Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Daniel Passarella

  December 2001

  Sometime in the late 1980s Inter Milan were losing an away match by several goals when in the last minute they were awarded a meaningless penalty. The fearsome Argentine center-back Daniel Passarella began galloping forward to take it, but before he could get there, Alessandro Altobelli, reasoning, like any striker, that a goal is a goal, stepped up and hit the ball into the net.

  Back in the locker room Passarella threw a fit. “It’s always the same!” he screamed. “At 0–0 no one dares take a penalty, but when it doesn’t matter anymore they all do.” Grabbing his genitals, he added, “You are cowards! You have no balls, no cojones.”

  This went on for some time. Most of the Inter players were used to Passarella and paid no attention, but after a while Altobelli could take no more. He strode up to the Argentine and asked, “You talking about me?” Passarella knocked him out with a single punch, stripped, and wandered off to find the showers.

  A few minutes later Altobelli came to. He stared about him enraged and then, spotting the fruit bowl customary in Italian locker rooms of the era, grabbed a little knife meant for peeling oranges. In the shower stalls he found a naked Passarella calmly shampooing his hair. “Come on then!” Passarella cooed at his knife-wielding colleague.

  Altobelli didn’t know what to do. He didn’t really want to stab his team-mate to death like Norman Bates in Psycho. He would probably have been fined, or even transfer listed. So he just stood in front of Passarella waving the knife for a while until, to his relief, other players dragged him away, and he could pretend this was happening against his will. All the while Passarella continued soaping his hair.

  “Passarella,” concluded the former player who told me the story, “was a thug, a murderer.” That may sound harsh, but Passarella himself might take it as praise. As coach of River Plate, Argentina, Uruguay, and now Parma, he has prided himself on ferocity, toughness, discipline. He sometimes seems to believe he works in the army rather than the entertainment industry.

  The past few years have been unkind to “El Kaiser.” Argentina, the team he took to the quarterfinals of the last World Cup, has blossomed since his departure. Uruguay unexpectedly qualified for the World Cup nine months after he resigned as its manager. In November he took over Parma, proclaiming, in his thick Argentine accent, that he had the players to “finish in the top four” of Serie A. The team is now sixteenth in the table after four consecutive league defeats. Sunday’s match at Atalanta could be his last.

  Sacking a manager after a month in the job would normally be silly, but in this case it would simply correct the error of having hired him in the first place. The Passarella mode of management does not work, and had he not been a great player (“the best defender I have ever seen,” judges Diego Maradona), Parma would never even have considered him.

  Passarella is the victim of a youth spent in the Argentina of military dictators: of Juan Perón, who had served in the Italian army under Mussolini, and thugs like Jorge Videla, who had electrodes attached to the genitals of dissenters and made thousands of people “disappear.” Passarella, short-haired “gran Capitán” of the Argentine team that won the 1978 World Cup for the generals, was their poster boy, their soldier on the pitch.

  The generals lost office after the Falklands War, but Passarella completed a glorious playing career in Italy, socking Altobelli, head-butting an opposing side’s physiotherapist, kicking a ballboy who was slow to return the ball. Later, as manager of Argentina, he revived all the generals’ prejudices, saying he wouldn’t pick homosexuals or players with earrings or long hair. The latter edict, unfortunately, ruled out Gabriel Batistuta and Fernando Redondo.

  Batistuta had a haircut in order to play in the last World Cup, but Passarella’s rule remains too silly for words. What, Maradona asks, about Mario Kempes, Argentina’s chief goalscorer in 1978, “who had a mane down to his waist?”

  It sums up Passarella’s problem as a manager: He can only work with some players some of the time. If you are short-haired, obedient, and respond well to being shouted at, you can work with him. If you aren’t and don’t, you can’t. Senior players tend not to tolerate being bullied, which is why Passarella has always preferred working with youngsters.

  Passarella, I was told by Mauricio Macri, president of Boca Juniors, “rules through fear.” You won’t find this childish and outdated method advocated in any management textbook. Few people perform consistently for a boss who scares them. Passarella’s style is unvarying: exhortation coupled with bullying. “I’m trying to teach my players that we need courage, heart, and pride,” he said last week.

  But most players need different treatment at different times: Sometimes they need to be relaxed, sometimes to be listened to. Great soccer managers, like great fathers, know how to mix fear and love.

  Maradona, in his frank and often hilarious memoir, notes another problem: If you demand total discipline you have to be totally disciplined yourself. But he recalls Passarella “smearing shit on the door-handles at the training camp, to amuse himself and his mates.” That really will not do.

  *Passarella is now president of the Argentine club River Plate. Under him, in June 2011, River was demoted for the first time in its 110-year history.

  Arsène Wenger

  May 2003

  With the ironic courtesy the French do so well, Arsène Wenger fields half-It witted questions from the British sporting press. Occasionally, the corners of his lips turn up and he ventures a joke: “You always feel sorry, you see. Even for Chelsea.” Otherwise, the Arsenal manager’s comportment retains its inhuman perfection: Never a hair out of place, and rarely a clause, either.

  Wenger’s work is almost as perfect. Admittedly, Arsenal has just surrendered the Premiership to Manchester United, but on Saturday afternoon it should dismiss Southampton to pick up a second FA Cup running. Though no bigger than several other English clubs, Arsenal constantly ranks among the country’s two best teams. Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, a memoir of supporting the club, says that whereas United wins prizes because it is a giant institution, Arsenal does so only because Wenger is its manager. The Frenchman is a standing reproach to almost every other manager in sport. Few have such a hinterland of knowledge, and no one else has used it so well.

  Wenger’s path began in the village of Duttlenheim, in Alsace, where his parents ran a restaurant. Growing up near the German border helped make him a cosmopolitan. He learned the Alsatian dialect and later German and English.

  Though already planning a life in soccer, Wenger went to college to study economics. The litany of British soccer is that you must leave school at sixteen to dedicate yourself to the game, but the degree helped set him apart from other managers. Whereas some spend to show their status, he understands the value of money. He famously signed three great Frenchmen, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, and Robert Pires, for less than the $35 million for which he sold the troubled Nicolas Anelka.

  Wenger can buy players cheaply partly because he makes them himself. He learned this running Monaco’s soccer academy, where his products included Lilian Thuram and Emmanuel Petit, who went on to win the 1998 World Cup with France. Later, as manager of Monaco’s first team, he shaped George Weah so profoundly that when the Liberian was voted World Player of the Year in 1995, he gave the award to Wenger.

  Many great players feel that sort of bond with Wenger. They respect him because he respects them—unusual in the hierarchical world of soccer. When the authors of a French book asked Thuram to nominate a mentor for a joint interview, there was only one possible choice. “It’s always he who guides me, who inspires me,” said Thuram of Wenger.

  Wenger had turned the midfielder Thuram into a defender, just as he turned the defender Petit into a midfielder and the winger Henry into a center-forward. He took Henry, Vieira, and Anelka from reserve benches or youth teams to soccer’s zenith. “Arsène has always analyzed the game of every player so as to bring him to reflection a
nd progress,” says Thuram. “He remains a formateur, an educator. Coaches sometimes forget that they are there to shape.”

  In fact, they usually do. Most sportsmen never realize their potential for want of a formateur like Wenger. A student of autobiographies, Wenger believes that greatness ensues only when a talent meets someone “who taps him on the shoulder and says, ‘I believe in you!’”

  After Monaco, Wenger went to Japan to coach and have his mind broadened. The Japanese dedication to detail spurred his progress to perfectionism. “You feel you have more chance of winning if you concentrate every part of your energy on how to win,” he said. “If you lose a day by not concentrating on it, you feel guilty.” It is a terrible realization that hits people in all fields and stops them from ever relaxing again. Wenger went from Homo universalis (by sporting standards) to monomaniac.

  Arriving at Arsenal in 1996, he was effectively an unknown foreign chief executive with a funny accent taking over a high-profile traditional company in decline with many entrenched senior figures. His success was total.

  Wenger used all the tools. Previously, the prematch meal at Arsenal had consisted of baked beans with Coca-Cola. “Some players went on to the pitch burping,” Dennis Bergkamp reminisced. Not under Wenger. He also applied statistics—a common tool in American sports but never in soccer—to work out, for instance, when in a match particular players tended to tire and require substitution.

  He introduced the doctrine of continuous improvement. In September, he was ridiculed for saying Arsenal could go through the season unbeaten, but he was only being a perfectionist. Losing the title this year hurt terribly. “The job of coach,” as he defines it, “consists of many efforts to have, from time to time, a supersatisfaction, but, above all, many disappointments that you must surmount to return.”

  Of the million or so Britons who call themselves Arsenal fans, approximately none appears unhappy with Wenger. Besides transforming their club, the Alsatian has created several great players and changed British soccer management. The game needs more economists-turned–youth coaches.

  Guus Hiddink

  March 2006

  It’s what glossy magazines call a “dream home.” The nineteenth-century mansion on the Amstel River in Amsterdam is still being renovated, but Guus Hiddink and his girlfriend plan to move in soon. The world’s most soughtafter soccer coach has never been a workaholic, and as a fifty-nine-year-old multimillionaire he’s had enough of driving to practice every morning. Now he intends to live Amsterdam’s bohemian, arty life. Only the job of England’s manager might entice him away.

  For months Hiddink has been linked with every big coaching job in soccer. Last week he said he was quitting PSV Eindhoven, the provincial Dutch club where he has spent much of his career. This summer he will coach Australia at the World Cup, and afterward take over another national team. We will soon discover whether it is Russia, as the oligarch Roman Abramovich hopes, or England.

  Hiddink is one of six sons of a village schoolteacher from the Achterhoek, or “Back Corner,” of the eastern Netherlands. The Back Corner is wooded and quiet, and on visits home from stints in Madrid or Seoul, Hiddink enjoyed tootling along its back roads on his Harley-Davidson Fatboy. “Pom-pom-pompom-pom.” He puffs out his cheeks to mimic the motor’s roar.

  Growing up among brothers—two of whom also became professional players—prepared him for a life among sportsmen. “I learned to share, listen, and communicate,” he has said. Hiddink is a man at ease with other men. He has the gift for the right friendly gesture, grabbing your shoulders from behind by way of greeting, happy to talk but also to sit listening while others tell stories. He is a large, soothing presence.

  He grew up milking cows, plowing behind two horses, and dreaming of becoming a farmer. But Dutch agriculture was already dying, and he went into soccer instead. At nineteen he became assistant coach of the Back Corner’s semiprofessional club, De Graafschap. The head coach spotted in training sessions that his young assistant could play a bit, and so Hiddink made an unusual career move: from coach to player. The handsome, round-faced, wavy-haired playmaker was too lazy and slow for the top, but he did play with George Best on the San Jose Earthquakes. “I was his roommate,” says Hiddink, enjoying what to him is a quirky American word, and he mimics himself fielding the phone calls from Best’s groupies: “George is not here. George is sleeping.”

  In 1984 Hiddink became PSV’s assistant coach. He waited three years for the head coach to be sacked, took his job, and a year later was holding aloft the European Cup. Hiddink, then sporting a Groucho Marx mustache, was a collegiate manager. He had less status than some of his players, but that didn’t matter because he has what he calls “a small ego.” He smoked cigarettes with his stars, swapping jokes and listening to their ideas as if they were brothers. In the Dutch tradition, Hiddink respects player power.

  Later, when coaching in Turkey and Spain, he arrived at a defining insight. He decided he would ignore the circus around soccer: death threats, newspaper headlines, or what the club’s vice president supposedly said to the center-forward’s mistress. “Mister, let it go,” urged his assistant at Valencia. “Limit yourself to soccer.” Since then, Hiddink has.

  In 1998 he led Holland to the World Cup semifinals. In 2002, more surprisingly, he repeated the trick with South Korea. Hiddink taught the formerly obedient Korean players to think for themselves on the pitch. He is now doing the same with Australia, and would do so with England. Hiddink always wants autonomous, thinking “Dutch” players: a center-back who knows when to push into midfield, a striker who drops a few yards.

  In Korea Hiddink achieved a status possibly unprecedented for a soccer manager. The country had craved global recognition, and he delivered it. His autobiography appeared in a Korean print run of a half-million, despite competing with an estimated sixteen Hiddink biographies. In the Back Corner, Korean tour buses made pilgrimages to the Hiddink ancestral home. After the World Cup, the man himself dropped in on his octogenarian parents. “Well, it wasn’t bad,” admitted his father. “Coffee?”

  Hiddink returned to PSV and last year took the club to within minutes of another Champions League final. In his spare time he coached Australia to their first World Cup since 1974. But meanwhile the Dutch tax police were after him. Hiddink had claimed to be living in Belgium, where taxes are lower, but the taxmen disputed this. According to Hiddink, they tapped his phone calls to find out where he spent his nights. These days the answering machine of his cell phone warns, in German, “Careful, the enemy is listening.” This German phrase from World War II appears to be Hiddink’s way of accusing the taxmen of Gestapo practices. Their interrogations helped persuade him to leave the Dutch labor market.

  Russia has offered him a nice gig: a fantastic salary to live beside the Amstel and occasionally pop to Moscow on a private jet provided by Abramovich. But the job lacks the magic of being England’s manager. Hiddink would relish England’s three biggest challenges. He has the psychological expertise to inspire tired multimillionaires. He loves dealing with difficult characters: Wayne Rooney would be a cinch for him. And he would improve the thinking of a team that has everything but intellect. Hiddink has a better résumé than any English candidate for the job, and better English than the other foreign candidates.

  London too offers a bohemian, arty life. His girlfriend would be an hour from her beloved Amsterdam. But Hiddink isn’t sure whether he wants the job. He dreads the British tabloids crawling all over his family. In any case, the Football Association may choose an Englishman instead of the best man. It could be another case of British newspapers plus British fear of immigrant labor damaging British national life.

  Sven-Göran Eriksson

  May 2006

  What if England had to go to the World Cup without Wayne Rooney? Sven-Göran Eriksson, England’s manager, gave his trademark weak smile. The Swede is often depicted as being entirely without charisma, but in fact he has the gentle charm of a family doctor. We w
ere sitting in his little office in London’s Soho Square: two desks shoved together, a table to chat at, and a sign on the wall saying, “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much,” which may be the Eriksson family motto. It was two weeks before Christmas. Rooney was healthy. His broken foot at Euro 2004 had probably sealed England’s elimination, but there was no reason to think that would happen again.

  “It should be very good to have Plan B and Plan C,” Eriksson replied, “but the fact is very simple: We have only one Wayne Rooney, and as he played in Portugal, that was fantastic. As long as he was on the pitch, we kept the ball very well up front. We couldn’t find another one. But who finds two Wayne Rooneys?”

  Now Rooney has a broken foot again and may miss the entire World Cup, Eriksson’s last tournament managing England. “I think we will win it this time,” the Swede said this month. Whether Eriksson’s last shot at eternity comes off or not, we can already assess his legacy. We have discovered his one outstanding quality. We know his impact on English soccer, and on British life. And we have some indications even for the coming World Cup.

  The Eriksson era began during a sumptuous dinner one night in Rome in 2000 when he took a call from Britain on his cell phone. He chatted for a couple of minutes in English, then turned to his assistant at Lazio Roma, Tord Grip: “What do you say to being my assistant manager with England?” A Swedish friend dining with them shouted, “Never England! That’s bad food, ugly women, and terrible weather.” But Eriksson and Grip were already discussing which players to pick.

  To Eriksson, England didn’t mean ugly women at all (quite the contrary). It didn’t merely mean $6.6 million in salary. It meant memories of the Saturday afternoons of his youth in the backwoods town of Torsby watching English soccer on television, supporting Liverpool.

  In January 2001 Eriksson became England’s fourth manager in four years. The country’s soccer was in the midst of an identity crisis. The traditional English game—muscular, not very clever, long balls hoofed forward by big men on muddy pitches—had failed. England needed to adopt the intelligent passing soccer of continental European teams. Yet no English manager seemed capable of this. For the first time ever, England hired a foreigner.