Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Cruijff took responsibility not only for his own performance, but for everybody else’s too. He was forever pointing, a coach on the field. Michels had told him, “If a teammate makes a mistake, you should have prevented that mistake.” Frank Rijkaard, later a teammate of Cruijff’s and opponent of Maradona’s, said that Maradona could win a match by himself, but didn’t have Cruijff’s gift of changing the team’s tactics to win it.

  As a leader, Cruijff was a child of his time. Like his contemporary Franz Beckenbauer, or the students in the streets of Paris in 1968, he was a postwar baby boomer impatient to seize power. The boomers wanted to reinvent the world. They didn’t do deference. Before Cruijff, Dutch soccer players had knocked on the chairman’s door to hear what they would be paid. Cruijff shocked Ajax by bringing his father-in-law, Cor Coster, in with him to do his pay talks.

  Cruijff drove everybody at Ajax crazy. He never stopped talking, in that working-class Amsterdam accent, with his very own grammar, his penchant for apparently random words (“Them on the right is goat’s cheese”), and the shrugs of shoulders that sealed arguments. He once said about his playing career, talking about himself in the second person as usual, “That was the worst thing, that you always saw everything better. It meant that you were always talking, always correcting.”

  His personality was so outsize that Michels hired not one but two psychologists to understand him. Cruijff, always open to new thinking in soccer, was happy to talk to them. One shrink, Dolf Grunwald, blamed everything on Cruijff’s father fixation. “Really [Cruijff] denies all authority because he—subconsciously—compares everyone to his F. [Father].... If he can stop seeing in Michels the man who is not as good as his f. [father], we’ll have moved on a lot.” (Grunwald died in 2004, but Dutch author Menno de Galan obtained his notes.)

  Grunwald said that when teammates attacked Cruijff, he became “more nervous and talkative.” But when Cruijff felt accepted, he calmed down. “Then his attitude changes too: soft voice, sits down, hangs or lies, talks less, somewhat damp eyes.”

  After Grunwald fell out of favor with Michels, Cruijff was sent to Ajax’s other shrink, Roelf Zeven, where he lay on the sofa and talked incessantly about his father-in-law, Coster. Here was the missing link in Freud’s work: the father-in-law fixation.

  All the talking may have helped. From 1971 to 1973, Cruijff’s Ajax won three straight European Cups. A neighborhood team from a country that had never done anything in soccer before, whose stadium would have been small for the English second division, and whose players earned no more than successful shopkeepers had reinvented soccer.

  Then Ajax blew themselves up. Cruijff’s departure was instigated by the player power that he himself had created. In 1973 the players gathered in a countryside hotel to elect their captain. The majority voted for Keizer, against the incumbent Cruijff. He fled to Barcelona, whereupon Ajax’s team collapsed. Cruijff himself would never win another international prize as a player.

  The transfer fee Barcelona paid for Cruijff was so big—5 million guilders—that the Spanish state wouldn’t countenance it. Finally, Barça got him into Spain by officially registering him as a piece of agricultural machinery. Cruijff scored twice on his debut, and that season, 1973–1974, Barcelona won its first title in fourteen years. Immediately afterward he rushed off to the World Cup in West Germany.

  The Dutch team that summer was largely his creation. It was Cruijff, the captain, who had told midfielder Arie Haan that he would play the tournament as libero. (“Are you crazy?” Haan had replied. It proved to be a brilliant idea.) It was Cruijff who had groomed Holland’s striker, Johnny Rep, as a youngster at Ajax, sometimes screaming at the bench during games, “Rep must warm up!”

  The tournament wasn’t Cruijff’s best month in soccer, but it was the month that most people saw him and the style he had invented. For many foreigners, the Cruijff they know is the Cruijff of his only World Cup.

  Cruijff notionally spent the tournament at center-forward, but he was always everywhere. Sometimes he’d sprint down the left wing and cross with the outside of his right foot. Sometimes he’d drop into midfield and leave opposing center-backs marking air. Sometimes he’d drop back just to scream instructions. Arsène Wenger tells the story of Cruijff telling two of Holland’s midfielders to swap positions and then returning fifteen minutes later to tell them to swap again. To Wenger, this showed how hard it was to replicate the fluidity of “total football” if you didn’t have Cruijff himself.

  Holland hammered Brazil in the semis, but after that everything went wrong. Several days before the final, the West German tabloid Bild published a story headlined “Cruyff, Champagne, Naked Girls, and a Cool Bath.” It claimed that several Dutch players had held a nocturnal party with half-clad Mädchen in their hotel pool. Cruijff spent much of the night before the final on the phone to his wife, Danny, promising her the article was a lie. It was a terrible moment for a man who had spent his adult life building the secure family he had lost at age twelve; Cruijff was no George Best. That phone call, says his brother Henny, is why he played “like a dishrag” in the final. None of it would have happened if their father hadn’t died so early, added Henny.

  Admittedly, Cruijff wasn’t a dishrag in the first minute of the final. Dropping back to libero he picked up the ball, ran across half the pitch, and got himself fouled just outside the German area. Referee Jack Taylor, an English butcher, wrongly gave Holland a penalty. But thereafter, Cruijff mostly hung around in his own half, allowing Berti “the Terrier” Vogts to mark him out of the game. In fact, Vogts had more scoring chances than Cruijff did. Holland lost 2–1. At the reception afterward, Cruijff buttonholed the Dutch queen Juliana and asked her to cut taxes.

  Cruijff’s next four years at Barcelona were mostly depressing. He got kicked a lot, won no big prizes, and suffered from stress. “If you’re not enjoying [soccer], you can’t bear the pressure,” he said later. In 1978, at only thirty-one, he retired. He refused even to play in the World Cup in Argentina. Many foreigners wrongly believe he was boycotting the Argentine military regime. Rather, haunted by the “swimming pool incident” of 1974, Cruijff stayed home for “family reasons.”

  A Dutch television broadcaster tried to change his mind with a campaign called “Pull Cruijff Over the Line” (with a theme song by “Father Abraham” of Smurf-song fame). Cruijff briefly mused about playing on the condition that he could take his wife. Nothing came of it. And so David Winner argues in Brilliant Orange that the “swimming pool incident” determined the outcome of two World Cups: 1974 and 1978, which Holland again lost in the final.

  In October 1978 Cruijff played his farewell match: a friendly with Ajax against Bayern Munich, which Ajax lost 0–8. And that would have been the end of Cruijff the player, but for a pig farm. In Barcelona, Cruijff and his wife, Danny, had met a French Russian opportunist named Michel Basilevitch. “The most handsome man in the world,” Danny Cruijff called him. Basilevitch, who drove a leased Rolls-Royce, persuaded them to put the bulk of their money in a pig farm. The Cruijffs lost millions of dollars. Next thing anyone knew, Cruijff had returned to soccer, in the United States, with the Los Angeles Aztecs and later the Washington Diplomats.

  Though he loved money with the passion of a man who had grown up without it, he hadn’t come just for the cash. He enjoyed the anonymity of the United States—he could go shopping without being bothered—and he fell in love with soccer again. As ever, there were irritations. In Washington, he drove his British coach, Gordon Bradley, and his British teammates crazy with his fancy ideas about soccer. Once, after Bradley had given a team talk and left the locker room, Cruijff got up, wiped the blackboard clean, and said, “Of course, we’re going to do it completely differently.” One of the British players, Bobby Stokes, said that when the “Dips” bought Cruijff they should also have bought a year’s worth of cotton wool to block the other players’ ears. At one point Cruijff grew so despairing of his teammates that he announced he would limit himsel
f to only scoring goals, and did.

  The American years provided perhaps the most characteristic Cruijff story: Cruijff and the Florida bus driver. Pieter van Os, in his Dutch book on Cruijff’s American years, interviewed several eyewitnesses to construct a full account. What seems to have happened is that just after the Dips landed in Florida for a training camp, the bus driver got them lost. Cruijff had never been to the place before. However, he immediately went to the front of the bus and, standing beside the driver, dictated the correct route. Apparently, he often used to direct taxi drivers in cities he didn’t know. Maddeningly, he usually turned out to be right.

  When Cruijff returned to Ajax in 1981, the Dutch were skeptical. The Calvinist Holland of the time distrusted anyone who thought he was special. Cruijff had never been very popular in his own country, where he was known as “Nose” or the “Money Wolf.” By now he was thirty-four, with a broken body. Surely, he was just coming back for the money, right?

  He made his Second Coming in an Ajax-Haarlem game. Early in the first half, he turned two defenders and lobbed the keeper, who was barely off his line. For the next three years, Dutch stadiums sold out wherever Cruijff played, as people flocked to see him one last time. He gave us thirty-yard passes with the outside of his foot that put teammates in front of the keeper so unexpectedly that sometimes the television cameras couldn’t keep up.

  But what he did on the field was only the half of it. The older Cruijff was the most interesting speaker on soccer I have ever heard. “Until I was thirty I did everything on feeling,” Cruijff said. “After thirty I began to understand why I did the things I did.” In 1981 I was twelve, living in Holland, and for the rest of my teens I imbibed everything he said about soccer. It was as if you could read a lucid conversation with Einstein in the paper every day or two.

  Cruijff said things you could use at any level of soccer: don’t give a square ball, because if it’s intercepted the opposition has immediately beaten two men, you and the player you were passing to. Don’t pass to a team-mate’s feet, but pass it a yard in front of him, so he has to run onto the ball, which ups the pace of the game. If you’re having a bad game, just do simple things. Trap the ball and pass it to your nearest teammate. Do this a few times, and the feeling that you’re doing things right will restore your confidence. His wisdoms directly or indirectly improved almost every player in Holland. “That’s logical”—the phrase he used to clinch arguments—became a Dutch cliché.

  Cruijff had opinions on everything. He advised golfer Ian Woosnam on his swing. He said the traffic lights in Amsterdam were in the wrong places, which gave him the right to ignore them. His old teammate Willem van Hanegem recalls Cruijff teaching him how to insert coins into a soft-drink machine. Van Hanegem had been wrestling with the machine until Cruijff told him to use “a short, dry throw.” Maddeningly, the method worked.

  The aging Cruijff won two straight league titles with Ajax. When he was thirty-six, and Ajax wouldn’t pay him enough, he switched to its archrival, Feyenoord, and won the title again in his final season as a player. As Scheepmaker said: Statistically, buying Cruijff didn’t guarantee you a championship, but it certainly made it immensely more likely. When Cruijff was substituted during his last match, Scheepmaker folded up his desk in the press box and rose to applaud a man who, he said, had made his life richer than it would have been without him.

  *Unfortunately, the only time I ever met Cruijff, he ended up hating me. I had interviewed him in his Barcelona mansion in spring 2000, and things had gone quite well. As per agreement, I wrote about it in the Observer ahead of Euro 2000. The newspaper had paid him for it. Initially, the Observer and Cruijff had also agreed that he would write a series of columns during Euro 2000 (with me as ghostwriter), but that deal fell through, as deals with Cruijff often do.

  A few months after Euro 2000, I wrote a starstuck account in a Dutch magazine about my meeting with the great man. The cover of the magazine was a photograph of me holding a drawing of Cruijff beneath the words, “Johan and Me.”

  Cruijff was furious. He said I should have paid him again before writing about the meeting a second time. Suddenly, two attacks on me appeared in the Dutch press. In brief, they said I was a plagiarist who wrote about other people’s extramarital affairs and had accused Cruijff of fraud.

  I don’t know if anyone has ever had a more upsetting experience with his childhood hero. If so, I can’t bear to hear it.

  Andrés Iniesta

  May 2009

  It rarely happens, but sometimes a player stops to savor the moment. On Wednesday night Andrés Iniesta was twenty-five years old, in Rome, at his peak, and part of a Barcelona team that was passing rings around Manchester United. This was as good as it gets. So for a second during yet another attack he just rolled the ball around under his foot, as if tickling its belly. In Rome, Iniesta showed his sport the way forward.

  Iniesta, his teammate Xavi, and Barcelona’s coach, Josep Guardiola, possibly don’t share DNA, but in soccer terms they are brothers. The first brother, Guardiola, emerged twenty years ago as the definitive Barça playmaker: effectively the side’s quarterback, who launched almost every attack with a perfect pass. The second brother, little Xavi, was better. Finally, almost a decade ago, a tiny white-faced teenager showed up at Barça’s training. Guardiola studied Iniesta for a bit, turned to Xavi, and said, “You’ve seen that? You’ll push me towards the exit, but that guy will send us both into retirement.”

  It took a while. In 2006, when Barcelona last won the Champions League, Iniesta appeared only as a substitute. But inside the club, everyone knew he was coming. Last year I asked Barcelona’s then coach, Frank Rijkaard, to name the player with the perfect personality for top-class soccer. Rijkaard hemmed and hawed, but finally, in triumph, shouted out the right answer: “Andrés—Andrés Iniesta! He’s always there in training, always tries, and is just a wonderful soccer player.”

  Iniesta’s magical year began in Vienna last June 30. In the final of Euro 2008, his Spanish team passed rings around Germany. Vienna prefigured Rome. Both times, Iniesta, Xavi, and their buddies seemed to be playing piggy-in-the-middle against Europe’s second-best team. Germany and United chased ball in the heat. It wasn’t fair.

  Barcelona has to play like that. “Without the ball we are a horrible team,” says Guardiola. “So we need the ball.” Barça is too little—perhaps the shortest great team since the 1950s—to win the ball by tackling. The unofficial minimum height for top-class soccer is about five feet eight, and Xavi, Iniesta, and Lionel Messi are below it. The minimum for central defenders is about six feet, and Carles Puyol is below that. So Barça defends either by closing off space through perfect positioning or by keeping the ball. Johan Cruijff, Dutch father of the Barcelona style, teaches, “If we have the ball, they can’t score.”

  Modern soccer is supposed to be manlier. Managers talk about “heart,” “grit,” “bottle,” and mileage covered. What Iniesta showed in Rome is that these are secondary virtues. Soccer is a dance in space. When everyone is charging around closing the gaps, you need the technique of Iniesta to find tiny openings. In Rome, he barely mislaid a pass. Sometimes he’d float past United players, his yellow boots barely marking the grass. Occasionally he hit little lobs, a sign that he knew this was his night.

  We know how good United is. That’s the measure of how good Barça was in Rome. In games at this level, some very respected players get found out. It happened to United’s Ji-Sung Park, Anderson, and Michael Carrick, but also to Wayne Rooney. Excellent with his right foot, he is helpless with his left. Barcelona covered his one foot.

  When it was over, Barça’s players celebrated with Barça’s fans behind the goal. But as we looked from players to fans and back again, already it was impossible to say which was which. Iniesta is a Barça fan. On Wednesday he was one of seven starting players raised in Barcelona’s academy, the Masia.

  Had he popped into the VIP buffet elsewhere in the Stadio Olimpico, he’d have s
een a portent. Eusebio, Portugal’s star of the 1960s, was hanging around alone in a blazer. Every few seconds, someone would come up to hug him, or just express awe, and Eusebio would smile. He must do this one hundred times a week. A year ago, you couldn’t have imagined Iniesta in old age receiving such honors. You can now. In Rome Rooney called him “the best player in the world at the moment.” Iniesta’s next target: the World Cup 2010.

  *Watching Iniesta during overtime of the World Cup final in Johannesburg, I was reminded again of the Champions League final. In Johannesburg Iniesta had been kicked to pieces by Mark van Bommel all game, but when Van Bommel went into defense to replace John Heitinga (who had been sent off), Iniesta was suddenly free. From that moment on he ran the game and, fittingly, scored the winner. In the space of three years, he had won three Spanish titles, two Champions Leagues, the European Championship, and the World Cup. Not bad for a man so modest and ordinary looking that when a woman in a Barcelona café mistook him for a waiter, he dutifully went to the kitchen and got her order.

  Eric Cantona

  August 2009

  Eric Cantona had just won his first league title in England, with Leeds United, in 1992. British television reporter Elton Welsby, desperate to get him to talk, ventured into baby French: “Magnifique, Eric!” Cantona replied, “Oh, do you speak French?” “Non,” admitted Welsby. And that was the end of that.