by Simon Kuper
I suspect that’s true of most of soccer’s superstars. “The very rich are different from the rest of us,” Scott Fitzgerald mused to Ernest Hemingway. “Yes,” said Hemingway. “They have more money.” Great soccer players are different from the rest of us, too: They have more talent. Otherwise, the scary truth seems to be that they really are rather like you and me.
It’s still worth reading about them. First, these are the heroes of our time—in countries other than the United States and, increasingly, inside the United States, too. We all want to be them; we want to understand them better. Second, each one is shaped by his background. Xavi is a different kind of central midfielder than Gerrard largely because they come from different places. Just as any biographer of anybody would do, I have tried to locate these players in their origins. With David Beckham and Eric Cantona—both now earning their keep in American soccer—I was most interested in how others respond to them.
Once I’ve met the guy, or have watched him play and read and spoken to a lot of other people about him, I am free to go off and write what I like. That is because soccer players almost never read me. Hopcraft points out the problem of reporters who follow one club all year. They are the journalists who are most likely to get access but are least able to write honestly. “The mere preservation of a tolerable social connection between such a man and the club’s players and officials means that he is unlikely to be uncompromisingly critical of them,” says Hopcraft. I don’t have that problem. I show up at the club, do the interview, leave forever, and then publish it in the Financial Times or a little Dutch magazine. I can be uncompromisingly critical.
“In the main in this book I am more concerned with people than technique,” writes Hopcraft, and so am I in mine. I am also concerned with technique, with the craft of soccer: what distinguishes Rooney or Rio Ferdinand from other English players, or why Lampard and Gerrard are so good for their clubs and so disappointing for England. But most of the time, I try to describe these players as if they were human beings. What would you think of Michael Essien or Edwin van der Sar or José Mourinho if he lived next door to you, or worked in your office? There are no demigods in this book, just ordinary men, successful professionals pursuing their careers, often rather bemused by the world’s response to them. Hopcraft died in 2004 at age seventy-one, but I hope he would have approved.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Most of these profiles were previously published in the Financial Times, the Observer, the Times of London, Hard Gras in the Netherlands, and an array of other publications. I thank them all for permission to reprint the articles here. I have tidied up the odd phrase and corrected some errors, but I haven’t tried to make myself seem more prescient than I was at the time.
A few pieces—including many of the ones about English players—were written especially for this book.
Throughout I have used the word soccer to describe the sport. Many fans—including many Americans—assume this is some cringeworthy American invention. It isn’t. Soccer is originally a British word, a contraction of association football, and until about 1970 it was the most common word for the game in Britain. There’s nothing wrong with it. However, I have kept the word football whenever it appears as part of a proper noun, a set phrase, or a title: for instance, the magazine France Football, the style “total football,” or the book The Football Man.
PART I:
The Players
Bert Trautmann and Helmut Klopfleisch
September 1997
It’s a couple of days after Germany knocked out England at Euro 96. The German team is staying three hundred yards from my front door, in the Landmark Hotel. I walk past the Allsop Arms and the local tramps, who are wearing discarded England caps and scarves, and turn into the Marylebone Road. At the Landmark I have arranged to meet Helmut Klopfleisch.
I know Klopfleisch from a year I once spent in Berlin. He is a moonfaced electrician who was born in East Berlin in 1948 and became a Hertha Berlin fan soon afterward. On August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, separating him from his club. For a while Klopfleisch spent Saturday afternoons huddled beside the Wall with other Eastern Hertha fans, listening to the sounds coming from the stadium a few hundred yards away in the West. The border guards soon put a stop to that.
For the next twenty-eight years Klopfleisch followed Western teams around Eastern Europe. The Stasi, the East German secret police, followed him. Klopfleisch was often arrested—in 1986, for instance, for sending a good-luck telegram to the West German team at the World Cup in Mexico. In 1989, months before the Wall came down, he was expelled from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since then he has followed the German national team around the world. He has become the unofficial team mascot, licensed to hang around the hotel and chat with players.
This evening he is sitting at a table in the lobby of the Landmark with the president of Werder Bremen and an old man in checkered trousers. Fritz Scherer, the former president of Bayern Munich, is with them, but excuses himself as soon as I arrive. The old man in checkered trousers is tall and tanned, with elegant gray hair and a perfectly buttoned shirt. It is immediately obvious from his aura that he is a legend.
When we are introduced I fail to catch his name, and so I guess that he is Fritz Walter, captain of the German team that won the World Cup in 1954. But after a couple of minutes I realize that this man is Bernd Trautmann, “Bert” to the English. He is indeed a legend: a German soldier in World War II who was taken prisoner by the British, he stayed on in Britain after the war ended, turned out to be a promising goalkeeper, and ended up joining Manchester City. Most famously, he broke his neck during the FA Cup final of 1956 but played on as City held on for victory.
Trautmann talks like a legend, slowly and ponderously, knowing that whenever he talks, people will listen. It’s a style common among very beautiful women.
The conversation turns to Nelson Mandela. Trautmann coughs, and the rest of us fall silent. “I have ordered Mandela’s book,” Trautmann says. “In my house in Spain I have two thousand books, and I have read most of them. When I come home,” and he looks around our little circle, “I will read that book.” With great formality he takes a handful of nuts from the bowl on the table.
This goes on for a couple of hours, yet I find it interesting. First of all, Trautmann really is a legend, so nothing he says is dull. But also, the atmosphere at our table is calm and soothing. I assume that this is typical of team camps when everything is going well. The Werder president and Trautmann occasionally order rounds of beer, nobody looks around to see if he can see anyone more interesting (Jürgen Klinsmann, say), and every speaker is permitted time to hold forth.
Klopfleisch alone says little. The general opinion—which I think he shares—is that as a simple electrician, he should be grateful to be here at all.
When Trautmann doesn’t have anything more to say, the Werder president explains to me why the German camp is so calm: The Bayern players are behaving themselves. It was different in the past, he assures me. He can say that because his good friend Fritz Scherer has left. “Uli Hoeness—that’s the arrogance of Bayern in one man,” says the Werder president.
“Paul Breitner,” says Trautmann. The Werder president shivers as if he has food poisoning.
The Werder players are very serious characters, he says. Sometimes there’ll be a talk on religion in town, and a group of them will go along. Not the Jehovah’s Witnesses or anything like that. No, serious theological evenings. Not really Bayern’s thing, he thinks. The Werder president says that Werder and Bayern represent two sides of the German character.
“North and South?” I guess.
“I’m afraid I must correct you,” he says. “Werder is the Germany of the collective. No stars. Everyone works hard to build something together. The Germany of the 1950s, as it were.”
“And Bayern?”
“Bayern is the Germany of today. Too rich, spoiled, always quarreling, and disliked everywhere. And yet they usually w
in.”
That leads us to the great question: Why do Germans always win? Surely, these men must know.
Trautmann takes some more nuts. Klopfleisch and the Werder president look polite but uncomprehending. They don’t see my point. After all, Germany doesn’t always win. They didn’t win the last World Cup, for instance. No, things are not going well for Germany at the moment. The new generation doesn’t want to work, and . . .
I give up.
Have they had a nice time in England?
Oh, yes. They are all Anglophiles. There is a tranquillity about this country that Germany lacks.
“You know,” says the Werder president, “I grew up in East Berlin. Later I fled to the West. So the division of Germany determined my life. It was the same, of course, for Herr Klopfleisch. And Herr Trautmann became a legend as a result of being taken prisoner in the war. But in England nothing has changed for a hundred years. It’s the Old World. I like that so much. The war put an end to all that in Germany.”
I learned one thing during my time in Berlin: When it gets late and there is beer on the table and a foreigner present, German conversations turn to war.
“I am a simple man,” says Trautmann. He pauses. “This is what I have always remained, but I read my books, and what I read is this: The French, the Americans, the English, they all knew exactly what Hitler was going to do. And so as a simple man I ask myself: Why didn’t they do anything? If France had chased him out of the Rhineland in 1936 . . .”
At eleven o’clock he goes to bed. The Werder president follows, but first he puts our beers on his room bill. It’s easy when the German soccer federation is paying, but even so . . .
Klopfleisch and I have a last cup of coffee. He grumbles, “It’s always the same with these old Germans. If this, if that, then Hitler would never have happened, and they could sleep easily at night.”
Klopfleisch is bitter. The lives of these three men may have been determined by Hitler, but only Klopfleisch’s life was ruined. He was not allowed to go to university, and when he was kicked out of the GDR, he lost everything he had. He’s pleased that he can go to a tournament in the West with the national team, he says, but it means less to him than it would have in the days of the Wall.
Klopfleisch’s complaints are starting to bore me. He is not a legend. The legend has gone to bed, and so I leave too. “Good luck on Sunday,” I say, as if Germany needs it.
*Late-night German conversations no longer invariably turn to war, and Germany’s victory in the final of Euro 96 (the whole of Wembley booed when Oliver Bierhoff scored their golden goal) was the last time they won a trophy.
I last saw Klopfleisch in Berlin in 2009. He was in a hospital bed. He still enjoyed talking about soccer, but kept returning to his pain at seeing former communists live happily ever after. He had been a hero of the cold war, and after the Wall fell he thought that justice would at last be done. He was wrong. As part of the deal on German reunification, most East German communists and spies were left unpunished.
A Stasi agent, who had spied on Klopfleisch from the church beside his flat, had taken over his summer house outside Berlin, his “Little California.” Klopfleisch has been trying for twenty years to get the house back.
Someone in the hospital room asked if he saw his battle with the late GDR as a sort of soccer match. “A match lasts ninety minutes,” Klopfleisch sighed. “This one just went on forever.”
As I write, in autumn 2010, Bert Trautmann is in his late eighties and still going strong.
Johan Cruijff
January 1999
When Johan Cruijff was a young player and still rather naive, Dutch journalists used to tease him by asking him what was the last book he had read.
Invariably, he would cite the now-forgotten American novel Knock on Any Door. Sometimes the journalist would say: “But you said that last time!” and Cruijff would reply, “I’ve read it again. It’s a very good book.”
So it is ironic that Cruijff—voted European player of the century last week by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics—is responsible for the Dutch publishing sensation of this winter.
The book, You Have to Shoot, or You Can’t Score, and Other Quotes from Johan Cruijff, first appeared in October. It sold out instantly. It was reprinted twice in November, sold out again, and now sits once more in piles beside the tills in half the bookstores in Holland.
The quotes were assembled by Henk Davidse, who collected Cruijff interviews for decades and found rich material. Cruijff talked a lot. Even on the pitch, on the ball, with three men on him, he was always gesticulating and shouting advice to teammates. His whole life has been a conversation.
He talked about everything. The chapter headings include “On Guilders, Pesetas, and Dollars,” “On Tar and Nicotine,” “The Dutch Team: A Difficult Relationship,” and “On His Youth, Father Manus, Brother Henny, Wife Danny, the Children, and Health.”
And Cruijff said things that no one else did. “Even when he talked nonsense,” wrote Nico Scheepmaker in his biography Cruijff, Hendrik Johannes, 1947–1984, Fenomeen, “it was always interesting nonsense.”
Cruijff understood soccer better than anyone, but he also thought he understood everything better than anyone. He told a Chicago taxi driver the quickest way into town, advised Ian Woosnam to change his swing, and before having heart bypass surgery debated the method of operation with his surgeon.
He not only said new things but also said them in his own words. Being a genius who left school at the age of twelve, he often found that his thoughts ran ahead of his vocabulary. In Holland in recent months, various learned essays have appeared on the topic of Cruijff’s Dutch. Its main characteristics are his frequent use of the word you to mean I (“That was the worst thing, that you always saw everything better”), his outdated Amsterdam working-class formulations (ken instead of kan for can), and his penchant for apparently random words (“Them on the right is goat’s cheese”). Cruijff himself is oblivious to these defects. “Talking,” he muses in the book, “if I could do everything as well as talking . . .”
His Spanish is more flawed than his Dutch, but in a different way. He relies too much on the word claro (meaning “of course”), pronounced in an Amsterdam accent with a shrug of the shoulders, and on the self-invented phrase en el este momento (meaning “now”), used as a delaying tactic.
In fact, his best language may be English, which he learned as a child hanging around Ajax’s English coaches Keith Spurgeon and Vic Buckingham. He still makes the odd mistake, though. “Why should I gone back when everything they are doing with soccer in Holland is wrong now?” he once asked the Washington Post. But shining through the errors, always, are remarkable formulations.
Like many great philosophers, Cruijff has mastered the apparent paradox. Thus: “Chance is logical.”
“Italians can’t beat you, but you can lose to them.”
“Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake.”
And, on turning fifty in 1997: “Really I haven’t lived fifty years, but one hundred.”
Cruijff now feels himself to be an old man, and this is the sadness that underlies the book, the reason it was published now. Davidse is celebrating a mind that no longer exists. “The tooth of time has done its work,” Cruijff said in 1996, shortly before being sacked from his last job as coach of Barcelona.
Instead of having original thoughts, he now spends his time taking his grandchildren to the zoo and commentating on Dutch television, often continuing to speak after the microphone has been turned off, because he has never understood how TV works.
Davidse’s book is part of Holland’s attempt to thank him at last. As a player, Cruijff was often maligned as greedy, and at Ajax he was stripped of the captaincy by his teammates. Fans used to shout “Nose!” at him.
There was delight in 1979 when it turned out he had lost all his money to a French Russian con man called Basilevitch. This winter, the tens of thousands of Dutchmen dr
opping into bookstores are, in a quiet way, saying good-bye and sorry. As Cruijff might tell them: “You only start to see it when you get it.”
Bruce Grobbelaar
March 1999
Bloody mist, eh?” says Bruce Grobbelaar, jumping out of his car just in time for training. “You can’t see a golf ball on the fairways.” Behind him Table Mountain is indeed shrouded in the stuff, and across the bay from the training ground Robben Island is barely visible, either. The former Liverpool keeper has landed in Cape Town, where he now coaches the Seven Stars.
A Grobbelaar training session goes something like this: Grobbelaar spins a ball on his finger, frowning in concentration while the players stretch and run laps. Grobbelaar places a ball on an orange post and kicks it into the distance while the players pass to one another. Grobbelaar performs the kickoff for two five-a-side games simultaneously, by punting two balls out of his hands at the same time. Grobbelaar watches the five-a-sides, saying “Goal” when appropriate. When a shot goes high over the bar he says, “Boom!” At the end, Grobbelaar selects five players to run short sprints and do push-ups as punishments for unspecified sins.
