Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  I spent a week of that World Cup staying with six German journalists in a villa in the Riviera village of Saint Paul de Vence. The villa had a barbecue, a big garden, and a pool, in which we played water polo at midnight. It was a good villa.

  The German team’s hotel was three minutes away. One evening Jürgen Klinsmann came to sit in our garden. He drank our beer and said that in the future he’d come around every evening, because our villa was so much nicer than the team hotel. We never saw him again.

  A couple of nights later, defender Christian Wörns came to sit in our garden. He drank our beer and told us that the atmosphere on the team really wasn’t so bad. That was because Matthäus had stopped making trouble.

  Why had he stopped? we asked.

  “I think,” mused Wörns, reclining in his deck chair in shorts and bath slippers, beer bottle in his hand, “that if everyone keeps beating up on you, you learn to shut up.”

  It’s true that by 1998, Matthäus wasn’t Germany’s Chef anymore. Klinsmann and Bierhoff were the Chefs, while the team had enough old blokes like Jürgen Kohler and Thomas Helmer to beat up on him when necessary.

  But after that World Cup, only Bierhoff was still there. Matthäus was allowed to keep playing, and in February 1999, on the night that Germany lost 3–0 to the United States, the phone rang in his Florida hotel room. It was Erich Ribbeck, asking him to come to his room and explain how Germany should play. Matthäus had become the Chef again.

  In the Atlantic room it’s half past eleven. Matthäus is still bursting with energy, but we’re dropping from exhaustion. Because he was an important player, we manage one last question: “What kind of player were you?”

  Matthäus likes the question. He thinks about it. Tonight is his night. “Today I’m saying everything. I’m putting it all out there,” he’s told us.

  “I certainly wasn’t a Maradona,” says the man who in 1990 became World, European, and German Player of the Year, as well as World and European Sportsman of the Year. “I was a very fast player. If I saw space, I used it. If I beat someone, he didn’t catch me again. I was a player who came with a run-up. What Maradona saw in a small space, I saw over long distances.

  “I’m small, but for instance I’m good with my head. Yes, what made me strong is that I could do all sorts of things. I always had a weak left foot, but when I was twenty-eight Trapattoni taught me to play with my left.”

  Matthäus rewinds a tape and makes sure everything is on it. Then it’s time to say farewell. When it’s my turn, he puts both his hands on my shoulders, practically hugs me. I tell him I’m going to be in New York in a couple of months. “Come ’round!” says Lothar. I promise I will.

  In New York I’m too busy to meet Matthäus, but I do want to see him play. The MetroStars are playing the Kansas City Wizards in Giants Stadium. I get into a taxi at Times Square. Then I get into another. It turns out that Lothar isn’t the only New Yorker who barely speaks English. “Giants Stadium,” the Indian taxi drivers repeat the unfamiliar words. They’ve never heard of the place. Finally, I find an Indian who is willing to let me guide him.

  In Giants Stadium there are eight thousand spectators. On the field I spot a small midfielder with a big head who is charging around the field—as they say in New York—like a crazy. Every time a teammate touches the ball, he throws up his arms and screams with rage.

  The MetroStars score. Matthäus’s teammates are pleased and cheer. On the big screen two 1930s comedians dance around a table. But the goal only makes Matthäus angrier.

  Then Kansas City scores twice. Matthäus (as they would say in the States) freaks. He chucks his captain’s armband at the linesman, Chip Reed. Reed, who looks like a U.S. marine, chucks it right back at him. The rest of the match, Matthäus wanders around the field mumbling to himself like a bum with a shopping cart on the subway.

  Our final farewell took place in the hotel bar outside Amsterdam. My friend Bart has been sitting there all evening, hoping for a glimpse of Lothar Matthäus.

  It’s midnight, and Lothar is now drinking beer at the bar with two Kicker journalists. I carefully put my hand on his shoulder. “Lothar,” I ask, “would you mind, for Bart here . . .”

  Lothar throws himself on Bart. He wants nothing more from life than to give Bart an autograph. “How you write name?” he asks in English.

  I write Bart’s name on a magazine: B-A-R-T.

  “I haf to be right,” Lothar explains.

  “For Bart,” he signs my notebook.

  Lothar bangs Bart on his shoulders. He hugs me one more time. Then we’re finally allowed to leave.

  *Poor old Matthäus is still not taken seriously in his own country, and his career as a manager has suffered accordingly. As I write, he is coaching Bulgaria.

  Jari Litmanen

  October 2000

  Edgar Davids, who thinks there is something funny about players who know a lot of soccer trivia, would have smirked had he seen Jari Litmanen entering a canal-side house in Amsterdam one spring evening last year.

  Litmanen had come to compete in a soccer quiz, but first he toured the house, exclaiming at its beauty. Perhaps, he said, he would buy one just like it. In seven years at Ajax, it had never previously occurred to him to move into Amsterdam. Instead, he had lived in the unlovely commuter town of Diemen, because all he thought about was soccer.

  The home that evening was stuffed with Holland’s most august soccer trivia experts. Some of them, at an Amsterdam dinner years before, had shamed Nick Hornby with their grasp of Arsenal history. But in this toughest of contests, the greatest Finnish player ever held his own. He would have done even better had he been a less generous man. When the question designed for him came up—“Who is Finland’s most-capped international?”—it turned out that the other player present, the then Ajax captain Danny Blind, knew the answer, too. (It’s Ari Hjelm, with one hundred caps, as everyone knows.) Litmanen turned to Blind in amazement. “But,” he stammered, “it’s months since I told you that.”

  That level of obsession is probably required if you want to become a great Finnish player. There are no one-man teams in international soccer, but as England may discover on Wednesday, Finland is probably the closest thing to it. Christoph Daum, the German coach-elect who watched them beat Albania 2–1 in their first World Cup qualifier last month, wrote afterward, “Jari Litmanen is the heart and soul of the team.”

  To some degree this was predestined twenty-nine years ago, when Litmanen was born the son of two players. His mother, Liisa, was a gifted defender, while his father, Olavi, played for Reipas Lahti, the club founded by Finns expelled from Karelia by the Russians in World War II. Litmanen’s Karelian heritage has made him a Finnish patriot, who always sings the national anthem. “With gooseflesh,” he adds.

  As a child, he kicked a ball around in the family’s vast back garden, where he imagined, in the place of the usual snow, the grass of his beloved Anfield. In a school essay he wrote that he would be a team player, not an individualist. That he nonetheless acquired the nickname “Diego” seems to have been a tribute to his dark hair.

  He planned his career with the care normally associated with young politicians. In his late teens, he set off on a veritable European tour to find the club where he would learn the most. Leeds United, managed by Howard Wilkinson, rejected him, as did Bobby Robson’s PSV Eindhoven, while Litmanen had never expected to win a contract at Barcelona. However, the club’s manager, Johan Cruijff, recommended him to Ajax, and in 1992 Litmanen landed in Amsterdam.

  Ajax then already possessed a decent number 10, Dennis Bergkamp. It was as a substitute for him that the Finn made his club debut on August 23, 1992, in the eighty-seventh minute of a 3–1 victory over Go Ahead Eagles. For most of that season, however, he sat on the bench, studying Bergkamp like a stalker.

  A year later he replaced him, and by 1995 Litmanen was probably the world’s best attacking midfielder. There is an anonymity to his brilliance: Litmanen seldom dribbles or flies in wit
h a tackle or fires home from thirty yards. Typically, he sends a precise ball out to the wing, and then surges stiffly into the box to finish off. Passing and scoring, passing and scoring. He says, “Zidane is fantastic on the ball, he also defends well, but he scores too little. Verón passes with feeling, is an outstanding playmaker, scores too little.”

  Litmanen scored twenty-four goals in forty-four European matches with Ajax, a club record. Of all the players they lost in the nineties—Davids, Bergkamp, Kluivert, Kanu, the De Boers—the crowd misses the Finn most. Occasionally, the Amsterdam Arena still resounds to his special song, “Oh oh Litmanen, oh oh oh oh.”

  Last year, virtually every self-respecting club in Europe courted him. He chose Barcelona, partly because they have a large squad. When it comes to injuries, Litmanen is the Finnish Bryan Robson, and he did not want to join a club like Liverpool, where he would have been under pressure to play weekly. But his choice of club worked rather too well. He barely plays at all. Barça now want to sell him, but Litmanen feels mistreated and insists on staying while pocketing his weekly net salary of $60,000.

  This may make the above paean to his brilliance sound hyperbolic. However, Litmanen’s main problem at Barça is probably that he is a Finn. Being a great Finnish player is like being a great Czech car: You never get the respect you deserve. Had Litmanen not been Finnish, he would surely have been voted European Player of the Year in 1995, when Ajax won the Champions League and World Club Cup. Instead, George Weah won, and the Finn came third.

  Notionally, Wednesday’s game is a World Cup qualifier. In fact, the closest Litmanen will ever get to a World Cup is his hard-drinking tour of France 98 with a bunch of old ice-hockey friends. Bound for undeserved oblivion, poor old Litmanen will soon be just a quiz question himself.

  *As I write, Litmanen, aged forty, is somehow still officially playing soccer and is even vice captain of Finland. In April 2011 he signed for the Finnish champions HJK Helsinki. Seven months earlier he had scored for his club Lahti against AC Oulo with a bicycle kick. Litmanen has now played international soccer in four decades, and (in case you ever get asked this quiz question) has long since broken Ari Hjelm’s Finnish record of caps. His retirement is rumored but may in fact never happen. The man just really likes playing soccer.

  Juan Sebastián Verón

  July 2001

  In the first minute of the Arsenal-Lazio match last year, Juan Sebastián Verón lofted a fifty-yard free kick with the outside of his right boot that landed at the feet of the sprinting Pavel Nedved. It was the sort of pass Michel Platini used to make. Verón, the twenty-six-year-old Argentine midfielder who joined Manchester United last week for $39 million, is potentially the world’s best player. He is a two-in-one, combining much of Zinedine Zidane with something of Roy Keane. Painfully thin and six foot two, with a tattoo of Che Guevara, a shaven head, and a goatee, he looks as if he should be a pirate, but in fact his physique is designed for soccer. However, there is a reason he is joining United for a little more than half the price that Real Madrid just paid for Zidane—three years his senior—and it is not just that Real is more profligate than United (although it is).

  Verón’s career began before he was born. His father, Juan Ramon Verón, an Estudiantes left-winger known as La Bruja (The Witch), scored the goal at Old Trafford on September 25, 1968, that deprived United of the World Club Cup (a trophy taken seriously in South America). Sodden Argentine fans at the ground sang, “If you see a witch mounted on a broomstick—it’s Verón, Verón, Verón.”

  Juan Sebastián Verón was born in La Plata in 1975 and before long had scored thirteen goals in a game. He would steal his father’s car (“I’ve always been a nut”), skip school (“My marks were about zero”), and at the age of fifteen embark on a remarkable sex life (“Like everybody, with a prostitute”). However, the boy could read the game, pass, and tackle, too. Brujita (Little Witch) had barely turned pro with Estudiantes when Diego Maradona pronounced, “I’ve seen a brave and young player. He’s called Verón. He’ll be successful.”

  Six years, six clubs, and several Ferraris later, that is only arguably true. Viewed one way, Verón’s career has been a steady forward march: from Estudiantes through Boca Juniors, Sampdoria, Parma, and Lazio to Manchester United. He is no longer a walking tabloid story. Everyone ranks him among the world’s best players. Impressively, he’s managed this while playing below his potential. There was another telling moment at Highbury in that Champions League game when he fired the ball forty yards at the head of a team-mate on the touchline. A beautiful strike, impossible to control, it was hit to show off. Lazio, a flaky team, lost 2–0.

  This is at odds with Sir Alex Ferguson’s assessment of the player when he signed. “You need one player who can make a difference. The people watching United only want to see the best, and we’ve got that today.” But have they? Viewed another way, players measure each other in medals. Verón’s trophy cabinet—if he has anything so passé—is filled mainly with the panties he used to collect. He has won two Italian Cups (no big deal in Italy), a UEFA Cup with Parma, and Lazio’s league title. His haul makes him one of United’s least-decorated players. But then medals never seemed the point. Renewing his Lazio contract in 1999, he said, “Since I really like Rome, which reminds me of Buenos Aires, I decided to stay.”

  Earning millions in a beautiful city where the fans didn’t demand trophies, he could shine while playing at 75 percent. He was allowed off-days. That’s why he is currently valued at half the price of Zidane. Sergio Cragnotti, the Lazio owner, called him “the new Platini.” But the comparison quickly breaks down. Platini scored goals; Verón does not. Despite a mean shot, he has only twenty-four league goals in the past six years. Platini, furthermore, could take free kicks. Verón, who was once bored by training, began staying on after Lazio’s Saturday practice to hold free-kick contests with Sinisa Mihajlovic, but the loathsome Yugoslav generally won.

  Verón might have enjoyed life at Lazio forever had it not been for some forged genealogy. During the late nineteenth century, an Italian, Giuseppe Antonio Porcella, set off for South America. Verón’s people, claiming that Porcella was his great-grandfather, secured him an Italian passport. Unfortunately, Porcella never seems to have arrived in South America, and Verón’s great-granddad was actually an inhabitant of Rio de la Plata named Ireneo Portela. Verón had to appear in court, and a ban from soccer seemed likely.

  The affair was traumatic and damaged his relations with Lazio. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, despite possessing false documents, but had already decided to leave. In January his agent visited England, trying to hawk the player to Liverpool or Manchester United. Later Verón said he wanted to join Barcelona, and Real Madrid had a sniff. But Real went for the top of the market instead, and Verón remembered that United had maintained their interest even when a ban seemed imminent.

  So it was that Verón was unveiled last week. In signing, Verón has made a leap of faith, moving to a country he barely knows to join a club he had never visited before his medical exam, but Ferguson, in signing a player who has consistently played below his best, is making the bigger leap. The person who seems to have convinced them both is Sven-Göran Eriksson. The Swede managed Verón at Lazio. Now he visits United more often than probably any other club. “He practically has a seat with his name on it in the director’s box,” says a United insider. Eriksson and Ferguson respect each other and talk often. Eriksson will have assured Ferguson that he can make an honest pro of Verón, and will have helped persuade Verón of the benefits of playing for United. Great players regularly snub Manchester. As Dutch midfielder Phillip Cocu said last week, “Being allowed to live in the sun of Barcelona is different from having to live in the drizzle of northern England.” Nor does the club pay as well as its peers—Roy Keane’s $70,000 a week would be an insult to Verón.

  What United has to offer is prizes and a life. No club in Europe has won more trophies in the past decade. And as Fabien Barthez ha
s found, in Manchester a great player can live almost as he likes. Whereas players in Italy are forever in training camp, United’s players gather at Old Trafford only a few hours before kickoff, even for big Champions League matches. “Everyone is very friendly and just sort of chilled,” says the United insider. “There isn’t much tension.” On the other hand, and this is crucial in Verón’s case, Ferguson and his players exercise strong social control. Mark Bosnich was doomed when he arrived out of shape for training. When Dwight Yorke became a little too chill last season, the other players let him know. Anyone who relaxes during practice will have Keane on his case. At United, Verón won’t be allowed to hit pretty fifty-yard passes to no particular end: He will be made to perform to his potential or leave, his talent wasted. Perhaps he needs United more it needs him.

  *Watching the thirty-five-year-old Verón play for Argentina at the World Cup in South Africa, I was strangely reminded of England’s long-ago cricket captain Mike Brearley. Brearley read cricket brilliantly but didn’t play it brilliantly. He was almost a nonplaying captain, and so was Verón. In old age, the shaven-headed one played at a walking pace. Still, it was enough for his old friend Maradona.

  Ruud van Nistelrooy

  August 2001

  Ruud van Nistelrooy still can’t understand a word Nicky Butt says. So dense is Butt’s Mancunian mumble that the Dutch striker has to ask Jaap Stam to interpret. However, Van Nistelrooy is learning fast. Every day he practices his Mancunian accent, teaching himself to say “Butty” while distorting the u and omitting the t’s: “Boo’ey.” After just one month at Old Trafford, his English is already deteriorating.

  Ian Rush said of his time in Italy that it was like a foreign country. Van Nistelrooy must know what he means. Although his whole life has been a preparation for this moment, he has never experienced anything like Old Trafford before. No player in the United squad has traveled farther to arrive here.