Soccer Men (16 page)

Central to the Gattuso myth are his simple origins. He comes from a small town in Calabria, one of Italy’s poorest regions, where he played soccer on the beach with gas cans for goalposts. Many of Gattuso’s relatives, like so many Calabrians, sought better lives abroad.

At nineteen, Gattuso did too. Whereas 85 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three live with their parents, he joined Rangers in Glasgow and fit right in. British players, he said, “tackle like men. In Italy, if you tackle a player they moan to the referee.” Gattuso likes burying someone and then shaking his hand—though a Gattuso handshake can be scary, too.

While other Italian players in Glasgow went around in beautiful suits, he hung around in tracksuits with Scottish players, notes Gabriele Marcotti, coauthor of
The Italian Job
with Gianluca Vialli. Gattuso left Scotland after only a year, but with a souvenir: his future wife, Monica, whose father owned his favorite Glaswegian pizzeria. Gattuso has promised to rejoin Rangers while still in his prime, but then he has also said he will never leave Milan, and has flirted with Manchester United, so it’s hard to know for sure.

At twenty-one he joined Milan. It seemed an odd match. If Milanese men are the best-dressed men in the world, and AC Milan players are the best-dressed men in Milan, as a quick visit to their training ground will ascertain, then what was Gattuso doing there? At five foot eight and 169 pounds, he is an unusually heavy player, and he calls himself “as ugly as debts.” To quote an Italian saying: “Man descends from Gattuso.” Furthermore, in a club famed for its passing, he received ironic applause at training whenever he completed a pass over five yards.

But he knew his place. “I’m just a stealer of balls,” he says. Italians call his type a
mediano
, the guy whose job is to procure the ball for someone who
can play—in Milan’s case, the great Kaká. Here is a typical midmatch exchange between the two men:

Gattuso: “Go on, run.”

Kaká: “I don’t do defending.”

Gattuso: “All right, then. Go up there and score.”

But Gattuso reveres Kaká: “He is so perfect that sometimes I have to touch him to make sure he really exists.” Indeed, Gattuso’s most famous spat, the frantic bouncing up and down and shrieking at Christian Poulsen of Schalke, was prompted by Poulsen’s taunting of Kaká. “He behaved like a child,” Poulsen said afterward, but in fact Gattuso had behaved just like Rumpelstiltskin, the evil, bearded dwarf in the fairy tale.

Nonetheless, Gattuso improves Milan’s brand. A peasant among aristocrats, he helps the club appear rooted. Certainly, he identifies with Milan, and with its owner, Silvio Berlusconi, to the extent that he chastised his then teammate Vikash Dhorasoo for reading the center-left daily
La Stampa.
“It’s a communist rag,” explained Gattuso, recommending instead one of Berlusconi’s own papers.

Before last summer’s World Cup, at an Italian squad meeting, Gattuso and others noted the team’s reputation for petulance, diving, and arguing with referees. Gattuso said it had to stop.

During the tournament he policed Italian behavior. He also turned himself into a global brand. This was thanks only partly to his appearance with several teammates in—most appropriately—an underwear advertisement. Gattuso also helped marshal perhaps the best defense ever assembled. In the final, when Fabio Grosso cut out a French attack at the expense of a corner, something that would have won him applause in any other side, Gattuso beetled across to scold him: Italy didn’t concede corners.

During the tournament Gattuso burnished his peasant’s image. He displayed a preoccupation with toilets, saying that the night before the final, nervous, he had gone to the bathroom twenty times, while the night after, bursting with drink, his reported total hit twenty-eight. The tournament’s venue being Germany, home to many Calabrian immigrants, including some of Gattuso’s relatives, he frequently eulogized these people, “who worked so hard for years for five hundred euros a month.” He seemed to be trying to identify with them. “This is the victory of a workers’ team,” he said after
the final. “We have shown we have balls as big as houses” (just in case anyone had missed the underwear ads).

Gattuso became lionized as an “antigalactico.” Even his beard seemed a throwback to an age when players were ordinary guys. In fact, Gattuso is far more glamorous than he admits. This Calabrian migrant is a globalized multimillionaire who recently adorned the cover of the Italian
Vanity Fair.
Many women adore him. Yes, he is a
mediano
, but in recent years
mediani
have staged a sort of peasants’ revolt, upstaging the Kakás to become soccer’s main men. Gattuso’s rustic image, though it fits his personality, is also a carefully managed brand. A gifted speaker and no fool, he is his own best brand manager.

Still, he deserves the acclaim. The season after winning the World Cup is the hardest (we’ve all been there), and here is Gattuso, a step away from his third Champions League final in five seasons. Officials planning for next month’s match in Athens had better pack some spare shorts.

April 2007

I
went left; he went left. I went right; he went right. I went left again; he went to buy a hot dog.” When Zlatan Ibrahimovic describes his moves in American street English, he sounds just like the basketball players on American inner-city playgrounds who are his soul mates. But whereas they usually remain mere neighborhood legends, the Swedish giant has become arguably the “winningest” player on earth.

Ibrahimovic, twenty-five, leads the playground legends who have conquered soccer as they once did basketball. His club, Inter Milan, is unbeaten this league season. Next Wednesday against Roma the club can seal the Italian championship. It would be Ibrahimovic’s fourth league title in four years with three clubs—Ajax Amsterdam, Juventus, and Inter, as long as you overlook the irksome fact that Juve was stripped of its prizes for having fixed matches.

Ibrahimovic grew up in the Swedish harbor town of Malmö, among the ghetto flats of Rosengård, a neighborhood of immigrants. Son of a Croat mother and Bosnian father, he speaks Swedish and what he thinks he should call “Yugoslavian,” though he isn’t sure. School was not his thing. “I’ve been at this school thirty-three years,” his former headmistress recalled, “and Zlatan is easily in the top five of most unruly pupils we have ever had. He was the number-one bad boy, a one-man show, a prototype of the kind of child that ends up in serious trouble.”

While blond Swedes did homework, Ibrahimovic played soccer—sometimes for a neighborhood club, Balkan, but more often on the playground. In ghettos, whether the game is basketball or soccer, what counts is not the score but your moves. In basketball, “streetball” players invent feints and give them names like the “Chicken Fajita Wrap.” The Harlem Globetrotters emerged from streetball. Zinedine Zidane’s famous “Roulette” originated on a Marseille playground.

While other talented teenagers were being schooled at big clubs, Ibrahimovic was on the playground giving “no-look passes,” a staple of both street soccer and street basketball. Eventually, he turned pro with Malmö. Niclas Kindvall, a teammate there, told me, “He gave passes at the wrong moment, took shots at the wrong moment. But he had it all.” Ibrahimovic was never going to stay long at Malmö after foreign scouts saw him lob the ball over one defender and backheel it over another before scoring.

At nineteen, wearing the ghetto uniform of hooded top, woolly hat, and giant watch, he joined Ajax. There, however, he revealed his ignorance of what “streetballers” disparagingly call “field soccer.” The sport rarely suits them. Dutch midfielder Edgar Davids once brought along to his club Juventus a Dutch-Arab kid who had humiliated him on an Amsterdam playground, but the kid took a dislike to field soccer and left almost immediately.

Ajax discovered that Ibrahimovic was slow, didn’t know where to run, seldom bothered scoring, and despite being six foot three couldn’t head. Fans began to wonder whether the club had signed the wrong Zlatan Ibrahimovic by mistake. The Amsterdam Arena persecuted him. He would loaf about yards offside, and a spectator would scream, “Come and sit up here, boy, and you’ll see it!”

“I’d never thought about soccer before,” Ibrahimovic admitted. “You want to sink through the ground when 50,000 people whistle at you.” Sometimes after matches he locked himself in his apartment.

Ajax also struggled to take the ghetto out of the boy. Defenders who marked him had a nasty habit of breaking their noses. Teammates suffered, too. “He was sometimes unmanageable,” says Ajax official David Endt. “Suspicion plays a big role with him. You see it in his game: that you won’t be screwed by someone else, but you’ll screw him.” As the cliché went, Ibrahimovic was a Balkan, not a Swede. He became a vehicle for Swedes to debate immigration.

Yet his ghetto qualities also made him special. Most Swedish soccer players are anonymous worker bees. They follow “the law of Jante,” a sort of Swedish code for living that ordains: “Don’t think you’re better than us.” But Ibrahimovic had never learned Swedish codes. His style of soccer—the very fact that he had a style—existed to show up the fools facing him. “It’s hard to compare him to another Swedish player in history,” muses Malmö novelist Fredrik Ekelund. Sweden’s former minister of culture Leif Pagrotsky says, “The reason he is so good is that he does things as a player that make him a bad boy: He expresses himself, doesn’t obey the rules, doesn’t listen.” In Swedish terms, Ibrahimovic was
kaxig
(stubborn, proud) like his hero, Muhammad Ali. “I take the street to the field,” he says.

Ibrahimovic baffled Swedes. When he took a penalty against San Marino even though the task had been assigned to someone else, it became a legendary moment of Swedish soccer. Later he briefly boycotted the national team. Yet Swedes, who love soccer but produced such an unlovely version of it, had been yearning for decades for a player like Ibrahimovic. He says, “During the World Cup in 2002 I was voted Man of the Match three times in Sweden, even though I hadn’t played. The people love me.”

Only in 2004 did the genius become a useful player. He began valuing goals above feints. He finally chose the right moments. In his words, “First the talent controlled me. Now I control the talent.”

Juventus, the sport’s most disciplined team, bought him and sent him to the gym. He gained twenty-two pounds. “Ibra” still caresses the ball under his soles, guiding it with every part of the foot, before deigning to score.
However, notes Kindvall, “He has lost some of the abilities that made him a crowd pleaser. He used to do some incredible trick almost every game. I miss those things. But he has gained so much.”

Inter would have won the title without Ibrahimovic’s fifteen goals. Italy’s next best team, Roma, trail by eighteen points and last Wednesday lost 7–1 to Manchester United. As Inter’s Patrick Vieira commented, other Italian teams just weren’t good enough this season. In streetball terms, Ibrahimovic “dissed” them all.

May 2007

O
n a dark, snowy day in 1985, a scared sixteen-year-old made his debut for AC Milan. “Where do you want to play?” Milan’s coach, Nils Liedholm, asked him. Amazed at being consulted, the kid said he preferred the right. He was right-footed at the time. He came on, didn’t make any mistakes despite having sore feet from tight shoes, and has hardly missed a game since. In the Champions League final against Liverpool next Wednesday, a month before his thirty-seventh birthday, Paolo Maldini will probably win his fifth European Cup with Milan.

Maldini is brilliant, handsome, and nice. Nobody dislikes him. Even Tommaso Pellizzari, a fan of Inter Milan who wrote a book against AC Milan called
No Milan
, admits, “In twenty years of soccer, he never did something you remember as bad or ugly.” Since many of us hope to achieve eternal perfection, the question is how Maldini does it.

It began with his father. Cesare Maldini had captained Milan himself, and his son seems to have constructed his life around seeking the old man’s approval. “From the moment I first remember seeing a picture of him holding the European Cup,” says Maldini, “I wanted to copy his success.” Cesare, from Trieste, had the
grinta
(grit) that typifies players of that region, and so Paolo, who had more natural gifts than his father, developed
grinta
.

When Milan moved him to left-back in his teens, Maldini achieved through
grinta
and practice something almost unfeasible for anyone older than twelve: He made his left foot as good as his right. “He still surprises me every day with his quest to always improve and to look inside as well,” says his father. Alberto Zaccheroni, who coached Maldini at Milan, recalls, “He plays the friendly game of the Thursday afternoon, against our youth team or an amateur side, as if it were the Champions League final.”

In the Champions League semifinal against PSV Eindhoven earlier this month, Maldini threw his head in front of a Dutch striker winding up for a shot. He was kicked in the face and stretchered off. Within a minute or so, he had resumed work. To maintain this level of
grinta
, you have to believe in the institution for which you work. Hardly any players love their clubs—they leave that to fans—yet Maldini actually seems to, even though he supported Juventus as a boy. No doubt this love is connected to love of father: at seventy-three, Cesare still scouts for Milan. Paolo regularly turned down better offers from clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea, and once, when Milan pleaded financial trouble, accepted a pay cut of 30 percent. He talks often about the importance of playing in his city of birth and admits it distresses him that Milan signs so many foreigners.

Maldini has subordinated ego to club. This make him a walking reproach to players who seek status through anything but performance. Wayne Rooney, who often seeks macho confrontation, got a pat on the head from Maldini. Robbie Savage, a Welsh player who before a Wales-Italy match threw away a Maldini shirt on television, was not granted a response at all. Maldini seldom speaks, but when he does it keeps his teammates in line.