Any number of leading European football clubs are apparently trying to sign Dinamo Zagreb midfielder Milan Badelj - I read as much in the Press, and on the internet.
Badelj is a Croatian, so it's understandable if English people are unfamiliar with his talents. The media, though, assess his capabilities in a succinct way: he is the new Zvonimir Boban.
Boban was the captain of Croatia's most successful national side, and spent the majority of his career playing for a great AC Milan team. He is also famous (or infamous, depending on your taste) for kicking a Serbian policeman in the head in one of the events which led up to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s.
Milan Badelj, then, has a lot to live up to! Why should he not shrug his shoulders and declare that being Zvonimir Boban's replacement is too much - is it not sufficient that he is the only Milan Badelj? He, of course, can do exactly that, but the genie is already out of the bottle, and he'll be forever known, in some circles, as the new Zvonimir Boban.
Away from sports journalism, we see the media do this a lot - people and events which have long since gone nevertheless bleed into the present: some of David Cameron's policies are 'Thatcherite,' a new band insufflate listeners with the ghost of The Beatles. In our own lives, we do it too - when someone lets us down, the assumption is that the same will happen again before much longer. There is an expectancy that new friends, new lovers, are condemned to repeat the same mistakes of the past.
It seems, then, that our lives are governed by associative learning. A quick, handy way of summing up the world is to say something resembles or is like something else. Milan Badelj is just like Zvonimir Boban (but he is not.) You're just like my old girlfriend (but you're not.) In adopting this viewpoint, we are able to satisfy ourselves with rapid summaries, but so much information is lost.
What exists now is a simulacrum of what went before. In 10 years, when memories of Zvonimir Boban have begun to fade from even hardened football followers, there will be a young Croatian male weighted down with the label of 'the new Milan Badelj.' We look for that which is highest, most insurpassable, and compare everything else to it.
Would that we could - that I could - start with emptiness, and assess everything on its own merits. Would that I were not weighed down by a history of 'x being like y' and always straining to reach particular apogees that are a) not able to be compared and b) sweetened by an over-sentimental mind.
