Soccer Men (33 page)

Van der Sar had never imagined being so good so old. He kept expecting to decay. Surely, his eyesight must be going. It wasn’t. “Everybody doubts themselves,” he said recently after a mistake at Liverpool. “Every writer doubts themselves, every artist doubts himself and every soccer player does. That is what certain players thrive on.” (Note the reference to writers. After Roy Keane’s departure, Van der Sar became the only member of United’s reading circle.)

Van der Sar has peaked later than he had ever imagined, later than anyone had thought goalkeepers could. Yet that makes sense and will help change the conventional wisdom about goalkeepers’ careers. Soccer’s ideal generally is old heads on young legs, but that’s particularly true for keepers. Joop Hiele, Van der Sar’s former keeping coach, once explained, “Goalkeeping
is registering the situation, recognizing it and finding the solution. The more often you do it, the easier it gets.” An older keeper is so familiar with the structure of attacks that he has time to organize his defense. Younger keepers can’t. All they have is their talent. And when they make mistakes, they start doubting themselves. That’s exactly what happened to United’s young American Tim Howard, the club’s last failed keeper before Van der Sar.

Other old players get sick of soccer, but not Van der Sar. He mused recently, “There was a point last year when it was four degrees and the rain was pouring down. Ben Foster [then United’s deputy keeper] asked me whether I still wanted to do it in such rubbish weather. I said I loved it.”

He might have continued for even longer but for the brain hemorrhage that felled his wife around Christmas 2009. She seems to have recovered well, but she needs regular treatment in the Netherlands. Asked when he decided to retire, he says, “Let’s just say that it was playing on my mind from the moment Annemarie had her stroke.” Van der Sar feels it’s time for him to become a house husband for a while—preferably after pocketing the treble of league, Champions League, and FA Cup.

Anyway, he couldn’t go on forever (could he?). “He made the point himself: It is pointless trying to be Superman into your forties,” reports Ferguson. In the showers at work one day, Wayne Rooney lobbied the Dutchman to continue, but to no avail. It was left to another teammate, Rio Ferdinand, to deliver the encomium. “To be honest,” the center-back told United’s official magazine, “he’s changed my thinking when it comes to goalkeepers. If I ever become a manager, then I’ll be looking for my goalkeeper to exhibit as many of Edwin’s traits as possible.” And so says everyone in the game.

June 1998

A
re Glenn Hoddle, England’s soccer coach, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, in any way related?

The evidence is piling up. Hoddle, a devout Christian and keen singer, spent a formative spell in France with Monaco before getting his first big break as a team manager with Chelsea. Two years ago he became the youngest ever England coach, replacing the scandal-hit Terry Venables.

Hoddle made Paul Gascoigne the key member of his team, but the moment Gazza stepped out of line he dropped him from the World Cup squad. Now Hoddle is the undisputed boss of the England side.

Blair, a devout Christian and keen singer, spent a formative spell in France as a Paris bartender before joining the Labour Party in Chelsea. Last year he became the youngest British prime minister in two centuries, replacing the scandal-hit Tory government. He made Gordon Brown the key member of his cabinet, but the moment Brown stepped out of line, complaining that the prime minister’s job should have been his, Blair’s aides leaked to the press that Brown had “psychological flaws.” Brown remains minister of finance, but Blair sets the agenda.

Few of the similarities between the two men are coincidental. The mood in British soccer and politics in recent years has been uncannily alike. Blair and Hoddle have come to power on the same wave.

What unites them is that they are outsiders: Blair within the Labour Party and Hoddle in English soccer. Labour was wary of Blair because he was not a member of the tribe. He had not worked in the mines, at sea, or in the railways; he had soft hands and was married to a lawyer. It was said that he did not know “The Red Flag,” Labour’s unofficial anthem, by heart.

Nor does he belong to any particular British class or region. He was born in Scotland but soon moved to England, and his father, who had been adopted by a working-class family, rose in the world. Blair went to private
school and, in a school election at the age of twelve, briefly stood as a Conservative candidate.

Hoddle was not a member of the soccer tribe. He grew up in Harlow, Essex, an antiseptic, anonymous New Town, not the traditional working-class background of most players.

He became even more isolated within the game when, on a soccer trip to Bethlehem, he found God. After that he would not swear or do anything to excess, which made many other players regard him with suspicion. Furthermore, he stood out in English soccer as an artist among battlers.

As outsiders, Blair and Hoddle would not normally have risen to the top. However, their luck was that the more traditional leaders had failed. Labour, led by members of the party tribe, had lost four general elections in a row, and in desperation turned to Blair. Soon afterward the UK did too, after years of sleaze and decay. English soccer had been decaying too, though Venables, who took charge in 1994, had improved things. But image remained his problem, and so the Football Association turned to Hoddle.

These two outsiders were not interested in tradition. Blair knew the UK had won World War II and that it had long been a sovereign state, just as Hoddle knew that England had won the World Cup in 1966—he had run through Harlow that day waving a banner. But neither man thought these memories should determine policy. Blair, for instance, decided to treat European monetary union as an economic issue alone. Hoddle deserted England’s traditional long-ball game.

Both also deserted the romantic schools that had helped shape them. Blair, who joined a far-left Labour Party, has been cruel to the Left in power. Hoddle, once the star of a Tottenham side that played romantic soccer, has turned out a dull but competent England team.

What these two men care about is not history but achievement. Blair wants to make the UK a modern economy; Hoddle wants to win the World Cup. This means keeping up with best practices around the world. Blair has borrowed key policies, such as welfare-to-work, from the United States, while Hoddle draws more from continental Europe. When England held Italy to a 0–0 draw in Rome last October, it was much commented on that his team played like an Italian side.

Success and failure become apparent much more quickly in soccer than in politics. If Hoddle’s England does well in the World Cup, it will be seen as an omen for Blair’s UK. Yet Blair would do well to resist crawling over any England success, as he has in the past, because this alienates the public. Instead, he should congratulate his long-lost brother quietly.

December 2001

S
ometime in the late 1980s Inter Milan were losing an away match by several goals when in the last minute they were awarded a meaningless penalty. The fearsome Argentine center-back Daniel Passarella began galloping forward to take it, but before he could get there, Alessandro Altobelli, reasoning, like any striker, that a goal is a goal, stepped up and hit the ball into the net.

Back in the locker room Passarella threw a fit. “It’s always the same!” he screamed. “At 0–0 no one dares take a penalty, but when it doesn’t matter anymore they all do.” Grabbing his genitals, he added, “You are cowards! You have no balls, no cojones.”

This went on for some time. Most of the Inter players were used to Passarella and paid no attention, but after a while Altobelli could take no more. He strode up to the Argentine and asked, “You talking about me?” Passarella knocked him out with a single punch, stripped, and wandered off to find the showers.

A few minutes later Altobelli came to. He stared about him enraged and then, spotting the fruit bowl customary in Italian locker rooms of the era, grabbed a little knife meant for peeling oranges. In the shower stalls he found a naked Passarella calmly shampooing his hair. “Come on then!” Passarella cooed at his knife-wielding colleague.

Altobelli didn’t know what to do. He didn’t really want to stab his team-mate to death like Norman Bates in
Psycho
. He would probably have been
fined, or even transfer listed. So he just stood in front of Passarella waving the knife for a while until, to his relief, other players dragged him away, and he could pretend this was happening against his will. All the while Passarella continued soaping his hair.

“Passarella,” concluded the former player who told me the story, “was a thug, a murderer.” That may sound harsh, but Passarella himself might take it as praise. As coach of River Plate, Argentina, Uruguay, and now Parma, he has prided himself on ferocity, toughness, discipline. He sometimes seems to believe he works in the army rather than the entertainment industry.

The past few years have been unkind to “El Kaiser.” Argentina, the team he took to the quarterfinals of the last World Cup, has blossomed since his departure. Uruguay unexpectedly qualified for the World Cup nine months after he resigned as its manager. In November he took over Parma, proclaiming, in his thick Argentine accent, that he had the players to “finish in the top four” of Serie A. The team is now sixteenth in the table after four consecutive league defeats. Sunday’s match at Atalanta could be his last.

Sacking a manager after a month in the job would normally be silly, but in this case it would simply correct the error of having hired him in the first place. The Passarella mode of management does not work, and had he not been a great player (“the best defender I have ever seen,” judges Diego Maradona), Parma would never even have considered him.

Passarella is the victim of a youth spent in the Argentina of military dictators: of Juan Perón, who had served in the Italian army under Mussolini, and thugs like Jorge Videla, who had electrodes attached to the genitals of dissenters and made thousands of people “disappear.” Passarella, short-haired “
gran Capitán”
of the Argentine team that won the 1978 World Cup for the generals, was their poster boy, their soldier on the pitch.

The generals lost office after the Falklands War, but Passarella completed a glorious playing career in Italy, socking Altobelli, head-butting an opposing side’s physiotherapist, kicking a ballboy who was slow to return the ball. Later, as manager of Argentina, he revived all the generals’ prejudices, saying he wouldn’t pick homosexuals or players with earrings or long hair. The latter edict, unfortunately, ruled out Gabriel Batistuta and Fernando Redondo.

Batistuta had a haircut in order to play in the last World Cup, but Passarella’s rule remains too silly for words. What, Maradona asks, about Mario Kempes, Argentina’s chief goalscorer in 1978, “who had a mane down to his waist?”

It sums up Passarella’s problem as a manager: He can only work with some players some of the time. If you are short-haired, obedient, and respond well to being shouted at, you can work with him. If you aren’t and don’t, you can’t. Senior players tend not to tolerate being bullied, which is why Passarella has always preferred working with youngsters.

Passarella, I was told by Mauricio Macri, president of Boca Juniors, “rules through fear.” You won’t find this childish and outdated method advocated in any management textbook. Few people perform consistently for a boss who scares them. Passarella’s style is unvarying: exhortation coupled with bullying. “I’m trying to teach my players that we need courage, heart, and pride,” he said last week.

But most players need different treatment at different times: Sometimes they need to be relaxed, sometimes to be listened to. Great soccer managers, like great fathers, know how to mix fear and love.

Maradona, in his frank and often hilarious memoir, notes another problem: If you demand total discipline you have to be totally disciplined yourself. But he recalls Passarella “smearing shit on the door-handles at the training camp, to amuse himself and his mates.” That really will not do.

May 2003

W
ith the ironic courtesy the French do so well, Arsène Wenger fields half-It witted questions from the British sporting press. Occasionally, the corners of his lips turn up and he ventures a joke: “You always feel sorry, you see.
Even for Chelsea.” Otherwise, the Arsenal manager’s comportment retains its inhuman perfection: Never a hair out of place, and rarely a clause, either.

Wenger’s work is almost as perfect. Admittedly, Arsenal has just surrendered the Premiership to Manchester United, but on Saturday afternoon it should dismiss Southampton to pick up a second FA Cup running. Though no bigger than several other English clubs, Arsenal constantly ranks among the country’s two best teams. Nick Hornby, author of
Fever Pitch
, a memoir of supporting the club, says that whereas United wins prizes because it is a giant institution, Arsenal does so only because Wenger is its manager. The Frenchman is a standing reproach to almost every other manager in sport. Few have such a hinterland of knowledge, and no one else has used it so well.

Wenger’s path began in the village of Duttlenheim, in Alsace, where his parents ran a restaurant. Growing up near the German border helped make him a cosmopolitan. He learned the Alsatian dialect and later German and English.

Though already planning a life in soccer, Wenger went to college to study economics. The litany of British soccer is that you must leave school at sixteen to dedicate yourself to the game, but the degree helped set him apart from other managers. Whereas some spend to show their status, he understands the value of money. He famously signed three great Frenchmen, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, and Robert Pires, for less than the $35 million for which he sold the troubled Nicolas Anelka.