Soccer Men (38 page)

In Kusturica’s final scene, two musicians (one of them the great Manu Chao) stand on the street playing a song: “If I were Maradona. . . .” Suddenly, Maradona is standing beside them, listening. Behind his huge sunglasses, he starts to weep. He knows how the fans feel. He is one himself. The Argentine team has always belonged to him.

March 2009

A
year ago, one of Barcelona’s countless vice presidents mused over lunch at the Nou Camp stadium that perhaps Josep “Pep” Guardiola should be the club’s next coach. It seemed a weird idea. Guardiola was then thirty-seven and had never managed a professional soccer club, let alone the biggest on earth.

True, replied the veep, but Guardiola was a Catalan, and “Barça” longed to have a Catalan coach. After all, she added, when the Catalan Victor Valdés was given a chance as Barcelona’s keeper, he wasn’t yet a world beater, but he had learned on the job.

I never wrote about the conversation because I assumed she was fantasizing. But months later Guardiola got the job. He then transformed last season’s jaded and hedonistic Barça team into what the great Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi calls “the most beautiful soccer cause of recent years.” Next month Guardiola’s lot meet Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Perhaps only Barça can stop an English side from winning the trophy again.

Guardiola’s inspired appointment offers two lessons to any company: how to choose a boss and how the boss should choose his team. The key point about Guardiola is that he has been identified with Barcelona almost from birth. He comes from Santpedor, a village so Catalan that many locals spoke the forbidden regional language throughout General Franco’s dictatorship. At thirteen he entered the “Masia,” the “farmhouse” for young players next to Barcelona’s stadium. Most of his life since has been spent in the square kilometer of the Nou Camp. As Jimmy Burns writes in
Barça: A People’s Passion
, locals still remember Guardiola as a skinny fifteen-year-old ballboy illegally running onto the pitch and hugging a player during a European semifinal in 1986. They remember him as a skinny playmaker, standing on the balcony of the Generalitat building in 1992, holding aloft the European Cup, and saying in Catalan, “
Ja la teniu aquí
” (Here you have it). The phrase gave many in the crowd gooseflesh, because it deliberately echoed the legendary “
Ja soc aquí
” (Here I am) of the Catalan president Josep Tarradellas when he returned from decades of French exile to Barcelona as an old man, after Franco died.

In other words, Guardiola, a reader of Catalan poetry, is such a perfect Catalan hero that he’s practically a character from a nineteenth-century nationalist poem himself. Cynics mockingly call him “the Myth.” Most Barça fans always hoped that the Myth would return one day as the skinny coach, though perhaps not quite as soon as this.

This background matters because it helps Guardiola govern with the grain of the club culture. As Joan Laporta, Barça’s president, told a business partner, “I was looking for somebody who understood the Barça way, and nobody understands it better than he does.” The Barça way is the attacking, quick-passing soccer down the wings that the Dutchman Johan Cruijff introduced to the club. In Guardiola’s phrase, Cruijff painted the chapel, and subsequent coaches must merely restore and improve it.

The local media and fans agree. By governing with the grain—by
being
the grain himself—Guardiola wins instant acceptance in this club of tireless warring factions. It’s like the company that dares appoint an unknown from the ranks as CEO because everyone likes him and he understands the company.

Contrast this with a “star” CEO or coach from outside who tries to overturn the corporate culture: José Mourinho, for instance, won prizes at Chelsea
but was never entirely accepted there largely, because his defensive tactics offended English soccer culture. The moment Chelsea stopped winning, Mourinho had to leave.

Star players obey Guardiola because they know they have no chance of forcing him out. They stick to the three-page “Code of Good Conduct” he wrote before the season, stick to their zones on the field, and when the great striker Samuel Eto’o dares talk back at practice, he is banished to the showers in seconds. Barcelona’s players are so good that as long as they serve the collective, they will win prizes.

And that’s the main management lesson from Guardiola’s work: He kept his best players. A year ago everyone expected Barcelona to sell the difficult, underperforming Eto’o and Thierry Henry. But Guardiola knew that soccer’s scarcest resource is talent. It would have been easier to buy lesser, more dutiful players. Instead, he dared persevere with class. He melded Eto’o, Henry, and Lionel Messi into soccer’s most thrilling attack.

Only one step remains in Guardiola’s career path: to displace Sant Jordi as the skinny patron saint of Catalonia.

April 2010

I
n 1996, José Mourinho suddenly became a powerful man. At only thirty-three, the unknown Portuguese had come to Barcelona chiefly to translate for the English manager, Bobby Robson. However, he fast became more than a translator. Mourinho took a duplex in the beach town of Sitges, near Robson’s house, and often talked soccer with him over dinner, recounts Mourinho’s biographer Patrick Barclay. Robson let Mourinho write dazzling scouting reports. And Mourinho had one great advantage over his boss: He spoke Spanish. When Robson talked to players, or gave press conferences, Mourinho interpreted. Many felt he sometimes added thoughts of his own.

Barcelona gave Mourinho’s coaching career liftoff. Yet when soccer’s winningest coach returns to town with Inter Milan for Wednesday’s semifinal
of the Champions League, he doesn’t come as an old friend. To the contrary: Mourinho has become the anti-Barcelona, the man who stands for everything that Barça is not. He now helps define the club’s identity.

That’s new, because when he worked at Barcelona, few locals had heard of him. Even the club’s president knew him only as
el traductor
(the translator). Only Barcelona’s coaches and players understood his importance. Mourinho charmed the then captain, Pep Guardiola, and persuaded everyone that he knew soccer. He was even allowed to coach the team in some friendlies. Barça was arguably the first side he ever managed.

In 2000 he drove out of Sitges almost unnoticed to coach in Portugal. Four years later, Barça fans watching Porto win the Champions League noticed a vaguely familiar face on their television screens:
El traductor
had become champion of Europe. They also noticed that he had rejected Barcelona’s etiquette. Barça’s motto is “more than a club”: Everyone in the institution is expected to make himself subservient to it. But at the press conference, after Porto’s victory, Mourinho talked mainly about himself. He, too, seemed to consider himself “more than a club.” Whereas Barcelona prizes elegant humility, Mourinho is shouty.

As a tactician, too, he was the anti-Barcelona. The club’s creed is “beautiful soccer.” Mourinho’s was “It’s not important how we play.” His genius lay in finding and exploiting his opponent’s flaws. As he said, “If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car, to beat you in a race I have to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank.”

When he returned to Barcelona as coach of Chelsea in 2005, he proclaimed that he had already won as many European Cups as Barcelona had in its history. To show how well he knew Barcelona’s Ferrari, the day before the match he announced Barça’s lineup. He beat Barcelona—chiefly because he had spotted that Barça’s then left-back, Gio van Bronckhorst, couldn’t tackle—and enraged the city. Sociologists like to say that groups define themselves by contrast to some imaginary Other. For Barcelona, Mourinho had become the Other.

When Chelsea visited again in 2006, Barcelona fans pounded on their team bus and jeered, “
Traductor!
” As in all dysfunctional relationships, Mourinho and Barcelona know just how to hurt each other: He regularly beats Barça, and Barça pretends not to respect him.

In truth the club feared Mourinho. In 2008 two club officials visited him in Portugal to canvass him about becoming head coach. He would have loved it: the world’s best players, and the ultimate revenge. But Barça finally decided he wasn’t the right man. Instead, it appointed his old friend Guardiola. Seeing Guardiola now, Mourinho must reflect on how easy the star player’s path to the coaching summit was compared to his own.

Before their two teams met in Milan last week, Mourinho put more sugar in Barça’s tank. Inter’s playmaker Wesley Sneijder says, “His team talk lasted over two hours, spread across two days. He emphasized Barcelona’s strong points, and wanted us to use those to knock them out.” Inter clogged the central defense, frustrating Barcelona. Afterward, when Barcelona’s players grumbled about the referee, Mourinho chastised, “They should say that Inter was stronger, and that’s it.” He loves it when Barcelona’s moral superiority slips.

For decades Real Madrid functioned as Barcelona’s imaginary Other. Now one little man has usurped Real’s role. On Wednesday, Mourinho should take those cries of “
Traductor!
” as a covert tribute.

April 2010

I
n 2004 Arsène Wenger was looking for a defensive midfielder who could one day replace Patrick Vieira at Arsenal. The manager wanted a runner. So he ordered a search through modern soccer’s computerized databases for the defensive midfielders who covered the most ground per match. The search produced an obscure name: Mathieu Flamini, a rookie at Olympique Marseille, was covering eight and a half miles on average in the handful of professional matches he had played. He didn’t even have a professional contract yet. Wenger went to watch Flamini, saw that he could play soccer, and signed him.

Flamini spent four years mostly on the Arsenal first team and in his last season ran more miles per game than anyone else in the Premier League. He then refused to renew his contract and joined Milan.

The story sums up Wenger’s genius in evaluating players—and his lack of funds to keep them. Currently, after Arsenal’s 4–1 thrashing by Barcelona in the Champions League, Wenger is being viewed with pity. His Arsenal team hasn’t won a prize for five years. Critics berate him for refusing to spend the money he has on big transfers. Yet the critics are wrong. Perhaps no soccer manager does more with what money he has than Wenger. No wonder that Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, and the man who brought novel
Moneyball
methods of evaluating players to baseball, himself probably the most admired executive in sport, calls the Frenchman “undoubtedly the sports executive whom I admire most.” Wenger remains a model of how to value players.

A key to Wenger’s career is something he did outside soccer: studying economics at the University of Strasbourg in his native France. That helped teach him both the precise value of money—to him, $25 million is not simply “a lot”—and the importance of data. Most managers in hidebound, antiintellectual soccer don’t understand either point well. But value for money and respect for data are Wenger’s abiding reference points when he looks for players.

Caring about data, Wenger pioneered the use of stats to assess players. More than twenty years ago at Monaco he worked with a computer program called “Top Score,” developed by a friend. It assigned points for any act a player performed on the pitch. “Most players who got high scores went on to have successful careers,” said Wenger. Few managers rely so much on statistics. Wenger got rid of Gilberto Silva when the data showed that the Brazilian was taking a split second longer to pass the ball on than he had the season before. He often uses stats to back up a hunch he already has about a player. Perhaps, he half-jokes, he doesn’t have enough confidence in his own judgment.

One hunch concerned a young Liberian playing in Cameroon named George Weah. Wenger—who monitored half the leagues on earth years before everyone else did—kept getting intriguing reports about Weah. However, the reports would add that the guy was a rough diamond. Finally, Wenger sent a Monaco colleague to West Africa to watch him. The colleague phoned back after the match, “The bad news is, Weah broke an arm. The good news: He played anyway.”

At that, Wenger took the gamble and bought him. After signing his contract, Weah sat at the table with his head in his hands. Wenger said, “George, cheer up, you’ve just signed for Monaco.” Weah replied, “Yes, boss, but nobody gives me any money.” It turned out he didn’t have a penny. So Wenger pulled five hundred French francs out of his wallet—then about ninety dollars—and handed it to Weah. Wenger, a funny man away from press conferences, likes to joke about the size of Weah’s “signing bonus.” The Liberian exemplifies Wenger’s knack of getting quality cheap.

In the old days it was easy. When Wenger joined Arsenal in 1996, other Premier League managers were still barely scouting abroad. Nobody else seems to have realized that Milan’s reserve Vieira and Juventus’s reserve Thierry Henry were great players. Spotting that didn’t require mystical insight—Vieira convinced Arsenal’s fans of the same fact inside forty-five minutes in his debut against Sheffield Wednesday—but none of Wenger’s British rivals seemed even to know Vieira.

However, over time Wenger lost some advantages, because others copied him. They too began using stats and scouting abroad. And Manchester United had an advantage over him: more money.

This season Arsenal is believed to have the fourth-highest wage bill in England. Chelsea pays the most, then the two Manchester clubs. Logically, Arsenal should finish fourth. Instead, it is third. That’s impressive.

Beane, at the Oakland A’s, knows all about working with a small budget. He told me, “If you have less than your competitors, you can’t do things in the way that they do it or you are destined to fall behind them. If we did things exactly like the Yankees, we are destined to finish exactly where our payroll says we should. If Arsenal want a striker and Man U want a striker and Chelsea want a striker, well, Arsenal will get the third-best striker.” In other words, the critics who urge Wenger to pursue expensive big names like his rivals do are wrong. Wenger knows it’s pointless for Arsenal to chase stars.