after attempting to force Liverpool to sell him.

But goals change perceptions about soccer players.

On Sunday, Suárez led Liverpool as its captain. He scored twice. He helped set up three more goals. He was the catalyst for such a humiliating 5-0 defeat at home for Tottenham Hotspur that the London club fired its coach, André Villas-Boas, less than 24 hours later.

Suárez was back in London the following night. The player who divided fan opinion just five months ago was in a bow tie and tuxedo, honored by the Football Supporters' Federation — which represents 500,000 soccer fans throughout England and Wales — as its top player of 2013.

Whoever writes his script is a fantasist.

The award ceremony took place at Emirates Stadium, the home of Tottenham's closest and biggest rival, Arsenal. And the ironies were inexhaustible. It had been Arsenal that bid one pound more than the £40 million, or $65 million, required in his contract to try to get him to leave Liverpool in August.

John Henry, the chief shareholder of the group that owns Liverpool, refused the sale, and Suárez sulked and was ordered to train apart from rest of the team.

Yet on Sunday, while his tenacity and seemingly built-in instinct for scoring goals led Liverpool's destruction of Tottenham, a familiar voice eulogized Suárez on French television.

"I think every defender in England hates to play against Luis Suárez," said Arsène Wenger.

The Arsenal manager was moonlighting as a television pundit a day after his own team lost, 6-3, at Manchester City.

"From the information I gathered in the summer," Wenger said, "he is really easy to work with — respectful, loves training, an angel."

The Arsenal manager paused and then added: "He turns into a demon when he's on the pitch. We all dream of having players like that."

The message from Liverpool's owners is they can dream on.

The rumor around soccer is that Suárez is on a promise. He must knuckle down and do his best to help Liverpool qualify for next season's Champions League. After that, he can either stay on his own terms or be allowed to leave if some other team, such as Real Madrid, offers a world-record sum for his services.

Fantasy? Maybe not. When Suárez is in form — which he has been in every single game since he finished his 10-game ban for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic last April — he draws comparisons to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Really, he does. Suárez doesn't have Messi's immaculate balance or Ronaldo's dancing feet. But he has tenacity, and he chases down lost causes and turns them into goals. He has an impudence bordering on genius. He can leap higher than defenders who stand head and shoulders above him, and he can score from 30 yards out or from point-blank range.

He served a long banishment for racially taunting Manchester United's Patrice Evra. The biting incident was a repeat of what he did while playing in the Netherlands for Ajax. He cheated Ghana out of the 2010 World Cup with a deliberate hand ball on the goal line. He has dived to trick referees into giving him penalties.

Sometimes, he tells us that the ill tempers and the sneaky moments are the product of a difficult childhood in Uruguay. He is the fourth of seven sons from parents who separated when he was 9. At 15, he was sent off for head-butting a referee.

But even then, this embryonic demon had a sweetheart who could bring out a better side to him. He followed a girlfriend, Sofia, to Europe when her family emigrated. Maybe she is the angel, because each time he has let himself down on the field, the word is that the woman who became Mrs. Suárez both calms him and explains to him that this is no way to live his life.

Truly the family man, one can imagine the couple's 3-year-old daughter, Delfina, winding Papa around her finger, or see Benjamin Suárez, born in September, one day learning all the soccer tricks from his famous, and infamous, father.

There was a moment before Sunday's match at Tottenham that showed his grown-up side. Olivia Brown, a 10-year-old allowed to walk down the line of players in the center of the field, cheekily withdrew her hand when Suárez went to shake it. She put her thumb to her nose and giggled at the opposing player.

He saw the funny side. It isn't an original insult, because a young Chelsea fan had done the same to Liverpool's usual captain, Steven Gerrard, two years ago. And it turned out that the girl's father, Des Brown, a Spurs fan, had bet his child £20 to thumb her nose at Suárez.

Child's play, and not at all edifying.

Mr. Brown and his daughter might not have felt so clever 90 minutes later after Suárez, perfectly well behaved, took his tally to 17 goals in 11 Premier League games. Those 17 goals exceed what Tottenham, as a team, has scored all season.

It takes Suárez to 68 goals in 108 appearances in a Liverpool shirt, mirroring the 111 goals in 159 games for Ajax. In the red shirt he is clearly an inspiration, though many wondered before Sunday whether such a provocative individual could possess leadership qualities or earn the trust of his fellow men.

"Nothing different happened today," Suárez said after Sunday's victory at Tottenham. "For me, the only one who is captain of Liverpool is Stevie," he said, referring to Gerrard. "I play striker."

Striker, destroyer, controversialist, inspiration. And, until the next demonic outburst, a fan favorite, too.

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