by Simon Kuper
Rep says he doesn’t have a single souvenir left from the World Cup of 1974. “I don’t think so. Oh, yes, an Argentine shirt. I’ve got nothing from the World Cup ’78. We didn’t even swap—just went inside quick as a spear.”
The players’ syndrome explains why Hölzenbein was more interested in the World Cup of ’54 than ’74: In 1954 he was still a fan.
Give players the chance to chat without an interviewer, and they talk about the strangest things: Did you ever play with that guy? Strange bloke, wasn’t he? Didn’t I once play against you at a summer tournament in Abidjan?
Rep reminisces about a striker he played with at Valencia who was known as El Lobo (The Wolf), because he was also dangerous at night.
Hölzenbein asks if we know the former Dutch player John Pot.
“Cor Pot!” we correct him in chorus, referring to a journeyman defender turned journeyman coach.
“John Pot,” says Hölzenbein decidedly. “Big, strong guy who used to play at the back for Fort Lauderdale.”
“A darling of a man,” adds Mrs. Hölzenbein.
“I’ve looked him up on the Internet, but found nothing,” says Hölzenbein.
Later I Google John Pot and find only one reference: When George Best scored a brilliant goal for the San Jose Earthquakes against Fort Lauderdale on July 22, 1981, he beat (according to a reconstruction by the Oakland Tribune) Ray Hudson, Thomas Rongen, “Steve Ralbvsky, then John Pot and finally Ken Fogarty.” Otherwise, it’s as if John Pot never existed. I consulted several experts on Dutch soccer, but none had heard of him. A mystery is born.
Anyway, this is the kind of thing old players have in their heads: Where is John Pot? The fan who runs into a former player in a bar will ask him about his Schwalbe, or about the “Swimming Pool Affair” (a German tabloid story headlined “Cruyff, Champagne, Naked Girls, and a Cool Bath,” which according to many Dutch fans cost Holland the World Cup final a few days later). But the typical former pro (and I’m not talking about Rep or Hölzenbein now) remembers his first goal for the first team, or the curvy housewife he met in a café on the night after the final, or the teammates who used to tease him, or the article in the local newspaper that hinted he was gay.
The history of soccer would read very differently if it were written by actual players. They would never organize a debate about a long-gone World Cup final, or if they did, it would focus on the postmatch banquet to which the wives weren’t invited, and where Rep and Germany’s Paul Breitner swapped suit jackets.
World champions or not, shortly after midnight we are kicked out of the café. On the street we say good-bye to my friend Rutger. Rep has been cadging cigarettes from him all night. Now the two grip hands like old pals, and Rutger shakes Hölzenbein’s hand and kisses Mrs. Hölzenbein. Then Rutger turns to me and half-whispers, “You know, I’m never going to forget this.”
I think Rep and Hölzenbein have had a nice time, too.
Michael Essien
August 2005
The most surprising aspect of the Michael Essien saga, to his teammates, is that he has stopped smiling. A man of practically no words, the Ghanaian tends to sit beaming in a corner of a locker room when not bouncing around soccer fields so vigorously that you get tired just watching him.
Essien is upset because his club, Olympique Lyon, is blocking his transfer to Chelsea. Lyon want a fee of $54 million, which would make him the most expensive defensive midfielder in history. Chelsea, the world’s richest club, has offered $35 million. Manchester United may also be interested. Meanwhile, Essien has gone on strike at Lyon. This tug-of-war is happening because the mute monster is the model player of our time.
His story is suitably globalized. Essien grew up in the steamy Ghanaian capital of Accra with four sisters. He spent his childhood dribbling around trees and sometimes crashing into them. He first appeared on television while helping Ghana’s under-twelves thrash Benin, was later spotted by scouts at a tournament in New Zealand, and at seventeen got a trial with Manchester United. He showed up at Old Trafford with a fellow Ghanaian, whose bad behavior irritated United. The club didn’t particularly like Essien, either, but offered him a spell with its Belgian farm team, Royal Antwerp.
Essien said no. He mooched around his agent’s apartment in Monaco distraught, until the agent phoned Bastia in Corsica and persuaded them to take the boy. There Essien grew into a monster. He is less than six feet tall, but his body is nearly as broad as his smile. He says he never gets tired. Mind you, he also says his hobby is sleeping.
Bastia was delighted: Essien didn’t even speak, which is exactly how soccer clubs like players. In 2003 it sold him to Lyon for €12 million. This May a Parisian court decided that part of that sum had been funneled to a Corsican nationalist, terrorist and Bastia fan Charles Pieri, who was jailed for ten years.
At Lyon Essien kept getting bigger, as if in a horror movie. “Physically, he’s the most impressive person I’ve played with,” says his teammate Sidney Govou. Another teammate nicknamed him the Bison. Essien himself remarks that he has yet to meet anyone who could knock him over.
An economist would note his multifactor productivity. The trend in sports is to measure more and more, and whichever variable Lyon chose, Essien was best on the team. He touched the ball more times than anyone else and had the most tackles, most completed passes, most interceptions of opponents’ passes, and sometimes the most shots on goal, but despite his penchant for sawing opponents in half, he was rarely caught fouling. You could judge him without even watching him. Reading the stats was enough. He was voted France’s best player of last season.
In short, Essien exemplified the growing physicality of most sports, from tennis to baseball. The average player now runs almost six miles a match, nearly three times more than thirty years ago. With everybody whizzing around, space shrinks. The center of midfield, where the ball is most often, has become like the line of scrimmage in American football: a “pit” where monsters like Essien roam, trampling the weedy playmakers who once ruled there.
The only playmakers still thriving in central midfield are the two-in-ones, men so physically strong that they double as monsters: Pavel Nedved, Michael Ballack, or Steven Gerrard. Weedy playmakers—Francesco Totti, Alessandro del Piero, and even Zinedine Zidane—struggle. The exemplary tale is that of Javier “the Rabbit” Saviola, Argentina’s weedy playmaker in their 3–0 thrashing of Essien’s Ghana in the World Youth Cup final of 2001. Saviola went straight to Barcelona for a salary of $4.4 million a year. Today, while everyone wants the Bison, Barcelona is quietly offloading the Rabbit onto their little neighbors Espanyol.
This autumn Essien may even help Ghana qualify for its first-ever World Cup. He needs to. Ghanaian fans often judge players by their willingness to “serve their country,” and Essien, like most expatriate players, has been found wanting. The problem isn’t that he emigrated. Ghanaians expect that. Whereas the country once exported cocoa, gold, and slaves, today it exports cocoa, gold, and workers. But fans don’t like expat players showing up for an international match “in posh-posh cars,” complaining that their plane tickets weren’t waiting for them at the airport, and then resting on the pitch. Before a crucial qualifying match in South Africa in June, Essien had to insist, “We’re ready to die for our country.” Perhaps it was true, because Ghana won.
But he’s miserable now. Lyon is testing the theory that Chelsea—funded by Roman Abramovich’s billions—will pay any transfer fee. Chelsea is trying to prove them wrong.
In the few recorded instances of Essien speaking, he has mentioned his dream of joining Manchester United. But such sentiments seldom influence players, and today he would prefer Chelsea. Meanwhile, he wanders around shrouded in gloom and in his headphones, irritating his employer. “At that level of remuneration, a certain ethic should exist,” says Jean-Michel Aulas, Lyon’s chairman, expressing a peculiar moral philosophy.
At least the Zeitgeist is on Essien’s side. As Damon Runyon wrote, “The race is
not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet,” and it’s even more true now than when Runyon wrote it.
*As I argue in my later article on Cesc Fabregas, the era of “monsters” ruling central midfield was short-lived. On the other hand, the era of Essien at Chelsea has been long-lived.
Fabio Cannavaro
July 2006
Holding the World Cup aloft is the highlight of a life, but the Italian captain Fabio Cannavaro was a world champion long before Sunday. Now he simply has the medal to prove it. The cherub carved from stone should also have been named player of the tournament, because he was the image not just of Italy but of this World Cup.
From soon after birth in Naples thirty-two years ago, Cannavaro cultivated a peculiarly Italian ambition: to be a defender. The man-marker is a peculiarly Italian profession, like gondolier or fashion designer. The most enjoyable thing in soccer, says Cannavaro, is marking: “Marcare, marcare, marcare!” He is scornful of strikers. They can play terribly and be praised for one goal, but defenders are hanged for one mistake. Cannavaro belongs to the Italian school that says the perfect match ends 0–0, because there were no errors.
Had he been born in Britain, he would probably never have found employment as a center-back: He is only five foot eight. To compensate, he built up his upper body and arms. A defender needs his arms, Cannavaro says, because he must constantly touch his striker, place him where he wants him to be. Cannavaro loves the details of his craft.
He understands his worth. Asked at Euro 2000 to name the best defenders there, he said, “After myself and Nesta, I think the Frenchman Thuram.” But Cannavaro’s sole mistake of that tournament allowed France’s Sylvain Wiltord to score the equalizer in the final. France won.
On Sunday there could be no repeat. Going into the final, Cannavaro’s defense had conceded once in six games, and that an unstoppable own goal. Cannavaro sets high standards for his men. When his colleague Marco Materazzi permitted a German shot in the semifinal, Cannavaro stood beneath the giant, lectured him, and then slapped him in the face. Cannavaro believes a defender does not permit shots—he throws out a limb to block them—or corners, free kicks, or even throw-ins.
Cannavaro was the tournament’s best gymnast, ahead of Miroslav Klose. He routinely outjumps much taller men, or clears by overhead volley. So agile is he that he can defend side-on, forcing the striker into a particular direction, because he can always stretch to tackle. He can even break the rule that says defenders should not go to the ground. Cannavaro can, because he rises instantly. On Sunday he performed three sliding tackles on Florent Malouda in just over a second, possibly a world record.
His battles with Thierry Henry were everything a World Cup should be: the best against the best. Henry managed a shot, and once actually dribbled past Cannavaro, but was eventually substituted, drained and scoreless, like dozens of Cannavaro’s opponents before him.
Cannavaro did not man-mark Henry. He and Materazzi had the flexibility to mark by zone. Cannavaro is both marker and libero: He probably had Malouda covered when Materazzi fouled him for France’s penalty. For that, Materazzi may have taken a pounding worse than anything Zinedine Zidane did to him.
Cannavaro watched the penalty shoot-out without smiling, his massive tattooed arms folded, Andrea Pirlo hugging him from behind. Goals are not his business. He has scored one in one hundred internationals. Italians don’t care. They admire defending. During Sunday’s game their fans applauded him more than any other player. We should do likewise, because if you can’t appreciate defending, this World Cup was rather empty.
Dirk Kuyt
September 2006
I knew players like Dirk Kuyt even before he was born. As a kid I played against them in the dunes of his home village of Katwijk on the Dutch coast. I respected and feared the Kuyt type, but I never imagined Liverpool Football Club signing one. Yet last month the club bought the Dutchman for about $19 million. Today he hopes to start his first match for them, the Merseyside derby against Everton. The temptation is to say he won’t be worth $19 million, but then Kuyt has always been, as President Bush might say, “misunderestimated.”
On winter Saturday mornings around 1980, the year of Kuyt’s birth, my soccer team would travel to Katwijk in the backseats of our dads’ cars. Often our opponent would be Kuyt’s future club, Quick Boys. As we passed Katwijk’s churches, fast-food joints, and the bed-and-breakfasts with their German signs in the windows, sea gales would shake the car.
Quick Boys’ locker rooms were always packed, because Katwijk’s sailors and fishermen all played their soccer on Saturdays. Sundays were reserved for worshiping the Lord. Every local male seemed to play: Quick Boys currently have twenty men’s teams, and fifteen teams in the under-nine age group alone. Telling the men from the boys was often tricky, because many Katwijk children—raised on fish, milk, and the west wind—were already as big as Kuyt is now.
Our opponents tended to be albinos like Kuyt and only had a handful of surnames between them, often Kuyt. They didn’t bother much with ball control, perhaps because the wind and the Lord took charge of that, but in my memory we always lost. Sometimes we were watched by hundreds of spectators. And Quick Boys wasn’t even the best club in Katwijk. Their rivals, FC Katwijk, later also became Dutch amateur champions. Having often watched the Quick Boys–Katwijk derby, Kuyt won’t be overawed by Everton-Liverpool.
Amateur soccer was such a big deal in Katwijk that the local stars seldom bothered joining professional clubs. Yet at eighteen Kuyt signed for FC Utrecht. Nobody expected much of the potbellied sailor’s son with Katwijkian ball control, but he almost instantly became a regular. In fact, the only thing that seemed to throw him at Utrecht was the godlessness of his new teammates. “In Katwijk certain things are taken for granted. I came to FC Utrecht and saw guys who lived with their partners, got a child, and only then got married,” he marveled. The Lord only knows what he will make of the Premiership.
In 2003 a bigger Dutch club, Feyenoord, reluctantly shelled out €1 million for Kuyt. Few expected him to cope with the higher level, but his unforeseen rise continued: Within a year he was Feyenoord’s best player. This was probably because Kuyt works harder at himself than does any other soccer player. He treats training sessions and matches as mere episodes in his packed working schedule. When not in the gym, or studying future opponents, he pays weekly visits to a mental coach, to a layer-on of hands, and to his personal physiotherapist.
None of this is intended to treat injuries. Kuyt never gets injured. He went five years and a month until this spring without missing a Dutch league match, eleven months longer than Frank Lampard’s record streak in England. Rather, Kuyt hires healers to perfect an already superhuman body, much as Pamela Anderson got breast implants. He gives an example: “Recently my physio got special soles installed in my soccer cleats. Tests showed I don’t stand completely straight on my feet, so that I can’t move my neck fully. Since I’ve been wearing those soles, my neck is free again.”
Besides injuries, Kuyt has also excluded loss of form. He is mentally so strong that he almost never plays badly. In each of the past four seasons, he scored at least twenty league goals.
Kuyt exudes the joy of a man in his prime whose every body part is in perfect working order. Most goalscorers save their energy for scoring. Kuyt gallops down wings and tackles on his goal line. A better defender than most defenders, he provides more assists than most wingers. His specialty is accelerating while receiving the ball, a horror for opponents.
Because he is never injured and always improving himself, he was able to advance inexorably from Quick Boys to Liverpool. This is an indictment of other soccer players. Kuyt’s rise implies that his colleagues, even those who aren’t drunks, are performing below their potential. If they all lived like Kuyt, professional soccer would be a better game.
“Doing your best isn’t a chore, is it?” he asks. “I must thank God on my bare knees that I became a soccer player.
And I do.”
There is one thing Kuyt can’t learn. No Katwijker will ever develop perfect ball control. “I don’t have the technique of Robin van Persie,” he once admitted, “but of all the Dutch talents I do have by far the best mentality.” It has taken him far: Last month his deathly ill father, a tube emerging from his nose, presented him with the Dutch Player of the Year award at a gala evening.
But this summer’s World Cup suggested that even Kuyt’s mentality can’t take him all the way. On his first venture onto international soccer’s upper slopes, his running kept defenses busy, but in his only match as Holland’s first-choice center-forward, against Portugal, he failed.
On August 15 Glenn Roeder, manager of Newcastle, one of countless clubs hoping to sign him, watched Ireland-Holland in Dublin. Holland’s center-forward duly scored twice. Sadly, it wasn’t Kuyt, but the twenty-three-year-old debutant Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, scorer of more than fifty goals last season. Huntelaar is the latest to overtake Kuyt in the hierarchy of Dutch center-forwards.
It’s possible that Liverpool bought the wrong Dutch striker: that although Kuyt won’t flop at Anfield, because he never flops, he won’t quite conquer the place, either. However, Kuyt always proves doubters wrong. “My career is a straight line upwards,” he notes. At the very least he will teach his teammates something about being an athlete.
Romario
March 2007
