Soccer Men (2 page)

We ask, “What was he like?” in part because we are looking for the secret of the man’s success. We want to believe that great players become great in part because of the men they are. They cannot just be good at kicking a ball. We assume their characters must also be conducive to great achievement. Surely, there are personality traits that unite the firecracker Maradona with the brooding Zidane and the homeboy Messi. In other words: Are superstars exceptional people?

I hope this book adds up to something like a group portrait of the profession. Let’s start with the players’ life paths. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book
Outliers: The Story of Success
, popularized the “10,000-hour rule.” This is a notion from psychology, which says that to achieve expertise in any field, you need at least 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals
,
this number comes up again and again.... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.”

One constant of players’ autobiographies is therefore a childhood spent kicking a ball around and, in a cliché of the genre, sometimes sleeping with one. There’s one thing all the great players, from Maradona to Messi, have in common: They hit the 10,000-hour mark, at least.

Hitting that mark has consequences for character. Few of the game’s superstars have broad life experience outside soccer. From their early teens,
when they typically start the move into top-class soccer, they are actively discouraged from developing interests outside the game. One friend of mine, who had a modestly successful playing career, says it’s not that players are stupid. Rather, they’re blinkered.

That characteristic has probably worsened over time, as the sport has become ever more professional. In various ways, the superstar has changed over recent decades. In particular, two superstar types have all but died out: the leader and the rock star.

From the 1960s, when media attention for players began to grow (see
The Football Man
), until the 1990s, when television money began to flood the game, the profession that soccer resembled most closely was rock music. Like rock stars, players were pursued by fans and groupies. Like rock stars, they tended to peak in their twenties. Like rock stars, they could say and do and drink and take drugs almost as they liked. Strange to tell, few clubs before the 1990s demanded that players looked after themselves. And so you got rock-star players like George Best and Maradona, and even rock-star managers like Malcolm Allison.

These men lived hard. Not only did the clubs allow it, but players had little to lose by ruining their bodies. After all, few made much money from soccer. Best was “young, popular and rich by lower-middle-class standards,” notes Hopcraft in his profile. “It is only because the pay and conditions of leading [players] were so recently those of moderately skilled factory helots that Best and his contemporaries look so excessively and immodestly affluent.” Soccer had given these players a brief window in which they could live like rock stars, and so they did.

The other type of superstar common from the late 1960s until the 1980s was the leader. Maradona was one (being a rock star didn’t get in the way), but the ultimate leader-superstars were Johan Cruijff and Franz Beckenbauer. Both men were born just after the Second World War, as part of western Europe’s baby boom. By the late 1960s, in a world growing in prosperity and shedding deference, the boomers were seizing power for themselves. They demonstrated against Vietnam and led the street revolutions of 1968. On the soccer field, too, they made a power grab.

Cruijff and Beckenbauer didn’t only take responsibility for their own performances, but did so for everybody else’s as well. They were coaches on
the pitch, forever pointing and telling teammates where to move. They helped the nominal coaches make the lineups. They didn’t do deference. They demanded a greater share of the game’s profits. Cruijff shocked his club, Ajax Amsterdam, by bringing his father-in-law in with him to conduct his pay talks.

Yet when soccer changed in the 1990s, both leaders and rock stars were doomed. With all the new money coming in, clubs became better organized. They regained control over their players. Often the manager—typified by Alex Ferguson at Manchester United—became a sort of dictator over his team. Clubs also began to focus more on the physical and demanded that their players abandon rock-star lifestyles. Even Ronaldinho had to leave Barcelona when the club grew fed up with his partying every night, particularly after he began to take along the teenage Messi. In soccer, the rock star was ousted by the corporate man. Liverpool’s defender Jamie Carragher, in his autobiography
Carra
, describes the “robotic, characterless ideal modern coaches want.”

Soccer players today are almost all followers rather than leaders. Joan Oliver, when he was Barça’s chief executive, insisted to me that Messi was a leader. But it turned out that by
leader
, Oliver meant something very different from a Cruijff or a Beckenbauer. Messi, Oliver explained, was a “twenty-first-century leader”: someone who didn’t speak much but led by example. That’s not what Cruijff would have called a leader.

So today’s superstar—Lampard, Kaká, Messi—is a slightly monomaniacal corporate man and yes-man. (In my profile of Florent Malouda, I describe his battle to turn himself into just that person.) Sure, they want to win. Like all good corporate executives, they take their jobs seriously. And they’re paid a lot to win. They practice hard. A few are driven fanatics—Edgar Davids, profiled here, for example. But anecdotal evidence doesn’t suggest that all superstars are like that. Boudewijn Zenden, who played alongside Davids on the great Dutch team of 1998, told me that it simply wasn’t true that everyone on the team was a driven fanatic. The one thing they all had in common, Zenden said, was that they were very good at soccer. Davids was known inside the game as a driven fanatic. Other superstars, by contrast, give every appearance of being relaxed. Wayne Rooney emphasizes in his autobiography how “laid back” he is. Steven Gerrard (himself a “twenty-first-century” leader by example only) confirms, “What I love about Rooney
is, however big the occasion, he’s relaxed.... No warm-up, no tension, let’s get cracking, lads. No worries.” If you have the gifts of a Rooney, you probably don’t need the personality of a Davids.

The myth of the superstar as driven fanatic is one that sports fans like. It suggests an explanation for how these legends got where they are: a route we could all follow to succeed in life, no matter how much or little talent we have. This was the myth behind those ubiquitous advertising posters featuring Tiger Woods: “We know what it takes to be a Tiger.” The idea was that Tiger lived every second of his life in devotion to golf and had gotten where he was thanks to fanatical drive. Then it turned out that Tiger spent much of his time picking up girls in bars. In other words, he is a slightly monomaniacal corporate man who got where he is through a natural gift, good coaching, and hitting the 10,000-hour mark (or in his case, given that he started when barely out of the crib, more like the 20,000-hour mark). He works very hard and relaxes the rest of the time, like millions of successful people in all fields. Other than being a brilliant athlete, Tiger has no special characteristics.

I suspect that’s true of most of soccer’s superstars. “The very rich are different from the rest of us,” Scott Fitzgerald mused to Ernest Hemingway. “Yes,” said Hemingway. “They have more money.” Great soccer players are different from the rest of us, too: They have more talent. Otherwise, the scary truth seems to be that they really are rather like you and me.

It’s still worth reading about them. First, these are the heroes of our time—in countries other than the United States and, increasingly, inside the United States, too. We all want to be them; we want to understand them better. Second, each one is shaped by his background. Xavi is a different kind of central midfielder than Gerrard largely because they come from different places. Just as any biographer of anybody would do, I have tried to locate these players in their origins. With David Beckham and Eric Cantona—both now earning their keep in American soccer—I was most interested in how others respond to them.

Once I’ve met the guy, or have watched him play and read and spoken to a lot of other people about him, I am free to go off and write what I like. That is because soccer players almost never read me. Hopcraft points out the problem of reporters who follow one club all year. They are the journalists
who are most likely to get access but are least able to write honestly. “The mere preservation of a tolerable social connection between such a man and the club’s players and officials means that he is unlikely to be uncompromisingly critical of them,” says Hopcraft. I don’t have that problem. I show up at the club, do the interview, leave forever, and then publish it in the
Financial Times
or a little Dutch magazine. I can be uncompromisingly critical.

“In the main in this book I am more concerned with people than technique,” writes Hopcraft, and so am I in mine. I am also concerned with technique, with the craft of soccer: what distinguishes Rooney or Rio Ferdinand from other English players, or why Lampard and Gerrard are so good for their clubs and so disappointing for England. But most of the time, I try to describe these players as if they were human beings. What would you think of Michael Essien or Edwin van der Sar or José Mourinho if he lived next door to you, or worked in your office? There are no demigods in this book, just ordinary men, successful professionals pursuing their careers, often rather bemused by the world’s response to them. Hopcraft died in 2004 at age seventy-one, but I hope he would have approved.

Most of these profiles were previously published in the
Financial Times
, the
Observer
, the
Times
of London,
Hard Gras
in the Netherlands, and an array of other publications. I thank them all for permission to reprint the articles here. I have tidied up the odd phrase and corrected some errors, but I haven’t tried to make myself seem more prescient than I was at the time.

A few pieces—including many of the ones about English players—were written especially for this book.

Throughout I have used the word
soccer
to describe the sport. Many fans—including many Americans—assume this is some cringeworthy American invention. It isn’t.
Soccer
is originally a British word, a contraction of
association football
, and until about 1970 it was the most common word for the game in Britain. There’s nothing wrong with it. However, I have kept the word
football
whenever it appears as part of a proper noun, a set phrase, or a title: for instance, the magazine
France Football
, the style “total football,” or the book
The Football Man
.

September 1997

I
t’s a couple of days after Germany knocked out England at Euro 96. The German team is staying three hundred yards from my front door, in the Landmark Hotel. I walk past the Allsop Arms and the local tramps, who are wearing discarded England caps and scarves, and turn into the Marylebone Road. At the Landmark I have arranged to meet Helmut Klopfleisch.

I know Klopfleisch from a year I once spent in Berlin. He is a moonfaced electrician who was born in East Berlin in 1948 and became a Hertha Berlin fan soon afterward. On August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, separating him from his club. For a while Klopfleisch spent Saturday afternoons huddled beside the Wall with other Eastern Hertha fans, listening to the sounds coming from the stadium a few hundred yards away in the West. The border guards soon put a stop to that.

For the next twenty-eight years Klopfleisch followed Western teams around Eastern Europe. The Stasi, the East German secret police, followed him. Klopfleisch was often arrested—in 1986, for instance, for sending a good-luck telegram to the West German team at the World Cup in Mexico. In 1989, months before the Wall came down, he was expelled from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since then he has followed the German national team around the world. He has become the unofficial team mascot, licensed to hang around the hotel and chat with players.

This evening he is sitting at a table in the lobby of the Landmark with the president of Werder Bremen and an old man in checkered trousers. Fritz Scherer, the former president of Bayern Munich, is with them, but excuses himself as soon as I arrive. The old man in checkered trousers is tall and tanned, with elegant gray hair and a perfectly buttoned shirt. It is immediately obvious from his aura that he is a legend.

When we are introduced I fail to catch his name, and so I guess that he is Fritz Walter, captain of the German team that won the World Cup in 1954. But after a couple of minutes I realize that this man is Bernd Trautmann,
“Bert” to the English. He is indeed a legend: a German soldier in World War II who was taken prisoner by the British, he stayed on in Britain after the war ended, turned out to be a promising goalkeeper, and ended up joining Manchester City. Most famously, he broke his neck during the FA Cup final of 1956 but played on as City held on for victory.

Trautmann talks like a legend, slowly and ponderously, knowing that whenever he talks, people will listen. It’s a style common among very beautiful women.

The conversation turns to Nelson Mandela. Trautmann coughs, and the rest of us fall silent. “I have ordered Mandela’s book,” Trautmann says. “In my house in Spain I have two thousand books, and I have read most of them. When I come home,” and he looks around our little circle, “I will read that book.” With great formality he takes a handful of nuts from the bowl on the table.