Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Usually the main suspense before a World Cup concerns who will win it. This year, people are just as eager to know whether in South Africa we will see the full Messi. If he can match some of the moments he has given us with Barcelona, but in soccer’s ultimate setting—well, the game doesn’t get better than that. This World Cup is in large part about Messi. But to understand him, you have to understand his Argentine football ancestry.

  It was sociologist Eduardo Archetti who explained the pibe to me, one day in Buenos Aires in 2000. The pibe, Archetti said, is a figure that Argentine soccer fans have had in their minds at least since the 1920s. The pibe learns his soccer on the potrero, a bumpy urban space, where only those who can dribble can keep the ball. He plays the creative game that Argentines call la nuestra, “ours,” a style that they say comes from a child’s imagination. In 1928 journalist Borocotó proposed in the great Buenos Aires soccer magazine El Grafico that Argentina build a monument in “any walkway” to the inventor of dribbling. The statue, Borocotó wrote, would depict “a pibe with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh that does not quite manage to form on his mouth, full of small teeth that might be worn down through eating ‘yesterday’s bread.’”

  You may recognize the description. Indeed, when Maradona came along fifty years later, Argentine soccer fans had been expecting him. A tango, “El sueño del pibe” (Dream of the pibe), had been written about him in 1943. In the song, which Maradona has sung in public, a young pibe likens himself to bygone legends:Dearest Mamita,

  I will earn money,

  I will be a Baldonedo,

  A Martino, a Boyé

  And the song ends with the pibe’s dream:He took the ball, serene in his action

  Ran past everybody to the keeper

  And with a firm shot he became the shooter.

  The song anticipates not just Maradona’s great goal against England in 1986 but England’s revenge by little eighteen-year-old Michael Owen in 1998 (Argentines nodded sadly and said, “The English have found themselves a pibe”) as well as many of Messi’s goals.

  The point is that to Argentines, Maradona and Messi are quintessentially Argentine. A soccer fan whom Archetti interviewed in the late 1990s told him, “Now our problem is that we have had Maradona, and we will always expect to get another one.” The fan himself knew the expectation was absurd, but he had it. Roberto “El Negro” Fontanarrosa, the legendary Argentine cartoonist, novelist, and Rosario soccer fan, believed something similar. “Maradona could never have come from Belgium,” he told me.

  Archetti, incidentally, had said that Argentine heroes are expected to die young, and sadly, that’s just what happened to both him and Fontanarrosa. Archetti died of cancer in Norway in June 2005, four weeks before Messi won Argentina the Youth World Cup in Holland. Poor Fontanarrosa went in 2007. At least he lived long enough to see Messi. He must have recognized the pibe at once.

  Messi may be quintessentially Argentine, but crucially, he left Argentina in adolescence. It was all because he had an extreme version of the pibe physique: at age thirteen, he was only four foot six. To reach a normal height, he would need hormone treatments costing about nine hundred dollars a month. His poor steelworker father begged help from the club Messi had joined, Newell’s Old Boys. “The Lepers,” traditionally run by incompetents, decided not to spend their shrinking resources on the tiny kid.

  What saved Messi’s career was his family’s origin in Catalonia. A cousin there persuaded Barça to look at him. In a trial match Messi scored five goals. The club agreed to pay for Messi’s treatments. The family left Rosario, crying, on what was Messi’s first plane journey, and landed in a European city of which they knew so little that they were surprised to find it was on the sea. Every night in Barcelona, the pibe injected the hormones into his feet. So short initially that when he sat on the team bench his feet didn’t touch the ground, he grew to five foot six, just big enough to be a player.

  I first saw him at that Youth World Cup of 2005. In the final Argentina beat Nigeria 2–1, with two penalties from Messi. My main memory is his second penalty. Some penalty takers wait for the keeper to dive, before choosing the other corner. But Messi just needed the keeper to shift his balance fractionally onto his right leg, before choosing the other corner. My neighbor in the stands was the world’s leading expert on youth soccer, the ancient, birdlike Dutchman Piet de Visser, a scout for Chelsea, and late in the game he inevitably exclaimed, “Maradona!”

  The same thought had struck Maradona. “I’ve seen the guy who is going to inherit my place in Argentinean soccer,” he announced on his television talk show, La Noche del Diez. “Messi seems to have an extra gear, a sixth speed. The ball remains on the upper part of his foot, like it’s glued to it. He feels the ball: That’s what makes him different.”

  But the overwhelming sensation when you watch Messi is still this: He’s a child. The nerd with the flowerpot hairdo looks like a kid who has won a competition to spend a day with Barça. His physique seems to mock all the man monsters and fitness rooms and “food supplements” of modern sport. When Messi receives a ball and doesn’t bother touching it, but just sets off running and lets it trot alongside him, he looks like a boy out with his pet dog. He dribbles with steps three-quarters the length of a normal pace, allowing him to change direction faster than any opponent. And being a child, he has superior balance to the men around him. That explains a characteristic Messi trait: how often he wins the “second ball.” Often he’ll get tackled, the ball will spin loose, the tacklers will be off balance, and Messi, who has instantly regained his full height, picks up the ball. That’s how he scored two of his four goals against Arsenal in April.

  Put simply: he’s a pibe from the potrero. “He expresses very well the collective dream of Argentine soccer,” says Jorge Valdano, the Argentine player–turned–technical director of Real Madrid and poet of the game.

  Yet Messi is also more than a pibe. Thanks to his growth problem, the most gifted player on earth entered the best soccer academy on earth, Barcelona’s Masia. The Masia saved him from becoming a second Maradona. Like many players of his era, Maradona had lived like a rock star. But Barcelona had learned from Maradona, and later from Ronaldinho. Each had joined Barça as the world’s best youngster. Both had fallen for temptation: Maradona for cocaine, Ronaldinho for drink.

  Temptation found Messi too. After he broke into Barcelona’s first team, Ronaldinho began taking him out on the town. Finally, Josep Guardiola, then coach of Barça’s second team, told him: “You’ve two options. Either you keep on partying, and you’ll be out of here in days. Or you start eating properly, quit the alcohol, go to bed early, and come to practice on time. Only then might you become the best in the world.”

  Barça models itself on a family, and it made sure Messi became not a rock star but an obedient son. Albert Capellas, youth coordinator at the Masia, which is housed in an ancient farmhouse next to the Nou Camp, says: “Messi and [Andrés] Iniesta don’t live here anymore, but this is their home. They come to eat, and if they have a problem they come to us, as they would to their mother and father. For us they are not stars. It’s Leo, it’s Bojan, it’s Andrés. We say, “You are a good man. Don’t lose your values.”

  On the field, too, Barcelona molded the pibe into a good boy. Frank Rijkaard, the Barcelona coach who gave Messi his debut, told me in 2008, “I’ve seen games where for ninety minutes it looked as if he was playing one against eleven, and he kept getting kicked, but we only won 1–0, or it was 0–0, or we lost 1–0. He’s a fantastic dribbler, but he was making leaps forward by seeking variation in his game: One time you dribble, another time you give the ball back and go deep. He was becoming more effective by doing less.” Maradona could dribble, pass, and score, but thanks largely to Barcelona, Messi also mastered soccer’s other main craft: tackling. He is the complete player.

&nb
sp; You might say the pibe became a European. It was an education Maradona never had. At twenty-two, Messi’s age today, Maradona was still playing in Argentina. In any case, Messi’s personality is more conducive to a long and consistent career than Maradona’s was. A man with nothing to say, he lacks Maradona’s wild poetry. “I don’t go out much. I enjoy being alone at home,” he says in two sentences never spoken by Maradona. Messi may not have all Maradona’s good qualities, but he lacks the bad ones.

  Yet, Argentineans ask, why doesn’t he play well for Argentina? When he’s with Barça, the only man who can stop him is Inter Milan’s pibe-crushing coach, José Mourinho. When he’s with Argentina, just pulling on the blueand-white shirt seems to do the trick. Perhaps Argentina suffers from a plethora of pibes. At times the team resembles Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Messi doesn’t combine well with Carlos Tévez, Sergio Agüero, or Pablo Aimar (all five foot six), certainly not when coached by Maradona (five foot four).

  Some Argentines believe the émigré doesn’t love his country enough. This enrages Messi, who as a teenager refused to play for Spain’s youth teams. (If he had, and was going to this World Cup with La Roja, FIFA might as well have handed Spain the trophy at the opening ceremony.) Messi says, “Nothing gets me more upset than for you to tell me I’m not Argentine. What do you know about my feelings?” His Swedish teammate Zlatan Ibrahimovic has commented dryly that if the Argentines don’t want Messi, they can give him to Sweden.

  Messi’s fellow pibe Maradona will probably try to resolve the matter by setting the boy free in South Africa. Like Maradona at the World Cup of 1986, Messi could then roam the pitch like a happy child. If all goes well, the Argentines will be able to rewrite that 1943 tango.

  *It turned out in South Africa that there is a way to stop Messi, and Maradona himself stumbled upon it. All you need to do is ensure that the boy keeps getting the ball fifty yards from the opponents’ goal. Then the opposition can form a nine-man screen to stop him from getting through. The Germans did.

  In 1986 Maradona won Argentina a World Cup by himself. Having lost one almost by himself in 2010, he and the nation have now called it quits.

  David Beckham

  October 2010

  David Beckham jogged up to take one of the last free kicks of his international career. The French fans sitting near the corner flag in Paris’s Stade de France rose and whistled him, mocking England’s iconic player. Then they got out their cameras. As “Becks” took the kick, a thousand flashes popped.

  Since Beckham won the Spanish title with Real Madrid in 2007, his career has passed through a long twilight. He’ll probably never play for England again. He still occasionally turns out for the L.A. Galaxy, but not many people notice anymore. He is increasingly prone to fouling younger, faster opponents. Deepening grooves mark the onset of middle age in that perfect face. Yet as the player fades, Beckham the brand is simply entering a new phase. It’s time to disentangle what soccer’s most powerful individual brand means to different people, and where Beckham and his brand managers can take it after he retires.

  Beckham has three main constituencies. The first are the people inside soccer. To his teammates—and to Real Madrid fans who had expected another lazy galactico—Beckham was an “honest professional.” To them he wasn’t a showoff on a billboard, but the sweet, quiet, and slightly dim boy in the corner of the locker room.

  At Manchester United, Beckham had absorbed Alex Ferguson’s dictum that everything you achieve is thanks to the team and that afterward you shower and get on the bus and keep your head down. When Beckham tries to describe himself, he usually gropes for the word professional. Criticized in public by his teammate Landon Donovan at the Galaxy in 2009, he hit back with the harshest slur he could think of: “It’s unprofessional in my eyes. In soccer players’ eyes throughout the world, it would be unprofessional to speak out about your teammates, especially in the press and not to your face.” Not once in seventeen years in soccer, he added, “have I been criticized for my professionalism.”

  Beckham’s second constituency, the English nation, has been the least kind to him. Few British heroes are as popular at home as they are abroad. The basic reason is that the British can place each one of their compatriots precisely on the national class ladder. Just as Winston Churchill was unmistakably upper class, Beckham was clearly Essex Man, and so each was distrusted by members of other classes. To quote the musical My Fair Lady: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him, / The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.”

  Beckham’s one inelegant feature is his voice, that high-pitched, nasal monotone. Whenever he appeared after an England game to convert soccer into clichés, something of the magic drained. Beckham became a vehicle for the British to mock their new cult of vapid celebrity. To most adult English people, there was something tacky and absurd about him. Typically, when a pair of his boots was auctioned for charity in 2000, they were bought by a man dressed as a ferret to publicize a new Web site.

  Even Beckham’s own class treated him with suspicion. Many in the working classes felt that Beckham had deserted his roots—hence the peculiar enmity he attracted from fans of West Ham, his local club in childhood.

  Worse, in a country that prefers its heroes flawed, his physical perfection counted against him. That’s why Beckham’s first appearance in the national melodrama had to be as villain. After getting sent off against Argentina in 1998, he took more abuse than any English player before him. Things got so bad that a placard outside a Nottingham church proclaimed, “God forgives even David Beckham.”

  His third constituency—the rest of the world—was the most grateful, and it’s here that Beckham will best be able to build in coming decades. The Beckham brand is strongest abroad, because foreigners experience him without the irritating soundtrack. At the World Cup of 2006, after England’s dull victory over Trinidad, I was hanging around the “mixed zone,” the place where journalists shout questions at passing players listening to iPods. Everyone was hanging around pointlessly. Suddenly, there was a stampede, and I was knocked over by a sprinting Asian cameramen. I looked up from the floor: Beckham had arrived. “And for that you knocked me over?” I wanted to ask the cameraman. Beckham wasn’t going to say anything worthwhile. But then foreigners barely noticed what Beckham said. To them, he is simply beauty, fame, and wealth incarnate, an Andy Warhol painting come to life.

  Like Marilyn Monroe or Charlie Chaplin, Beckham works best as a silent brand. Fittingly, his first autobiography was essentially a picture book. It’s this visual brand that has been carefully managed from the start. Typically, Beckham’s first meeting with his future wife seems to have been orchestrated to boost both their brands. Beckham was lucky that just as his career was starting, he met a brand manager as gifted as Simon Fuller, the future creator of American Idol. Fuller supported Manchester United. In the mid-1990s, when he was managing artists, he suggested to his client Victoria Adams that she go and watch Beckham play. Jimmy Burns writes in his When Beckham Went to Spain: “Victoria subsequently related . . . that Fuller’s ambition at the time had been to have her dump her then boyfriend Stuart in favour of someone famous, like a footballer.”

  It worked. The Beckhams produced three sons, bearers of the Beckham brand. Over the years, it was above all Mrs. Beckham and Fuller who turned a very good right-half into a great brand. They understood that Beckham speaks through his body. It became a work of art in progress, the creation of hairdressers, tattooists, soccer managers, couturiers, and his wife, who all redesigned him endlessly as if he were a doll.

  Once his appeal was discovered, it was marketed. In soccer, it has long been thought best practice to shield yourself from the media. Beckham, however, went on promotional tours of the United States and Asia. The inspiration seemed to come from his wife: In soccer you are expected to let your feet speak for you, but in pop music, where you are your image, life is ceaseless self-promotion.

  The farther away
people are from England and from soccer, the louder the Beckham brand seems to speak to them. Chinese women created Beckham shrines on their office desks. There was a Buddhist Beckham shrine in Thailand and a chocolate “Bekkamu” statue in Tokyo. Many of these admirers know him not so much from soccer as from his advertisements. The ads are so potent that one selling Castrol oil was blacked out in Teheran in 2003, on the orders of the city’s then mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while Iran also banned television commercials showing Beckham’s bare legs. (The Iranian ads, incidentally, skirted the borders of truth in advertising. “Makes your bike go like Beckham” was the tagline. Did that mean “Quite slowly”?)

  Beckham has sold everything from sunglasses to chocolate. He is the place where high fashion and soccer meet, the sweet spot that companies like Nike and Adidas are seeking. And it is not simply that he sells products—the products sell him, too. A Beckham ad for hair cream or jeans is also an ad for Beckham. He initially conquered America in a similarly oblique way. When a small independent British film went into production, it got permission to use his name in its title. Bend It Like Beckham finally appeared in 2002 and became a surprise hit in the United States. Later Fuller sent the man himself to play there.

  So strong did Beckham’s brand become that over time he helped brand his own country. I first noticed this during the World Cup of 2002 in Japan. Arriving in a provincial airport, I was met by a tournament volunteer, a middle-age Japanese woman who was helping us clueless foreigners find our way around. Hearing I was from England, she said, “England players, all so handsome!”

  “What?” I asked. “Paul Scholes? Nicky Butt?” (A friend to whom I told this story later that day continued, “David Seaman, Emile Heskey, Danny Mills?”)