Soccer Men (46 page)

Off the field he exemplified the ambitious young money-oriented Federal Republic. Never a hippie or a lefty, Beckenbauer was an instinctive bourgeois. He was barely of age when he married the first in a parade of elegant blondes, bought himself a semidetached house with a mortgage, and took elocution lessons. He always allied himself with the establishment: with the right-wing Christian Social Union in Bavaria, every big German company or television channel, and the country’s biggest tabloid,
Bild Zeitung
.

But he also, always, had charm: good looks, wit, and a lightness of touch. When I asked one of his fellow world champions of 1974 whether Beckenbauer was a tough nut, the man replied, “No! He is so nice. If you speak to him, the next time he sees you, he will remember everything about you, drape his arm around you, ask how you are.”

When soccer became commercialized, Beckenbauer was present at the birth, plugging soup on television in the midsixties. It was the start of four decades as the poster boy of German industry. Having represented almost every German multinational, he is now practically their collective face. The former teammate mimes Beckenbauer ducking as companies throw money at him: “Here’s €1 million! Here’s another €1 million!”

Beckenbauer’s first apotheosis came in 1974, the last time the Federal Republic hosted a World Cup. The team started off badly. After it lost a grudge
game against East Germany, its manager, Helmut Schön, panicked. He sent out his captain, Beckenbauer, to represent him at a press conference. Beckenbauer told the press that from now on Germany would play more “realistic” soccer. Several players were dropped—probably at the captain’s instigation—and a little later, Beckenbauer was lifting the World Cup in his hometown. His smile as he does it is one of the great happy images of the Federal Republic.

During that World Cup Beckenbauer had also banned a German tradition: swearing an oath of loyalty to the fatherland in the locker room before each match. He thought it didn’t motivate multimillionaire players. It wasn’t that he feared overblown German patriotism: Beckenbauer appears to have spent very little time contemplating the Nazi past. Rather, he just wasn’t interested in it. His own date of birth absolved him from German sin. He saw little point in looking back. Campaigning in 1998 to bring the 2006 World Cup to Germany, he said, “All over the world they’re still showing those old films harking back to things that happened forty, fifty years ago. That gives a wrong impression of this country. . . . A World Cup gives you a chance to present yourself to the world for a solid five weeks.”

The rest of his playing career after 1974 passed in glory with only one blip: In 1977 it was revealed that he hadn’t paid all his taxes. Shamed, and with another marriage collapsing, he fled to New York to play for the Cosmos. There he learned decent English, an essential attribute in his later global rise.

He retired as a player in 1982. Two years later he was appointed Germany’s manager, charged with saving the country’s decaying soccer. In 1986 he took his team to the World Cup final in Mexico. The side played ugly, battling soccer, and during its matches the eye was drawn easily to the elegant figure of Beckenbauer, standing upright beside his dugout, with such poise that one overlooked his startling checkered trousers. He always, then and thereafter, took care to disassociate himself from the shortcomings of post-
Kaiserzeit
German soccer. Days before that final, chatting to friends, he said the names of several of his players aloud and guffawed. “What was so funny?” he was asked. “Just think of it,” said Beckenbauer. “In a day or two these guys could be world champions!” They weren’t: They lost to Argentina. “Luckily, because if we’d won it would have been a defeat for soccer,” Beckenbauer wrote later.

In 1990 his German team did win the World Cup, though again without playing beautifully. Beckenbauer as manager always produced “realistic soccer” rather than the beautiful game he himself had played. That night in Rome, while his players went wild, Beckenbauer strolled alone across the pitch, gold medal around his neck, looking around him like a man walking his dog. He later explained that he had been saying good-bye to soccer.

It was more an auf Wiedersehen: See you later. He soon returned in his third incarnation as soccer politician. Alone among soccer’s former greats, he was born to the role: Beckenbauer isn’t a squabbler like Johan Cruijff or a dullard like Bobby Charlton or a drunk like George Best or a recovering drug addict like Diego Maradona or a weak character like Michel Platini or a talking puppet like Pele. Despite being German, Beckenbauer is liked worldwide.

At home he no longer has to ally himself with the establishment. It tries to ally itself with him. Every German politician tries to attach himself to the Kaiser
.
When Beckenbauer would drop in on his former fan Gerhard Schröder in the chancellory, and Schröder would crack open a bottle of red, it was clear which man needed the meeting most. When Schröder pushed through a major tax reform, German comedian Harald Schmidt joked, “And the greatest surprise is: without the help of Franz Beckenbauer!”

Nothing seems to damage him in Germany: not his constant contradictory statements to the nearest microphone nor the inevitable split with his latest blonde. The former teammate told me, “The thing about Franz, his greatest gift is in his . . . ,” and the teammate gestured at his crotch. “But he makes all his women happy! They all go away with money.” Beckenbauer, with his facility to laugh about himself, always happily admits his mistakes, and the German public always forgives him. In a country sick of upheaval, he represents a reassuring continuity. The Federal Republic is no longer very successful at soccer or anything else, but Beckenbauer still represents the Germany that wins with a smile.

The smile falters only when he is criticized. Then he throws a tantrum. Last week he did so when a German consumer group said some of the World Cup stadia were unsafe. Beckenbauer duly appeared in
Bild—
his representative on earth—and announced from Cape Town that the group should stick to “face cream, olive oil and hoovers.”

Usually any attacks on Beckenbauer came from the critical intellectual Left—a lot of people in Germany. Beckenbauer reads books but disdains intellectuals, and they tend to disdain him as too rich, greedy, right-wing, unapologetic, celebratory, and Bavarian.

Now the incarnation of Europe’s critical Left is taking him on. Danny Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red” of the 1968 student revolutions, has founded an
Allianz gegen Franz
, or “Alliance against Franz.” It aims to stop Beckenbauer from becoming president of the European soccer association UEFA. The argument is that Beckenbauer, who is already president of Bayern Munich, would devote his reign to making the world safe for the big clubs.

He probably would, and he probably will. If Beckenbauer stands next year, he will surely win. He always does. As the only soccer official who is popular with the European public, he would have a power almost unprecedented in the game. If he carries on like this, his ancient nickname of Kaiser will require an upgrade.

November 2009

I
t’s taken too long, but at last European soccer clubs are starting to learn from American sports. Mike Forde, Chelsea’s performance director, visits the United States often. “The first time I went to the Red Sox,” he says of the Boston baseball team, “I sat there for eight hours, in a room with no windows, only flip charts. I walked out of there saying, ‘Wow, that’s one of the most insightful conversations on sport I’ve ever had, with guys that don’t know who Beckham or Ronaldo are. It wasn’t, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t know anything about our sport.’ That was totally irrelevant. It was, ‘How do you make decisions on players? What information do you use? How do we approach the same problems?”

Forde, holding forth excitedly from his comfy chair at Chelsea’s health club, is tapping the statistical revolution that has swept American sports. The
revolution’s manifesto was Michael Lewis’s baseball book
Moneyball
(2003). Earlier this year, Lewis proclaimed, “The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport.” In soccer, Forde is spreading the virus.

Forde worked at Bolton Wanderers before Chelsea, and he looks like a soccer man: trim, graying, regional accent, nice suit. That helps him deal with hidebound soccer men who are wary of fancy numbers spouted by dowdy statisticians. “Letting even a top-level statistician loose with a more traditional soccer manager is not really the right combination,” says Forde.

He studied psychology in San Diego, and that early American experience proved key. He often visits Billy Beane, hero of
Moneyball
, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, and a soccer fan who grills him on English soccer’s latest goings-on. Recently, though, Forde has been studying basketball, a sport more like soccer. “Basketball’s ahead of us,” Forde admits. However, he says England’s biggest soccer clubs now have people in roles like his. “We as a nation are probably more open to the American experience than maybe the French are, the Italians are. Maybe we’ll be quicker to adapt the
Moneyball
ideas because of that.”

Adapting those ideas began a decade ago, when clubs started to buy data on the number of passes, tackles, and miles run for each player per game. Forde remembers the early hunt for meaning in the numbers. “Can we find a correlation between total distance covered and winning? And the answer was invariably no.” People from the England rugby team told Forde that possession won matches. Yet that didn’t work in soccer. “If you had 55 percent possession, the chances of winning were
less
than if you had 35 percent possession.”

But the data can help clubs evaluate individual players. After all, says Forde, “Most of the elite clubs are probably spending 70 percent of their revenues on 2.5 percent of their workforce. Really all we’ve got is talent.”

Clubs are always buying the wrong players. Forde sees his task as “risk management”: reducing the game’s uncertainties. For instance, he studies data covering a player’s whole career to avoid the old trap of signing someone just when he’s in top form. A player, explains Forde, spends minimal time
in the ideal state of flow. “The player thinks that’s his normal standard. It’s not. My job is to see what form he regresses to.”

The search is still on for the best data to evaluate players. If a forward is tearing up the French or Dutch league, you need to predict his strike rate in the tougher Premier League. Forde says, “We’ve created our own algorithm: The guy scores fifteen goals in France. Is that ten in England?” Finding criteria to assess defenders is harder. “Is it tackles? Well, look at Paolo Maldini: He made one tackle every two games.”

The holy grail would be discovering the key to victory. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” Forde admits. But he says, “If you look at ten years in the Premier League, there is a stronger correlation between clean sheets and where you finish than goals scored and where you finish.” Billy Beane would be proud.

June 2010

I
f Uruguay’s Diego Forlan ends up taking a penalty against Ghana on Friday night, we have a pretty shrewd idea of where he will put it: in the opposite corner to his previous penalty. Forlan has a pattern of hitting one spot kick to the right of the keeper, the next left, the next right, and so on. He is trying to shoot in a random sequence, but failing. And one man has spotted it.

The man is Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, economics professor at the London School of Economics, who is watching the World Cup from his native Basque country in between bouts of child care. Palacios-Huerta played professional soccer in Spain’s third division, and then began looking at penalties as a real-life case study of game theory. He has studied more than 9,000 penalties since 1995, and now probably knows more about penalty takers than all the teams in the tournament. Their ignorance amazes him: “I have nothing at stake. They have lots: the whole nation.”

You rarely anymore hear coaches or players grumble that shoot-outs are “a lottery,” but their planning for them mostly remains antediluvian. Germans, for instance, revere the crib sheet that their keeper Jens Lehmann had tucked into his sock during their victorious shoot-out against Argentina in the last World Cup. Yet the sheet, scribbled on a piece of hotel notepaper, is ludicrously simplistic. It lists seven Argentine penalty takers and their supposed preferred corner: “Messi left,” for instance.

Palacios-Huerta notes that almost no regular penalty taker has a careerlong bias toward one side. Lionel Messi, he says, randomizes his penalties almost perfectly. “He can also change his mind at the very last instant,” notes Palacios-Huerta. Sometimes Messi waits for the keeper to shift his weight very slightly to one side, and then shoots to the other corner.

Four years on, some teams may have crib sheets more sophisticated than Lehmann’s. One team in the quarterfinals has an hour’s film of penalties taken by its opponents, plus a penalty database. That’s why it was silly of England’s coach, Fabio Capello, to announce his designated penalty takers before playing Germany. He gave the opposition time to study their habits.

But Palacios-Huerta thinks that even today’s most sophisticated teams probably just count who shoots how often to which corner. “I would be supersurprised if they do any kind of statistical test,” he says. He himself runs two. The first is: Does a particular kicker follow a truly random strategy? If the kicker does, then the direction he chooses for his next kick—right of the keeper, through the middle, or left—cannot be predicted from his previous kicks. A random kicker is like a man tossing an honest coin: Whether he throws heads or tails this time cannot be predicted from his previous throws.

But people in real life struggle to follow random strategies. Often they fall into patterns, and Palacios-Huerta gets excited when he detects someone’s patterns. Argentina’s Gonzalo Higuaín, for instance, kicks too often to the right. And the keeper whom Higuaín may face in a shoot-out on Saturday, Germany’s Manuel Neuer, also fails to randomize: Too often, Neuer dives to the opposite corner from his previous dive, going first right, then left, then right, and so forth.