Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  It shows the instant you meet him. He enters the room—rapidly, of course—looks you in the eye, smiles, sticks out his hand, and says in his Welsh-Mersey lilt, “Hello, how are you?” An utterly banal sequence, except that few other English players could manage it. Owen may be the only England player with basic good manners.

  Being both gifted and sensible, Owen progressed as rapidly as he moves. At seventeen, he made his Liverpool debut as a substitute, and when his team got a penalty, guess who was entrusted with it? At eighteen years and fifty-nine days, Owen became the youngest England player of the twentieth century.

  This was weird. English soccer is run by the English working classes, who in their professions tend to follow the dictum that experience trumps talent. The best players traditionally had to prove their worth for years before being picked for England, after which they were given a berth on the team until years past their prime. In 1998, the notion of playing an eighteen-year-old in a World Cup therefore seemed heretical. England’s manager, Glenn Hoddle, tried to dismiss Owen as “not a natural goalscorer,” which raised the question of who on earth was. Owen began that World Cup on the bench beside another green youngster, a mere twenty-three-year-old named David Beckham.

  Within a couple of games they were on the team. In St. Etienne, against Argentina, this produced an iconic moment of soccer history. A quarter of an hour into the game, somewhere in midfield, Beckham shoved the ball into Owen’s feet, whereupon the small boy with the big head set off running. I still remember the scene in the press stand. I was sitting among the British journalists, men who regard a World Cup chiefly as an opportunity to consume fourteen pints a day on expenses. When England scores they never cheer, though people do jolt awake and shout, “‘Oo gave the pass?”

  But while Owen was running, the men around me wriggled their beer bellies out from behind their desks and began thumping their tables and screaming, “Go on, my son!” It worked, because Owen kept going. And then he put the ball into the top corner. An identical run of his earlier had produced an England goal from a penalty, and so in just sixteen minutes Owen had become one of the world’s most dangerous strikers.

  The goal registered not so much for its importance, or its technical accomplishment, as for the attitude it betrayed. World Cups are ruled by fear. Most players are on a mission not to screw up. Yet there was Owen, dribbling as if in his back garden in Hawarden. He had “balls,” said Diego Maradona.

  I asked Owen whether he hadn’t been afraid to try that run. Didn’t he think, as a teenager playing Argentina in the World Cup, “What am I doing here?”

  “No,” said Owen. “That was probably why you could succeed, and why a lot of youngsters burst onto the scene in any sport. It’s because they don’t have a fear factor.”

  He bought an entire street in Hawarden for his family to live on, while he and his girlfriend moved into a nearby mansion, Lower Soughton Hall. Meanwhile, he had become a hero who transcended the usual partisanship of soccer. When he ran into the stand chasing a ball in Southampton’s little stadium soon after the World Cup, the opposition fans grasped at his legs as if he were a religious icon or a crate of beer. Later in 1998, I was in Valencia for a bad-tempered European tie during which two senior Liverpool players were sent off. When one of them abandoned the captain’s armband on the turf, Owen was quickest to pick it up. Liverpool won 1–2, and after the final whistle the crowd berated the visitors and their own players. Owen, though, sensed what was coming. He dawdled until he was the last player left on the pitch, and then it came: his ovation. He applauded back.

  The boy had balls and Road Runner legs, but he also had a brain. There are great instinctive players and great thinking players, but Owen is both. “Since I was a kid I’ve always watched players and tried to pick points,” he told me. “But it’s also important to try to use your strengths, because that’s what got you there in the first place.” Owen was born with pace and what he calls “an ability to know where the ball is going to be.” But he also had the intelligence and application to work out how to improve his game. It’s a rare combination.

  You see his intelligence off the field, too. Many times after England matches I have stood in the “mixed zone,” where journalists shout out questions to passing players. It’s mostly a sad scene. Paul Scholes, who could barely talk, used to trudge by with head bowed—probably more out of shyness than rudeness. With other players, it was rudeness. David Platt used to stop to chat with selected journalists about horse racing. When David Beckham became captain, he always stopped for a word. “I just hit it and it went in” is his usual account of a goal, though Beckham’s voice is so high-pitched that some words are audible only to certain breeds of dog.

  Only Owen stops for a thoughtful analysis of his game. At the World Cup in Japan, he sometimes did so with a black garbage bag slung over his shoulder, so that he looked even more than usual like the boy next door. Owen seems immune to status. His partner is not a model but a girl he met in kindergarten, and life for him is not a series of confrontations in which you have to defeat all comers with your clothing, but a chance to play snooker, table tennis, or darts after training in your specially designed home. Or you could play golf. Whereas Beckham uses his clothes and hairstyles to draw the observer’s eye, Owen, who is arguably equally good-looking, and has done much more for England, tends to make himself look neutral.

  Quite soon Owen began picking up small injuries. In recent years they got bigger. Since 2004 he has had four operations, the most serious one after tearing his knee ligaments with nobody even near him against Sweden at the last World Cup. In the last two seasons he barely played for Newcastle, his club. British journalists who watched him in the Premier League noticed long ago that he had lost his teenager’s pace. Too often they saw him disappoint against small sides. Many wrote off Owen.

  That was to miss the two essential points about him. First, he has what you might call the opposite of nerves: The bigger the match, the better he plays. His goals generally come against teams like France, Argentina, Brazil, a hat trick against Germany, Brazil again, Argentina again, two late goals against Arsenal in an FA Cup final, saving England’s qualification against Russia, and so on. That is why international soccer, not club soccer, is his natural milieu. Playing for Liverpool, Real Madrid, and Newcastle, Owen has never won a league title or a Champions League, and he probably never will. We will remember him for World Cups.

  The other essential point about Owen is that being intelligent, he can improve even as he slows down. In 2002 I asked him whether the older Owen was better than the teenager. “Yeah, definitely,” he said. “I’ve got a much better left foot than I had then. I can head the ball much better than I could then. I can drop off and hold the ball up much better than I did then. Results have proved that I have improved on them things.” To borrow a phrase from the Guardian journalist David Lacey: From a scorer of great goals, he has matured into a great scorer of goals. “He may be the top goalscorer in the world,” said England’s previous manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson.

  When Owen’s body let him down again at the World Cup, he simply set to work at it. He paid for a helicopter to transport him between his mansion and Newcastle, where he spent his days doing exercises in the club’s swimming pool and gym. He knew he owed the club that had risked $29 million on him in 2005. Given his absenteeism so far, that currently works out at more than $1 million a match.

  His haul of three goals against Israel and Russia last month suggests Newcastle’s investment is safe, even if he has already missed club matches with injuries this season. “Between my ears,” Owen explained after his return for England, “I’m strong. There might be a lot of people with more skill than me, but there are not many who are mentally stronger. Whether it comes to longterm injuries, lack of form, or criticism, I have thicker skin than anyone.”

  Owen needs nine more goals to catch England’s all-time leading scorer, Bobby Charlton, who got forty-nine. If he stays fit, he will. There
is no longer any great mystery about that. The only mystery is whether he can emulate Charlton’s feat of 1966 and finally carry England to their second-ever trophy.

  *With hindsight, both Owen and I were too optimistic about the benefits of maturity. My profile of him exemplifies the problem of interviewing soccer players: If you interview them, you have to quote what they say, and what they say often ends up driving the article. Owen said he had improved with age. At the time of the interview, in 2002, that view still seemed plausible, and so I made it the focus of the article. It turned out to be wrong.

  Speaking to the “Guardian” in 2010, Owen admitted that he had passed his peak by the age of twenty-one because of his injuries. “At 18 to 20,” he reminisced, “I was probably one of the quickest things around, at the peak of my powers. But what can you do?”

  He never did catch Charlton. As I write he has forty goals for England—nine fewer than Charlton—and though he is only thirty-one years old, he seems to have no prospect of adding any more.

  Kaká

  February 2008

  The young man with the big smile sitting opposite me is the official “World Player of the Year.” He looks more like an Edwardian poet. Willowy and fat-free, brown hair shiny as in a shampoo advertisement, with white middle-class skin that reveals he has never eaten a lousy meal in his life, Kaká could be the Brazilian Rupert Brooke.

  His club, AC Milan, is the reigning European and world champion. Does he have moments on the field when he feels, “What I’m doing now is perfect”?

  “Yes,” replies Kaká, twenty-five, in his American-tinged English. “Sometimes, everything that I want to do, I can do. These are good games, a perfect game.” When has he felt like that? “Ah, against Manchester, the semifinal of the Champions League. Both games, I could do everything that I thought.” Was there any particular moment of perfection? “The second goal in Old Trafford.”

  Phil, AC Milan’s resident English teacher, sitting in on his pupil, recalls the scene: Kaká somehow contrives to get two of Manchester United’s defenders to bump into each other and fall over. What’s startling is Kaká’s composure: He runs with his head up, seeing everything, and when the time comes he gently slots the ball past the keeper.

  We are at Milanello, Milan’s training ground in the Lombardian countryside near Lake Como, which may be the world’s nicest office. The air is so clear here that at ten yards you can see the pores in a man’s skin. The six training fields are so flat that you can lie on the ground and not see a single undulation. You sit in the bar, drinking perfect espressos for free, and every young man who passes, world champion or not, says, “Buon giorno.”

  The players here are kept perfect by soccer’s best medical team. Just in case the Milan Lab needed any more oomph, last week it took on Microsoft as a partner. Before meeting Kaká, I asked the lab’s doctors about him. Jean Pierre Meersseman, head of the lab, shrugged: “What can you say? He’s number one. Nobody is faster than him; nobody has the acceleration he has.” Daniele Tognaccini, Milan’s chief athletics coach, dubbed Kaká “the kilometers man.” Though the Brazilian is a creator, he also covers more turf per match than any teammate except the worker Rino Gattuso.

  Kaká has arrived only twenty minutes late for our meeting, which for a soccer player is early. He apologizes profusely for having missed me yesterday, has a stand-up read of the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper, and then ponders the question of whether it’s fun being Kaká. “It’s a lot of pressure, responsibility. But these are good things: To have a big responsibility with Milan, it’s good. I can manage this pressure.” But when the season ends, can he finally exhale and relax? “I just relax when we win something. If we lose something, it’s difficult to relax.”

  Kaká joined Milan in 2003. Uniquely in soccer, the team has barely changed since then. Have his colleagues here at Milanello become more than just colleagues? “Milan is a big family. In the year, I think, the same time I spend with my wife I spend here with my friends. The day before the game, we stay here in training camp. If we got sixty games in the whole season, there’s another sixty days in camp, and every day training.” The “feeling” between him and his fellow midfielders, he adds, “is abnormal. We’ve been playing together for five years, and now I know how Gattuso moves, Pirlo, Seedorf. We can play without seeing each other.”

  But is it hard to get motivated for sixty games a season? “Sometimes it’s too much,” Kaká agrees. “Every time we play in Champions League, we always have motivation and concentration. Champions League is always important because you have to win, every game. Championship—you have to win every game, but sometimes you don’t have the motivation that you have against Inter, Juventus, Rome, and Champions League games.” He is presumably referring to games in half-full stadiums in provincial Italian towns with hooligans throwing things.

  Is that why Milan is only fifth in the Italian championship? “Errm, yeah, I think,” he says with an embarrassed chuckle.

  The question of motivation preoccupies Kaká. When he arrived at Milanello, he says, he noticed a curious quality about Milan’s legendary defender Paolo Maldini: Every day, the guy wanted to win. “This surprised me,” says Kaká. “For that I learn everything about Paolo. Why he’s got this motivation, and the other players don’t.” It may explain why Maldini at thirty-nine is now in his twenty-third season on the first team.

  Did Maldini tell him the secret? “No, I just observed him. He speaks poco—not very much.”

  Who are the talkers in Milan’s locker room?

  “The tookers?” Kaká is baffled, and Phil clarifies. “The talkers? Ahh, Ronaldo, Gattuso.”

  Kaká once thought of getting an MBA. Like many corporate types he motivates himself by setting himself objectives. But what objectives can he possibly have now that he has won everything? His habitual grin grows to cover the whole porcelain face. “I want to win everything again. World Cup, and Champions League, championship and Golden Ball, World FIFA Player of the Year, and . . .” He trails off, possibly because the list is endless. “These are the things I learned with Paolo. Always win.”

  *Two days after I published this article in the Financial Times, I got a panicked e-mail from one of Milan’s press officers. Where could he get a copy of the newspaper? They’d all be gone now, I said, and offered to e-mail him the article instead.

  No, he said, Kaká wanted the actual paper. The player was very keen to read the article in the Financial Times itself. Milan’s players spend endless hours before games in training camp at Milanello, and Kaká likes to spend the time practicing his English. What better study material than a profile of yourself?

  Cesc Fabregas

  February 2008

  Arsenal had won yet again, and Arsène Wenger, their manager, was loafing in the players’ tunnel, relaxed, or as relaxed as Wenger ever gets. His prodigy, Cesc Fabregas, had scored again. An acquaintance of Wenger’s, who also happened to be in the tunnel, asked why it was that Fabregas—always a wonderful passer and tackler—was now scoring too.

  “I’ll tell you a story about that,” replied Wenger. “I told him this summer, ‘The number on your back is 4 [traditionally the defensive midfielder’s number]. So at Arsenal you’ll be judged on your defensive positions, the tackles you make. Get that right, and the passes and goals will look after themselves.”

  From then on the boy began scoring. Wenger’s point was that he had taken the pressure off Cesc’s goals by telling him to worry about something else.

  The manager paused, before adding his punch line: “Last year he missed thirteen [or however many it was] scoring opportunities.” Wenger loves stats at least as much as he loves soccer.

  Now his twenty-year-old Catalan is the complete player, who over the next three months will be central to deciding whether Arsenal wins the Premier League and Champions League. More than that, Fabregas represents a new shape of player: the little boy as leader.

  Though Barcelona is a giant club, Catalonia hardly ever produ
ces great players. There was excitement, therefore, when a fifteen-year-old urchin who had first watched Barça as a baby in his grandfather’s arms was seen passing balls like a quarterback in the club’s “Masia,” or farmhouse, for young players.

  Then Arsenal stole him. With hindsight that was inevitable. Like the old East German Stasi, Arsenal’s scouting team sees everything. In 1999 I went to watch South Africa under-seventeens play Zimbabwe under-seventeens in a little Soweto stadium. It was a scary time and place, and a marginal match, but in the main stand were five other white men: Arsenal coaches who had landed at the Johannesburg airport that morning.

  The Arsenal scout who spotted Fabregas was Francis Cagigao. The son of Spaniards who emigrated to London in the 1970s, Cagigao played for Arsenal in the FA Youth Cup final of 1988, but now scours Europe for Wenger.

  Soon after Fabregas was spotted, he became Arsenal’s youngest-ever debutant, at sixteen. Then he was Spain’s youngest international in seventy years. It all seemed odd. The teenage Fabregas was built like a waif and stood barely five feet seven. “An unproven featherweight,” wrote his then team-mate Ashley Cole.

  In those days, way back in 2005 or 2006, the central midfield in soccer was like the line of scrimmage in American football, a “pit” where monsters like Arsenal’s Patrick Vieira (six foot three) roamed. The physical takeover of soccer, as in most sports from tennis to baseball, looked unstoppable.

  Yet in just two years it has been reversed. The turning point occurred in Berlin just after half past six the night on June 30, 2006, during the match between Germany and Argentina at the last World Cup, when the Argentine coach, Jose Pekerman, sent on his big striker, Julio Ricardo Cruz (six foot two), instead of Cesc’s old Masia playmate Lionel Messi (five foot six, thanks to growth hormones). Messi with his small turning circle would have twisted the giant German central defenders silly. But they ate up Cruz, and Germany knocked out Argentina. The era of the boy had begun.