Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Not everyone was delighted. To quote the Sun: “What a climb-down. What an admission of decline. What a humiliation. What a terrible, pathetic, self-inflicted indictment. What an awful mess.” The newspaper organized a protest, which prompted comedian Jeremy Hardy to comment, “I don’t know why everyone’s making such a fuss about a foreign manager when it’s having all those English players in the team which is the problem.”

  Eriksson set about teaching those English players to think autonomously, as continental ones do. In his early days on the job he would call them in one by one for chats before a match. After explaining the opposition’s tactics in the player’s zone of the field, he would ask, “What would you do?” The player would generally look blank and say, “I dunno. You’re the boss, Boss.”

  In England, the manager had traditionally done any thinking that was required. But gradually Eriksson’s players began doing some, too. This was quite a turnabout in a team—captained by David Beckham—that is rich in everything but intellect.

  But the change in England’s players had little to do with Eriksson. He is not a revolutionary, but merely a symptom of a foreign revolution that began in English soccer a decade ago when Frenchman Arsène Wenger became manager of Arsenal. None of Eriksson’s first-choice eleven now plays his club soccer under an English manager. Eriksson believes that traditional English soccer no longer exists. “No one is playing it like that today in the Premier League,” he remarked in Soho Square. He said it might still be possible to speak of “northern European soccer. Maybe.” He has also noted that traditional drinking habits are disappearing from the English game.

  On September 1, 2001, Eriksson’s decreasingly English team beat Germany 5–1 in Munich. This was before everyone began hammering Germany, and it remains the zenith of his reign. But he entered the postmatch press conference unsmiling, said that the score line flattered England, and added that the most important thing was that the German coach’s father recovered from the heart attack he had suffered that night.

  This was wonderful psychology. Eriksson knew he would get credit for the victory anyway. By sidestepping the credit, he bought the chance to sidestep blame when England lost. But it also said something about him. In the words of the English poem, he can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

  He had learned this long before coming to England, during a career that has been an education in managing hysteria. His curriculum vitae is packed with “bubble clubs”: Benfica, Fiorentina, and Lazio, run by megalomaniacal chairmen, covered by sensationalist newspapers, followed by unrealistic fans. Bubble clubs have a tendency to go bankrupt.

  The soothing tedium of Eriksson’s manner was the perfect antidote to these environments. When he was named England’s manager, I was excited because a year earlier I had interviewed him in Rome. I had gold in my notebook! But turning to the relevant pages, I saw I had barely made a note. Eriksson had spoken fluently for nearly fifteen minutes while saying nothing. The second time I met him, at lunch with a small group in Zurich, we all hoped to get him chatting. Instead, he spent the meal politely questioning a Chinese journalist about Chinese soccer. His mediocre English—so rare for a Swede—also tends to neutralize inquiries. The sadness of the British media is that it is forever trying to extract words from Eriksson and Beckham, one of whom hardly says anything, while the other has nothing to say.

  Only in his last months in England has Eriksson become more forthcoming. In Soho Square I asked him how he judged his own record on the job: quarterfinal of the World Cup 2002 in Japan and quarterfinal of Euro 2004 in Portugal.

  “Ooohhh,” he began. “If you had asked me the day before I took the job, of reaching the semifinal in Japan [sadly, it really was only the quarterfinal], I think the whole nation would have been happy with that.” It’s true that when he took over, England looked unlikely even to qualify for the World Cup. “If you asked the nation today, they wouldn’t be happy with the quarterfinal. It has to be more, I suppose. It was okay in Japan, I think. We met Brazil, and we were not fit enough second half to compete with them, even if we had eleven against ten men. I was not happy with Portugal, to go out in the quarterfinal.” He said the problem both times was that his players were tired after long seasons. Luckily, though, they would have an extra week of rest before this World Cup.

  But surely one week couldn’t be the only thing that has kept England out of the semis. “The last two times? I would say so.” The only thing? “If you’re not fit enough.... [I]n Japan, we never scored one goal the second half. So I think the main reason is that.”

  It’s probably true that the English Premiership is physically more demanding than any other league. Yet Eriksson was refusing to acknowledge a pattern. The three games England has lost under him in major tournaments, against Brazil in 2002 and against France and Portugal in 2004, all followed the same sequence: the Englilsh start well and score in the first half, then retreat to their own penalty area where they tackle bravely and hoof the ball away blindly for the rest of the game in hope of a backs-to-the-wall triumph reminiscent of Dunkirk in 1940. But their opponents, allowed to have the ball and camp around England’s goal almost without interruption, eventually score. Even England’s victory over Argentina in 2002 mostly followed this pattern, except that the Argentines didn’t score.

  It seems a curious method, given that England now has excellent players capable of keeping possession. Has Eriksson failed to eradicate an ancient reflex of English soccer? “Well, it’s nothing we try to do, but sometimes we are tired. We can’t keep the ball, and then it ends up there.” He added, “I think we were a little bit unlucky. France—how could we lose that game? Two stupid goals in two minutes, was it? And against Portugal, we could have won that game, except we didn’t.”

  This summer will be different, he promises. “We are much better now than we were two years ago, four years ago.” He points to France Football magazine’s authoritative poll for European Player of 2005: second and third places went to two Englishmen, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, while John Terry also made the top ten. “I don’t know when England [last] had three in the top 10. And we had [Jamie] Carragher [at] number 20.”

  On the other hand, Rooney has broken his foot, and England’s best goalscorer, Michael Owen, has only just recovered after five months out with a broken foot. Owen insists he is now fit, but he once told me, talking about his performance at Euro 2000: “I had just come back from injury, so I wasn’t playing at my best. Sometimes they say it’s as long as you’ve been injured, that’s how long it takes until you’re firing again. So if that was the case, I obviously wasn’t playing to my best ability in Euro 2000.”

  This bodes ill. Indeed, during my interview with Eriksson, his World Cup wall chart dropped off his office wall: splat. Some of Eriksson’s more credulous predecessors might have resigned there and then. The Swede merely chuckled.

  He may not win the World Cup, but he has already left a mark on this country. It’s mostly to do with the way he speaks. Unlike most of his predecessors, Eriksson doesn’t use rhetoric drawn from the two world wars: no talk of hand grenades, trench warfare, players bloodying their shirts for England. Until this month, he never spoke as if England had a manifest destiny to win trophies. He doesn’t believe that England should play its own brand of soccer. In short, he has quietly buried England’s exceptionalism in soccer.

  In one department he has been revolutionary. English soccer, like many English working-class professions, always observed the rule that experience trumped quality. That was why apprentice players cleaned the professionals’ boots. Players were selected for England only after years of professional service, and then kept their places until years past their prime.

  But Eriksson made Rooney England’s youngest debutant ever. Now he is taking an even younger man to Germany: Theo Walcott, who has never appeared in a Premiership match and will be the youngest player on any squad at the World Cup. Picking Walcott was probably wro
ng, but it is brave.

  In a small way Eriksson has changed British society, too. He showed that a foreigner could do “the second most important job in the country”—to quote the title of a book about England managers—without destroying the national essence. Britain is now dotted with foreign chief executives and sports managers, but Eriksson is the most visible example of the British economy’s globalization. Even though he hasn’t done a brilliant job, and despite the FA’s pledge in 2000 that he would have an English successor, he as a foreigner has been sufficiently acceptable to most English fans that the man initially chosen to succeed him was a Brazilian, Luiz Felipe Scolari.

  Scolari refused the job, fazed by English hysteria. But nothing ever shook Eriksson. The tabloids have devoured him for his foreignness, his love affairs, his defeats, and his flirts with better offers. All through it he has remained polite and bland. “I can’t change the English press,” he explains. “I suppose? I don’t think so. But I know for sure they will not change me. Yes. Absolutely sure.” In any case, he added, he didn’t read newspapers. “And in fact if I buy them, I buy them for the Sudoku. I like that.”

  If he never wins a prize, his crowning moment will remain the press conference the night in Lisbon in 2004 that England lost to Portugal. Several hundred hard-bitten soccer journalists crowded into a sweaty hall to quiz the loser. He told them, “I’m really sorry about it. Once again I thought we had a good chance to reach the final here.” It was bland as ever, yet in the circumstances simply to remain tedious was dignified, even heroic. When he finished, the journalists applauded. It wasn’t because they thought he was a good coach. They just thought he was a good man.

  José Mourinho

  January 2007

  This is the end game. José Mourinho may be paranoid, but now they really are out to get him. Behind closed doors men are scheming to oust Chelsea’s coach. Juventus’s manager, Didier Deschamps, admits he was approached to replace Mourinho, but says he won’t. As a conspiracy theorist, Mourinho must feel vindicated. The intrigues around him accord with the way he interprets the world.

  Mourinho was raised in Portugal under a regime that no longer exists in Europe: a fascist dictatorship. As a boy he lived on the estate of his greatuncle Mario Ascensao Ledo, sardine magnate and onetime president of Vitoria Setubal soccer club. The child Mourinho played soccer with a servant and attended private schools, thus escaping the miserable education then reserved for most Portuguese. He learned the languages—initially French, English, and Spanish—that made his career. Mourinho first rose in soccer as a translator, and his linguistic gifts helped attract Chelsea.

  In 1974, when he was eleven years old, Portugal’s Carnation Revolution brought down fascism. Most of his family’s businesses were expropriated, and the estate was lost. Elsewhere, the childhood realm of Mourinho’s future wife, Tami, was also being shattered. In what is now Angola, where her parents were Portuguese settlers, guerrillas fought colonial rule. Her father joined the Portuguese army and was shot and left disabled. When Portugal’s new rulers surrendered the colonies in 1975, the family went as refugees to Lisbon, feeling betrayed.

  Portugal’s revolution was the last in western Europe. Most of us on this side of the Continent can no longer imagine hidden forces overturning our lives. Mourinho can.

  Experiences like his and Tami’s—common in poor countries—tend to produce conspiracy theorists. Intellectually, there are two sorts of countries: ones where people tend not to believe in conspiracy theories (most of western Europe) and ones where they do (poor countries). Thus, many Iraqis believe that Saddam Hussein is still alive, his execution staged; many Arabs assume the Jews were behind the September 11 attacks; and many Africans think Western scientists concocted AIDS in laboratories.

  A peculiarity of Portuguese conspiracy theories is the centrality of soccer. This may be inevitable in a country whose two best-selling dailies are sports newspapers. Eusebio, the greatest Portuguese player ever, has explained that the English arranged Portugal’s elimination from the World Cup of 1966 by moving the England-Portugal semifinal from Liverpool to London. Today many Portuguese assume that their team’s exits from Euro 2000 and the World Cup of 2002 were fixed.

  Just as Texas is the home of UFO sightings, so Portugal’s second city of Porto nurtures soccer conspiracy theories. Porto’s setting is enchanting: the mountains, the Douro River, the vineyards where port wine is made, the Atlantic. But the city’s main buildings are mostly concrete monstrosities. Under fascism, the state spent on Lisbon instead. What bothered Porto almost as much were the perceived plots against its soccer. There are sometimes as many as nine top-division clubs playing in a thirty-mile radius of the city, perhaps the highest density in Europe, but the biggest is FC Porto, the club where Mourinho made his reputation. A story from 1940 has the fascist secret police arresting two Hungarian players of Porto as spies; one was later executed. Many locals still assume that Portuguese soccer is rigged against them.

  In 2004 Mourinho took this mental heritage to England, where he found conspiracies everywhere. Here is a sample of his allegations, which English people are conditioned to dismiss as wacko:• Arsenal controls the Premiership’s fixture list and rigs it to give Chelsea a tough schedule. (“Is José Mourinho the only one who can look at the fixtures and find something very strange?”)

  • Sky Television broadcast Michael Essien’s knee-high tackle on Liverpool’s Didi Hamann hundreds of times, because it hates Chelsea and wanted Essien suspended. In fact, all of England hates Chelsea. “When we lose there will be a holiday in the country.”

  • A hidden hand placed Chelsea in a strong group in this season’s Champions League, forcing them to pile up yellow cards.

  • “Something is happening with the English press in relation to Frank Lampard.” Because Lampard is an excellent player, the press is scheming to undermine him.

  Mourinho talks like this partly in order to unite his players against the world—and most players are dumb enough to fall for it—but he also appears to believe it.

  British newspapers love his conspiracy theories. Rather than report an encounter between two brilliant teams, we cover Mourinho. This is partly due to British soccer’s hierarchies. Players are not trusted to speak, and so the manager is the voice and face of the club. Mourinho’s Armani cashmere coat became Chelsea’s de facto crest. He is the English game’s dominant personality, as malign as he is brilliant.

  Now Chelsea’s owner, Roman Abramovich, appears to be getting sick of him. The problem is not Mourinho’s results. Match for match, he remains probably the most successful soccer coach ever. All the talk of Chelsea trailing Manchester United by six points in the league is a mere snapshot. Come May, Mourinho may well have clocked up his third title in three years. Meanwhile, Chelsea remains in the Champions League and in both domestic cups. Rather, his problem is his persona. His bad image in England—due to his team’s workmanlike soccer, and to his paranoia—has clung to Chelsea.

  Now others within the club are intriguing against Mourinho. The characteristic form of business in rich countries is the corporation. It is meant to provide transparency, reducing the scope for conspiracy theories. But Chelsea is a different animal. The club’s power structures are rarely visible. Several men around Abramovich are each building an empire: his Russian advisers; Pino Zahavi, the Israeli agent; Chelsea’s chief executive, Peter Kenyon; the sporting director, Frank Arnesen; and Mourinho. They never all sit down together for formal meetings. Private chats drive events. In this environment, a hidden hand can suddenly take away your realm. Mourinho understands how that works.

  Glenn Hoddle

  April 2008

  Ehhhmmmmm,” says Glenn Hoddle. After a monologue about the World Cup of 1998, the tournament that will always remain the highlight of his career, he falls silent. “The only problem is that you’ve done enough here to write a book. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” he laughs loudly. “I’ve got to say, we’ve touched on things there that I haven�
��t spoken about.”

  “You mean like visualization?” I ask.

  “Yeah, a lot of that stuff. It’s not been done with a reporter, as such. And even touching the England stuff as in depth as that.”

  That’s what a journalist likes to hear. But it’s too late. If we had had this interview ten years earlier, I could have sold it somewhere for a bag of money. Sadly, not many people care about Glenn Hoddle anymore. Before the interview a friend tells me, “At least you can find out whether he’s nuts or not.” The name Hoddle now chiefly evokes images of the born-again England manager who brought in faith healer Eileen Drewery to cure injured players and who was sure that England was going to win the World Cup of 1998 until it didn’t. Where does Hoddle work now? Still at Wolves? No, nowhere anymore.

  He is the Robert F. Kennedy of English soccer. American liberals sometimes lie awake at night wondering what would have happened if Bobby hadn’t been shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. Then he would have beaten Richard Nixon in the presidential elections later that year, and the United States would have pulled out of Vietnam, and . . . But if you think like that you go mad. Similarly, you can’t think about what would have happened if English soccer had chosen the Hoddle path. It’s just that sometimes you can’t help but wonder. And Hoddle can’t either.

  Like most people I had almost forgotten Glenn Hoddle, when one wet afternoon on a Parisian side street I answered my cell phone, and it was him. A week later we were sitting down at a table in the “Polo Bar” of a hotel in Ascot. It’s a posh place, walking distance from the racecourse. Fake Greek statues dot the cold lawn outside the window.