Soccer Men (22 page)

But during the World Cup, Ribéry seemed not merely to play better each game but actually to become a better player. At first, he often played with his head looking down at the ball. Turning his back on a defender, he would sometimes block his own view forward. But by the second round, when he scored a solo goal against Spain, he was a real international. Offers poured in, from Arsenal, Real Madrid, almost every big club in Europe. The world’s 1 billion Muslims liked his public prayers before matches. He almost won France the World Cup, too, but late in the final against Italy—only forty-three days after his debut for France—his shot rolled just past the post. “If I had scored . . . ,” he mused in
France Football
. “Ah! If I had scored, my friend. I still haven’t got over this match.”

He returned home confused by his new status. He still invariably described himself as “simple.” But from a cheery ugly little Ch’ti nobody had ever heard of, he had been transformed into a cheery ugly little Ch’ti who was the national hero. Sometimes his new status helped: He persuaded the small northern club Calais to sign his younger brother, François. (The boys’ father, also François, clearly didn’t have much imagination when it came to names). Third-division Calais seemed the sort of ambience where Franck himself would look more at home than at the Stade de France.

But being famous wasn’t always easy. When he ate an ice cream cone on the beach with his family, the photograph made the newspapers. The popular French
Guignols
satirical TV program unveiled a Ribéry puppet that said dumb things in a weird accent. The real Ribéry appeared on France’s 8:00 p.m. national television news to announce that he would leave Marseille
for a giant club. Marseille’s fans were angry, and someone threatened him in his own home. He decided to stay at Marseille for another year.

On the field, though, he became ever more dominant. In September 2006, not three months after the World Cup final, France met Italy again in a qualifier for Euro 2008. France won 3–1, largely thanks to Ribéry. When the Italian Gennaro Gattuso finally caught him after another wild chase, he tapped him on the neck and said, “You’ve given me a hard time.” From a world champion, that was respect.

There are two types of attacking players. The one type—the passer, Zidane—wants the ball in his feet so that he can pass it. The other type—the runner, Henry—runs deep so that the passer can give it to him in space. Ribéry, uniquely, was both types in one.

And he has body, too. The night before the kickoff of Euro 2008, two great European coaches were having a chat at a sponsor’s evening in Basel. The subject, of course, was kilometers. “How many kilometers a game do your fullbacks run?” one coach asked the other. “And your central midfielders?”

Yet when the coaches began talking about individual players, they didn’t praise kilometer-eating supermen like Dirk Kuyt or Gianluca Zambrotta. Instead, they rhapsodized about little Ribéry. They particularly admired his strength. One of the coaches, who had worked with Ribéry, said, “He once picked up one of our doctors, a guy of 100 kilos, and put him in a washbasin. The doctor didn’t want to go, and fought back, but he couldn’t do anything.”

Last summer Bayern paid $34 million for Ribéry. Though he arrived in Munich with barely a word of German, he wore Lederhosen when required (“It was a bit strange suddenly to walk around in a costume like that”) and made practical jokes from the start. “I’ve met my match here in a player like Lukas Podolski,” he concedes. “With him it’s always fun. It’s true that I put toothpaste on his doorknob and salt in his glass. And I once hid his soccer boots. I also stuck his locker closed with plasters so that he couldn’t open it and get changed. So he was late for practice several times.” Because most soccer players are like children, these antics have lightened the atmosphere at a club where players traditionally hate each other.

In his first German season, Ribéry won the German double and was voted the Bundesliga’s Player of the Year. Starting from the wing, he ran
games. Mark van Bommel, his teammate at Bayern, says that soon Ribéry will be the best in the world. English clubs occasionally try to sign him. No wonder that when Ribéry hurt his ankle in France’s last game of Euro 2008 against Italy, Bayern got a bit emotional. The club’s eternal general manager, Uli Hoeness, said Bayern was “incredibly annoyed with the French doctors,” who had made “twenty-five different diagnoses” of Ribéry’s injury. Given that these were the people who had missed Lilian Thuram’s heart condition for the fourteen years he played for the national team, Bayern should count themselves lucky the docs didn’t amputate Ribéry’s arm by accident.

To get away from it all after work, he goes home to a villa in the countryside outside Munich. “I do need a bit of peace,” he says.

You can imagine. An ordinary joe who has stumbled into a world of glamour, as if he had won a lottery to become a star player, is now supposed to win the Champions League. This season millions of spiritual Ribérys with scarred faces in living rooms around Europe will be cheering him on.

September 2008

O
n September 22, 1976, a great soccer player was born in Rio. “Do you know who Ronaldo was named after?” his father asked a visiting reporter years later. “After the doctor who closed off his mother’s tubes after his birth. Ha, ha. Doctor Ronaldo, his name was.”

That birth kicked off the most fertile week in soccer history. Four days after Ronaldo, little Michael Ballack was born in Görlitz in the German Democratic Republic, Francesco Totti followed in Rome on September 27, 1976, and the quartet was completed when Andriy Shevchenko came to earth in the Ukrainian village of Dvirkivschyna on September 29.

There was probably something in the water that summer. On July 1, 1976, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Patrick Kluivert had both been born in the
Netherlands. Whatever the secret, as the quartet turns thirty-two and sees the finishing line ahead, it’s a chance to sketch a sort of composite career of the modern soccer star.

The first point to emerge is that origins barely matter. In modern soccer it’s irrelevant whether you come from a village evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster (like Shevchenko), a Roman family so traditional that your mother was forever ironing your soccer uniform (Totti), or Dr. Salvador-Allende-Strasse 168, Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany (Ballack).

All four grew up dreaming of greatness. Totti wanted to be a gas station attendant and Ronaldo a singer, Shevchenko boxed, and Ballack was identified by the GDR as a future speed skater. Only Ronaldo was a teen prodigy at soccer: At seventeen he sat on Brazil’s bench at the 1994 World Cup final, reputedly shaking with nerves for fear he’d be sent on. The first thing he bought with his new wealth was braces. His buckteeth had plagued his youth.

The other three reached the top later. None featured at the Youth World Cup of 1995. The Player of the Tournament, a Brazilian named Caio, was hardly heard of again.

Ballack took longest to become a star. At twenty-two he still wasn’t a regular in the German Bundesliga. His long stretch in anonymity may be why he is the only member of this quartet never to have married a model or showgirl. Instead, he met a pretty waitress at the Café Am Markt in Kaiserslautern. Meanwhile, Ronaldo has worked his way through a legion of blondes collectively known as the Ronaldinhas.

This is the first generation of globalized soccer players. Whereas the first former Soviet players to move west flopped, Shevchenko left Dynamo Kiev for Milan and adapted instantly. He had merely gone from a partly capitalist country with a strong mafia where the common man had nothing to a partly capitalist country with a strong mafia where the common man went about dressed from head to toe in Armani. He married an American model.

All four gave their children cosmopolitan names. Shevchenko named one son Jordan, after Michael Jordan; Ballack’s boys are Louis, Emilio, and Jordi; and Ronaldo’s boy is Ronald, because the player and his then wife enjoyed eating at McDonald’s. Even Totti, the eternal Roman, called his daughter Chanel.

By their late twenties, these players were living a merciless succession of great moments—even if Ballack’s involved just missing the great prizes. Time at the top moves too fast to allow much time to savor. In Yokohama in 2002, not an hour after Ronaldo had scored twice to win the World Cup final, a Brazilian journalist told him, “We are not interested in the past, only in the future.” Didn’t Ronaldo want to win Olympic gold? What about the next World Cup?

“I don’t want to feel any pressure now about the future,” Ronaldo answered in his quiet way. “I don’t want anything except to celebrate. Thank you very much.” He had finally learned the one essential skill for life at the top: saying no.

All these players devised a way of dealing with stress. Totti stayed forever with AS Roma, where he is loved even when he doesn’t perform every week. Shevchenko has just rejoined Milan, the best club at cosseting players. Ronaldo prioritized World Cups, often dropping out of club soccer for months on end. And by the time Ballack reached the top, he was mature enough to cope with the pressure. All four seem to have managed to remain decent people.

We can now chart each man’s peak. Ronaldo’s was in 2002, Shevchenko’s in 2004 when he was voted European Player of the Year, Totti’s in 2006 when he won the World Cup, while Ballack almost won everything this summer. It shows that the further forward you play, the more dependent you are on acceleration, and the earlier you peak. Ballack, the only pure midfielder of the quartet, has lasted best.

The journey ends prematurely. Gradually, injuries take a cumulative toll. Totti and Ballack are now struggling to return to fitness. Shevchenko hopes to score his first goal of the season before his birthday. Ronaldo is recuperating on a Rio beach from yet another horrible knee injury, but cannot yet say good-bye: “I feel such a passion for soccer that I’m ready for any sacrifice to come back.” He hints at joining Manchester City.

However, the Brazilian weekly
Veja
recently photographed him sprawled potbellied on a yacht, smoking and drinking beer. In one way or another, this is how it ends.

April 2009

E
very December in Paris, some glamour boy is awarded the “Golden Ball” for European Player of the Year. There should be a parallel ceremony in a back room, where Europe’s most underappreciated player is given a scuffed plastic sippy cup. The award would long have been hogged by Claude Makelele, a ball winner so unobtrusive that Real Madrid flogged him to Chelsea in 2003 rather than give him a pay rise. Real hasn’t reached the semifinals of the Champions League since. “Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley,” asked Makelele’s friend Zinedine Zidane after Real bought David Beckham that summer, “when you are losing the entire engine?”

Paul Scholes of Manchester United succeeded Makelele as the European player with the highest performance-to-attention ratio. However, Scholes lost the sippy cup when every pundit on earth began pointing out how underappreciated he was. Now the sippy cup goes to Xavi Hernández Creus, who as the central midfielder of Barcelona and Spain drives on both of the world’s best soccer teams. More than that: As Chelsea will notice when they meet Barcelona in the forthcoming semifinals of the Champions League, Xavi incarnates Barcelonan soccer.

This is only partly because he is a local boy, who still used to ride the subway to the stadium when he made his debut for Barcelona a decade ago. More significantly, Xavi was raised practically from birth to be Barcelona’s version of a quarterback—or, as they call it in the Nou Camp stadium, a “number four.”

The “four” buzzes around central midfield distributing passes like a quarterback. It’s a role created by Johan Cruijff, the Dutchman who updated seventies “total football,” as it became known, for Barcelona. Soon after Cruijff began managing Barça in 1988, he spotted a reedy kid named “Pep” Guardiola toiling unnoticed in the youth teams and anointed him a “four.” Guardiola became a legendary “four.” Today he manages Barcelona.

One day in the late 1990s a tiny “four” named Xavi, too timid to speak, showed up at training and began passing like Guardiola. Boudewijn Zenden,
then playing for Barça, told me, “We said, ‘It’s the same kind of player!’ They had this education where you just open up a can of number fours. It’s hard to say, but Xavi’s a more complete player than Guardiola.” Guardiola himself agreed, telling Xavi, “You’re going to push me out the door.” Though Xavi is undeniably more mobile than Guardiola, and has eyes in the back of his head, these are not judgments he easily accepts. He recalls, “I’d watch older players and think, ‘With him there, I’m screwed.’”

Xavi didn’t seem to want to become a Catalan hero like Guardiola. He didn’t do the things that get players headlines, like squabbling or being transferred or scoring a lot of goals. He never spoke much. At five foot six on a good day, he was no superhero. All he did was hit passes, left to right, up and down, like someone filling in a crossword puzzle at top speed. Just as the legendary Chelsea defender Ron “Chopper” Harris incarnated the foul, Xavi incarnates the pass.

Cruijff had taught Barça a style straight out of a Graham Greene novel: Everything hinged on finding the third man. Everyone had to be in motion so that the man on the ball could always choose between two players to pass to. No wonder Barcelona kept producing “fours.” After Xavi came the even littler Andrés Iniesta, and then Cesc Fabregas, currently in exile at Arsenal, who says with Xavian modesty, “Xavi is several classes better than me.”

At Euro 2008, Xavi, Iniesta, and Cesc were all on the field weaving triangles together. In the final, they made the Germans chase the ball as if in a training exercise. Spain is now unbeaten in thirty-one games. They had another undefeated run of twenty-five games before falling to Makelele’s France at the World Cup of 2006. Plainly, they have been the best national team on earth for five years now. Moreover, Barcelona is the most glorious club side on earth. If Xavi isn’t careful, people will soon notice him. Luckily for him, Barça’s forwards get most of the credit, and as he always tells everyone, he’s not half as good as Iniesta anyway.