Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  When he launches into a critique of England’s current 4–4–2—too rigid, too few overlapping players who move forward one line, very different from when he was in charge—I ask whether it’s frustrating still to be thinking like a top-level coach but not to be working as one. “Yeah,” says Hoddle, “that’s a good question, and I’m thinking that myself now, as I’m talking to you. But, but—strange that, because you must have read my mind.” He chuckles, trying to turn it into a joke.

  Hoddle has kept thinking all those years. He quotes Pele: “The wonderful thing about soccer is that we’re all learning, and there’s something else to find out about the game.” Back when he wrote his World Cup Story, he still thought that he made only one mistake at his World Cup. He should have taken Eileen Drewery to France to heal England’s injuries.

  By now, though, Hoddle has had a decade to stew on that tournament, and he doesn’t say anything to me about either Eileen or reincarnation. If you’re an intelligent person with half-baked ideas, and a whole country makes fun of them, then you learn from the experience even if you never get a chance to repeat it.

  In the Polo Bar Hoddle says he should have taken a sports psychologist to the World Cup. He used one at his clubs. “At first players hated it,” he admits. “It’s all so difficult.” But just imagine, he goes on, if Scholes, who was too shy ever to speak, had said of a teammate during a group discussion, “To be honest, I’ve always thought he’s one of the best center-halves I’ve ever played against.” Then the player would think, “Oh bloody hell, didn’t realize—hang on a minute.” It would have given the man a charge of confidence. But Hoddle’s England didn’t have psychologists or group discussions.

  Would visualization and sports psychology have helped get rid of England’s historic penalty trauma? “I think it definitely would. There’s certain techniques that you can do.”

  That’s new, too. After England was eliminated, Hoddle said that you couldn’t practice penalties. Now he tells me, “Nine times out of ten if you miss a penalty in shoot-outs, it’s between the walk between the halfway line and the placing of the ball. So it’s in your mind where you’ve missed it. I can tell, I think nine times out of ten, if a player’s gonna miss it. With how he reacts, what his eyes are doing, when he gets the ball on the spot. But it does help if you’re like Brazil and you can get a left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and hit the top corner.” He laughs curtly. “You don’t see a goalkeeper dive in the top corner. So whether you work on that visualization, it’s quite handy to have those abilities. We had one left-footed player in the whole squad: Graeme Le Saux.”

  When he starts his academy, Hoddle wants to teach the teenagers to visualize:Sometimes I sensed where people were, actually. Behind me or something. If I can just help these young players a little bit, to play with your head up and see the picture. Some people play with their head down, and some people play with a picture.

  I used to do a thing with players, I’d say, “I want you to keep that ball up, but look at me.” And it’s really hard. They’d get to two, and they’d drop it. Three. But suddenly, if you keep practicing, you can get to ten. You don’t have to look at the ball to be in control of it.

  I say, “I can see that the academy makes sense. But you were the most successful young manager in England. Then you got the big job. In terms of soccer, you did it quite well. Now you’d normally be at your managerial peak, but you’re no longer a manager. Isn’t that strange?” He answers, “Yes. If I’m honest, I thought I’d be doing it [the academy] when I’m about sixty-five.” And he laughs at himself again.

  Suddenly, it turns out that we have been sitting here for nearly two hours. The short English winter’s afternoon is nearly over. Hoddle has to go. He’s taking his son to a sports psychologist. “We’ve done visualization with him. That’s worked really well.”

  But it could all have been so different.

  *Two years after we spoke, the Glenn Hoddle Academy in Montecastillo is up and running and has returned one or two players to the lower reaches of professional soccer. The Spanish property crash cannot have helped funding.

  The main thing I took away from meeting Hoddle is how normal and reasonable he seemed. It helped me understand how years of tabloid coverage turns almost every England manager into a caricature of himself. I had expected to meet a ridiculous person.

  Diego Maradona

  September 2008

  Of course Argentina shouldn’t have let Diego Maradona coach its soccer team. He won’t last long in the post. He has enough trouble getting out of bed, let alone showing up in Glasgow for Scotland-Argentina on November 19. The fat cigar smoker and former cocaine addict with the geriatric’s heart may not even be around for the next World Cup. But all this misses the point. A national team doesn’t exist only to win. It also represents the nation. And nobody in soccer incarnates his country and its fans like Maradona does. That is part of his genius. Here are some scenes from his life, and from two recent films about him, which explain why Argentina had to give him the job.

  Mexico City, 1986: After his two legendary goals have knocked England out of the World Cup, Maradona and his teammates sit joking in the locker room. The striker Jorge Valdano teases him: While Maradona was dribbling past six Englishmen, Valdano was running alongside him calling for the ball. Why didn’t Maradona pass? Yes, replies Maradona, I was watching you, and kept meaning to pass, but the English kept getting in the way, and suddenly I’d beaten them all, so I just scored.

  Valdano is awed: “While you scored this goal you were also watching me? Old man, you insult me. It isn’t possible.” And the midfielder Hector Enrique calls from the showers: “Lots of praise for the goal. But after that pass I gave him, if he hadn’t scored, he should have been killed!” Everyone laughs. As Maradona notes, Enrique had shoved the ball into his feet in their own half.

  It is a characteristic Maradona scene: Though he towered over his teammates, he always felt one with the team. When I asked Valdano if he liked Maradona, he replied, “I love Maradona. I’m from the country of Maradona.”

  Buenos Aires, 2004: Maradona lies in intensive care, his heart failing. Argentines gather outside the hospital doors. They expect him to die young. That is what Argentine heroes do: Eva Perón, Che Guevara, Carlos Gardel, the singer Rodrigo. In the Catholic tradition, the heroes die to redeem the country’s sins.

  Like Evita, Maradona is a sort of Argentine folk saint. In Carlos Sorín’s 2006 movie The Road to San Diego, an illiterate woodcutter decides that a fallen tree in the forest resembles a cheering Maradona. He crafts the thing into a statue of Maradona and carries it across Argentina. Some people he meets laugh at him, noting that the statue looks nothing like Maradona, but many grasp its religious status. “Santa Maradona,” as a Brazilian truck driver remarks.

  In Emir Kusturica’s new documentary Maradona by Kusturica, crowds form around Maradona wherever he goes, as if he were an icon in a Catholic procession. It looks exhausting, but Maradona understands the iconography. In his interviews with Kusturica, he wears an outsize silver cross and explains how God saved him in intensive care.

  Qatar, 2005: Maradona and Pele appear at the launch of something or other. Afterward, writes James Montague in his book When Friday Comes, the Qatari crowd rushes the stage. Everybody ignores Pele. Montague says, “All I can see in the melee is the top of Diego’s unkempt Afro, buried in a sea of adoring fans.” Agustín Pichot, Argentina’s former rugby captain and Maradona’s friend, explains that people love Maradona because he is “authentic.” We feel we know him. He is flawed like us.

  That’s partly because Maradona looks like an ordinary person. Never has a great athlete looked less like a great athlete. In Sorín’s film, set in poor, provincial Argentina, we see rural people with withered faces on rickety buses—a cheap prostitute, a blind lottery-ticket seller—who recognize themselves in the tubby, little former slum dweller. Maradona is their link to greatness.

  Germany, World Cup, 20
06: Maradona is here as a fan. He sits in the stands wearing an Argentine replica shirt, jumping rhythmically with the other Argentine supporters. Pele or Franz Beckenbauer couldn’t have done it. But Maradona embodies Argentina.

  Cinemas, 2008: Kusturica’s film is agitprop for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Emir Kusturica. Yet it also captures a truth about Maradona and Argentina: The player avenges the country’s frustrations about its place in the world. The film includes a cartoon version of Maradona’s goal versus England, in which he dribbles past Margaret Thatcher (who gets herself decapitated), a handbag-wielding Queen Elizabeth, a horned Tony Blair who bites Maradona’s ankle before dropping into the underworld, and a pistol-toting George W. Bush.

  Kusturica calls the goal “one of those rare moments that a country heavily in debt to the IMF triumphed over one of the rulers of the world.” That, surely, is too much honor for England. However, Maradona and many Argentines experienced the goal as just that. If you want to understand why Latin America is going left-wing, look at Maradona. He incarnates Chávezian resentment.

  In Kusturica’s final scene, two musicians (one of them the great Manu Chao) stand on the street playing a song: “If I were Maradona. . . .” Suddenly, Maradona is standing beside them, listening. Behind his huge sunglasses, he starts to weep. He knows how the fans feel. He is one himself. The Argentine team has always belonged to him.

  Josep Guardiola

  March 2009

  A year ago, one of Barcelona’s countless vice presidents mused over lunch at the Nou Camp stadium that perhaps Josep “Pep” Guardiola should be the club’s next coach. It seemed a weird idea. Guardiola was then thirty-seven and had never managed a professional soccer club, let alone the biggest on earth.

  True, replied the veep, but Guardiola was a Catalan, and “Barça” longed to have a Catalan coach. After all, she added, when the Catalan Victor Valdés was given a chance as Barcelona’s keeper, he wasn’t yet a world beater, but he had learned on the job.

  I never wrote about the conversation because I assumed she was fantasizing. But months later Guardiola got the job. He then transformed last season’s jaded and hedonistic Barça team into what the great Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi calls “the most beautiful soccer cause of recent years.” Next month Guardiola’s lot meet Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Perhaps only Barça can stop an English side from winning the trophy again.

  Guardiola’s inspired appointment offers two lessons to any company: how to choose a boss and how the boss should choose his team. The key point about Guardiola is that he has been identified with Barcelona almost from birth. He comes from Santpedor, a village so Catalan that many locals spoke the forbidden regional language throughout General Franco’s dictatorship. At thirteen he entered the “Masia,” the “farmhouse” for young players next to Barcelona’s stadium. Most of his life since has been spent in the square kilometer of the Nou Camp. As Jimmy Burns writes in Barça: A People’s Passion, locals still remember Guardiola as a skinny fifteen-year-old ballboy illegally running onto the pitch and hugging a player during a European semifinal in 1986. They remember him as a skinny playmaker, standing on the balcony of the Generalitat building in 1992, holding aloft the European Cup, and saying in Catalan, “Ja la teniu aquí ” (Here you have it). The phrase gave many in the crowd gooseflesh, because it deliberately echoed the legendary “Ja soc aquí ” (Here I am) of the Catalan president Josep Tarradellas when he returned from decades of French exile to Barcelona as an old man, after Franco died.

  In other words, Guardiola, a reader of Catalan poetry, is such a perfect Catalan hero that he’s practically a character from a nineteenth-century nationalist poem himself. Cynics mockingly call him “the Myth.” Most Barça fans always hoped that the Myth would return one day as the skinny coach, though perhaps not quite as soon as this.

  This background matters because it helps Guardiola govern with the grain of the club culture. As Joan Laporta, Barça’s president, told a business partner, “I was looking for somebody who understood the Barça way, and nobody understands it better than he does.” The Barça way is the attacking, quick-passing soccer down the wings that the Dutchman Johan Cruijff introduced to the club. In Guardiola’s phrase, Cruijff painted the chapel, and subsequent coaches must merely restore and improve it.

  The local media and fans agree. By governing with the grain—by being the grain himself—Guardiola wins instant acceptance in this club of tireless warring factions. It’s like the company that dares appoint an unknown from the ranks as CEO because everyone likes him and he understands the company.

  Contrast this with a “star” CEO or coach from outside who tries to overturn the corporate culture: José Mourinho, for instance, won prizes at Chelsea but was never entirely accepted there largely, because his defensive tactics offended English soccer culture. The moment Chelsea stopped winning, Mourinho had to leave.

  Star players obey Guardiola because they know they have no chance of forcing him out. They stick to the three-page “Code of Good Conduct” he wrote before the season, stick to their zones on the field, and when the great striker Samuel Eto’o dares talk back at practice, he is banished to the showers in seconds. Barcelona’s players are so good that as long as they serve the collective, they will win prizes.

  And that’s the main management lesson from Guardiola’s work: He kept his best players. A year ago everyone expected Barcelona to sell the difficult, underperforming Eto’o and Thierry Henry. But Guardiola knew that soccer’s scarcest resource is talent. It would have been easier to buy lesser, more dutiful players. Instead, he dared persevere with class. He melded Eto’o, Henry, and Lionel Messi into soccer’s most thrilling attack.

  Only one step remains in Guardiola’s career path: to displace Sant Jordi as the skinny patron saint of Catalonia.

  José Mourinho

  April 2010

  In 1996, José Mourinho suddenly became a powerful man. At only thirty-three, the unknown Portuguese had come to Barcelona chiefly to translate for the English manager, Bobby Robson. However, he fast became more than a translator. Mourinho took a duplex in the beach town of Sitges, near Robson’s house, and often talked soccer with him over dinner, recounts Mourinho’s biographer Patrick Barclay. Robson let Mourinho write dazzling scouting reports. And Mourinho had one great advantage over his boss: He spoke Spanish. When Robson talked to players, or gave press conferences, Mourinho interpreted. Many felt he sometimes added thoughts of his own.

  Barcelona gave Mourinho’s coaching career liftoff. Yet when soccer’s winningest coach returns to town with Inter Milan for Wednesday’s semifinal of the Champions League, he doesn’t come as an old friend. To the contrary: Mourinho has become the anti-Barcelona, the man who stands for everything that Barça is not. He now helps define the club’s identity.

  That’s new, because when he worked at Barcelona, few locals had heard of him. Even the club’s president knew him only as el traductor (the translator). Only Barcelona’s coaches and players understood his importance. Mourinho charmed the then captain, Pep Guardiola, and persuaded everyone that he knew soccer. He was even allowed to coach the team in some friendlies. Barça was arguably the first side he ever managed.

  In 2000 he drove out of Sitges almost unnoticed to coach in Portugal. Four years later, Barça fans watching Porto win the Champions League noticed a vaguely familiar face on their television screens: El traductor had become champion of Europe. They also noticed that he had rejected Barcelona’s etiquette. Barça’s motto is “more than a club”: Everyone in the institution is expected to make himself subservient to it. But at the press conference, after Porto’s victory, Mourinho talked mainly about himself. He, too, seemed to consider himself “more than a club.” Whereas Barcelona prizes elegant humility, Mourinho is shouty.

  As a tactician, too, he was the anti-Barcelona. The club’s creed is “beautiful soccer.” Mourinho’s was “It’s not important how we play.” His genius lay in finding and exploiting
his opponent’s flaws. As he said, “If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car, to beat you in a race I have to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank.”

  When he returned to Barcelona as coach of Chelsea in 2005, he proclaimed that he had already won as many European Cups as Barcelona had in its history. To show how well he knew Barcelona’s Ferrari, the day before the match he announced Barça’s lineup. He beat Barcelona—chiefly because he had spotted that Barça’s then left-back, Gio van Bronckhorst, couldn’t tackle—and enraged the city. Sociologists like to say that groups define themselves by contrast to some imaginary Other. For Barcelona, Mourinho had become the Other.

  When Chelsea visited again in 2006, Barcelona fans pounded on their team bus and jeered, “Traductor!” As in all dysfunctional relationships, Mourinho and Barcelona know just how to hurt each other: He regularly beats Barça, and Barça pretends not to respect him.

  In truth the club feared Mourinho. In 2008 two club officials visited him in Portugal to canvass him about becoming head coach. He would have loved it: the world’s best players, and the ultimate revenge. But Barça finally decided he wasn’t the right man. Instead, it appointed his old friend Guardiola. Seeing Guardiola now, Mourinho must reflect on how easy the star player’s path to the coaching summit was compared to his own.

  Before their two teams met in Milan last week, Mourinho put more sugar in Barça’s tank. Inter’s playmaker Wesley Sneijder says, “His team talk lasted over two hours, spread across two days. He emphasized Barcelona’s strong points, and wanted us to use those to knock them out.” Inter clogged the central defense, frustrating Barcelona. Afterward, when Barcelona’s players grumbled about the referee, Mourinho chastised, “They should say that Inter was stronger, and that’s it.” He loves it when Barcelona’s moral superiority slips.