Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  For decades Real Madrid functioned as Barcelona’s imaginary Other. Now one little man has usurped Real’s role. On Wednesday, Mourinho should take those cries of “Traductor!” as a covert tribute.

  Arsène Wenger

  April 2010

  In 2004 Arsène Wenger was looking for a defensive midfielder who could one day replace Patrick Vieira at Arsenal. The manager wanted a runner. So he ordered a search through modern soccer’s computerized databases for the defensive midfielders who covered the most ground per match. The search produced an obscure name: Mathieu Flamini, a rookie at Olympique Marseille, was covering eight and a half miles on average in the handful of professional matches he had played. He didn’t even have a professional contract yet. Wenger went to watch Flamini, saw that he could play soccer, and signed him.

  Flamini spent four years mostly on the Arsenal first team and in his last season ran more miles per game than anyone else in the Premier League. He then refused to renew his contract and joined Milan.

  The story sums up Wenger’s genius in evaluating players—and his lack of funds to keep them. Currently, after Arsenal’s 4–1 thrashing by Barcelona in the Champions League, Wenger is being viewed with pity. His Arsenal team hasn’t won a prize for five years. Critics berate him for refusing to spend the money he has on big transfers. Yet the critics are wrong. Perhaps no soccer manager does more with what money he has than Wenger. No wonder that Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, and the man who brought novel Moneyball methods of evaluating players to baseball, himself probably the most admired executive in sport, calls the Frenchman “undoubtedly the sports executive whom I admire most.” Wenger remains a model of how to value players.

  A key to Wenger’s career is something he did outside soccer: studying economics at the University of Strasbourg in his native France. That helped teach him both the precise value of money—to him, $25 million is not simply “a lot”—and the importance of data. Most managers in hidebound, antiintellectual soccer don’t understand either point well. But value for money and respect for data are Wenger’s abiding reference points when he looks for players.

  Caring about data, Wenger pioneered the use of stats to assess players. More than twenty years ago at Monaco he worked with a computer program called “Top Score,” developed by a friend. It assigned points for any act a player performed on the pitch. “Most players who got high scores went on to have successful careers,” said Wenger. Few managers rely so much on statistics. Wenger got rid of Gilberto Silva when the data showed that the Brazilian was taking a split second longer to pass the ball on than he had the season before. He often uses stats to back up a hunch he already has about a player. Perhaps, he half-jokes, he doesn’t have enough confidence in his own judgment.

  One hunch concerned a young Liberian playing in Cameroon named George Weah. Wenger—who monitored half the leagues on earth years before everyone else did—kept getting intriguing reports about Weah. However, the reports would add that the guy was a rough diamond. Finally, Wenger sent a Monaco colleague to West Africa to watch him. The colleague phoned back after the match, “The bad news is, Weah broke an arm. The good news: He played anyway.”

  At that, Wenger took the gamble and bought him. After signing his contract, Weah sat at the table with his head in his hands. Wenger said, “George, cheer up, you’ve just signed for Monaco.” Weah replied, “Yes, boss, but nobody gives me any money.” It turned out he didn’t have a penny. So Wenger pulled five hundred French francs out of his wallet—then about ninety dollars—and handed it to Weah. Wenger, a funny man away from press conferences, likes to joke about the size of Weah’s “signing bonus.” The Liberian exemplifies Wenger’s knack of getting quality cheap.

  In the old days it was easy. When Wenger joined Arsenal in 1996, other Premier League managers were still barely scouting abroad. Nobody else seems to have realized that Milan’s reserve Vieira and Juventus’s reserve Thierry Henry were great players. Spotting that didn’t require mystical insight—Vieira convinced Arsenal’s fans of the same fact inside forty-five minutes in his debut against Sheffield Wednesday—but none of Wenger’s British rivals seemed even to know Vieira.

  However, over time Wenger lost some advantages, because others copied him. They too began using stats and scouting abroad. And Manchester United had an advantage over him: more money.

  This season Arsenal is believed to have the fourth-highest wage bill in England. Chelsea pays the most, then the two Manchester clubs. Logically, Arsenal should finish fourth. Instead, it is third. That’s impressive.

  Beane, at the Oakland A’s, knows all about working with a small budget. He told me, “If you have less than your competitors, you can’t do things in the way that they do it or you are destined to fall behind them. If we did things exactly like the Yankees, we are destined to finish exactly where our payroll says we should. If Arsenal want a striker and Man U want a striker and Chelsea want a striker, well, Arsenal will get the third-best striker.” In other words, the critics who urge Wenger to pursue expensive big names like his rivals do are wrong. Wenger knows it’s pointless for Arsenal to chase stars.

  Those who think that for some bizarre psychological reason he doesn’t want stars—especially goalscoring or muscular stars—are wrong. He loves them. He’s tried to buy many of them, too. Sitting in his office at the Emirates Stadium after a match early this season, he mused to guests about the period when he was weighing up an unknown striker at Le Mans called Didier Drogba. Wenger decided not to take the risk. Imagine Drogba at today’s sweet-passing Arsenal, he added; he’d score a hat trick every game.

  Or, he went on, there was the time he flew the teenage Cristiano Ronaldo to London. The boy, still unknown at Sporting Lisbon, was shown around the Highbury stadium, was given an Arsenal shirt with his name on the back, and agreed to join Arsenal. But before he did, Manchester United played Sporting in a friendly. The kid so awed United’s defenders that on the plane home they urged Ferguson to buy him. Sporting said it had already agreed to sell him to Arsenal, Wenger recalls. United offered nearly $20 million, a multiple of Arsenal’s price. United got him. But Wenger told his guests in the office, “Next time you see him you ask him—he still has that Arsenal shirt.”

  And after the sixteen-year-old Wayne Rooney netted from thirty yards for Everton against Wenger’s Arsenal in 2003, Wenger said he thought the boy was the best English player he’d seen since coming to the country. But very soon after, bigger clubs were chasing Rooney.

  The point is: Wenger knows he cannot have established stars. He knows that if City offers Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Touré much higher salaries than they get at Arsenal, the players will leave. Arsenal could have gotten stars by going hopelessly into debt, as “bubble clubs” like Lazio Roma, Valencia, Rangers, and Celtic have done, but this economist refuses to bankrupt his employer. Over time, Wenger spends more modestly on transfers than less successful clubs like Liverpool, Newcastle, even Tottenham, let alone Real Madrid. From 1998 to 2007, Wenger’s net spending on transfers (i.e., his purchases minus his sales) was £39 million. Ferguson’s was £123 million. (I owe these calculations to Len Williamson.) Yet Arsenal remained competitive with Man United in this period, while also building the expensive Emirates Stadium, which will raise the club’s revenues in the long run. Beane compares Wenger to the legendary American investor Warren Buffett: “He runs his club like he is going to own the club for a hundred years.” And he adds, “Wenger seems to understand that you are only as strong as your business. People don’t want to hear that the business is running good. Until the business starts to go awry.”

  However, running a good business isn’t enough for Wenger. When he worked in Japan and saw how painstakingly Japanese girls arranged flowers, or cleaners picked up bits of paper, he became a perfectionist. He still wants Arsenal to win everything. Now that other managers have copied his old tricks, he needs to find new methods to differentiate himself from his rivals.

&n
bsp; First, that means avoiding transfers when possible. Transfers cause disruption. Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s chief executive, says the club doesn’t like buying players who will need time to adjust and who “might or might not be 5 or 10 percent better than the players we already have.”

  Second, it means knowing just when to sell. Wenger likes to sell players when they are at their most fashionable, but fractionally past their best. It’s like selling a stock at the top of the market. He flogged Henry for $32 million at age twenty-nine, Vieira for $25 million at twenty-nine, Emmanuel Petit for $10.5 million at twenty-nine, and Marc Overmars for $38 million at twenty-seven, and none ever did as well again afterward. Beane notes, “Nothing strangulates a sports club more than having older players on long contracts, because once they stop performing, they become immovable.”

  Third, Wenger likes to buy players young and cheap. Thinking longterm, unlike most managers, he often signs players before they are ready for the first team. He therefore gets them at a discount—remember Robin van Persie or Cesc Fabregas—and has time to shape them. Van Persie said nearly six years ago, “Wenger is the only coach I’ve had who’s kept his word. He told me he’d bring me slowly. The first month he didn’t expect anything of me. Then he’d gradually give me more playing time. It began with two minutes. Now we’re on half an hour.” Today Van Persie is a star, as Wenger foresaw. Ferguson, too, has brought young players to stardom: Ronaldo and Rooney. The difference is that he bought them when everyone could already see they’d become stars. They were priced commensurately.

  Last, Wenger is a realist. He knows that any player Arsenal can afford will lack something. Usually that something is experience: Wenger could afford to sign Van Persie at twenty-one, but couldn’t have afforded him now. Sometimes that missing something is strength: Wenger knows it matters, and in his early years at Arsenal he had famously physical teams, but it’s the quality he is most willing to forego in a player. When critics scoff that today’s Arsenal players are physically weaker than Chelsea’s, Wenger knows they are right, even if he’d never admit it. But he also knows he cannot afford players who are simultaneously experienced, very skilled, and strong.

  His cut-rate Arsenal does better than you’d expect. It usually makes at least the quarterfinals of the Champions League. It is now challenging United and Chelsea for the Premier League. Weirdly, however, Wenger’s critics often measure him against those much richer clubs, then complain when he loses. Beane sighs, “In those years of not winning, they’ve opened the Emirates. There’s a debt service that comes with it. They have been able to service it and put themselves in a position to [potentially] win year after year. But sport has a habit of saying, ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

  Given how much wages determine soccer, Wenger almost cannot win. He tries to forget the fact. Some of his critics simply don’t know it.

  José Mourinho and Louis van Gaal

  May 2010

  José Mourinho “got angry, angry!” recalls Louis van Gaal. It was 1997, and the two men had just heard that Van Gaal would replace Bobby Robson as Barcelona’s head coach. Mourinho, Robson’s interpreter, must have feared his career would sink with his boss’s.

  Instead, Mourinho impressed Van Gaal, who kept him as an assistant. Thirteen years later, in Madrid tonight, Mourinho’s Inter Milan faces Van Gaal’s Bayern Munich in the Champions League final. Europe’s foremost coaches look like opposites: the handsome Latin and the flat-faced Dutchman. They play like opposites: Van Gaal regards attacking soccer as a moral duty, while Mourinho believes only in winning. Nonetheless, they are spiritual twins. Both are outsiders, theoreticians, the sort of people whom soccer clubs rarely recruit as coaches.

  Traditionally, good players later get jobs as coaches, even though the professions don’t have much to do with each other. But neither Mourinho nor Van Gaal was a very good player. The Dutchman, a semipro at Sparta Rotterdam, was let down by his gangling body: One spectator remarked that he ran as if he had swallowed an umbrella. Mourinho peaked in Belenenses reserves.

  Instead, both had a more relevant apprenticeship: decades of studying coaching. Asked why failed players often succeed as managers, Mourinho once replied, “More time to study.” Van Gaal at age twelve would go to watch Rinus Michels train Ajax Amsterdam. At about that age, Mourinho was analyzing opponents for his father, manager of a little Portuguese club.

  Even as a player, Van Gaal was effectively a coach. As playmaker, he would march around the center circle shouting instructions at his teammates. He would sometimes reorder Sparta’s lineup in midmatch. Yet he later struggled to find coaching jobs. Few wanted a middling former player who looked peculiar and got up people’s noses. Mourinho couldn’t get coaching jobs because he hadn’t played. Instead, he kept studying. At Barcelona, Van Gaal let him analyze prospective opponents. “I had to teach him how to look,” the Dutchman says.

  Both men spent decades earning the status that was handed free to former great players. When the two men finally became coaches, not at huge clubs, each took fewer than five years to win both the UEFA Cup and the Champions League. This wasn’t coincidence. Each man had developed a theory of soccer. Mourinho has recorded his in his so-called bible, which no outsider is allowed to see. Van Gaal published his as a Dutch book, Visie.

  Though Van Gaal’s teams attack and Mourinho’s don’t, their “visions” are oddly similar. Like coaches in American football, both men know exactly where their players should be at any moment in the match. Van Gaal’s former player Dennis Bergkamp told author David Winner, “I don’t want to be disrespectful, but Van Gaal could have eleven machines on the field. Robots: you do this, you that.” Mourinho likes robots, too. Both men distrust bigname players who might make independent decisions.

  Both work harder than the plausible former stars in handmade suits who populate most coaching dugouts. Van Gaal, before a friendly against an amateur team, gave each Bayern player a sheet containing an analysis of his opposite number and match instructions. Mourinho claims to have watched the recent Inter-Chelsea game seven times. “This is not seven times putting the DVD in and letting the DVD run,” he clarified. “I watched it seven times, and stop, and go back, and stop again.”

  Lately, the two men have been lauding each other. “He taught me the trade,” says Mourinho. “Maybe one day I’ll be his assistant,” jokes Van Gaal, who doesn’t normally do self-deprecation. Each senses how much the other needs praise. Mourinho’s nonstop babbling about himself is often interpreted as a tactic designed to deflect pressure from his players. It’s not: Just after his players’ greatest triumph, the elimination of Barcelona, when there was no pressure to deflect, Mourinho upstaged them by charging around the pitch between the water sprinklers celebrating for the television cameras. “I won this” was his message. Similarly, after Bayern became German champions, Van Gaal gave such a bombastic speech from the balcony of Munich’s town hall that German satirists have been likening it to “balcony scenes” of past leaders. These men crave the respect so long denied them.

  You might think their success will dissuade clubs from handing coaching posts to former stars. It won’t. Soccer’s traditions never die.

  Fabio Capello

  June 2010

  In 1987, former player Fabio Capello took some psychological aptitude tests normally given to recent MBAs. Capello was working as an executive in the sporting wing of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, and everyone could see he was bright. However, nobody expected him to score as highly as he did, writes his biographer Gabriele Marcotti. An impressed Berlusconi sent him for a year’s high-level executive training. In 1991 Capello became coach of the empire’s soccer team, AC Milan, and performed brilliantly.

  He leads England into this month’s World Cup as arguably the most successful manager of England ever. He is unlikely to win the tournament, but he has set a new template for the job. He has redefined what was once a chiefly ambassadorial role as a meritocratic one, best filled by a top-class coa
ch from continental Europe, who descends on backward England as a sort of development consultant.

  Capello was born in 1946 in the cold northern Italian town of Pieris, a dozen miles from the then Yugoslav border. His father, a schoolteacher and the local soccer coach, had recently returned from a German prisoner of war camp weighing just 105 pounds. Capello’s upbringing was tough. Swimming, for instance, consisted of his father taking him to the nearby cliffs and throwing him from the rocks into the sea.

  Capello became a top-notch player, who played thirty-two times for Italy and scored at Wembley for the country’s first-ever victory in England in 1973. However, he was never single-minded about soccer. In the 1970s he became fascinated by the new arte povera movement, which made art out of rubbish and other discarded materials. He preferred the company of art dealers to players. He became a notable collector of modern art.

  There was nothing artistic about his coaching. A pragmatist, he tailored his style to the players he had. All he cared about was winning. He was as tough with his players as his father had been with him, taking on even the biggest stars. “Aren’t you ashamed of being so fat?” he roared when the Brazilian striker Ronaldo emerged from the shower. “He’s a shouter,” confirms his former player Clarence Seedorf.

  Yet Capello holds no grudges, writes Marcotti. He judges people only on whether they can help him win in the future. In a rage at Real Madrid, he once said that David Beckham “will never play for me again.” But Beckham did, helped Real win the league, and later served Capello’s England team.

  The craggy Italian won nine league titles in sixteen seasons as a club coach. Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at Cass Business School in London, has calculated that only about 10 percent of managers consistently perform better with their teams than their clubs’ wage bill would predict. Usually in soccer, the club with the biggest salaries finishes at the top of the league, and the club that pays least finishes at the bottom. Only a few outstanding managers, like José Mourinho and Alex Ferguson, have much of an effect on results. Capello heads the small elite.