Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  The other players break into this world not much later. At eight, Gerrard is already training at Liverpool with Jason Koumas and a brilliant goalscorer named Michael Owen, who soon becomes a close friend. Cole and Rooney join the respective academies of Arsenal and Everton at nine, though all these five players seem to have played most of their early soccer informally with friends; you can’t get to the 10,000 hours of practice required to achieve mastery if you rely on the academy. Lampard is underwhelmed by West Ham’s famous academy anyway, even if around this time it also produced Michael Carrick, Jermain Defoe, and Glen Johnson, the supporting cast of the golden generation.

  By their teens, the five authors are already on a career track. The schoolboy Gerrard is courted by Alex Ferguson (“top man,” adds Gerrard), and letters from other clubs keep landing on the family doormat. A crucial staging post—their equivalent of university entrance exams—is trying to get into the then national academy at Lilleshall. Gerrard is rejected. “Me! Captain of Liverpool Boys! Rated by Liverpool!” He admits that the brush-off hurts to this day. Lampard doesn’t get in, either, but curiously their contemporary Carragher does. Pretty soon, Carragher makes his debut for England schoolboys playing up front (“A shy striker called Emile Heskey [sat] on the bench”). Of course, Carra scores, “the Italian keeper Gianluigi Buff on having no answer to my lethal finishing.”

  With all this going on, school cannot matter much. The five are not necessarily stupid—well, Carragher, Lampard, and Gerrard aren’t. Rather, as budding stars they are taught to view anything outside soccer as a distraction. That’s why players are seldom complete human beings. The only one of the five who seems to show any interest in his education is Lampard, who (almost uniquely among England players since World War I) attends private school. One of several kids “from ‘new money’” at exclusive Brentwood in Essex, he plays soccer matches at schools like Eton. However, he is keen to emphasize to the reader that he was pretty nifty with a book, too. Aged sixteen he gets a very impressive ten General Certificates of Secondary Education, including, famously, a starred A in Latin, before Lampard Sr. tells him to leave school to concentrate on soccer.

  None of the four others need much encouraging. Life away from soccer doesn’t seem a natural home for any of them: Gerrard, for instance, “never had many mates” at secondary school but did at Liverpool FC. He passes nine General Certificates of Secondary Education, yet spends his last school exam pondering “exactly how I would burn my uniform.” Most of Rooney’s school reports (perhaps the best thing in his book, and one unarguable benefit of New Labour’s famous “targets”) describe him as a popular and sociable child. However, his results are disappointing, even in the one subject where you would think he’d do quite well. At eleven, he gets a B for phys ed, with the comment, “wayne is a very agile sportsman who’s worked hard throughout the year. he needs to maintain this level of work next year.” What does it take to get an A in PE?

  Rooney leaves school and becomes a star. (He makes his debut for Everton at sixteen years and ten months, yet is disappointed that the club waited so long.) The other four leave school and become apprentices. “Only now do I realize that it was one of the happiest times of my career, a life without the constant pressure I would come to know later,” says Lampard. Gerrard feels much the same way. He particularly likes the practical jokes of the locker room. The boys at Liverpool cut off bits of each others’ socks, punish each other for wearing unfashionable clothes, hit each other with towels, and lock up the club podiatrist for three hours. It’s all hilarious (especially when the furious podiatrist leaves his job), except sometimes when it isn’t. Gerrard writes: “If someone couldn’t take the banter or a prank, arguments would erupt. Rucks were part of my daily life. If I ruined someone’s trainers and they weren’t happy, I reacted. Pushing and shouting broke out. ‘Can’t you fucking well take a joke?’ I’d scream at Greggo or Wrighty . . .”

  Practical jokes are an aspect of soccer life that just doesn’t translate well when explained to outsiders. Gerrard cannot seem to see what these rituals are for. Benignly, they bond the group members to each other and to the institution. Less benignly, they establish who is top dog, who can bully whom, and who is protected by his lapdogs. The role of Michael Owen amid all this is interesting: “All the banter and wind-ups often had Michael bang in the middle of it. He was clever about it, though. Michael hated getting caught. He was just focused on reaching the top. Greggo and Boggo were different.” Where are Greggo, Boggo, and Wrighty now?

  STAGE 2: YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

  Their professional debut isn’t some sort of Hollywood moment. They had seen it coming for years, much as an upper-middle-class boy knows he will go to college. After Rooney makes his debut for Everton, he and his mates get fries and gravy from the local fast-food joint and then kick a ball around on the street. Rooney is not in awe of his new adult teammates, who after taking one look at him have nicknamed him “Dog,” though he cannot think why.

  All five make their debuts in the utterly familiar environments of their home clubs, though none of the others is quite as much at home as Lampard. When he stands on the touchline at eighteen, ready to go on against Coventry, Uncle Harry, West Ham’s manager, puts his arms around him and Coventry’s waiting substitute, thirty-eight-year-old Gordon Strachan, and tells Strachan, “Go easy on him!” Frank Sr., West Ham’s assistant manager, smiles from the dugout.

  Perhaps the most confusing thing about life on the first team is that suddenly there are foreigners. The players had spent their youth entirely among English people. “My mind was closed to other cultures back then,” Lampard admits. “I was very much a home boy whose interests and tastes didn’t venture much beyond the boundaries of London and where I grew up.” The foreigners are scary. The teenage Gerrard is worried when Liverpool appoints a French manager: “On first impressions, Gérard seemed a nice guy. But I was shitting myself because of the language. I didn’t know how good his English was.... I was just terrified of this French set-up. I wanted it to be English, to be people I knew and understood.” Later Gerrard is similarly anxious about England’s plans to appoint a foreign manager. To this day, he retains an instinctive suspicion of foreign players and their supposed propensity to cheat. “Piss off to Spain or Italy, where they niggle, dive or pull shirts,” he writes.

  Given these stereotypes, it’s no wonder that each nationality tends to stick together in a club. When Lampard arrives at Chelsea, the club’s training ground consists of six small dressing rooms. Lampard joins the “English section,” whose members are Terry, Jody Morris, and for some reason Eidur Gudjohnsen. Beyond that, Lampard recalls, “there was an Italian room, a French room and the rest of the world. It was a terrible set-up for a soccer club and didn’t help at all in building and promoting the team spirit.” Lampard spends the next few years working chiefly with foreigners, but their foreignness never quite wears off. When he acquires a Spanish girlfriend, who later becomes the mother of his children, it is something “I just never imagined in a million years.”

  At this stage in his ascent, the player has another scary encounter with a new force: the tabloids. A ritual of the modern top-class player’s career is an early hazing by the News of the World. Especially if you are a talented Englishman playing in England, your almost unlimited access to sex is balanced by having to perform it in front of the nation. At Liverpool’s Christmas party in 1998, a young Carragher, dressed in a Quasimodo costume, is photographed “working my way through a variety of angles” with a stripper. On the eve of publication, “I waited at a garage until midnight for the first edition of the Sunday papers.”

  Carragher doesn’t get caught that way again. Any leading player in Britain soon becomes a sort of part-time professor of media studies. There is nothing very new about this. Arthur Hopcraft wrote in The Football Man more than four decades ago, “The Football League, in wintry discontent in 1968, called upon all League clubs to deny Press facilities to any representative of The
People, after the newspaper had published a series on the drinking capacity and bedroom manners of one of Stockport County’s players.”

  The News of the World excels at this sort of thing. It gets hold of a video of Lampard, Ferdinand, and Kieron Dyer cavorting with an array of girls in the Cypriot resort Ayia Napa and exposes Ashley Cole, then at Arsenal, for being illegally “tapped up” by Chelsea. Rooney’s taste for prostitutes goes public. The stories upset the players, so much so that Cole writes his book in a (very unconvincing) attempt to deny the allegations. Cole actually seems more upset by a later suggestion in the News of the World that he is gay. I personally have never wavered from my conviction that Cole is the most heterosexual man on earth and had not previously realized that anyone had ever dared suggest otherwise. Yet after wading through page after page of his denials of this long-forgotten story, even I had to start to thinking that he was protesting too much.

  The tabloids bring unhappiness and paranoia into these players’ lives. But on the upside, in the new world there is money (an irrelevance, the players insist) and girls (even more of them than the players were used to). When Gerrard recalls a night on the town with the phrase “I was out trying to pull a few birds,” the plural gives away the confidence of the rising player.

  STAGE 3: BREAK WITH BOYHOOD CLUB

  While Arsenal’s “Invincibles” finish the league season unbeaten in 2003–2004 and are dancing on the pitch at the end, Ashley Cole thinks (or so he tells us), “I want to stay on at Arsenal and break David O’Leary’s 555 league appearances. Even beat John Lukic as the oldest player, running out until I am 40. . . . I felt like I was in the land of make-believe when I walked through the famous Marble Hall to sign up for Arsenal aged nine. Now I’m touching the dream.” He loves this club, he swears.

  The break with their boyhood club is a central drama of most of these books. All the players break except Gerrard, and even he came very close to going to Chelsea. Each player describes his break in detail, and what emerges from their accounts, cumulatively, is that it’s wrongheaded of fans to expect any player to think like a fan. True, all these players were once fans. But once they become players, they join a different species.

  They do still remember how fans feel. When Rooney and Carragher were born, their fathers were both devoted Everton supporters. In fact, though Rooney escaped being named after Adrian Heath, James Lee Duncan Carragher was named after Evertonians Gordon Lee and Duncan McKenzie. (Gerrard’s dad supported Liverpool, but the young Gerrard regularly went to Goodison Park, too, and he admits that the childhood pictures of himself in an Everton uniform are genuine.)

  Rooney first went to Goodison as a six-month-old in diapers—probably a fraction too young to break into the reserves—and at age nine wrote a letter to the club’s center-forward, Duncan Ferguson, telling him he shouldn’t be in prison. “In all the photos of when I am little, I seem to be wearing an Everton strip of some sort,” notes Rooney. He even wears his Everton uniform to his tryouts with Liverpool, at nine; Carragher does the same when he starts playing five-a-sides at Liverpool’s School of Excellence.

  Rooney isn’t wearing Everton colors to be defiant. It’s just what he wears after school. Liverpool likes the look of him nonetheless and asks him back the next week. But in the meantime, Everton offers him schoolboy forms. Rooney signs for the club he loves. However, he admits, “Had Liverpool asked me to sign first and not have another trial, then I’m sure I would have signed for them and been a ‘Red.’” In other words, even at nine he is not thinking as a fan. Fandom is just a small part of his identity. Like the other four authors, he relates to soccer as a player. Later, after joining Man U, Rooney will talk about how he hates Liverpool, and maybe he did, as a fan, but he didn’t hate them as a player.

  Carragher, despite regarding himself as “the biggest Blue in Bootle,” does join Liverpool. Quite simply, he explains, the club’s youth academy is better than Everton’s. Other Everton fans like Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman make the same choice. Still, Carragher’s feelings for Everton do take a while to die. When he’s first named as a sub for Liverpool’s first team, in 1996, he is warming up on the field at halftime when the latest scores from other grounds are read out over the loudspeaker. Everton is beating Newcastle 2–0. Carragher spots his dad in the stands eating a meat pie and gives him the thumbs-up. His dad, despite being an Evertonian, is furious at his son’s stupidity. Luckily, the Liverpool fans at the away end don’t spot the gesture.

  The players do have some genuine fans’ emotions. However, these emotions are much weaker than the players’ desire to make it as a player. Each of these books comes out and says at some point that players are motivated by ambition, not loyalty. Discussing Nick Barmby’s move from Everton to Liverpool, Gerrard says, “The argument that raged about his move was stupid. Barmby had to leave Goodison for Anfield. He wanted success. End of debate.” The player might support one club or another, but that is an irrelevance.

  The problem is that the fans don’t see things that way. As Carragher notes, “Fans will never accept that a Liverpool player may want to leave for professional reasons. They cling on to the far-fetched notion that their favourite players wouldn’t even think of playing anywhere else.” Being a loyal supporter is a shibboleth of English soccer, the game’s equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. Players are always being encouraged to talk as if they are fans first. That’s why Cole in his book still goes on about his love for Arsenal. “My heart and soul was tied to Arsenal with a fisherman’s knot. I don’t think even Houdini could have unraveled it,” he says. Fans hear these claims and are tempted to believe them. Then, when the player leaves—in Cole’s case because Arsenal were offering him only $100,000 a week—the fans feel betrayed. In other words, the players get tripped up by their own attempts at PR. Then the fans berate them for leaving, and that turns the players against the fans, who just don’t understand.

  Carragher’s final emotional break with Everton comes on January 24, 1999. He has just returned from Old Trafford, where Liverpool had been leading Manchester United 0–1 in an FA Cup tie only to concede twice in the last two minutes. Carragher goes straight to his local pub in Bootle “to drown my sorrows, hoping I’d see a few sympathetic mates.” But, he says, “Perhaps I should have known better. As I walked through the door, there was laughter. Friends, people I’d grown up and traveled around Europe with following Everton, didn’t think twice about treating me like any other ‘dirty’ Kopite.”

  He turns around and walks out. His old friends don’t understand. They are relating to him as soccer fans. “Now I wasn’t a fan, but someone who’d been toiling for his team only to see the biggest win of his career stolen in the worst way possible.” That’s when his patience with Everton snaps. He spends much of a long, honest, and erudite chapter on Everton castigating the club’s fans. However, he remains such an instinctive fan that he later transfers his loyalties to Liverpool. He writes Carra as part of his ongoing debate with fellow Liverpool fans. Liverpool being a surprisingly small town, he knows many of them personally. After he retires, he plans to sit in the stands among them. Still, he admits, if Liverpool benched him, he would leave the club. Even he is always a player first.

  Lampard, Rooney, and Cole enter their first clubs as fans, but they swiftly become employees. As Cole asks, “What do they say about not getting too close to the club you support because you learn too much and it ruins the mystery essential to blind hero-worship?” When Rooney signs his first professional contract at Everton, he is aghast to find that “over a hundred press people and twelve different camera crews” have been invited to witness the moment. He sips water straight from a bottle on the table, and Moyes beside him whispers, “Use the fucking glass!” Rooney soon starts going off Moyes, and off Everton.

  Lampard as a teenager at West Ham gets weekly abuse from thousands of fans, after his uncle and father lose popularity. When the eighteen-year-old is carried off badly hurt on a stretcher at Villa Park, so
me West Ham supporters in the away section cheer. Lampard dreads driving to his home ground on match days. “There wasn’t a single time that I left Upton Park after being slagged off or jeered by some of the supporters that I didn’t take their anger home with me,” he admits. “These punters had so many hang-ups about me that I began to wonder if the torrents of abuse I received were actually some amateur attempt at collective therapy.” They probably were.

  That his father played more than seven hundred games for West Ham doesn’t give the fans pause. Lampard devotes pages and pages to this long-gone time. “It’s important to me that people understand just how deeply I feel about what happened,” he writes. He says he has no feelings for his boyhood club anymore.

  Professional soccer is an uglier working environment than most of us ever experience, let alone in our teens. Fans might say that players are paid enough to put up with this sort of thing, but that’s a peculiar kind of morality. Even rich people can hurt. Lampard says, “I am actually quite sensitive, that’s how I am.”

  Reading these books, you understand why players are so ready to break with their boyhood clubs. If only they would ditch the hypocrisy. “I’ll always be an Arsenal fan, even if I’m not an Arsenal player,” Cole claims to be thinking as he applauds his fellow supporters one last time after the lost Champions League final of 2006.

  Much as one sees why players leave, it’s worth dwelling on Cole’s long account of why he joined Chelsea, because the story is unintentionally hilarious. First comes the famous phone call from his agent, Jonathan, telling Cole that Arsenal is offering him a mere £55,000 a week. By now this passage is a classic of soccer literature, but age cannot wither it: “When I heard Jonathan repeat the figure of £55k, I nearly swerved off the road. ‘He is taking the piss Jonathan!’ I yelled down the phone.”