Soccer Men (25 page)

But the Frenchman made his impact on English soccer as much off the field as on it. He was a different man from other players. Almost any other player describes himself as a “professional.” The key to Cantona is that he saw himself as an artist. That is obviously part of his appeal to Loach, the reason the director made Cantona effectively the cocreator of
Looking for Eric.
Cantona, by playing himself, seems to be using the film to tell us something about who he is.

Cantona knows something about the arts. He has painted, exhibited photographs, produced plays, and read poems (and almost signed for one French club after its president gave him a Joan Miró painting), but he also saw his soccer as a form of art. Auclair, who actually is an artist, points out that Cantona has a naive view of artists. To the player, the “artist” is simply someone who expresses himself with absolute freedom.

Still, the point is that as a self-proclaimed “artist,” Cantona saw his job as performing. The professional merely tries to win matches. Cantona always
wanted to give something to the fans. It bothered him that in France, the small crowds were generally cold and critical. But English fans, so numerous, noisy, and close to the pitch, responded to him. He performed for them. “In just two months in England I feel more at home than I ever did in France,” he said. “Now that I have mastered the perils of driving on the wrong side of the road, I can cope with everything.”

A professional would have ignored Matthew Simmons, the fan who abused Cantona from the stands at Crystal Palace in 1995, because to the professional, fans are incidental, but Cantona leaped into the stands and karate-kicked Simmons. To Cantona, that too was part of being an artist. Self-expression might mean a pass flicked off the outside of the boot over a defense. It might mean learning to play the trumpet (badly) during his ninemonth ban for kicking Simmons. Or it could mean violence on an impulse. Auclair works hard to defend him against English xenophobes, but on the evidence of his book, Cantona’s career is a litany of spontaneous violence: punching teammates, leaping into the crowd to slug people even before Simmons, taking on almost a whole team of opponents after a match, judo-kicking an opponent, breaking a television reporter’s rib, and so on.

For Manchester United’s fans, the violence was part of his appeal. The club’s history—and that of Ferguson himself—divides into pre-Cantona and post-Cantona eras. It wasn’t merely that Cantona taught United “continental” soccer. He also changed the club’s identity. Perhaps the seminal moment was the press conference he gave after his leap at Simmons. Faced with a roomful of journalists who were expecting him to say he was sorry for what was then being portrayed as the most dastardly act in British life since Hitler’s Blitz, he said only (the accompanying commentary is by Auclair): “When the seagulls [a sip of water] follow a trawler [leaning back, smiling, pausing again], it’s because they think [another pause] sardines [and another] will be thrown into the [slight hesitation] sea [a smile and a quick nod]. Thank you very much.” The journalists guffawed. The artist had branched out into performance poetry. As the credits roll at the end of Loach’s film, footage of the speech is shown: it’s the quintessential Cantona moment, the artist confronting the world.

What most United fans—and Ferguson—loved about the speech was its lack of contrition. So much of Cantona’s appeal was that he did whatever
he wanted, no matter what the world thought. He was happy to reject the world, and to reject old friends at the merest suspicion of disloyalty. This, of course, has since become Ferguson’s stance: If you’re not with Manchester United, you’re against us, and we don’t care anyway. No wonder the manager, who is still close to his former player, now tells anecdotes of Cantona’s physical assaults as if they were charming jokes. He admired the violence.

Auclair told me, “It chimes in with Cantona’s own perception of the world, which is totally black-and-white: Either you are with me and you are my greatest friend, or you are my enemy. It’s more calculated in the case of Alex, whereas Cantona, I think, had serious behavioral problems. He was one of the elements that helped Ferguson build that particular side of Manchester United.”

The Cantona of Loach’s film, too, is a talisman who protects the postman and other United fans against a hostile world. It’s fitting that in the climactic scene, dozens of United fans, all wearing Cantona masks, including Cantona himself, take apart a villain’s mansion to help their mates. Violence in the service of justice is part of Cantona’s—and Ferguson’s—ethic.

However, after the Simmons incident, Cantona quietly changed. He resolved to ditch expression through violence. While coaching kids as part of his punishment, he told one boy, “If you’re going to get a yellow card, walk away and don’t argue with the referee.” Cantona mostly stuck to that ethic himself while winning his last two titles with United.

He never won anything grander. He should have been France’s center-forward when they became world champions in 1998, but when he understood that his role would be subordinate to Zinedine Zidane’s and Youri Djorkaeff’s, he pulled out. That’s why, as Auclair says, the enduring fascination with him is entirely English. Cantona is not part of the legend of French soccer. In fact, had he played in the 1998 World Cup, and gotten in Zidane’s way, or caused renewed fractures within the squad, the French legend of 1998 might never have happened.

By then he had retired anyway. He quit suddenly in 1997, aged only thirty. Admittedly, he had got fatter, even double-chinned, but once again he was rejecting the world’s largesse while it was still being offered. Cantona was being fabulously himself. So alluring are the spoils of soccer that it’s hard to think
of another player strong enough to walk away while still at the top. Cantona had thought he would return to soccer later, but he could never quite be bothered. He wouldn’t have had the same impact again in England anyway, because by the late 1990s brilliant “artists” were flooding the Premier League.

Auclair describes Cantona’s retirement from soccer as a death. In fact, his own account makes clear that it wasn’t. Afterward, Cantona successfully reinvented himself. Though he once said he “would love to be poor,” he has been an efficient point man for Nike, as well as popularizing beach soccer, and has become an artist of sorts. It’s not that he has a gift for any other art form besides soccer. “He’s a decentish actor,” Auclair grudgingly admits. Indeed, Cantona’s halting diction in Loach’s film suggests why he so rarely spoke to the world: That wasn’t his forte. Yet it still looks like a pretty good life: money plus a rung, however low, in the artistic pantheon. It’s more than most former players manage.

Cantona lives on, in Britain at least, as the man who took English soccer from an English era to a continental one, and as the man who together with Ferguson and the club’s then marketing manager, Edward Freedman, forged Manchester United’s modern identity. The Premier League has seen better players, but nobody who meant as much.

December 2009

I
live in Paris (lucky). I always watch France at the Stade de France (not so lucky in recent years). I was there the night Thierry Henry’s handball
against Ireland got France to the World Cup. Lining up at the train station afterward, crushed in amid furious Irish and apologetic French fans, you could see France would be carrying two leaden legacies to the World Cup. The first would be the handball. The second would be Thierry Henry himself. The Henry problem has nothing to do with the handball. Rather, after fifteen years as a professional, the thirty-two-year-old is now almost completely worn-out. France’s coach, Raymond Domenech, must be wondering how to avoid picking his captain for South Africa.

This is hard because Henry was once the world’s best striker. At Euro 2004, after he had scored a casual double against Switzerland, I asked Swiss keeper Jörg Stiehl what made the Frenchman special. Stiehl explained that when most players shoot, they are so busy watching the ball and their opponents that they can barely see the goal. They hardly aim. But Henry retained perfect ball control even while sprinting past defenders. “He has time to look up and see where you are,” said Stiehl. That’s why Henry seldom needed to shoot hard. He just rolled the ball beyond the keeper’s reach.

He was still the world’s best striker in 2006, when the highlight of the World Cup was his duel in the final with the world’s best defender, Fabio Cannavaro. Henry would have appreciated the encounter even though he lost, because unlike many players, he loved soccer. In his Arsenal years he’d sometimes sit at home in Hampstead watching French third-division matches, having fun identifying the players who should be playing higher. In Arsenal’s locker room he’d quiz his teammates about obscure soccer trivia.

The death knell came in 2007, when he was twenty-nine and Arsène Wenger sold him. The moment Wenger sells a star is like the moment the surgeon invites the patient into his office for a private chat. That’s the moment you know it’s all over. Wenger excels at selling players for a fortune the instant they pass the top of their personal hill.

One morning in the spring of 2008, a few months after the sale, Henry sat in Barcelona’s trophy room explaining to some Spanish television reporters that he was playing badly because he was missing his daughter in London. He’s still playing badly, but it’s not because of his daughter. I saw Henry live several times this year in the Stade de France and for Barcelona, and he now moves like somebody’s dad with back problems. Six days after
France-Ireland, Barcelona’s decision makers watching Henry stumble around against Inter Milan will have reminded themselves to buy a new striker—possibly as early as this winter. Already Henry rarely starts for Barça.

Physical decline is all the crueler if your body was once perfect. Someone like Zinedine Zidane, never much of an athlete to begin with, could age with more grace. No wonder that after the furor over the handball Henry admitted to having considered retirement. Knowing when to stop is the hardest thing in sport, and he has stuck around at the top level a season too long. The old Henry wouldn’t have needed the handball. He would have eaten Ireland up over the two games.

This should have been the moment to write a fawning sporting obituary, assigning Henry’s place in soccer’s pantheon. He’s not up with the gods—Pele, Maradona, Cruijff, Zidane—as he might have been, had David Trezeguet’s penalty been three inches lower and France won the last World Cup. However, he belongs in the second row, alongside Michel Platini, George Best, and his own hero, Marco van Basten.

Unfortunately, it’s no time for obits. Henry still has one last World Cup to play. Domenech is too loathed at home to dare risk dropping his most powerful player. Yet he should. Henry damages France. The team has better forwards: young Karim Benzema and Nicolas Anelka, already thirty but with all his faculties still intact. France has better ballplayers: Franck Ribéry (who covets Henry’s spot on the left wing) and the rising playmaker Yoann Gourcuff. Henry slows down France’s attacks.

Above all, the self-absorbed, domineering captain cows his teammates and coach. Against Ireland, a fearful Domenech left in the terrible Henry and substituted Gourcuff instead. You hope someone—possibly some of France’s world champions of 1998—can persuade Henry that he was too great a player to allow himself the closing humiliation of a fourth World Cup.

*
With hindsight, “humiliation” was too weak a word. Luckily for Henry, he experienced most of France’s World Cup from the bench. A few weeks later, soon after he had begun playing for the New York Red Bulls, the local Fox 5 television station offered him the coronation of a live interview. One early question must have surprised him, “So you just won the World Cup, right?”

May 2010

O
pinions differ as to who first put Leo Messi on a soccer field. His dad says the boy’s grandma forced the coach, Don Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, to let the tiny five-year-old play with his older brothers. Aparicio’s own version was that he only had ten players and, spotting the tyke kicking a ball against a wall, asked Messi’s mother, “Will you lend him to me?”

Opinions converge on what happened next. Messi’s mom dressed him in the team’s uniform. The first ball came to his right foot, but nothing happened. Then a ball fell to his left. “He came out dribbling as if he’d played all his life,” “Apa” later recalled.

A stray foreigner witnessing the moment in the fading Argentine river town Rosario, birthplace of Che Guevara, a place that time forgot, might have gasped. Argentines didn’t. They recognized Messi at once: He was the
pibe
, “the boy,” they had been waiting for.

Usually the main suspense before a World Cup concerns who will win it. This year, people are just as eager to know whether in South Africa we will see the full Messi. If he can match some of the moments he has given us with Barcelona, but in soccer’s ultimate setting—well, the game doesn’t get better than that. This World Cup is in large part about Messi. But to understand him, you have to understand his Argentine football ancestry.

It was sociologist Eduardo Archetti who explained the
pibe
to me, one day in Buenos Aires in 2000. The
pibe
, Archetti said, is a figure that Argentine soccer fans have had in their minds at least since the 1920s. The
pibe
learns his soccer on the
potrero
, a bumpy urban space, where only those who can dribble can keep the ball. He plays the creative game that Argentines call
la nuestra
, “ours,” a style that they say comes from a child’s imagination. In 1928 journalist Borocotó proposed in the great Buenos Aires
soccer magazine
El Grafico
that Argentina build a monument in “any walkway” to the inventor of dribbling. The statue, Borocotó wrote, would depict “a
pibe
with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh that does not quite manage to form on his mouth, full of small teeth that might be worn down through eating ‘yesterday’s bread.’”