Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Oddly, until 2000 England had never recruited from that pool. In a country that happily recruits chief executives and sometimes even monarchs from abroad, England’s manager was one of the last jobs reserved by convention for an Englishman. Unfortunately, few Englishmen were elite managers. The country, long isolated from the European mainstream, had developed its own dysfunctional “kick and rush” style of soccer. This favored warrior virtues over thought. Accordingly, England produced few great soccer thinkers.

  Worse, convention required that the England manager must have diplomatic gifts. That ruled out the best English manager of recent decades, the provocateur Brian Clough. Every Englishman who got the post ended up disappointing a demanding public. Before Capello, managing England was often called “the impossible job.” Rather, it was a difficult job made impossible by a misguided recruitment policy.

  Capello had long wanted his last coaching job to be with England. He had spotted the nation’s unrealized potential. When he got the job with its salary of about £6 million (then about $12 million)—his appointment a symptom of the Europeanization of Britain since the 1990s—he scarcely even pretended to respect English traditions. Previous England managers had done the bidding of British tabloid newspapers. The best-known players were celebrities and so had to play at whatever cost. Capello, who does not care what the media say about him, broke this Hollywood-style star system. He banished the star Michael Owen from the squad, banished Steven Gerrard from central midfield, and used Beckham only as a humble substitute until the player disappeared from contention with a torn Achilles tendon. Capello banished the players’ free-spending wives and girlfriends, or WAGs, from the team’s camp: Rustenburg at this World Cup won’t be the media circus that Baden-Baden was at the last one.

  Above all, though, he has largely banished the old frenzied, blind English game—what soccer historian Jonathan Wilson calls England’s “headlesschickenness”—even if it sometimes reappears like a genetic defect. Capello’s England plays intelligent continental soccer. They value possession of the ball over speed. The results are telling: Capello’s team has won 75 percent of its twenty-four matches. No previous England manager won more than 60 percent.

  Crucially, too, Capello has given the tabloids nothing to work with off the field. He is a conservative, traditional Catholic—so much so, in fact, that in 2006 he praised the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. What he liked about Spain, he said, was “the order Franco left behind.”

  In the UK he has wisely kept quiet about politics. He also lacks the free-range libido of another predecessor, Sven-Göran Eriksson, whose many relationships kept the tabloids busy. Capello lives a quiet, golfing life in London. He has made “the impossible job” seem almost a soothing leisure pursuit, like flower arranging.

  His England will probably fly home in tears: It has generally lost against first-rank teams in friendly matches. However, Capello has redefined the job for a generation. His next few successors will surely be drawn from the elite of winning, monogamous continental European coaches.

  *Even after Capello’s disappointment in South Africa, he continued to outshine all previous England managers. As of May 2011, he had won 67 percent of his matches with England.

  Diego Maradona

  June 2010

  It was nearly midnight in freezing Johannesburg, but a bunch of us exhausted journalists were hanging on in a half-empty Soccer City for Diego Maradona. Argentina’s manager gives press conferences that are more fun than most of the games here. His team had just beaten Mexico, its fourth straight win, and the celebrations seemed to be taking some time. Finally, the great man showed up, looking as ever like a tramp who had found a nice suit and two identical Swiss luxury watches, and proceeded to provoke journalists. “That’s a stupid question,” he told one. To another: “Listen, what are you actually aiming at?” When a journalist asked about Germany, Argentina’s opponent in Saturday’s quarterfinal, Maradona refused to answer but offered the man “carte blanche”: “You may write whatever you want about what I think about Germany.”

  Yet when the suit from FIFA tried to end the press conference, Maradona objected, “Finally I get the chance to speak and he wants to send me away!” There was a message he wanted to convey, after two years in this job: “You see, as a coach, they said I had no idea, and suddenly I’ve won four games and they see me as someone else.”

  Here is Maradona triumphant. The critics said he knew nothing about coaching. They said someone else was running Argentina’s tactics. It’s now clear that Maradona truly is the boss. This is his team—for better or for worse. It’s perfectly possible that on July 11 here in Soccer City he will be holding the World Cup aloft for the second time in twenty-four years, and shortly afterward running naked through Buenos Aires as per promise. Yet it’s also perfectly possible that Argentina will fail, and if so it will in large part be Maradona’s fault.

  Maradona was appointed in 2008 not so much for his supposed tactical brilliance but to incarnate the nation. It was a little like when cheerleader Kevin Keegan was appointed manager of England: Maradona was not a mere technician, but someone who stood for Argentina, who not only embodied Argentine soccer but at the last World Cup had come to Germany as a fan, an Argentine shirt taut over his belly, jumping up and down on the terraces to the chants of “If you don’t jump, you’re an Englishmen.”

  Julio Grondona, eternal boss of the Argentine Football Association, had tried to surround the novice coach with experts. Maradona didn’t want experts. He let his old septuagenarian coach Carlos Bilardo (under whom he’d won the World Cup in 1986) have a small role, but like many former playersturned-coaches, he preferred the company of old buddies. His adjutants here in South Africa, dressed in the same gray suits, are his former teammates Alejandro Mancuso and Hector “El Negro” Enrique. Neither has much coaching experience, either. It’s just that Maradona goes way back with them. The greatest moment of Enrique’s career was shoving the ball into Maradona’s feet before the little man dribbled through half the English side to score the so-called best goal ever at that ’86 World Cup.

  Even when it came to picking players, Maradona surrounded himself with buddies. Juan Sebastián Verón, with whom he had played at Boca Juniors in the early 1990s, is now thirty-five and fading, but he made the squad. So did young Javier “Huesito” Pastore, whom Maradona loves for his ability to mimic anyone he encounters, from waiter to bus driver. World-class players like Javier Zanetti and Enrique Cambiasso, whom Argentina desperately needs but who don’t seem to be part of the family, aren’t in South Africa. Maradona’s logic seems to be that he selects on passion, feeling for the shirt. That translates into selecting only people who totally buy into his project. “I was talking to Carlos Bilardo and other people in the team,” Maradona mused here the other night, “and we were talking about the good vibrations we feel.” It’s more fun with your mates.

  Bilardo, although never quite rejected, has never quite penetrated this phalanx of buddies. He and Mancuso openly loathe each other. In December Bilardo said that Mancuso “encouraged the separation” between himself and Maradona and that he’d tell all on the radio. In the event he didn’t, Maradona himself crushed the squabbles by noting who was boss. “No one is going to impose anything on me, not even suggest a player. They didn’t do that to me when I was fifteen, and now I’m forty-eight.”

  This is quite true, and something almost everyone missed before the World Cup. Maradona simply isn’t the sort of guy to defer. Nor is he cowed by the responsibility of coaching a team at a World Cup. He’s always saying here how comfortable he is at World Cups: “I have seen many things, and perhaps others have not done what I have done.” To him a World Cup is as familiar an environment as a favorite vacation destination is for normal people.

  And of course he knows soccer. So although he listens to others, he, in the phrase of George W. Bush, is the decider. Last week Argentina beat Greece, w
ith the substitute Martin Palermo scoring a late-second goal. Speaking about himself in the third person, Maradona revealed afterward, “Enrique, Mancuso, and Maradona discussed whether Palermo or Higuaín should come on. Enrique and Mancuso wanted ‘Pipita’ [Higuaín], so I said ‘Yeah? Bring on Martin then.’”

  But just because Maradona is the decider, it would be wrong to assume that he determines events. The role of the coach in soccer generally is overestimated. In our recent book Soccernomics, sports economist Stefan Szymanski and I showed that players’ salaries determine almost by themselves where a club finishes in the league. The typical coach doesn’t matter much. Because the coach appears after the game to explain why his team won or lost, we start to believe that he shaped the result. In fact, he is usually better understood as his team’s spokesman.

  At a World Cup, it would be ludicrous to think that the best players in the country, with many years of professional experience, need to be told by a coach just what to do. Argentina has a very mature culture of soccer tactics; this is not New Zealand, or England. Here in South Africa Maradona often consults with a forum of senior players: Verón, Javier Mascherano, and Gabriele Heinze. On the field, they can shape matters. Maradona also happens to possess the best player on earth, Leo Messi, who is in the habit of winning games single-handedly. “If you have such a sensational team, it’s easy,” said Maradona after his boys whipped South Korea 4–1. Perhaps he was trying to be modest, but it was true.

  Certainly, a “Maradoniano” team is taking shape. Messi has finally become, in Argentine soccer parlance, the team’s “owner,” running things from central midfield, as Maradona wanted—after all the coach’s previous plans for Messi failed. The team has scored four times from set pieces, which Maradona claims to orchestrate. They don’t play the defensive Bilardista antifutbol associated with the old coach.

  But the mark of Maradona is also visible in the team’s failings. In the absence of Zanetti and Cambiasso, there is no decent right-back and only one ball-winning midfielder in Mascherano. That means Argentina often goes long periods without possession. “What I didn’t like is that we left the ball so often to Mexico in the second half,” Maradona complained in Soccer City. “It’s our ball.” But that’s the team he created.

  We may yet get to relish that naked run (or waddle). But if so it will have as much to do with Mascherano or Messi or the glorious Carlos Tévez as with the fat chap who does the press conferences and his kitchen cabinet.

  *Maradona’s struggle to find work after the World Cup is a sign of the times. He spent months looking for a job, advertising his availability to English clubs but getting no response, before finally signing for Al-Wasl in Dubai. Ho wever, as I write, he seems in no rush to fly into the Emirati summer and actually start work.

  Fifteen years ago, there was still a widespread belief in soccer that a great player would generally become a great coach. His sheer presence would motivate his players to exceed their limits. That’s why Bryan Robson was given all the spending money he wanted at Middlesbrough and touted as a future England manager practically before he had unlocked his office door. It’s also why Keegan was named manager of England in 1999.

  Now, though, soccer is a bit more professional (see the profile of Mike Forde in Part III), and no club with any sense will touch Maradona.

  Malcolm Allison

  October 2010

  Thinking of Malcolm Allison, who has died at age eighty-three, two very different images spring to mind. At Crystal Palace in 1976, he invited the porn actress and vicar’s daughter Fiona Richmond to join him in the team bath. Naturally, press photographers were on hand to record the moment.

  That was “Big Mal,” the extroverted hedonist known to tabloid newspapers and people in soccer as “a great character.” But then there is the thinker Allison: sitting at a table in Cassetari’s café in the late 1950s, debating tactics with teammates from West Ham United, moving salt and pepper shakers around to make points about formations. Several of those teammates, inspired by Allison, also became leading soccer managers. One, Bobby Moore, captained England to victory in a World Cup. Allison could have helped make English soccer a thinking game, but instead he morphed into “Big Mal.”

  Allison was born in Dartford, Kent, in 1927, son of an electrical engineer. He was a bright boy, a reader, but he deliberately failed his entrance exams for grammar school because the school didn’t play soccer. After the war he served as a soldier in occupied Vienna, and there he first tasted continental soccer. He turned out for the local side, Admira Wacker. He sneaked into the Soviet zone to study the Red Army team and noticed how much they trained with the ball, whereas English teams of the day mostly ran laps.

  Back at his club, Charlton Athletic, he told the manager that his training methods were useless. He was promptly sold to West Ham. He made his debut there in 1951 and soon became captain, but in reality was almost the club’s de facto manager. In an era when players were expected to be deferential, Allison often ran practice and helped pick the team. He followed coaching courses and kept learning from the Continent. In 1953 the great Hungarians thrashed England 3–6 at Wembley. Allison loved the way their players changed positions during play, something almost unknown in England. He always favored passing soccer against the rugged English tradition of punting balls long. In short, he was a continental thinker about four decades before they began taking over English clubs. Allison had continental style, too: he favored Italian clothes and alone in his playing era wore his shorts very short.

  In 1957 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Part of a lung was removed, and he now lacked the stamina for soccer. Seventeen-year-old Moore replaced him as West Ham’s center-back, but in a sense this was a triumph for Allison. Moore said in his autobiography, “Malcolm had taught me everything I know. . . . When Malcolm was coaching schoolboys he took a liking to me when I don’t think anyone else at West Ham saw anything special in me. . . . It’s not too strong to say I loved him.” Moore’s famed passing game was founded on a piece of advice Allison had given him: Even before you get the ball, know where you are going to pass it.

  Inevitably, Allison became a manager, with Bath City and then Plymouth. He got his big break in 1965 when Joe Mercer, Manchester City’s manager, hired him as his assistant. Between 1968 and 1970 City won the league, the FA Cup, the League Cup, and the European Cupwinners’ Cup. It was City’s zenith, and Allison’s too. He coached the team while the calmer Mercer ran the business and was the club’s public face. Allison, who wrote the provocatively titled Soccer for Thinkers, was ahead of his time in the realms of fitness, diet, and motivation as well as tactics. Colin Shindler, City fan and author of Manchester United Ruined My Life, describes how he brought players to Salford University to have blood samples taken to measure their stamina. “In 1971 this was unique in British soccer and, predictably, was regarded by the players as a complete waste of time,” writes Shindler.

  Yet by then Allison had already began the downhill slide that occupied most of the second half of his life. During the World Cup of 1970 he had worked as a television pundit. Handsome, articulate, and fond of smoking cigars on screen, he drew viewers. Women mobbed him in the streets. He became “Big Mal.” “Allison did not win a single thing in English soccer after the birth of Big Mal,” notes his biographer David Tossell. “It seems to be more than coincidence.”

  At City, Allison insisted on being promoted from coach to manager. Shindler says he proved “a brilliant coach and a rotten manager.” Allison left the club for Crystal Palace in 1973, and from then on was known chiefly for what he did outside soccer. London offered gambling, nightclubs, champagne, and blondes. Among his claimed conquests was Christine Keeler, siren of the Profumo affair.

  Big Mal was a showman, famous for his sheepskin coat and fedora hat, though he could also give team talks shirtless, and took off even more to bathe with Richmond. He created that seventies phenomenon: the manager as hedonistic performer. Newspapers egged him on. A former “runn
er” for the press in Fleet Street in his youth, Allison understood media, and he fed journalists quotes and stories, sometimes while drunk. He would promise “to take soccer to the moon” or to “frighten the cowards of Europe.” He screamed at referees.

  All these were distractions. He began to go from job to job: Plymouth and Manchester City again, Middlesbrough, Kuwait, Galatasaray in Turkey, and even Memphis, where he was fired before his first game. (“You’re not really a manager until you’ve been sacked,” Big Mal liked to say.) His brief American experience prompted him to advise Middlesbrough to dye their pitch orange. When he later sued Middlesbrough for wrongful dismissal, it emerged that in a three-month stay at a local hotel he had run up a bill of £3, 500 for brandy, champagne, and cigars.

  He did win the Portuguese league with Sporting, but mostly he floundered without adult supervision. Like many of his contemporaries in English soccer, he was eaten away by alcohol. Wives and girlfriends came and went. He ended up alone with his Alzheimer’s in a one-room apartment in Middlesbrough. The Allison of Cassetari’s café and Soccer for Thinkers had disappeared long before—his loss, and English soccer’s.

  Jorge Valdano

  January 2011

  Jorge Valdano is trying to explain what Real Madrid is about—a question he’s better equipped to answer than perhaps anyone else—and the club’s director of soccer reaches into the past, to talk about a fellow Argentineturned-Madrilene. “You could say that Alfredo di Stefano incarnates Real,” says Valdano. Di Stefano was the linchpin of the great Real that won the first five European Cups, from 1956 to 1960. Valdano explains, “After a defeat it was best not to look at Alfredo, because his eyes would be spitting fire. When things were going badly, he’d forget about beauty and just pursue the result. Everything that has happened at this club, in one way or another, has been influenced by the spirit of di Stefano. This is a club with a very bad relationship to defeat.”