Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  At first glance I don’t recognize Hoddle because he’s gone gray, but he still looks like a sportsman with his bodywarmer and red shirt, and those famous long legs folded beneath the table. We order cappuccinos, and he shows me the brochure for the soccer academy that he’s trying to set up in Montecastillo in Spain: a second-chance academy for teenagers who have been cut by English clubs. He thinks he can get “15 to 20 percent” of the kids back into professional soccer. He says, “I’m excited. It’s my company. Having the freedom, with no chairman, chief executive, board of directors, referee making a silly decision—a minute to go, ruins your week—and a set of fans on your back. I’ve turned down six or seven jobs to keep this going. This is very, very, very much like a soccer club, in a way. And if we get onto the golf and the property side, with the Glenn Hoddle Academy, that could open doors for a second one pretty quickly. He says, still trying to raise the money for the first.” And Hoddle laughs at himself.

  He got the idea for the academy as a rising young manager at Swindon and Chelsea, when he kept having to tell seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, “Sorry, but you’re not good enough at the moment.” He’d always tell the player, “Prove us wrong. I’d love to see you in a few years’ time.” But he didn’t hear from many of them again.

  “It was horrible having to do it,” he says. “First experience of doing it to six eighteen-year-olds, when four of them broke down in the office and cried, I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t very nice. I thought soccer management was going to be a bit different to this.’” He decided then that when he had finished working as a manager, he would start the academy. John Syer, the sports psychologist who worked with Hoddle for years, once told me, “Glenn hides it well, but he has a heart of gold.”

  Still, it must have been hard for Hoddle the young manager to empathize with failures. Nobody had ever doubted that the boy from Harlow would make it. Hoddle says, “I was one that they were ready to sign on. I left school and went straight to an apprentice. Even though, when I look back at some of the clips, seventeen when I played: I was like a beanpole. Strong wind, and I’d have fallen over. But you have to have aggression. My first thing I ever did on a soccer pitch, I came on at seventeen against Norwich. Big Duncan Forbes was the center-half for Norwich. I broke his nose!” Hoddle bursts out laughing. “I ran for a ball, and it was right above him, and I was so excited, as a kid going on at White Hart Lane, I just jumped, and I was so determined to win this ball”—as he tells the story you know he can see that ball hanging in the air again—”and I caught him, and his nose went, ‘Tffuuummmm.’ Poor Duncan probably broke his nose about half a dozen times. It was my first minute of being on, and Spurs fans must have thought, ‘Ooh, we’ve got a real Dave McKay here!’”

  Yet even then Hoddle was developing his distinguishing quality: “That was me real gift, I thought: my vision to see a picture.” He had learned it from Jimmy Greaves. When Hoddle was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at Spurs in 1972, the worn-out old alcoholic had returned to train with his former club. Greaves had been granted a testimonial against Feyenoord to make some money. Hoddle says: “We played in a tight gym upstairs. It was ten a side, really tight, and he was in and around the goal all the time, and the one thing I saw was, before that ball was coming to him, he was forever looking ‘round his shoulders. It was amazin’. ‘Cause that was what he lived off, goalscoring: the ability to be looking and looking and looking, and he knows the ball is going to come, from where that girl is”—Hoddle points to a waitress at the other end of the Polo Bar—“and now it’s being passed and he’d go ‘Tcchoom’; he’d turn and pop it into the net before you even know it. And you’d think, ‘Shit.’ As that ball was coming he had that instant picture, where the goal was and where the defenders were. So he could swivel and hit it first time. It was such a tight game, it was amazin’. Okay, credit, I picked it up. Some people could have watched it and not seen it. But I learned off that.”

  In 1986 I moved with my parents from the Dutch town of Leiden to North London. On Saturdays I’d sometimes take the W3 bus from Alexandra Palace to Spurs. You went for Ossie Ardiles and Chris Waddle, but mostly for Hoddle. He could put the ball on your big toe with either foot.

  I remember this when Hoddle says he sometimes tells his son Jamie, a promising cricketer, “J, when you go over that white line, you have to become an actor sometimes; you have to go into a different person. When you come off, you haven’t got to be aggressive.”

  I tell him I’m surprised: I remember Hoddle as a player who seemed to bring his own personality onto the pitch. He seemed to have a calm about him.

  “Hmmm,” says Hoddle. “It’s interesting you saw a calm. I always looked at me when I watched videos, and I think it was: I used to make myself look as if I had more time than other people. I think David Beckham’s got that. Sometimes McEnroe looked like he had so much time when he’s playing shots. I also think the ball changes shape when certain players are in possession of it. It becomes an attachment of their body, when with others it’s not.” He pauses, then: “That’s something I was gifted. I think I had that from a very, very early age.” (This is the closest he will come during our conversation to invoking God.) “I had that ability to not be under pressure until I was absolutely being kicked. Whereas some people can be put under pressure from ten yards. You start to close them and they start panicking.” He laughs. “I didn’t realize until later on in my life that I was actually visualizing for a split-second when I hit passes, and when I hit shots.” Hoddle stands up, and on the Polo Bar’s patterned carpet he assumes the pose that every English fan over the age of thirty-five still has in his head: Glenn Hoddle with his arms spread wide, about to hit a long pass. “So if I saw Tony Galvin,” he explains, “on the left wing, and I saw the fullback, and Tony was there”—and twenty-five years later, Hoddle can still point them both out, somewhere in the air of the Polo Bar—“as I drop my head down to hit the ball, I can see him. Even now, to this day. I can see Tony Galvin, and I can see where I’ve got to hit the ball, over that fullback’s head, and I know Tony’ll be there.” It makes him laugh: “I’m just visualizing seeing Tony. I know where he is; the tunnel’s on that side. I know exactly where I am. I can see it!”

  Nonetheless, Hoddle’s Tottenham never won the title. He was something of an amusing irrelevance in English soccer. Because he was slim, and had beautiful long legs, and didn’t charge around like a homicidal maniac, he was nicknamed Glenda. He played fifty-three times for England, but in most of those games he was expected to charge around like a maniac.

  How often did he play in his own position? “Probably once, actually. It was Hungary away, qualifier. I played behind two strikers. I think I scored two and made one, or I scored one and made the two. That was the only time I played that way. They sort of played the midfield three behind me and let me go in just behind Trevor Francis and Paul Mariner.”

  I feed him an easy one: Does he agree with the view that England never put the trust in him that France put in his contemporary Michel Platini? “Absolutely. And I think if you cast your mind back to the eighties, particularly in this country, a creative player—it was so difficult. You had muddy pitches. You had rules where you could kick people; you could pull their shirts back. You could stop the creative player and not get booked.

  “Your Wimbledons and your Watfords—that’s the reason why those long-ball teams had some success. They’d wait for the back four to squeeze up to two yards from the halfway line, so you were playing in a 60-by-40 box, all the time, on, normally, mud. So for the creative players in them days”—and Hoddle’s voice goes hushed with horror—“you’re talking about a different game completely than now. And we had our head in the sand, we really did, about how the game could be played. Now it’s completely different. And with the back-pass rule, the game is opened, spread out, on beautiful pitches.

  “It was an ambition of mine to move abroad,” he says. He had offers from Schalke, Cologne, and PSV Eindhoven, and very n
early went to Napoli, but in the end he chose Arsène Wenger’s Monaco. In England, Hoddle the player never played more than a cameo role.

  But when he became a manager he was going to change everything. In Rotterdam in October 1993 Ronald Koeman (who by then should already have been sent off) curled a free kick over the English wall. England had failed to reach the World Cup of 1994. Graham Taylor was sacked. Long-ball soccer was discarded. At last, England was going to be turned into a European soccer country.

  Initially, the task was given to Terry Venables, because in 1994 Hoddle was only thirty-six years old. Yet he was already player-manager of Swindon and had the team playing attractive continental soccer. Then he moved to Chelsea, and in 1996, at thirty-eight, he became England’s youngest manager ever. He was given the opportunity he had never had as a player: to set English soccer on a new path. And one October night in 1997, he succeeded.

  When I ask him which match during his tenure as England’s manager made him proudest, he says, “Definitely Rome away. Italy.” England had to draw in Rome to qualify directly for the World Cup. “Italy had won seventeen matches out of seventeen,” says Hoddle. “Not even a draw.”

  He fielded eight defensive players. England put on the most disciplined performance most of their fans could remember, even if that sounds like damning with faint praise. Still, a couple of minutes from time it almost went wrong. Hoddle says:I don’t know if you remember, ‘cause I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was the only time in soccer where I actually physically felt my heart jump. Wrighty [Ian Wright] hit the post. Teddy [Sheringham] came in and—should have scored, maybe. Hit the target, got blocked, I think. And they came down the left-hand side, right in front of our bench. And they put a cross in, and Vieri backed away, had a header back across the goal. I remember Dave Seaman not moving.

  We weren’t behind the header, we were watching it come back across, so I can’t see whether it’s going in the net. I came out in such a sweat. I really thought the ball had gone in the net.

  After the game, when an elated Hoddle had confided his anxieties to Seaman, the keeper had told him, “It wasn’t a problem; it was going wide.” The way Hoddle tells it, you know Seaman had no idea where the ball was. Hoddle shakes with laughter.

  The game ended 0–0 and has gone down in English legend as “The Italian Job.” That evening, England had become Italy. Hoddle had created a modern team that had learned from other countries. The future of English soccer had arrived.

  Several other England managers have attempted an “Italian Job” since, but usually in vain. The moment against Croatia at Wembley in November 2007 when six English defenders neglected to mark a single Croatian striker was more typical.

  In Hoddle’s mind there was a moment when his career turned, when it was decided that he’d be spending this winter’s afternoon in the Polo Bar with me, and not on a throne somewhere. It was a moment at the World Cup in 1998, which felt like the moment when Vieri’s header flew toward Seaman’s top corner.

  The moment: “When Sol Campbell scored and it was disallowed.”

  The match: England-Argentina in St. Etienne. Eighteen-year-old Michael Owen scored his solo goal. At halftime the score was 2–2. Sitting in the press stand, I looked up for the first time and saw Scottish journalist Patrick Barclay eating his hand. Barclay looked at me and raised a meaningful eyebrow: I also had at least five fingers in my mouth, he meant to say. Neither of us could understand it, because neither of us supported England.

  Shortly after halftime Beckham kicked Diego Simeone softly, almost in slow motion, and was sent off. And shortly before the final whistle, in a full Argentine penalty area, with the scores still tied, Campbell headed the ball into the net. Hoddle says: “We thought we’d done it with ten men. And then to see five of your players celebrating by the corner flag, and Argentina coming down the right wing, and you’ve only got five outfield players!” Hoddle always knows which wing it was because he can still see it happening. “And I can remember Gary Neville sliding in at the far post just as the fella was gonna hit it. And he toes it away for a corner. And we’re trying to get all the players back in. Amazin’. Amazin’.”

  When the match went to penalties, Paul Ince and David Batty missed their kicks. Not only had England not practiced penalties, but Batty had never taken one in his life.

  “Did you enjoy those nights, those moments?” I ask.

  “They’re fantastic nights, they are,” says Hoddle. “That’s why you do the jobs. You don’t remember how much money you earned. They’re the things that you remember.”

  But surely St. Etienne is a bad memory?

  “Well, was it? It was a titanic effort. We went down to ten men with a complete second half, almost, and extra time, against a top, top team. It weren’t against Switzerland. And we nearly pulled it off. We should have done, if the referee had done his job right. David should never have been sent off. And Sol Campbell’s goal—well, still to this day I can’t understand why he’s disallowed it.” (Here is where Hoddle’s visualization skills fail him. Beckham kicked Simeone, and just before Campbell headed home, Alan Shearer elbowed the Argentine keeper.)

  I quote another retired player, who said that the moments that you’re all sitting broken in the locker room together, heads down, are also special moments. The solidarity of the shared pain is something to treasure. You just don’t realize it at the time.

  Hoddle is talking quietly now. His high has passed. “They are. Unfortunately, they’re not the one you think it’s going to be. What I always wonder, if we’d have beaten them with ten men, as we’d come close to doing, what would have happened? You know, you can have a ‘media momentum’ sometimes, which is a bit false, but I think maybe the momentum of that match would have took us—well, I don’t know where it could have took us.”

  Back in 1998 Hoddle had known for certain: If it hadn’t been for Beckham’s red card, he would have won the World Cup. In his extremely badly written Glenn Hoddle: My 1998 World Cup Story he says, “I couldn’t get away from my belief that we’d have won the world cup if we’d have beaten Argentina, and no-one on this earth will ever change my opinion that if we’d had eleven men on the pitch we’d have won that game.” That England would then have still needed to beat Holland, Brazil, and France was a detail. In the final words of his book: “I’ll always believe it should have been me. It should have been England.”

  I put it to him that he still isn’t finished with that World Cup. He replied, “You know what: I’ve never looked at the game. Sorry, I looked at the game after, when we went back in the summer, but I never studied the game. It would be interesting to look at that game now, really look it as a bit of a performance, rather than be involved in it as we were.”

  Eight months after St. Etienne his career at the highest level ended. In an interview with the Times, Hoddle was quoted as saying that handicapped people were paying for sins in former lives. This was widely felt to be (1) a nutty idea and (2), in Tony Blair’s new PC Britain, unkind to handicapped people.

  Now Hoddle reflects, “My emotion would be just purely frustration. Because it was a story that wasn’t true, not my beliefs—not how it was put anyway. And I had people that weren’t strong enough to stay with me, under such a stupid thing.” He means the FA officials who seized the opportunity to get rid of an unpopular manager. “My record stands up against anyone, really, in international soccer, so, errrm—”

  That’s an interesting view. After all, some people in international soccer have won the World Cup. Hoddle reached only the round of sixteen. “Stands up against anyone in international soccer?” I repeat.

  “Well, no, just if you look at the stats, the record is one of the better England manager’s records, if you like. And it wasn’t for soccer reasons that they sacked me.”

  He’s right on both counts. Hoddle’s England won 61 percent of its twenty-eight matches outright. On the day we speak, in February 2008, that is better than any other England manager in
history. The next best performers—Alf Ramsey, Ron Greenwood, Sven-Göran Eriksson, and all the prewar selection committees combined—are grouped a fraction behind him at about 60 percent.

  Hoddle’s also right to say that his career finished strictly because of his stupid opinions about something outside soccer. And now he’s drinking cappuccino in the Polo Bar.

  Was it a trauma?

  “What? The ahm . . .”

  The sacking.

  While Hoddle thinks about that, Sky Television and an Elvis-like singer fill the background. “I’ve got to say it was a massive disappointment, because I knew what perhaps we could have done on the pitch.” And he talks about his fantastic players, “your Shearers, your Inces, your Sheringhams, your—Owen, he was just a puppy. Your Tony Adamses, your Campbells, your Nevilles. Young Beckham. Scholes—‘the jewel in my crown,’ I called him. Stuart Pearce. Players that had real, real pride in their work.”

  While he was still managing them, Hoddle sometimes seemed to look down on his players, viewing them as less intelligent and less skillful than he had been himself. He once told Beckham, when they were practicing volleys in practice, that he didn’t have “the skill” for it. Now, though, he remembers the players as partners in his greatest adventure.

  Hoddle never got a top job again. In English soccer, an alcoholic wife beater can be “one of the lads,” whereas a somewhat arrogant man who finds God on a visit to Bethlehem is a dangerous lunatic. Hoddle didn’t swear, didn’t drink much, and didn’t have many friends. For most of his career he had never needed any. But after England, he could only get work at Southampton and Tottenham, and later a division lower at Wolves. He resigned in Wolverhampton in July 2006 and hasn’t worked at a club since. The day we meet, he still is only fifty years old.