Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

It’s often said he looks like the average Brazilian. Romario is coffee-colored, only five foot six (to be known as O Baixinho (Shorty) in Brazil is a pretty extreme condition) and not obviously an athlete. At forty-one he is segueing into middle age. His legs are bowed, his calves skinny. Only the vast thighs and torso give a clue to his trade. Romario is the most remarkable goalscorer still playing soccer. He claims to have scored 992 goals. When he gets his 1,000th he will retire, and a certain type of player will have gone extinct.

  Of course, he will finish in Rio de Janeiro, at Vasco da Gama, the club where he began in 1985. Born in a Rio slum and raised in a slightly nicer slum, Romario is the supreme Carioca, or citizen of Rio, who expresses his patriotism partly by buying his native city’s real estate. Outside Rio, his oddities are less appreciated. “In São Paulo,” growls a Paulista, “he is regarded practically as an Argentinean.” Romario is that characteristic Rio type, the malandro: an opportunist, a lover of fun, a rule breaker.

  At twenty-two he left Rio to join PSV Eindhoven. A malandro and the Dutch workplace were not an ideal combination. Here was a man whose hobby was sleeping (fourteen hours a day); who said his teammates could not play soccer; who flew home to Rio when he felt like it, matches or not; who liked nightlife so much he was going “to keep going out until I am ninety years old.” A PSV physiotherapist was made responsible for getting him out of bed each morning. On the pitch Romario rarely moved yet averaged nearly a goal a game.

  He treated his European years as an exile, a strictly moneymaking exercise: “In Holland I work; I live in Rio.” He failed to comprehend Dutch weather, or the natives’ habit of turning up for appointments, or the way they expected great players to obey rules. The one Dutch phenomenon he appreciated was the tall blonde girls.

  Yet he always scored, and eventually Barcelona signed him. Even at a giant club he remained blasé. Guus Hiddink, once his manager at PSV, remembers visiting Barcelona as coach of Valencia. Romario was about to kick off the match in front of one hundred spectators when he suddenly told the referee to hang on, jogged over to Valencia’s bench, and kissed his old boss on both cheeks. Hiddink mimes the kisses. To Romario the match was just décor, with him the only character. In an increasingly corporate sport, his selfishness was almost heroic.

  Brazilian greats are judged at World Cups. Partly due to his weird personality, Romario played only an hour at the Cup of 1990. He announced that the next tournament, 1994, would be “Romario’s Cup.” Brazil’s coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, who had previously banned him from the team, was persuaded to relent. “Romario came in a good mood,” Parreira told me years later. “He wanted to be what every soccer player wants: world champion. Romario is very good in the team. He plays the drums, he tells jokes, he’s not . . .”—Parreira tilted his nose in the air to show what Romario was not—“He’s a happy man.” That may be, yet Romario objected to sitting next to his striking partner, Bebeto, on the plane to the tournament, where his main sponsor was a beer brand.

  “I can place the World Cup before the Brazilian as if it were a plate of food,” said the boy from the favela. He did. The most functional of players, Romario used his genius only to score. “If it had been a European player, he would have put it in the far corner,” observed Russia’s goalkeeper Dmitri Kharin that World Cup. “But Romario is a Brazilian, and he put it in the near corner.” His goal against Holland in the quarterfinal was finer still. A cross landed too far ahead of him, so he flicked himself three yards through the air and, while still dropping, virtually on top of the ball, hit a half-volley with the outside of his right boot into the inside corner of the net.

  And that pretty much concluded his career in top-class soccer. He has spent the past thirteen years mostly in the decayed Brazilian league, with brief forays to places like Qatar, Adelaide, and Miami. One night I saw him playing for Flamengo in Rio’s almost-empty Maracana stadium, built for 200,000. Most of the fans who had shown up spent the match running up and down the track, following the ball. In this sort of ambience, Romario sometimes paid his teammates’ wages or forewent millions of dollars in unpaid salary. The match I saw he did nothing, except score.

  By then, to his distress, he had missed the World Cup of 1998. He had been injured, and Brazil’s coaches thought he was trouble. The decision possibly cost them the trophy.

  Every now and then Romario would announce his retirement but did nothing about it. Then he realized he was approaching Pele’s mark of 1,000 goals (Pele’s 1,000th remains an epic moment of Brazilian history). Local journalists in Eindhoven got phone calls from Romario, still speaking his own inimitable brand of Dutch, and wanting to know how many goals he had scored in forgotten preseason warm-ups against village teams.

  His quest offends soccer’s collective ethos, and almost everyone disputes his count of 992. The Brazilian soccer magazine Placar gives him 891. Many Brazilians mock his pursuit of Pele (whom Romario once described as “mentally retarded”). But Romario deserves his moment. Goals are rarer now than they were in Pele’s day: 12 were scored in Pele’s two World Cup finals, none in Romario’s one. A great striker nowadays might score 40 goals in a season twice in his career. Even Placar’s count implies that Romario has been averaging that for twenty-two years.

  That he got his goals mostly in Rio instead of for big money in Europe was his choice. “I’m difficult because I’m authentic,” he said.

  If you hear a player say that today, it’s probably a Nike slogan.

  *Romario is now Romario, MP. In October 2010, he was elected to Brazil’s lower house of Congress for the Socialist Party. On election day he arrived in an armored BMW to cast his own vote and then visited the slum where he grew up.

  Gennaro Gattuso

  April 2007

  It was one of the images of last year’s World Cup, though few people saw it: bearded Italian midfielder Gennaro Gattuso cavorting around Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in skimpy white underpants. Italy had won the final, and Gattuso was celebrating in his favorite manner. Horrified FIFA officials soon stopped him. But Gattuso had a right: It had been, for better or worse, a Gattusonian World Cup.

  Underpants are seldom just underpants, and Gattuso’s symbolized his transformation from peasant into king. For years his role in soccer teams was as servant to the stars. On Tuesday, when Milan visits Manchester United for the Champions League semifinal, he will be the team’s spiritual leader. But more than that, the square-shaped Gattuso has become revered as an “antisuperstar”: the antidote to everything glossy in modern soccer.

  Central to the Gattuso myth are his simple origins. He comes from a small town in Calabria, one of Italy’s poorest regions, where he played soccer on the beach with gas cans for goalposts. Many of Gattuso’s relatives, like so many Calabrians, sought better lives abroad.

  At nineteen, Gattuso did too. Whereas 85 percent of Italian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three live with their parents, he joined Rangers in Glasgow and fit right in. British players, he said, “tackle like men. In Italy, if you tackle a player they moan to the referee.” Gattuso likes burying someone and then shaking his hand—though a Gattuso handshake can be scary, too.

  While other Italian players in Glasgow went around in beautiful suits, he hung around in tracksuits with Scottish players, notes Gabriele Marcotti, coauthor of The Italian Job with Gianluca Vialli. Gattuso left Scotland after only a year, but with a souvenir: his future wife, Monica, whose father owned his favorite Glaswegian pizzeria. Gattuso has promised to rejoin Rangers while still in his prime, but then he has also said he will never leave Milan, and has flirted with Manchester United, so it’s hard to know for sure.

  At twenty-one he joined Milan. It seemed an odd match. If Milanese men are the best-dressed men in the world, and AC Milan players are the best-dressed men in Milan, as a quick visit to their training ground will ascertain, then what was Gattuso doing there? At five foot eight and 169 pounds, he is an unusually heavy player, and he calls himself “as ugly as debts.” To q
uote an Italian saying: “Man descends from Gattuso.” Furthermore, in a club famed for its passing, he received ironic applause at training whenever he completed a pass over five yards.

  But he knew his place. “I’m just a stealer of balls,” he says. Italians call his type a mediano, the guy whose job is to procure the ball for someone who can play—in Milan’s case, the great Kaká. Here is a typical midmatch exchange between the two men:

  Gattuso: “Go on, run.”

  Kaká: “I don’t do defending.”

  Gattuso: “All right, then. Go up there and score.”

  But Gattuso reveres Kaká: “He is so perfect that sometimes I have to touch him to make sure he really exists.” Indeed, Gattuso’s most famous spat, the frantic bouncing up and down and shrieking at Christian Poulsen of Schalke, was prompted by Poulsen’s taunting of Kaká. “He behaved like a child,” Poulsen said afterward, but in fact Gattuso had behaved just like Rumpelstiltskin, the evil, bearded dwarf in the fairy tale.

  Nonetheless, Gattuso improves Milan’s brand. A peasant among aristocrats, he helps the club appear rooted. Certainly, he identifies with Milan, and with its owner, Silvio Berlusconi, to the extent that he chastised his then teammate Vikash Dhorasoo for reading the center-left daily La Stampa. “It’s a communist rag,” explained Gattuso, recommending instead one of Berlusconi’s own papers.

  Before last summer’s World Cup, at an Italian squad meeting, Gattuso and others noted the team’s reputation for petulance, diving, and arguing with referees. Gattuso said it had to stop.

  During the tournament he policed Italian behavior. He also turned himself into a global brand. This was thanks only partly to his appearance with several teammates in—most appropriately—an underwear advertisement. Gattuso also helped marshal perhaps the best defense ever assembled. In the final, when Fabio Grosso cut out a French attack at the expense of a corner, something that would have won him applause in any other side, Gattuso beetled across to scold him: Italy didn’t concede corners.

  During the tournament Gattuso burnished his peasant’s image. He displayed a preoccupation with toilets, saying that the night before the final, nervous, he had gone to the bathroom twenty times, while the night after, bursting with drink, his reported total hit twenty-eight. The tournament’s venue being Germany, home to many Calabrian immigrants, including some of Gattuso’s relatives, he frequently eulogized these people, “who worked so hard for years for five hundred euros a month.” He seemed to be trying to identify with them. “This is the victory of a workers’ team,” he said after the final. “We have shown we have balls as big as houses” (just in case anyone had missed the underwear ads).

  Gattuso became lionized as an “antigalactico.” Even his beard seemed a throwback to an age when players were ordinary guys. In fact, Gattuso is far more glamorous than he admits. This Calabrian migrant is a globalized multimillionaire who recently adorned the cover of the Italian Vanity Fair. Many women adore him. Yes, he is a mediano, but in recent years mediani have staged a sort of peasants’ revolt, upstaging the Kakás to become soccer’s main men. Gattuso’s rustic image, though it fits his personality, is also a carefully managed brand. A gifted speaker and no fool, he is his own best brand manager.

  Still, he deserves the acclaim. The season after winning the World Cup is the hardest (we’ve all been there), and here is Gattuso, a step away from his third Champions League final in five seasons. Officials planning for next month’s match in Athens had better pack some spare shorts.

  Zlatan Ibrahimovic

  April 2007

  I went left; he went left. I went right; he went right. I went left again; he went to buy a hot dog.” When Zlatan Ibrahimovic describes his moves in American street English, he sounds just like the basketball players on American inner-city playgrounds who are his soul mates. But whereas they usually remain mere neighborhood legends, the Swedish giant has become arguably the “winningest” player on earth.

  Ibrahimovic, twenty-five, leads the playground legends who have conquered soccer as they once did basketball. His club, Inter Milan, is unbeaten this league season. Next Wednesday against Roma the club can seal the Italian championship. It would be Ibrahimovic’s fourth league title in four years with three clubs—Ajax Amsterdam, Juventus, and Inter, as long as you overlook the irksome fact that Juve was stripped of its prizes for having fixed matches.

  Ibrahimovic grew up in the Swedish harbor town of Malmö, among the ghetto flats of Rosengård, a neighborhood of immigrants. Son of a Croat mother and Bosnian father, he speaks Swedish and what he thinks he should call “Yugoslavian,” though he isn’t sure. School was not his thing. “I’ve been at this school thirty-three years,” his former headmistress recalled, “and Zlatan is easily in the top five of most unruly pupils we have ever had. He was the number-one bad boy, a one-man show, a prototype of the kind of child that ends up in serious trouble.”

  While blond Swedes did homework, Ibrahimovic played soccer—sometimes for a neighborhood club, Balkan, but more often on the playground. In ghettos, whether the game is basketball or soccer, what counts is not the score but your moves. In basketball, “streetball” players invent feints and give them names like the “Chicken Fajita Wrap.” The Harlem Globetrotters emerged from streetball. Zinedine Zidane’s famous “Roulette” originated on a Marseille playground.

  While other talented teenagers were being schooled at big clubs, Ibrahimovic was on the playground giving “no-look passes,” a staple of both street soccer and street basketball. Eventually, he turned pro with Malmö. Niclas Kindvall, a teammate there, told me, “He gave passes at the wrong moment, took shots at the wrong moment. But he had it all.” Ibrahimovic was never going to stay long at Malmö after foreign scouts saw him lob the ball over one defender and backheel it over another before scoring.

  At nineteen, wearing the ghetto uniform of hooded top, woolly hat, and giant watch, he joined Ajax. There, however, he revealed his ignorance of what “streetballers” disparagingly call “field soccer.” The sport rarely suits them. Dutch midfielder Edgar Davids once brought along to his club Juventus a Dutch-Arab kid who had humiliated him on an Amsterdam playground, but the kid took a dislike to field soccer and left almost immediately.

  Ajax discovered that Ibrahimovic was slow, didn’t know where to run, seldom bothered scoring, and despite being six foot three couldn’t head. Fans began to wonder whether the club had signed the wrong Zlatan Ibrahimovic by mistake. The Amsterdam Arena persecuted him. He would loaf about yards offside, and a spectator would scream, “Come and sit up here, boy, and you’ll see it!”

  “I’d never thought about soccer before,” Ibrahimovic admitted. “You want to sink through the ground when 50,000 people whistle at you.” Sometimes after matches he locked himself in his apartment.

  Ajax also struggled to take the ghetto out of the boy. Defenders who marked him had a nasty habit of breaking their noses. Teammates suffered, too. “He was sometimes unmanageable,” says Ajax official David Endt. “Suspicion plays a big role with him. You see it in his game: that you won’t be screwed by someone else, but you’ll screw him.” As the cliché went, Ibrahimovic was a Balkan, not a Swede. He became a vehicle for Swedes to debate immigration.

  Yet his ghetto qualities also made him special. Most Swedish soccer players are anonymous worker bees. They follow “the law of Jante,” a sort of Swedish code for living that ordains: “Don’t think you’re better than us.” But Ibrahimovic had never learned Swedish codes. His style of soccer—the very fact that he had a style—existed to show up the fools facing him. “It’s hard to compare him to another Swedish player in history,” muses Malmö novelist Fredrik Ekelund. Sweden’s former minister of culture Leif Pagrotsky says, “The reason he is so good is that he does things as a player that make him a bad boy: He expresses himself, doesn’t obey the rules, doesn’t listen.” In Swedish terms, Ibrahimovic was kaxig (stubborn, proud) like his hero, Muhammad Ali. “I take the street to the field,” he says.

&
nbsp; Ibrahimovic baffled Swedes. When he took a penalty against San Marino even though the task had been assigned to someone else, it became a legendary moment of Swedish soccer. Later he briefly boycotted the national team. Yet Swedes, who love soccer but produced such an unlovely version of it, had been yearning for decades for a player like Ibrahimovic. He says, “During the World Cup in 2002 I was voted Man of the Match three times in Sweden, even though I hadn’t played. The people love me.”

  Only in 2004 did the genius become a useful player. He began valuing goals above feints. He finally chose the right moments. In his words, “First the talent controlled me. Now I control the talent.”

  Juventus, the sport’s most disciplined team, bought him and sent him to the gym. He gained twenty-two pounds. “Ibra” still caresses the ball under his soles, guiding it with every part of the foot, before deigning to score. However, notes Kindvall, “He has lost some of the abilities that made him a crowd pleaser. He used to do some incredible trick almost every game. I miss those things. But he has gained so much.”

  Inter would have won the title without Ibrahimovic’s fifteen goals. Italy’s next best team, Roma, trail by eighteen points and last Wednesday lost 7–1 to Manchester United. As Inter’s Patrick Vieira commented, other Italian teams just weren’t good enough this season. In streetball terms, Ibrahimovic “dissed” them all.

  Paolo Maldini

  May 2007

  On a dark, snowy day in 1985, a scared sixteen-year-old made his debut for AC Milan. “Where do you want to play?” Milan’s coach, Nils Liedholm, asked him. Amazed at being consulted, the kid said he preferred the right. He was right-footed at the time. He came on, didn’t make any mistakes despite having sore feet from tight shoes, and has hardly missed a game since. In the Champions League final against Liverpool next Wednesday, a month before his thirty-seventh birthday, Paolo Maldini will probably win his fifth European Cup with Milan.