Soccer Men (24 page)

When Cruijff returned to Ajax in 1981, the Dutch were skeptical. The Calvinist Holland of the time distrusted anyone who thought he was special. Cruijff had never been very popular in his own country, where he was known as “Nose” or the “Money Wolf.” By now he was thirty-four, with a broken body. Surely, he was just coming back for the money, right?

He made his Second Coming in an Ajax-Haarlem game. Early in the first half, he turned two defenders and lobbed the keeper, who was barely off his line. For the next three years, Dutch stadiums sold out wherever Cruijff played, as people flocked to see him one last time. He gave us thirty-yard passes with the outside of his foot that put teammates in front of the keeper so unexpectedly that sometimes the television cameras couldn’t keep up.

But what he did on the field was only the half of it. The older Cruijff was the most interesting speaker on soccer I have ever heard. “Until I was thirty I did everything on feeling,” Cruijff said. “After thirty I began to understand why I did the things I did.” In 1981 I was twelve, living in Holland, and for the rest of my teens I imbibed everything he said about soccer. It was as if you could read a lucid conversation with Einstein in the paper every day or two.

Cruijff said things you could use at any level of soccer: don’t give a square ball, because if it’s intercepted the opposition has immediately beaten two men, you and the player you were passing to. Don’t pass to a team-mate’s feet, but pass it a yard in front of him, so he has to run onto the ball, which ups the pace of the game. If you’re having a bad game, just do simple things. Trap the ball and pass it to your nearest teammate. Do this a few times, and the feeling that you’re doing things right will restore your confidence. His wisdoms directly or indirectly improved almost every player in Holland. “That’s logical”—the phrase he used to clinch arguments—became a Dutch cliché.

Cruijff had opinions on everything. He advised golfer Ian Woosnam on his swing. He said the traffic lights in Amsterdam were in the wrong places, which gave him the right to ignore them. His old teammate Willem van Hanegem recalls Cruijff teaching him how to insert coins into a soft-drink machine. Van Hanegem had been wrestling with the machine until Cruijff told him to use “a short, dry throw.” Maddeningly, the method worked.

The aging Cruijff won two straight league titles with Ajax. When he was thirty-six, and Ajax wouldn’t pay him enough, he switched to its archrival, Feyenoord, and won the title again in his final season as a player. As Scheepmaker said: Statistically, buying Cruijff didn’t guarantee you a championship, but it certainly made it immensely more likely. When Cruijff was substituted during his last match, Scheepmaker folded up his desk in the press box and rose to applaud a man who, he said, had made his life richer than it would have been without him.

*
Unfortunately, the only time I ever met Cruijff, he ended up hating me. I had interviewed him in his Barcelona mansion in spring 2000, and things had gone quite well. As per agreement, I wrote about it in the
Observer
ahead of Euro 2000. The newspaper had paid him for it. Initially, the
Observer
and Cruijff had also agreed that he would write a series of columns during Euro 2000 (with me as ghostwriter), but that deal fell through, as deals with Cruijff often do.

May 2009

I
t rarely happens, but sometimes a player stops to savor the moment. On Wednesday night Andrés Iniesta was twenty-five years old, in Rome, at his peak, and part of a Barcelona team that was passing rings around Manchester United. This was as good as it gets. So for a second during yet another attack he just rolled the ball around under his foot, as if tickling its belly. In Rome, Iniesta showed his sport the way forward.

Iniesta, his teammate Xavi, and Barcelona’s coach, Josep Guardiola, possibly don’t share DNA, but in soccer terms they are brothers. The first brother, Guardiola, emerged twenty years ago as the definitive Barça playmaker: effectively the side’s quarterback, who launched almost every attack with a perfect pass. The second brother, little Xavi, was better. Finally, almost a decade ago, a tiny white-faced teenager showed up at Barça’s training. Guardiola studied Iniesta for a bit, turned to Xavi, and said, “You’ve seen that? You’ll push me towards the exit, but that guy will send us both into retirement.”

It took a while. In 2006, when Barcelona last won the Champions League, Iniesta appeared only as a substitute. But inside the club, everyone knew he was coming. Last year I asked Barcelona’s then coach, Frank Rijkaard, to name the player with the perfect personality for top-class soccer. Rijkaard hemmed and hawed, but finally, in triumph, shouted out the right answer: “Andrés—Andrés Iniesta! He’s always there in training, always tries, and is just a wonderful soccer player.”

Iniesta’s magical year began in Vienna last June 30. In the final of Euro 2008, his Spanish team passed rings around Germany. Vienna prefigured Rome. Both times, Iniesta, Xavi, and their buddies seemed to be playing piggy-in-the-middle against Europe’s second-best team. Germany and United chased ball in the heat. It wasn’t fair.

Barcelona has to play like that. “Without the ball we are a horrible team,” says Guardiola. “So we need the ball.” Barça is too little—perhaps the shortest great team since the 1950s—to win the ball by tackling. The unofficial minimum height for top-class soccer is about five feet eight, and Xavi, Iniesta,
and Lionel Messi are below it. The minimum for central defenders is about six feet, and Carles Puyol is below that. So Barça defends either by closing off space through perfect positioning or by keeping the ball. Johan Cruijff, Dutch father of the Barcelona style, teaches, “If we have the ball, they can’t score.”

Modern soccer is supposed to be manlier. Managers talk about “heart,” “grit,” “bottle,” and mileage covered. What Iniesta showed in Rome is that these are secondary virtues. Soccer is a dance in space. When everyone is charging around closing the gaps, you need the technique of Iniesta to find tiny openings. In Rome, he barely mislaid a pass. Sometimes he’d float past United players, his yellow boots barely marking the grass. Occasionally he hit little lobs, a sign that he knew this was his night.

We know how good United is. That’s the measure of how good Barça was in Rome. In games at this level, some very respected players get found out. It happened to United’s Ji-Sung Park, Anderson, and Michael Carrick, but also to Wayne Rooney. Excellent with his right foot, he is helpless with his left. Barcelona covered his one foot.

When it was over, Barça’s players celebrated with Barça’s fans behind the goal. But as we looked from players to fans and back again, already it was impossible to say which was which. Iniesta is a Barça fan. On Wednesday he was one of seven starting players raised in Barcelona’s academy, the Masia.

Had he popped into the VIP buffet elsewhere in the Stadio Olimpico, he’d have seen a portent. Eusebio, Portugal’s star of the 1960s, was hanging around alone in a blazer. Every few seconds, someone would come up to hug him, or just express awe, and Eusebio would smile. He must do this one hundred times a week. A year ago, you couldn’t have imagined Iniesta in old age receiving such honors. You can now. In Rome Rooney called him “the best player in the world at the moment.” Iniesta’s next target: the World Cup 2010.

August 2009

E
ric Cantona had just won his first league title in England, with Leeds United, in 1992. British television reporter Elton Welsby, desperate to get him to talk, ventured into baby French: “
Magnifique
, Eric!” Cantona replied, “Oh, do you speak French?” “
Non
,” admitted Welsby. And that was the end of that.

The mostly silent player—so well known, yet so little understood—continues to exert fascination twelve years after his retirement. At Old Trafford, where Cantona won four titles in five seasons with Manchester United, fans still sing “Oooh Aaah Cantona.” As Philippe Auclair reports in his new
Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King
: “In 2008, a poll conducted in 185 countries by the Premiership’s sponsor Barclays found him to be this competition’s ‘All-Time Favourite Player.’”
²
This summer, two new symptoms of Cantomania have appeared: Auclair’s biography follows shortly after Ken Loach’s movie
Looking for Eric
, in which Cantona (played by himself) steps out of a life-size poster to befriend a Mancunian postman.

Cantona wasn’t the best player the Premier League has ever seen. He was a tad slow, never won an international prize, and dazzled the Premiership when it was still a backwater. Yet he lives on in fans’ minds in largerthan-life-size format. Perhaps we now have enough distance to understand why. Both Auclair’s and Loach’s works, despite their flaws, help explain what made Cantona such a seminal figure for Manchester United, for English soccer, and indeed for English life in the 1990s. Cantona was an immigrant who landed at just the right moment.

The man who arrived in England in January 1992 had been a glorious failure in France. At twenty-five, he had already played for six clubs. He had also already briefly retired from soccer, after walking up to every member of the French league’s disciplinary committee, repeating the word
idiot
, and then walking out of the room. He collected red cards. Yet England needed him.

In the early 1990s it was a shabby country deep in recession. It was also quite isolated. At this time, just before Eurostar trains and budget airlines connected Britain to the rest of Europe, the mysterious European Continent was a world away. Cantona brought it close. Loach’s beautifully made, moving, and occasionally sentimental film is set in present-day Manchester, and whenever Cantona appears on-screen he provides a visual shock in the gloomy city: such a handsome figure amid the mostly pasty and overweight local soccer fans. When he arrived in 1992, that shock was even more pronounced.

English soccer then was as shabby as the country. Auclair describes the game of that era as “a drab, sometimes vicious affair.” The author, incidentally, is not only a French journalist but also a well-known indie musician who sings under the name Louis Philippe. He became very big in Japan, and now lives in London, though for three years he trekked all around Britain and France interviewing more than two hundred people for this comprehensive, fair, if at times pretentious tome. Auclair also forced himself to watch “hours upon hours” of Cantona’s English matches on tape, which reminded him how bad they were. English teams of the time mostly featured “hard-tackling box-to-box one-footed midfielders” and giant center-halves and center-forwards who couldn’t play soccer, all rolling around in the mud. The British mistrust of what was then known as “continental flair” was such that even after Cantona in his first six months in England had helped Leeds win the title, Leeds’s manager, Howard Wilkinson, sold him to Manchester United for just $2.15 million. When United’s manager, Alex Ferguson, told his assistant, Bryan Kidd, the price, Kidd gasped: “Has he lost a leg or something?” Wilkinson’s own son cried when Cantona went.

Crucially, Cantona had the physique to cope with the frenzy of English soccer. “People don’t realize how huge he was,” says Auclair. But Cantona could not merely rise above the frenzy; he could transform it into order. It had been years since England had seen a player like him, who seemed to
know where everyone on the pitch was at any moment, who could position himself almost unmarked “between the lines” of the opposition’s defense and midfield, and who could put the ball where he intended to with the speed and spin he wanted to. While giants galumphed around him, he found time. Ferguson told Auclair that Cantona became one of those players who “teach you something you didn’t know about soccer, and can’t be learned, because you had no idea it existed before they did it.” English soccer has seen players like that since: Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola, Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo. But back in the early 1990s Cantona alone could play this sort of soccer consistently. He was the player Ferguson had been searching for. The manager had already realized that United—without a league title since 1967—needed to abandon the traditional British style. Cantona showed him (and rising youngsters like Ryan Giggs and David Beckham) how.

In Ferguson’s words, he was “the perfect player, in the perfect club, at the perfect moment.” Partly this was Ferguson’s doing. The success at United of a player who had left in bad odor almost everywhere else may be the manager’s biggest triumph, as big as any Champions League trophy. Ferguson quickly understood that the key to Cantona’s fairly simple personality was always to take his side, no matter how wrong he was. The strategy paid off.