by Simon Kuper
The mostly silent player—so well known, yet so little understood—continues to exert fascination twelve years after his retirement. At Old Trafford, where Cantona won four titles in five seasons with Manchester United, fans still sing “Oooh Aaah Cantona.” As Philippe Auclair reports in his new Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King: “In 2008, a poll conducted in 185 countries by the Premiership’s sponsor Barclays found him to be this competition’s ‘All-Time Favourite Player.’”2 This summer, two new symptoms of Cantomania have appeared: Auclair’s biography follows shortly after Ken Loach’s movie Looking for Eric, in which Cantona (played by himself) steps out of a life-size poster to befriend a Mancunian postman.
Cantona wasn’t the best player the Premier League has ever seen. He was a tad slow, never won an international prize, and dazzled the Premiership when it was still a backwater. Yet he lives on in fans’ minds in largerthan-life-size format. Perhaps we now have enough distance to understand why. Both Auclair’s and Loach’s works, despite their flaws, help explain what made Cantona such a seminal figure for Manchester United, for English soccer, and indeed for English life in the 1990s. Cantona was an immigrant who landed at just the right moment.
The man who arrived in England in January 1992 had been a glorious failure in France. At twenty-five, he had already played for six clubs. He had also already briefly retired from soccer, after walking up to every member of the French league’s disciplinary committee, repeating the word idiot, and then walking out of the room. He collected red cards. Yet England needed him.
In the early 1990s it was a shabby country deep in recession. It was also quite isolated. At this time, just before Eurostar trains and budget airlines connected Britain to the rest of Europe, the mysterious European Continent was a world away. Cantona brought it close. Loach’s beautifully made, moving, and occasionally sentimental film is set in present-day Manchester, and whenever Cantona appears on-screen he provides a visual shock in the gloomy city: such a handsome figure amid the mostly pasty and overweight local soccer fans. When he arrived in 1992, that shock was even more pronounced.
English soccer then was as shabby as the country. Auclair describes the game of that era as “a drab, sometimes vicious affair.” The author, incidentally, is not only a French journalist but also a well-known indie musician who sings under the name Louis Philippe. He became very big in Japan, and now lives in London, though for three years he trekked all around Britain and France interviewing more than two hundred people for this comprehensive, fair, if at times pretentious tome. Auclair also forced himself to watch “hours upon hours” of Cantona’s English matches on tape, which reminded him how bad they were. English teams of the time mostly featured “hard-tackling box-to-box one-footed midfielders” and giant center-halves and center-forwards who couldn’t play soccer, all rolling around in the mud. The British mistrust of what was then known as “continental flair” was such that even after Cantona in his first six months in England had helped Leeds win the title, Leeds’s manager, Howard Wilkinson, sold him to Manchester United for just $2.15 million. When United’s manager, Alex Ferguson, told his assistant, Bryan Kidd, the price, Kidd gasped: “Has he lost a leg or something?” Wilkinson’s own son cried when Cantona went.
Crucially, Cantona had the physique to cope with the frenzy of English soccer. “People don’t realize how huge he was,” says Auclair. But Cantona could not merely rise above the frenzy; he could transform it into order. It had been years since England had seen a player like him, who seemed to know where everyone on the pitch was at any moment, who could position himself almost unmarked “between the lines” of the opposition’s defense and midfield, and who could put the ball where he intended to with the speed and spin he wanted to. While giants galumphed around him, he found time. Ferguson told Auclair that Cantona became one of those players who “teach you something you didn’t know about soccer, and can’t be learned, because you had no idea it existed before they did it.” English soccer has seen players like that since: Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola, Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo. But back in the early 1990s Cantona alone could play this sort of soccer consistently. He was the player Ferguson had been searching for. The manager had already realized that United—without a league title since 1967—needed to abandon the traditional British style. Cantona showed him (and rising youngsters like Ryan Giggs and David Beckham) how.
In Ferguson’s words, he was “the perfect player, in the perfect club, at the perfect moment.” Partly this was Ferguson’s doing. The success at United of a player who had left in bad odor almost everywhere else may be the manager’s biggest triumph, as big as any Champions League trophy. Ferguson quickly understood that the key to Cantona’s fairly simple personality was always to take his side, no matter how wrong he was. The strategy paid off.
But the Frenchman made his impact on English soccer as much off the field as on it. He was a different man from other players. Almost any other player describes himself as a “professional.” The key to Cantona is that he saw himself as an artist. That is obviously part of his appeal to Loach, the reason the director made Cantona effectively the cocreator of Looking for Eric. Cantona, by playing himself, seems to be using the film to tell us something about who he is.
Cantona knows something about the arts. He has painted, exhibited photographs, produced plays, and read poems (and almost signed for one French club after its president gave him a Joan Miró painting), but he also saw his soccer as a form of art. Auclair, who actually is an artist, points out that Cantona has a naive view of artists. To the player, the “artist” is simply someone who expresses himself with absolute freedom.
Still, the point is that as a self-proclaimed “artist,” Cantona saw his job as performing. The professional merely tries to win matches. Cantona always wanted to give something to the fans. It bothered him that in France, the small crowds were generally cold and critical. But English fans, so numerous, noisy, and close to the pitch, responded to him. He performed for them. “In just two months in England I feel more at home than I ever did in France,” he said. “Now that I have mastered the perils of driving on the wrong side of the road, I can cope with everything.”
A professional would have ignored Matthew Simmons, the fan who abused Cantona from the stands at Crystal Palace in 1995, because to the professional, fans are incidental, but Cantona leaped into the stands and karate-kicked Simmons. To Cantona, that too was part of being an artist. Self-expression might mean a pass flicked off the outside of the boot over a defense. It might mean learning to play the trumpet (badly) during his ninemonth ban for kicking Simmons. Or it could mean violence on an impulse. Auclair works hard to defend him against English xenophobes, but on the evidence of his book, Cantona’s career is a litany of spontaneous violence: punching teammates, leaping into the crowd to slug people even before Simmons, taking on almost a whole team of opponents after a match, judo-kicking an opponent, breaking a television reporter’s rib, and so on.
For Manchester United’s fans, the violence was part of his appeal. The club’s history—and that of Ferguson himself—divides into pre-Cantona and post-Cantona eras. It wasn’t merely that Cantona taught United “continental” soccer. He also changed the club’s identity. Perhaps the seminal moment was the press conference he gave after his leap at Simmons. Faced with a roomful of journalists who were expecting him to say he was sorry for what was then being portrayed as the most dastardly act in British life since Hitler’s Blitz, he said only (the accompanying commentary is by Auclair): “When the seagulls [a sip of water] follow a trawler [leaning back, smiling, pausing again], it’s because they think [another pause] sardines [and another] will be thrown into the [slight hesitation] sea [a smile and a quick nod]. Thank you very much.” The journalists guffawed. The artist had branched out into performance poetry. As the credits roll at the end of Loach’s film, footage of the speech is shown: it’s the quintessential Cantona moment, the artist confronting the world.
What most
United fans—and Ferguson—loved about the speech was its lack of contrition. So much of Cantona’s appeal was that he did whatever he wanted, no matter what the world thought. He was happy to reject the world, and to reject old friends at the merest suspicion of disloyalty. This, of course, has since become Ferguson’s stance: If you’re not with Manchester United, you’re against us, and we don’t care anyway. No wonder the manager, who is still close to his former player, now tells anecdotes of Cantona’s physical assaults as if they were charming jokes. He admired the violence.
Auclair told me, “It chimes in with Cantona’s own perception of the world, which is totally black-and-white: Either you are with me and you are my greatest friend, or you are my enemy. It’s more calculated in the case of Alex, whereas Cantona, I think, had serious behavioral problems. He was one of the elements that helped Ferguson build that particular side of Manchester United.”
The Cantona of Loach’s film, too, is a talisman who protects the postman and other United fans against a hostile world. It’s fitting that in the climactic scene, dozens of United fans, all wearing Cantona masks, including Cantona himself, take apart a villain’s mansion to help their mates. Violence in the service of justice is part of Cantona’s—and Ferguson’s—ethic.
However, after the Simmons incident, Cantona quietly changed. He resolved to ditch expression through violence. While coaching kids as part of his punishment, he told one boy, “If you’re going to get a yellow card, walk away and don’t argue with the referee.” Cantona mostly stuck to that ethic himself while winning his last two titles with United.
He never won anything grander. He should have been France’s center-forward when they became world champions in 1998, but when he understood that his role would be subordinate to Zinedine Zidane’s and Youri Djorkaeff’s, he pulled out. That’s why, as Auclair says, the enduring fascination with him is entirely English. Cantona is not part of the legend of French soccer. In fact, had he played in the 1998 World Cup, and gotten in Zidane’s way, or caused renewed fractures within the squad, the French legend of 1998 might never have happened.
By then he had retired anyway. He quit suddenly in 1997, aged only thirty. Admittedly, he had got fatter, even double-chinned, but once again he was rejecting the world’s largesse while it was still being offered. Cantona was being fabulously himself. So alluring are the spoils of soccer that it’s hard to think of another player strong enough to walk away while still at the top. Cantona had thought he would return to soccer later, but he could never quite be bothered. He wouldn’t have had the same impact again in England anyway, because by the late 1990s brilliant “artists” were flooding the Premier League.
Auclair describes Cantona’s retirement from soccer as a death. In fact, his own account makes clear that it wasn’t. Afterward, Cantona successfully reinvented himself. Though he once said he “would love to be poor,” he has been an efficient point man for Nike, as well as popularizing beach soccer, and has become an artist of sorts. It’s not that he has a gift for any other art form besides soccer. “He’s a decentish actor,” Auclair grudgingly admits. Indeed, Cantona’s halting diction in Loach’s film suggests why he so rarely spoke to the world: That wasn’t his forte. Yet it still looks like a pretty good life: money plus a rung, however low, in the artistic pantheon. It’s more than most former players manage.
Cantona lives on, in Britain at least, as the man who took English soccer from an English era to a continental one, and as the man who together with Ferguson and the club’s then marketing manager, Edward Freedman, forged Manchester United’s modern identity. The Premier League has seen better players, but nobody who meant as much.
*That final scene of Loach’s film was horribly imitated in October 2010, when a gang of balaclava-clad United fans descended on Wayne Rooney’s house, threatening to kill him for the crime of saying he would leave United.
Cantona is now supposedly director of soccer at the refounded New York Cosmos, though it’s hard to say for sure because at the time of writing, the team hadn’t actually played yet.
Thierry Henry
December 2009
I live in Paris (lucky). I always watch France at the Stade de France (not so lucky in recent years). I was there the night Thierry Henry’s handball against Ireland got France to the World Cup. Lining up at the train station afterward, crushed in amid furious Irish and apologetic French fans, you could see France would be carrying two leaden legacies to the World Cup. The first would be the handball. The second would be Thierry Henry himself. The Henry problem has nothing to do with the handball. Rather, after fifteen years as a professional, the thirty-two-year-old is now almost completely worn-out. France’s coach, Raymond Domenech, must be wondering how to avoid picking his captain for South Africa.
This is hard because Henry was once the world’s best striker. At Euro 2004, after he had scored a casual double against Switzerland, I asked Swiss keeper Jörg Stiehl what made the Frenchman special. Stiehl explained that when most players shoot, they are so busy watching the ball and their opponents that they can barely see the goal. They hardly aim. But Henry retained perfect ball control even while sprinting past defenders. “He has time to look up and see where you are,” said Stiehl. That’s why Henry seldom needed to shoot hard. He just rolled the ball beyond the keeper’s reach.
He was still the world’s best striker in 2006, when the highlight of the World Cup was his duel in the final with the world’s best defender, Fabio Cannavaro. Henry would have appreciated the encounter even though he lost, because unlike many players, he loved soccer. In his Arsenal years he’d sometimes sit at home in Hampstead watching French third-division matches, having fun identifying the players who should be playing higher. In Arsenal’s locker room he’d quiz his teammates about obscure soccer trivia.
The death knell came in 2007, when he was twenty-nine and Arsène Wenger sold him. The moment Wenger sells a star is like the moment the surgeon invites the patient into his office for a private chat. That’s the moment you know it’s all over. Wenger excels at selling players for a fortune the instant they pass the top of their personal hill.
One morning in the spring of 2008, a few months after the sale, Henry sat in Barcelona’s trophy room explaining to some Spanish television reporters that he was playing badly because he was missing his daughter in London. He’s still playing badly, but it’s not because of his daughter. I saw Henry live several times this year in the Stade de France and for Barcelona, and he now moves like somebody’s dad with back problems. Six days after France-Ireland, Barcelona’s decision makers watching Henry stumble around against Inter Milan will have reminded themselves to buy a new striker—possibly as early as this winter. Already Henry rarely starts for Barça.
Physical decline is all the crueler if your body was once perfect. Someone like Zinedine Zidane, never much of an athlete to begin with, could age with more grace. No wonder that after the furor over the handball Henry admitted to having considered retirement. Knowing when to stop is the hardest thing in sport, and he has stuck around at the top level a season too long. The old Henry wouldn’t have needed the handball. He would have eaten Ireland up over the two games.
This should have been the moment to write a fawning sporting obituary, assigning Henry’s place in soccer’s pantheon. He’s not up with the gods—Pele, Maradona, Cruijff, Zidane—as he might have been, had David Trezeguet’s penalty been three inches lower and France won the last World Cup. However, he belongs in the second row, alongside Michel Platini, George Best, and his own hero, Marco van Basten.
Unfortunately, it’s no time for obits. Henry still has one last World Cup to play. Domenech is too loathed at home to dare risk dropping his most powerful player. Yet he should. Henry damages France. The team has better forwards: young Karim Benzema and Nicolas Anelka, already thirty but with all his faculties still intact. France has better ballplayers: Franck Ribéry (who covets Henry’s spot on the left wing) and the rising playmaker Yoann Gourcuff. Henry slows
down France’s attacks.
Above all, the self-absorbed, domineering captain cows his teammates and coach. Against Ireland, a fearful Domenech left in the terrible Henry and substituted Gourcuff instead. You hope someone—possibly some of France’s world champions of 1998—can persuade Henry that he was too great a player to allow himself the closing humiliation of a fourth World Cup.
*With hindsight, “humiliation” was too weak a word. Luckily for Henry, he experienced most of France’s World Cup from the bench. A few weeks later, soon after he had begun playing for the New York Red Bulls, the local Fox 5 television station offered him the coronation of a live interview. One early question must have surprised him, “So you just won the World Cup, right?”
Henry handled it gracefully. “No, not just. I did. The last one we didn’t.” While he talked, his “handball goal” against Ireland was endlessly replayed on the screen behind his head. Still, it was a nice example of an interview in which the player comes across as more measured and intelligent than his interviewer.
Lionel Messi
May 2010
Opinions differ as to who first put Leo Messi on a soccer field. His dad says the boy’s grandma forced the coach, Don Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, to let the tiny five-year-old play with his older brothers. Aparicio’s own version was that he only had ten players and, spotting the tyke kicking a ball against a wall, asked Messi’s mother, “Will you lend him to me?”
Opinions converge on what happened next. Messi’s mom dressed him in the team’s uniform. The first ball came to his right foot, but nothing happened. Then a ball fell to his left. “He came out dribbling as if he’d played all his life,” “Apa” later recalled.
A stray foreigner witnessing the moment in the fading Argentine river town Rosario, birthplace of Che Guevara, a place that time forgot, might have gasped. Argentines didn’t. They recognized Messi at once: He was the pibe, “the boy,” they had been waiting for.
