Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  At Arsenal, Fabregas has replaced Vieira in the central midfield. The Catalan, now about five foot nine but still built like a waif, has led a featherweight conquest of Europe’s biggest clubs: Messi, Bojan, and Andrés Iniesta are at Barcelona; Robinho and Wesley Sneijder at Real Madrid; Carlos Tévez at Manchester United; Diego at Werder Bremen; Franck Ribéry at Bayern Munich; and Sergio Agüero at Atletico Madrid. All of them are five foot six. France’s new playmaker Samir Nasri is five foot eight, but a waif like Fabregas. None of them is older than twenty-four.

  It turns out that amid the galloping supermen of modern soccer, only little men slight enough to twist can find the remaining inches of space. That’s why French coach Raynald Denoueix says clubs are now scouting shorties. Small is beautiful.

  Robin van Persie, Arsenal’s Dutch forward, explains this eloquently. “Cesc is slow,” he told the Dutch magazine Hard Gras. “He’s one of the slowest here. But he’s still the quickest of us all. He always thinks two seconds ahead. I sometimes think, ‘Why doesn’t the opponent take the ball off him?’ And there he comes, peep, with a very little feint. In training I catch up with him and think, ‘Now I’ll get you.’ And with his toe he gives—peep—a very little pass for a one-two. That gets him another metre and a half. So irritating!”

  A week before Arsenal and Milan drew 0–0 in the Champions League, Milan’s Kaká told me that Cesc was “a new generation of player.” “I mean,” Kaká explained, “He’s complete. He can defend, he can attack, he’s got a good shot with his right, with his left. He can do everything. Modern player.” Of course, Cesc’s still a good seven years off his peak.

  *The ultimate triumph of the little men came at the World Cup of 2010. Spain’s central midfield in overtime in the final consisted of Fabregas, Iniesta, and Xavi.

  Nicolas Anelka

  March 2008

  According to the etiquette for international players, being two hours late for a meeting with someone from outside soccer does not count as late. So the twenty or so photographers, wardrobe dressers, PR reps, and representatives of CNN, the world’s worst television station, start to get antsy only when Nicolas Anelka’s delay enters its third hour. We are waiting for the great man in a studio in North London, where he is to do a fashion shoot for his new clothing line and explain how the most expensive player in history aims to spend what should finally be the peak years of his career.

  Everyone sits around exchanging bored sports-and-film gossip and eating cake. Eventually, the CNN crew has to leave. They arrange for a PR woman who happens to be around to do the interview instead. Such are the rigors of world-class reporting.

  Anelka arrives four hours late, without apologies. The rumor is that he had some physiotherapy at Chelsea, but nobody has bothered telling us. He is ushered into the wardrobe room to don his first outfit. And as soon as he starts to undress, you understand why he feels he has the right to waste the afternoon of twenty London yuppies: What a body! Sprinters’ legs, the upper torso of a basketball player, on top a thin and fragile shaven head, and the whole coated the color of milk chocolate. No fat; just fast-twitch muscle. Anelka strips down to a tiny pair of briefs, watched closely by a Swedish PR woman, a gay fashion worker, and Player magazine. What is his waist size? Thirty-four inches, the same as Player magazine’s, even though Anelka at six foot one is four and a half inches taller.

  Over the next hour, while Anelka poses in various outfits, and gets dressed and undressed again, he explains why he has had such a weird career, and whether in the next two years, perhaps playing a new position, he can redeem it and convert himself from one of the great players of our time into one of the great achievers.

  But first, that body.

  Do you appreciate how lucky you are to have been born with that?

  “No,” says Anelka, in a thin, reedy voice that you sometimes have to strain to hear. “When I started soccer, when I came to Clairefontaine, the best [soccer] school in France, I was small and—how do you say?” he holds his thumb and forefinger very narrowly apart. Despite a decade in English soccer, Anelka can hardly speak an English sentence without an error.

  Weak?

  “Yeah.”

  Stick-thin?

  “Yeah. And my brothers, they are smaller than me. And they are older than me. So I don’t know how I became like that, but I think it’s because I work every day. It’s not like I was already strong and tall.”

  Anelka was born twenty-nine years ago in Versailles, the son of a civil servant from the French Antilles. He grew up a few miles from Louis XIV’s palace, in one of France’s banlieues, or immigrant ghettos. This is of course the standard origin for top French players. In fact, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry grew up near Anelka in poor banlieues in the same generally rich region west of Paris.

  In 1998 the three youngsters were part of a group of friends who laughed together, listened to music in the evenings, and generally kept each other company in the French squad at Clairefontaine, as they waited to see which of them would make the final cut for the World Cup. Anelka was only nineteen but already France’s most gifted center-forward. “I remember he didn’t need to work as hard as others,” Vieira records in his autobiography. The day Anelka was cut from France’s squad, he packed and left at once.

  Anelka is famously a loner, but when I asked him if it was possible to have friends in soccer, he said, “I have some friends in soccer. It is people I know from maybe ten years.”

  Players from your generation, like Thierry Henry?

  “I think so, because I know them since I was kid, so I think it’s more simple.”

  He has said elsewhere that he has lost his presoccer friends from his youth in the banlieue—not because he changed, he insists, but because they began to regard him differently when he became a star.

  Anelka was only seventeen when Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger, poached him from Paris St. Germain’s youth team for just under $800,000. And the sad fact is that although he left Highbury at twenty, he arguably had the best years of his career there. The teenage Anelka had the pace of an Olympic sprinter, plus technique. Playing in front of Dennis Bergkamp’s passes helped too. He has never since beaten his seventeen league goals of the 1998–1999 season when Arsenal won the English double. After he scored twice for France against England at Wembley in early 1999, French captain Didier Deschamps remarked, “Now we have our Ronaldo.” (Few people then gave much thought to Henry, a fragile winger sitting on Juventus’s bench.)

  France, who had won the World Cup in 1998 without a striker, was now complete. You could hardly wait for all the World Cups Anelka would play. To date, he has played zero.

  In the summer of 1999, Anelka made the decision that changed his career: He left Arsenal for Real Madrid, for $35 million. Wenger has called Anelka the best natural finisher he had worked with and said that his departure was his biggest regret as a manager. Vieira’s verdict: “He made a big mistake in leaving.”

  Couldn’t you have learned more by staying with Wenger, soccer’s most respected shaper of young players?

  “No. I think I can learn myself. You know, soccer is not about one coach. It’s about . . .” But just as Anelka is about to explain what soccer is about, he is interrupted by photographers shouting instructions on posing. The flashes pop. Anelka continues, “He’s a good manager. Sometimes you make your decision, and you make your decision. And that’s it.” Anelka is not the type to admit any sort of dependence on anyone in soccer.

  So which coach taught you the most?

  “I think I had good relations with Kevin Keegan [who coached Anelka at Manchester City]. It was very easy for him to teach me things in training because he used to play soccer, he used to be one of the best, and he used to play up front like me, so I always had a great time with him.” This may be the first instance in recorded history that anyone has claimed to have learned more from Keegan than from Wenger.

  We return to the wardrobe, where the dresser and a couple of minders fuss over t
he half-naked Anelka in English and French: “That looks really good.” “Rapper style.” “Hanging off.” “Too short.” They’re slim fits.” Anelka is concentrating so hard on the clothes that he cannot answer any questions until we exit the wardrobe area.

  You came onto the scene at Arsenal already apparently complete. What have you learned since as a player?

  “I think you learn confidence on the pitch. When you first start, you don’t know anything about playing soccer. Ten years later, because you’ve played so many games, you know what to do and how to do it. You are not afraid anymore to try things, not like when you used to be very young. I think it’s special, because only people who have played soccer can speak about it. Even if I tried to speak about it, it’s difficult to make people understand. You need to trust you, more than anything, because if you don’t have confidence in you on the pitch, even if you are the best player in the world, you won’t do anything.”

  Do you always have this confidence?

  “Sometimes it’s difficult because you know sometimes you will have a bad game. You are not confident every game.”

  On Anelka’s first day at Real Madrid, as he tells it, nobody bothered to introduce him to anyone in the locker room. It wasn’t a great start. He says that Samuel Eto’o and Geremi—fellow black young Francophones—had a friendly word with him, to say, “Watch out. Some senior players have already gone to the president to ask why you’ve been signed when Fernando Morientes is already here.”

  It ended up being quite a season. That March of 2000, Anelka boycotted a practice to protest how Real’s coach Vicente del Bosque was using him. Everyone said his older brothers—who managed him as the only product of the family business—had put him up to it. The consensus in the British media was that Anelka was “mad.” They rechristened him “Le Sulk.” Real, already fed up with the expensive kid, gave him a forty-five-day ban. It became the most Anelka-esque episode of Anelka’s career.

  I went to Madrid during the ban to have a look. Anelka was celebrating his twenty-first birthday. He played golf and tennis, hung out with his brothers and the neighborhood pets, went to Real for punishment training, but was sent home for not calling in advance, and then served birthday cake and Coca-Cola to the hordes of journalists waiting outside his house.

  A club spokesman had told the journalists, “If we had known all this before, we wouldn’t have signed him. To have done otherwise would be masochistic.” Del Bosque said: “This is not a school.”

  In fact, Real, like most soccer teams, was rather like an old-fashioned British boarding school. You could see this even as Madrid took the field in a Champions League game against Dynamo Kiev while Anelka was spending another evening at home.

  The team was led onto the pitch by the trio of Raul, Fernando Hierro, and Fernando Redondo. Raul (good at games) was the most popular boy in the class. Hierro was the school captain: He had been around forever, was challenged by no one, and so had become a bit of a bully. Redondo was their pal. Roberto Carlos, Steve McManaman, and Fernando Morientes tagged along, good enough and sociable enough to have gained acceptance. But Anelka, as so often in soccer, was the strange, quiet boy who got bullied.

  As Henry says, “In soccer they never stop telling you that you’re nothing without the others. But in fact you’re always by yourself. Nico has understood that.”

  Eventually, Anelka decided to try to block out the negative in Madrid and concentrate on the positive. That season Real had two teams: a weak one in the league and an unbeatable one in the Champions League. In the final in Paris, with Anelka in the side, Madrid hammered Valencia 3–0. As a photographer instructs him to smile, he recalls, “I think it’s something special when you play a final in France, in Paris. How do you say? Good memory.” Is there a moment he remembers in particular? “When you take the trophy.”

  A few weeks later, at Euro 2000, Anelka became a European champion with France too, though he didn’t play in the final against Italy. At only twenty-one, he had already won almost everything. But in the eight years since, he has added just one more prize: a Turkish league title with Fenerbahce. Imagine what Anelka’s career might have been like if he had stayed with Wenger, or had turned up to practice at Real. But after that season he had to get out of Madrid. Anelka had played for two big clubs, and left both in bad odor. After that, he would barely get another chance in topflight soccer.

  Was it hard to do your growing up in public?

  “It was very difficult, but people don’t think about it. I think they don’t want to think about it. They just want to see someone’s success. But it’s difficult when you’re playing in big clubs and you are very young. You never know what’s happening inside the club, or inside your life. And they expect you to be good all the time. It’s hard to be good all the time. I don’t think people realize: It’s a nice game, it’s nice to watch, but”—and for once Anelka laughs—“it’s not an easy game.”

  The incomprehension of outsiders is perhaps the dominant theme of Anelka’s conversation.

  Paris St. Germain paid Real $30.2 million to bring the local boy home. The aim was to build a team around Anelka for the black and brown kids from the banlieues who populated the Auteuil end of the stadium (not so much for the Boulogne end, who are chiefly white skinheads).

  PSG’s president when Anelka joined was Laurent Perpère. He told me that Anelka didn’t speak. “You never knew what he wanted,” said Perpère. He remarked that in this the player strangely resembled Ronaldinho, who joined PSG in 2002 and also failed there. “He always smiled, but you never knew what he wanted. He was always in another world.”

  PSG’s coach, Luis Fernandez, didn’t hold with kids being stars. Perpère explains, “He thought there should be only one star in Paris, and that was Luis Fernandez.” In the end, Fernandez and Anelka got involved in some sort of fisticuffs at a training session in October 2001. Anelka said, “Luis comes from the banlieue, like me. So we’re used to shouting matches. We always reconcile afterwards.” But PSG quickly loaned Anelka to Liverpool. He would have liked to stay there, and Steven Gerrard was a great admirer, but Liverpool wouldn’t keep him. And so the parade continued, through Manchester City, Fenerbahce, Bolton, and now Chelsea.

  At which club were you happiest?

  “I think I was happy everywhere I played. There was no regret.”

  But why has a great player like you not always played for great clubs?

  “I think it was more about my character than my football,” says Anelka, as we trek back from photo shoot to wardrobe yet again. “A lot of people were speaking about me, but not on the football pitch, maybe outside. That’s why some of the doors was closed. But I kept working.” It annoyed people, he has said, to see a twenty-three-year-old driving a Ferrari. The critics forget the sacrifices he had made, leaving home as a child to join the academy in Clairefontaine where the boys were told that only four of the twenty-two of them would make it. “And at the start, I wasn’t one of those four.”

  Is your personality perhaps not suited to soccer?

  “I think it suits soccer, because if I didn’t have any personality, I wouldn’t be here today and play for the big clubs. So—maybe it was too strong.” Anelka allows himself a smile.

  Is that why your sporting heroes are strong personalities, like Maradona, Cantona, and Mike Tyson?

  “There’s something special about them because they’re very good at what they’re doing, and at the same they do what they want. They have extreme personality. I play football, and I try to be myself. But people say I have a strong personality. I don’t say anything. People say that. I have the luck to have—not the same personality, but a strong personality. They are a great example for me.”

  The second theme of Anelka’s conversation is beginning to emerge: Life is a morality play in which he is in the right. Anelka is one of the few northern European players (as opposed to Brazilians or Africans) with faith. While at Arsenal, he converted to Islam. Later he changed his name to Abdul-
Salam Bilal. His faith was a reason he later chose to play in Turkey. Other leading players, including Franck Ribéry and Robin van Persie, who both married Muslim women, are also among the few European converts to Islam.

  Within the game, the austere religion is a sort of antidote to locker-room lad culture. In British locker rooms in particular, the ultimate term of praise for a teammate is one of the lads. You get to be one of the lads through shopping, drinking, and sex, whenever possible in the company of other lads. Islam appeals to the likes of Van Persie, who need to be saved from laddism. But Anelka has no gift for lad culture, because he is not clubby, anything but “one of the lads.” His only laddish aspect is his dress. Islam is his shield from having to pretend to be a lad.

  His social problems cost him on the French team as well. The future Ronaldo missed a total of four years of international soccer because of rows with France’s coaches and his own walkouts. He didn’t want to play for Roger Lemerre, because whereas Lemerre addressed all the other players with the familiar tu, he sometimes used the more formal vous with Anelka. Later he once refused to show up for Jacques Santini. “Santini,” reveals Anelka between wardrobe changes, “is not a good manager anyway.”

  Raymond Domenech wouldn’t take him to the World Cup of 2006, even though Lilian Thuram went to try to talk the coach into it, bringing a mute Zinedine Zidane with him to add weight to his argument. Domenech picked Djibril Cissé instead, who isn’t even a poor man’s Anelka. Even when Cissé broke his leg just before the World Cup, Domenech still wouldn’t pick Anelka. Anelka says that when he’s with the French squad nowadays, he watches and speaks only when appropriate. You might almost think he had a difficult relationship with his own country. His two famous brothers have emigrated: One stayed on in Madrid, and the other runs a bar on Miami Beach.