Soccer Men (17 page)

Yet none of this quite covers him. There is something supernatural about his body, as if he were a Greek god poorly disguised as a human. To remain a great player aged thirty-six—as hardly anyone in history has—you must always have taken perfect care of yourself.

Milan’s training ground, Milanello, offers glimmers of an explanation. This sunny idyll on a hill above Lake Como comes alive a few minutes before ten each morning, when a parade of SUVs carrying multimillionaire players pushes past the armed guards. Maldini has made this commute for twenty
years. Between training sessions, he sleeps in his Milanello bedroom. He says, “It’s almost as though all your worries stop at the gates. This is the ideal manner to get the best out of you.”

It would appear so, for Maldini is not alone at Milan. The back four likely to face Liverpool have an average age of thirty-three, with thirty-nine-year-old Billy Costacurta in reserve. This is because the “Milan Lab,” the club’s medical team, has discovered the secret of eternal youth. The lab is always testing players’ muscles, brains, hearts, breathing, psyches, and so on, and then analyzing the data with computers. Whereas other teams still run laps together, each player at Milan follows his own customized regime. It works, particularly if you are a Greek god to start with. Adriano Galliani, Milan’s vice president, reports, “Paolo’s biological age is much lower than his actual age. The tests we have done now are better than three or four years ago.”

As they say, it’s partly a matter of how old you feel. Maldini believes that stress consumes energy. He tries to avoid it by not thinking about soccer outside work hours. He never reads the
Gazzetta dello Sport
, Italian soccer’s daily pink bible, never appears on television or in gossip rags, and never talks about soccer with his wife and sons and seldom even with his dad. Almost a decade ago he stopped appearing as a disc jockey on radio. David Endt, an official at the Dutch club Ajax, cites Maldini to young players as the example of how to manage their lives. When Endt told Maldini this, Maldini replied that he felt honored. Not only that, he actually
looked
honored. This is another trick of the mind required to remain great: Despite knowing you are great, you have to feel humble. Everyone talks about this; few manage it.

If Maldini ever retires, the Milan Lab will presumably clone him.

August 2007

L
ast summer, for a couple of scorching days in Leipzig and Stuttgart, Spain was the best team in the World Cup. Briefly, there were thrilling scenes. In the famous Spanish phrase, “We played like never before, and lost as usual.” But before they lost, the most thrilling sight of all was their blond kid up front, Fernando Torres.

Today Torres, twenty-three, kicks off the English soccer season with his new club, Liverpool, at Aston Villa. Whatever his precise transfer fee—perhaps $40 million—he is the most expensive Spaniard ever sold, and the most expensive player Liverpool has ever bought. However, his transfer is even more momentous than that implies. For years people eulogized Torres’s loyalty to Atletico Madrid, the club he had joined at age eleven and supported for much longer. Despite being too good for Atletico, he stayed. He was feted as the last player as fan. His move proves that the two are in fact different species.

As the Torres legend goes, when he was four or five his grandfather began urging him to play for “Atleti.” The old man dreamed of seeing Fernando wear the red and white in the first division. “Luckily he was able to see me play in the Calderón before he died,” says Torres, “though not in the first division.”

When Torres made his professional debut at seventeen, Atletico was suffering its “two years in hell” in the second division. The team of the Madrilene working classes is historically Spain’s third-largest club, but it is dwarfed by its neighbor Real, habitually wastes money, and plays beside a gasworks on the dirty banks of the Manzanares River. Atletico is a biggish club that acts like a little one.

The local boy was immediately appointed Atletico’s idol in residence. At nineteen he became club captain. Eventually, he practically became Atletico itself.

You can see why. Physically, Torres is acrobat, strongman, and sprinter in one. A mark of his quality is that he scores many different kinds of goals:
dribbles, headers, lobs, and drives with both feet. In fact, the outside of his right foot is a source of weirdly brilliant lobs.

Torres has mastered perpetual motion. “He has a tremendous degree of fitness, a tremendous energy,” Spain’s coach, Luis Aragones, said last summer. Torres’s three goals at the World Cup came in the last twenty minutes of matches, when exhausted defenders could no longer match his runs. However, noted Aragones, “We want to work on a couple of technical details.”

Rafael Benitez, Liverpool’s manager, confirmed immediately after forking out the record fee, “He needs to improve some things.”

Partly because Torres does everything at top speed, his control is deficient. That explains why he scores less than he should: Excluding penalties, he averaged fewer than twelve league goals a season over the past four years.

Still, every summer some very big teams courted him. Every summer he stayed at Atletico. He seemed to think like a fan.

Yet this was a delusion. Torres himself, a thoughtful man, has explained it well: “When you’re a supporter you think and dream about your club every day. You only see the good parts. When you cross the line and become a player, you see everything. That’s not always pretty.” Behind the curtain you see that a club is composed of venal humans muddling along. Everyone who ever gets on the inside of soccer feels this. A friend of mine, a Sunderland fan, says that when he became a journalist and stood in the tunnel beside the Sunderland players before a game, the illusion suddenly fell away for him. He never cared as much again.

Some players do remain fans on the side. Here’s a scene from a Madrid hotel bar in 2002: Steve McManaman, then a player with Real, the world’s biggest club, had just won a European game 3–0, but his thoughts were with the club he supported, Everton. “Macca” was working his cell phone to discuss Everton’s sacking of their manager, Walter Smith. “I feel for him,” sighed McManaman. “As a manager you’re only as good as your material. They lost 3–0 at the weekend—three individual errors.”

Yet the suggestion that McManaman should play for Everton just because he supported them would have struck him as absurd. Like anyone who ever worked to convert a raw talent, Macca had a career.

Torres does too. Given the choice between betraying his club and betraying his talent, he left Atletico. He returned from the ends of the earth (a
Polynesian vacation) to talk to Liverpool. Yet even at his new club he still feels obliged to talk like a fan. He recounts how years ago some of his Madrilene friends got tattoos with Liverpool’s slogan, “You’ll never walk alone.” Because of his job Torres couldn’t get the tattoo, but his friends bought him an armband bearing the slogan.

In truth, a professional player always walks alone. Nonetheless, Torres represents a coup for Benitez. Spain’s best players rarely emigrate. Like British players, they struggle with foreign languages in strange towns. Torres once said his game was not suited to England.

Benitez, a Spaniard himself, can reassure Spanish players that his Liverpool is a small corner of Spain. That’s a sentiment that matters to professional players. Fandom does not.

August 2007

O
ne freezing January in 2003 I trekked to Brittany to witness a French peculiarity: a village of 8,000 people with a soccer stadium that could fit twice as many. The village, Guingamp, which on the map occupied much the same spot as Asterix’s cartoon village, somehow had a team in France’s highest division. They even had a pair of promising players, called Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda.

That evening Guingamp were receiving Le Havre. Practically every villager walked to the stadium, evoking French wartime scenes of entire towns taking to the road. The crowd of 12,728 (approximately 13 of them from Le Havre) was impressive considering it was so cold that no sane human could have wanted to be outdoors. Malouda played terribly. Guingamp lost 1–2. They looked like a village team.

Tomorrow Malouda, now twenty-seven, should make his official debut for Chelsea alongside Drogba in the Community Shield match against Manchester
United. This is the story of how a boy from the edge of the earth erased his personality to become the perfect professional.

Malouda grew up in French Guyana, on South America’s northern tip, a skinny little brown kid nicknamed “Foufoup.” He puttered about on his motorcycle, studied hard at school, always got home by seven thirty, and was already preparing for life as a professional player. His dad was a local coach, who after each match would be waiting beside the field with an analysis: “Florent, you gave twelve crosses, four of them bad. You keep the ball too long before shooting. Your four goals . . .”

Malouda arrived in mainland France at fifteen. A year later he was playing in the French second division. Rather like an MBA student, he had a career plan. “He was always a serious boy,” explains his mother. “He left home knowing he would become a player in the French team.” He joined Guingamp at twenty, Lyon at twenty-three, and at twenty-four made his debut for France.

One summer afternoon in 2005 I watched him train with the national team in the forest of Rambouillet. He was a new boy in a side with hierarchies as strict as the court of Louis XIV, but that day, during a dispute in a game of musical chairs, Malouda threw a mock karate kick at the king himself, Zinedine Zidane. Then the French split into sides for tennis soccer. Patrick Vieira, dauphin to Zidane, was made a team captain, and announced he had sold one of his players for twenty euros. Yet when a quarrel erupted over the score, Malouda took on Vieira. “Foufoup” understood hierarchies, but he also knew his own worth, and just how far he was permitted to go. The next summer he was France’s best player for much of the World Cup final, yet accepted a lecture in the tunnel at halftime from his hierarchical superior, Thierry Henry.

By then he was the complete player. Malouda has no weaknesses. He can dribble, tackle, run, score, and cross with either foot. He can play in most positions. A stringy five foot ten, he looks as if he designed his own body to play professional soccer. Like most of Lyon’s players, he is fit enough to play two games consecutively. (Instead of buying Malouda, Chelsea could have cut out the middleman and signed Lyon’s brilliant fitness coach, Robert Duverne.)

Everybody in France admires Malouda. Last season he was voted the league’s best player. Yet hardly anyone loves or hates him. He is the player as robot, a purveyor of statements like “What matters is the team.” As he told the newspaper
L’Equipe
: “Since my arrival in metropolitan France, I’ve
erased certain traits of my character to avoid being rejected by the system, to the point where I get reproached for nonchalance even though I’m an electric battery.”

A French journalist explained to me the difference between Malouda and France’s dopey working-class hero Franck Ribéry: “If Ribéry rode the Tour de France and were caught taking drugs, everyone would forgive him. With Malouda, everyone would say, ‘You see? That explains it.’”

This summer Malouda’s career plan indicated a move to a megaclub. Several showed an interest, including Real Madrid, but Malouda was determined to join Chelsea. He knew that Real absentmindedly buys dozens of players, who are often forgotten until they get discovered months later screaming inside closets. He also presumably knew that as a Stakhanovite athlete, he was made for Chelsea.

The only hitch was that the Londoners—for years soccer’s biggest spenders—appeared almost out of cash. In 2005, when Chelsea paid Lyon $35 million for Michael Essien, they still followed the “reassuringly expensive” philosophy of shopping. This summer they spent weeks fishing behind sofas for bits of change, struggling to reach Lyon’s minimum price of $27.7 million for Malouda. Lyon revealed that Chelsea’s general manager, Peter Kenyon, even flew to Moscow to touch the club’s multibillionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, for more cash.

Malouda will be worth it. That day in Guingamp, a club director told me, “From time to time we have a little fantasy: A Brazilian player comes, or Szarmach, the Pole who played three World Cups.” With hindsight, having Malouda and Drogba on the village team wasn’t a bad fantasy, either.

September 2007

T
hat first goal against Russia said a lot about Michael Owen. It looked so easy. England’s John Terry and two large Russians jumped for a corner, missed it, and little Owen, who seemed to be coincidentally loitering by himself
behind them, stopped the ball and placed it in the net off the inside of the post. It was his thirty-ninth goal for England. He added a fortieth that night.

It looks easy, yet hardly anyone else can do it: anticipating where the ball will land, finding space, and placing it like a golfer sinking a putt. The category of men who have scored as easily as Owen in international soccer for as many years is small: Today only Miroslav Klose, Ruud van Nistelrooy, and Thierry Henry can make a case.