Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Oh, yes, laughs Philipp, who is from Cologne, when I tell him the story. A Bavarian nature person! Philipp knows Matthäus. Matthäus isn’t the sort of man to rise at five in the morning, pull on his hiking boots, and go off and climb a mountain. But Matthäus is the sort of nature person that Bavarians imagine nature people to be: a Bavarian with sunglasses on his head and a sweater slung over his shoulders who gets into his sports car and drives his beautiful girlfriend to a beer garden, where they drink wheat beer in sight of a mountain. Then the Bavarian nature person thinks, like the clerk in a Heinrich Heine story, “How beautiful nature in general is!”

  Munich has become Matthäus’s hometown. He left Herzogenaurach for good when he was eighteen, after getting a diploma as a painter and decorator. He was given a modest contract at Borussia Mönchengladbach. Without soccer, he’d have laid carpets.

  The young Matthäus rose fast: In May 1980, sitting in the German national team’s bus, he heard that he’d been picked for that summer’s European championship. He burst into tears. “Why?” asked veteran defender Bernard Dietz. Matthäus explained that he and his girlfriend had already booked their summer vacation.

  In 1984 he signed for Bayern Munich. He spent a total of twelve years there and became the best player in the world. Had he left it at that, there would now be a statue of him in every town in Germany.

  “And yet the last two or three years I no longer hear those jeers and whistles,” he reflects in the Atlantic room. “I think that now I’ve become a sort of role model for people in other professions, too.” He tells us about the letter he got recently from a man in his fifties, who like many Germans of his age couldn’t find work. At a job interview, the question of the man’s age had been raised yet again. “Look at Lothar Matthäus,” the man had replied. “He’s proving that age has nothing to do with performance.” The man had gotten the job.

  Matthäus says, “Bixente Lizarazu has said that when he’s thirty-eight, he hopes to be able to play like I do now. It’s nice to read something like that.” But it wasn’t always like that: At a Bayern practice a couple of years ago, Lizarazu gave Matthäus a thick ear.

  Matthäus’s troubles began early. At a very young age, he developed a gift for articulating dumb and irritating thoughts. At the European championships of 1980, Ribbeck, then a sort of jumped-up equipment manager, had said, “Even when we’re talking about the meal plan, he quacks something.” At the time Matthäus still had no status on the team. He won his first cap during the tournament, against Holland, and almost immediately gave away a penalty. Afterward, the German captain, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, told the press, “You can’t be that stupid.”

  Rummenigge was then the Chef (boss) of the German team. The German team almost always has a Chef: a man who tells the coach what the lineup will be, punishes dissidents, and makes the financial decisions. In the 1950s Germany’s manager Sepp Herberger used to say, “Fritz Walter ist mein Chef.” But the German obsession with Chefs derives from somebody else: It comes from Franz Beckenbauer.

  It’s hard for non-Germans to fathom the extent to which Beckenbauer towers over German soccer. He’s the Kaiser, but with more power than the nickname implies. The son of a Munich postal worker, conceived in the final months of war, he is the sort of person who would have become a Chef even if he had been an accountant or a machine operator at BMW.

  When West Germany lost to East Germany at the World Cup of 1974, Beckenbauer decided the lineup needed to be changed. He had a chat with his pal Gerd Müller, who had a soccer brain but no visible personality. Then Beckenbauer gave the new lineup to the coach, Helmut Schön, because it was Schön’s job to fill in the team sheet. Bernd Hölzenbein and Rainer Bonhof replaced Heinz Flohe and Bernd Cullmann. In the final Hölzenbein won the German penalty, and Bonhof gave the cross for Müller’s winning goal.

  Later, when Beckenbauer coached Germany, his official title was Der Teamchef. Ever since Beckenbauer, every German national team has had to have a Chef or Chefs.

  Matthäus, in the grip of his personal Kaiser complex, always wanted to be Chef. When he tells us about his international career, the main thing he talks about is his changing status. “Whereas under [manager] Jupp Derwall I was the fifth wheel on the wage, under Franz Beckenbauer I became a regular,” he says in fluent tabloidese. Matthäus usually calls him “Franz Beckenbauer,” in full, perhaps from uncertainty over whether they are on a first-name basis.

  “My breakthrough was the World Cup ’86. But I think it was a mistake of Franz Beckenbauer to have me mark Maradona in the final. I concentrated on Maradona, but we neglected our own game. After the 2–0 we changed that: I think that Karl-Heinz Förster took over Maradona, so that I could attack. We made it 2–2, then made a stupid mistake, and lost.”

  The point is that Matthäus had become Germany’s Chef. The transfer of power officially took place on June 17, 1986, in the final minutes of the game against Morocco, when the Germans were given a free kick. Rummenigge was getting ready to take it when Matthäus shoved him aside and scored. After that Beckenbauer, the coach, sometimes had a word with Matthäus about the lineup.

  But the problem with being Chef is that other people want to be Chef, too. Rudi Völler did. He and Matthäus would sometimes fire balls at each other in practice. Later, when Jürgen Klinsmann’s game improved, he wanted to be Chef, too. Eventually, Germany had enough Chefs to open a restaurant.

  Even at Bayern, Matthäus was always having to fight to stay Chef. Sometimes he leaked nasty things about his rivals to the press. Bild once reported that the other Bayern players called Klinsmann “Flipper,” after a performing dolphin then on television, because his ball control was so poor. The newspaper also announced that Matthäus had placed a bet on the limited number of goals that Flipper would score that season. (Matthäus won the bet.)

  The power struggles were bitter. Here are a few of the things the other Chefs said about Matthäus:“Tell it to the toilet seat.” (Rudi Völler)

  “He who talks a lot, talks a lot of nonsense.” (Franz Beckenbauer)

  “Our new press officer.” (Uli Hoeness)

  “My philosophy of life is that you have to help sick people.”

  (Thomas Helmer)

  When I ask Matthäus about all his rows, he tries to act the Kaiser. Ach, he says, there are tensions in every group. There are tensions in every family. Everywhere there is a certain hierarchy. It’s probably the same at your work, too, he says. You surely have a Chef and a secretary, who both do their jobs. And you need them both, don’t you?

  We all nod obediently, whether we have secretaries or not. Matthäus has sidestepped the question, given the standard answer, has spoken as if he should be playing for the Washington Diplomats. And then he says, “But it’s logical that the Chef has more to say to you than to the secretary!” And his buckteeth shape into a huge cheeky grin.

  It’s not just the other Chefs who are always attacking Matthäus. The rest of the German population does, too. Foreigners tend to think that all Germans are just Germans, but in reality there are several different kinds of Germans. There are old Germans and young Germans, Ossis and Wessis, respectable citizens and alternative types, the Cultivated and the Uncultivated, and they tend not to get on. “You Germans really don’t get on!” I once commented to a table full of fellow students at the Technical University of West Berlin. They laughed uneasily, because they didn’t get on.

  You can categorize a German by his attitude to Lothar Matthäus. Cultivated Germans despise Matthäus because he is Uncultivated: He turns his k’s into g’s, his t’s into d’s, and he has almost no grasp of the conjunctive tense!

  Alternative types despise Matthäus because they despise most Germans. Haters of Bayern Munich (possibly the most significant single group in German society) despise him because he is Bayern. And Bayern fans aren’t too keen on him, either, because he spent twelve years pissing in his own tent.

  The Dutch don’t like him, either. “Matthäus = Hitler,” said a b
anner at a Holland-Germany game in 1989. Tonight, two nights before what will surely be his last Holland-Germany (although with Matthäus you can never be sure), a Dutch journalist asks why he has such a bad image in Holland. “I’d rather ask the Dutch themselves,” replies Matthäus, obliging as ever, “because it’s a mystery to me. The Dutch people I know personally, whether they are fans or people from the hotel or journalists, are always very positive.”

  I have to tell him, “It’s because for Dutch people, you are Germany. You are the country. You are the team.”

  I mean a lot by it: white shirt with Prussian eagle, dives, hard work, winning, a certain ugliness (although Matthäus is popular with German women). The Dutch see Matthäus as the embodiment of everything they dislike about Germany, everything they don’t want to be themselves.

  “Matthäus = Hitler” is too strong. Really, the banner meant to say, “Matthäus = A German.”

  I don’t tell him all this, because I remember Paul Simon’s story about running into the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio in a New York restaurant. In “Mrs. Robinson,” Simon had sung:Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

  A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

  Whoo whoo whoo

  When he saw DiMaggio in the restaurant, he worried that the old man would be angry with him. It turned out DiMaggio wasn’t. He liked the song. But he didn’t understand it. The lyrics made no sense, he told Simon. Everyone knew where he was. People saw him on television commercials every day, he pointed out.

  DiMaggio had taken the song literally, whereas Simon had meant it metaphorically. Simon had meant to say that the DiMaggio-type hero had disappeared from American life. In the restaurant, Simon realized that sportsmen can’t think about themselves as metaphors. They think they really exist.

  That’s why I just tell Matthäus, “You are the country. You are the team.” He looks at me with wide eyes: “So every whistle is a nice compliment to me? Really I should feel honored.”

  It was a Dutchman who gave Matthäus the most awkward moment of his public life. Not Ruud Gullit, but the man who filmed Matthäus with a video camera at the Oktoberfest in Munich in 1993.

  “They forgot you with Adolf!” Matthäus yelled at the Dutchman, forgetting the video camera for a moment. It wasn’t the first incident in the course of a public speaking career that has veered from racism to sexism and back again. Once, at a German airport, he called out to a passing women’s basketball team that “our black guy” (Adolfo Valencia, his teammate at Bayern) “has one this long.”

  Inside the German team, only Klinsmann would object to this sort of thing. But most Germans outside soccer have a low tolerance for public racism. The German musician who registered in an Israeli hotel under the name Adolf Hitler was instantly expelled from the Berlin Philharmonic. However, Matthäus was one of the world’s best players, Chef of the German team, and so he couldn’t be expelled.

  Yet most Germans—even Bild readers—hate Nazi-type jokes. They cringe when English or Dutch people make them. To most Germans, Hitler is still real. It bothers them that their best player, running from microphone to microphone, might blurt out something dumb about Nazis at any moment.

  Matthäus isn’t a Nazi. Nobody who knows him thinks he has anything against black people. But he is a naughty boy who is attracted to taboos, just as he feels the urge to say mean things about Klinsmann in Bild (“He thinks too much”).

  I had assumed that Matthäus would have his fair share of national pride—perhaps because he was captain of Germany, perhaps because he reads Bild. In the Atlantic room I ask him if his heart beats faster when he hears the German national anthem, the way Italians feel about their anthem.

  He jokes, “It’s only because of the rhythm of the Italian anthem that it makes your heart beat faster.”

  But isn’t he proud to represent Germany?

  “It’s an honor to represent a whole country, such a big country where so many people play soccer. I don’t feel more than that.”

  I guess Germans born in 1961 aren’t big on nationalism.

  Now Matthäus is waving about one of our tape recorders. “Look, this one’s full. Do you have another tape?” He changes it himself.

  The Italian journalist asks Matthäus for his Greatest This, Best That. Best international: against Yugoslavia at the World Cup 1990. Best opponent: Maradona. Favorite club in childhood: Borussia Mönchengladbach. Biggest mistake: his public squabble with Berti Vogts and Jürgen Klinsmann. “We were old enough. We should have talked to each other.”

  The squabble lasted years. Vogts and Klinsmann got irritated during the 1994 World Cup when they realized that every conversation in the locker room was appearing in Bild. They may have been relieved when Matthäus was seriously injured after that World Cup. He was then already thirty-three and surely nearing the end. Just to be sure, the internationals from Bayern and Dortmund, led by Klinsmann and Matthias Sammer, reportedly agreed that he would never play for Germany again.

  Matthäus missed Euro 96. On July 21, 1996, he wrote in his (published) diary, “Today the European champions have arrived. Helmer, Ziege, Babbel, Kahn, Strunz and Scholl. There was a big hello at Munich airport. And sincere congratulations from me. European champion, for all of them it’s the highlight of their careers.”

  Translation: None of them has been world champion.

  His diary covers the season after Euro 96 and is the main source for anyone wanting to write the definitive story of Lothar Matthäus. “I believe,” he writes in the foreword, “that this diary gives an insight into my thoughts.” It does. I learned at school that every literary work has a theme. Mein Tagebuch (My Diary) has two: cell phones and the German tabloid press.

  The diary is itself written in the style of a tabloid newspaper. Day 1: “Friday, July 12: Franz-Josef-Strauss airport in Munich. It’s ten a.m. The loudspeakers announce ‘Last call for LH 410 through Düsseldorf to New York.’”

  This may be because the book was ghosted by Bild journalist Ulrich Kühne-Hellmessen. But I suspect that is more or less how Matthäus dictated it.

  The greatest influence on his thinking seems to be the German press. On Wednesday, August 14, he writes: “Bild, TZ, AZ [the three Munich tabloids], the Süddeutsche, the Merkur, Kicker and Sport-Bild—for me these are more or less required reading.”

  Seven publications! Later he reveals that he buys the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport as often as possible. Matthäus is like an academic keeping up with the literature of his field.

  In his defense, whereas normal people say things to each other—“talking,” as it’s known—all communication at Bayern Munich is done through the media. Matthäus learns from the newspapers that Mehmet Scholl’s wife has left him, that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is considering selling Scholl, and that Klinsmann wants a transfer.

  It’s noticeable how nasty everyone at Bayern is. The funniest character in the diary, besides Matthäus himself, is Beckenbauer. The Bayern president is constantly popping up to say something mean, in words dutifully recorded by Matthäus.

  Wednesday, August 21: “After the final whistle Franz Beckenbauer enters the changing-room as usual, and says: You can be very pleased you didn’t lose.”

  Tuesday, September 10 (after a defeat to Valencia on Beckenbauer’s birthday): “Franz stands up, and says just one sentence: I didn’t get the present I had in mind. He sits down again and the dinner is opened.”

  Friday, March 14: “At a certain point Franz bursts out: You are a shit team.”

  But cell phones get almost as much attention. In fact, whereas the most common word in many books is the or is, in Mein Tagebuch it is Handy (cell phone).

  Here’s the entry for Sunday July 28: “We have the new Bayern-Handys. All my friends already have my number. But now that I’m in Zurich I notice: the Handy has not yet been authorised, I cannot yet be reached. Kreuzer and Helmer were smarter, brought their old Handys with them. Now I have to let myself be teased.”

  La
ter that day, at Zurich’s airport, his eye falls on the Swiss tabloid Blick, which has put his wife, Lolita, on the front page. There are photos of her vacation on the Maldives beneath the headline, “Because of Lothar I Had to Let My TV Career Go.”

  All year, the themes of the diary remain constant:

  Thursday, October 3: “I have settled in the Limmer Hof, our training camp. I always think positive. So I must make the best of this situation too. The best thing: my Handy works here, so each one of my friends can reach me.”

  Monday, October 21: “In the Swiss Air plane there’s a copy of Blick. There are three pictures in it of Lolita, in the cockpit of a private plane. And there’s an interview: Lothar knows that I fly. But it’s none of his business. We’re now each going our own way.”

  Saturday, January 4, 1997 (when he runs into Matthias Sammer in a restaurant in Kitzbühel): “I go up to him, congratulate him with his European Player of the Year. Tell him his Handy number off by heart, that’s how often I called him. Now I know why I couldn’t reach him: Handys can’t get reception in Going.”

  Friday, March 14 (after a crisis meeting at Bayern in which his teammates have accused him of leaking everything to the press): “Of course I know that my contact with journalists offers points of attack. Still, I’ve been around long enough to know what I can pass on and what not. Often enough at breakfast, the egg stuck in my throat as I read which secrets had got out. I lie in bed and cannot sleep. The accusations have really hurt me. It’s one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I stare at the ceiling and think. Then it becomes clear to me: tomorrow against Schalke I won’t be captain anymore.”

  Reading Mein Tagebuch, you look into the soul of Lothar Matthäus. And what you find is this: he is a Bild reader.

  Nonetheless, Vogts, the German coach, called him up for the World Cup of 1998, on the condition that he’d occasionally keep his mouth shut.