Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Valdano is speaking as Real Madrid’s director of soccer, as a former player and coach of the club, but also as a gifted writer. Perhaps nobody inside the game can talk soccer better than he does. Ask him a question and he pauses a beat or two, before answering in complete sentences in his precise, Argentine-inflected Spanish.

  We’re sitting in Real’s offices inside the Bernabéu stadium one evening, an hour before a game. On one wall is a black-and-white picture of di Stefano’s team. It shows the players standing up in open-topped cars, dressed in summer suits, driving through Madrid amid cheering crowds. General Franco’s policemen accompany them on motorbikes. The photo is Real triumphant—the club’s natural state. But in Valdano’s four spells at the club since he first came here in 1984, Real mostly hasn’t been like that.

  There is something dysfunctional about post-Franco Real, and Valdano’s journey of these past twenty-five years helps illuminate what. The club has struggled to redefine its identity and regain the dominance it had in di Stefano’s era. Its present failure is baffling. There’s an almost iron law in soccer that money brings success, and Real is the world’s richest club: It had income of more than $565 million in the 2008–2009 season. Yet on the field it reliably gets humiliated by the world’s best team, its eternal rival, Barcelona. Real had better hurry up and win something soon—ideally the Champions League in London this May—for Valdano’s sake and its own.

  Valdano was born in 1955 in a small town in the Argentine pampas. “When I was small,” he told me once, “I often heard: ‘You’re in a country where nobody is hungry, where it’s unthinkable that there’ll ever be war, and where you have the most beautiful women in the world.’ Now we only have the most beautiful women in the world.” He has called Argentina “the world’s first undeveloping country.”

  But Valdano grew tall and strong on the then bounty of the pampas. He turned out to be good at everything, the man other men wanted to be. He devoured Jorge Luis Borges, briefly studied law, dressed as elegantly as he spoke, became a goalscoring striker, and in 1975 arrived in Spain to play for the little Basque club Deportivo Alavés. Franco died that same year, and so Valdano found himself a young left-wing intellectual in a free country just as young left-wing intellectuals in Argentina were being dropped from military helicopters into the River Plate. This shaped his thinking about soccer.

  He admired the bony, chain-smoking closet communist Cesar Luis Menotti, the Argentine coach who brought the country its first World Cup in 1978. Menotti believed in “a soccer of the Left”: a creative game in which working-class people expressed their natural genius. By contrast, “soccer of the Right” was the thuggish game played by certain Argentine teams, whose players read up on the personal problems of their opponents in order to unsettle them, just in case biting and spitting failed.

  Valdano, a subtle and funny man, only partly bought this spiel, yet the soccer he describes in his books is a Menottista soccer. It’s the soccer he always wanted his teams to play. That makes it so striking that last spring Real hired as its coach José Mourinho. The little Portuguese favors a defensive style that looks suspiciously like “soccer of the Right.” (More about Valdano and Mourinho later.)

  As a player Valdano won two league titles with Real. However, his great moment was winning the World Cup with Argentina in 1986. Valdano scored in the final, and just as thrillingly got the chance to observe his teammate Diego Maradona from up close.

  Valdano with Maradona, as in most of his relationships in soccer, was a literate, educated person who had wandered into an alien world. Other players often mock him as a pseudointellectual, and call him El Filósofo (The Philosopher), a nickname that’s intended an insult. On Spanish television’s version of the Spitting Image satirical puppet show, Valdano’s puppet was always blathering on about Plato.

  Valdano never hides his bookishness, but he doesn’t think it’s very relevant. He knows that reading books doesn’t help you win soccer matches. I could describe Maradona’s goal [the dribble against England in 1986] much better than he could,” he once told me, “but I could never have scored it.”

  This evening in Madrid’s offices we get talking about winning World Cups. Several of Real’s players pocketed one with Spain last year. Had that reminded him of his own triumph? “It seems pornographic to me that twenty-five years have passed, because I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. But when the Spanish players were being given their medals, my daughter asked, ‘Where’s your medal?’ My wife went off to search for it. Eventually, she found it. It’s now in a place where I can’t get to it,” he said, and laughed. Still, he insists he hardly ever thinks about lifting the cup.

  A year after that, hepatitis forced him to retire from playing. He became a writer, and a coach, and in 1994 he returned to coach Real. The club was then in its dark decades. It hadn’t won its pet prize, the European Cup, since 1966. Worse, in 1992 Barcelona had won the trophy for the first time, and Catalans had taken to mocking Madrilenes for only winning the cup “in black and white.”

  In fact, Spanish soccer was experiencing the same shift in power as Spanish politics: from the center to the regions. Under Franco, Real’s hegemony had been unchallenged. The general himself had made a point of catching the club’s games on the radio, taking a transistor with him if he went out partridge shooting, writes Jimmy Burns in When Beckham Went to Spain.

  None of this is to say that Real was a “fascist club,” as its detractors sometimes charge. In fact, notes Burns, during the Spanish civil war the club was briefly run “as a Soviet-style workers’ federation.” Yet Real did benefit from Franco. It’s not that he fixed referees or gave Real money. He didn’t need to. A dictator typically concentrates his country’s resources in the capital city. That’s where he, his bureaucrats, generals, and secret policemen live. It’s the last place where he wants an uprising. And so capitals and their soccer teams thrive under dictatorships. Every team from a dictatorship ever to win the European Cup (now called the Champions League) came from a capital city. By contrast, winning teams from democracies almost all come from provincial towns.

  After Franco died, Spain’s regions rose. Barcelona in particular grew richer, and its soccer team improved. Real’s decline fed the daily hysteria that grips the club. In Spain there are newspapers and television stations that live off Real. “This is a club that moves amid great turbulence. It’s a universal focus of news,” says Valdano. He tries to remain ironic amid the hysteria. When a journalist laid out two tape recorders in front of him prior to an interview recently, Valdano commented, “Ah! One to record my words, the other to record my thoughts.”

  But at Real, the hysteria often crowds out everything else. The club’s inherited obligation is to rule Europe with the world’s best players playing attacking soccer. It’s an obligation no other club has. When Real stopped meeting this obligation, it got caught in an endless cycle of hubris and despair. The club’s president would hire a coach, buy new players, say that this at last was the perfect team, as good as di Stefano’s, and when they lost three matches running, he’d throw everyone out and start again. Valdano himself was sacked months after leading Real to the Spanish title in his only full season as the club’s coach. At Real, the coach’s function is to be a human sacrifice.

  Real’s wealth did eventually buy more titles: the Champions League in 1998 (immediately after which the club sacked the winning coach) and 2000. UEFA, the European soccer association, named Real the club of the twentieth century. And in the summer of 2000, the Madrilene construction magnate Florentino Pérez was elected the club’s president with a mission to restore the glory days of di Stefano. Pérez made Valdano his technical director in charge of signing players. After a hiatus when Pérez was voted out of office in 2006, the two men returned to power in 2009. Today they are still chasing di Stefano’s legacy, watched from the stands by an impatient octogenarian di Stefano.

  Pérez’s big idea was to buy galacticos, the world’s greatest playe
rs. Di Stefano’s team, too, had been full of galacticos. Santiago Segurola, a writer on soccer and buddy of Valdano’s, has a nice theory about this. When Pérez was four years old, in 1951, his father began taking him to the Bernabéu stadium to watch Real. Pérez loved his dad. And so some of his happiest childhood memories were formed in that great concrete bowl, watching di Stefano’s team. Pérez, explains Segurola, has a Freudian relationship with Real. In Pérez’s mind, that great team of the 1950s is tangled up with his beloved father. By trying to reassemble the 1950s team—now with Cristiano Ronaldo as di Stefano and the Brazilian Kaká as Raymond Kopa—he is communing with his father. John Carlin in White Angels, his book about Real, describes the photograph he once saw hanging over Pérez’s bed: Pérez posing on the Bernabéu grass among four of his galacticos. As the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers says of Basil Fawlty: “There’s enough material there for an entire conference.”

  In name Valdano was Real’s technical director, but working for the mercurial Pérez he often seemed more spokesman than policy maker. His job was to turn the club’s actions into beautiful words. It might have been frustrating, but everyone in soccer, even Jorge Valdano, wants to stay on the boat, especially at Real, and so everyone does what it takes. In 2003 I sat in this same room listening to Valdano tell me that Real’s team would consist entirely of galacticos and homegrown players. In his fine phrase, Real wouldn’t sign “middle-class players.”

  In 2002 Real had won its ninth Champions League. But after that Pérez’s galacticos stopped producing. There were too many chiefs and almost no Indians. From 2004 through 2006 Real won exactly zero prizes. Looking back this evening, Valdano admits, “We lacked players of—you could say—the middle class. This time, as well as signing Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká, players with another profile have arrived to bring a greater stability. You always need players like Xabi Alonso. Guys who might not look spectacular, but who can read a match. Who can destroy a counterattack by taking one step left or right.”

  While Pérez was out of office, in 2007 and 2008, Real won the Spanish league twice. Pérez and Valdano returned for the 2009–2010 season, and again won nothing. In Pérez’s two eras in charge Real has spent hundreds of millions of euros in transfer fees, almost certainly more than any other soccer club, and has gone through more than a coach a year. The club’s debt was nearly $800 million in 2008, and surely more now. Meanwhile, pundits are debating whether the current Barcelona side is the best soccer team ever, better than di Stefano’s Real.

  When I ask Valdano about his second spell as technical director, he says, “That’s what is more difficult: Barcelona. It’s the strongest Barcelona in history.”

  Isn’t Barcelona’s beautiful game—invented by Valdano’s own hero Johan Cruijff—exactly the soccer Valdano has always had in his head? “No,” he smiles. “I’m from South America, not from Europe. I’ve always been a great admirer of Cruijff. But for me, Brazil of 1970 was the platonic dream of soccer.”

  Still, doesn’t Barcelona benefit from a fixed style? That gives the club a stability that Real seems to lack. Valdano interrupts:The leader of Barcelona is the style of play. Now, at the head of Barça is a person who has taken the respect for this culture to the point of exaggeration: Pep Guardiola [the current coach]. In Madrid it was always different. At Real there is an enormous passion for triumph. There’s an admiration here for the player who gives everything. That’s why a player like Angel di Maria has had such rapid success here. And there’s also a desire for spectacle. But that’s the order of things here. In Barcelona that order is reversed. First it’s the play, then the result.

  I once witnessed Real’s “enormous passion for triumph” close-up in Valdano himself. It was a few minutes after Real had lost a group match in the Champions League away against Milan. The defeat didn’t matter much. Real eventually progressed to the next round anyway. When I passed Valdano on the staircase leaving the San Siro stadium, I greeted him cheerily. He glared at me, “eyes spitting fire,” as he had described di Stefano after a defeat, and strode off. The usual courteous funny Filósofo had vanished. Like Real, Valdano has a very bad relationship with defeat.

  That’s why last spring the club hired the coach who is, match for match, probably the winningest in soccer history. It was unfortunate that a couple of years earlier Valdano had described the defensive soccer played by Mourinho’s then team Chelsea as “shit on a stick.” Unveiling the Portuguese at a press conference, Valdano admitted that he had once been “aggressive” about Mourinho’s style. However, he added, the two men had “resolved our differences in a personal meeting.” Since then Valdano, Pérez, and Mourinho have formed an uneasy trinity.

  Some companies get so obsessed with their internal processes that they lose sight of outcomes. In appointing Mourinho, Real showed that it has the opposite problem: it’s so obsessed with outcomes that it barely seems to care about processes.

  Why did Valdano appoint his ideological opposite? He says, “My idea of soccer is expressed in five books, and in the teams I coached at Tenerife, Real Madrid, and Valencia. All my teams had the same style. But in the position I am in now, I’m an interpreter of Real Madrid—not of my own ideas. And Real Madrid, at this moment, with our reorganization of the team, needed a very strong leadership, and nobody represented that better than Mourinho.”

  “In two years we have replaced almost the entire team. Now we have a side with an average age of twenty-four. Marcelo is twenty-two, Özil is twenty-two, Khedira is twenty-three. It’s a team with a lot of future.” The young men have played well under Mourinho, especially if you forget the 5–0 thrashing by Barcelona on November 30.

  How has the Portuguese changed Real? “If this team has a quality,” says Valdano, “it is its devotion. We haven’t yet lost a point because the players weren’t trying hard enough. Surely, that must have something to do with the coach’s personality.”

  His way of working, with very clear ideas, is well suited to players today. When I was a player I liked to have more liberty than obligations. Today they seem to prefer having more obligations than liberty. They seem comfortable with a demanding coach who imposes a regime on them. We do have personalities here. We have Iker Casillas, captain of the world champions. We have players of great intelligence like Xabi Alonso. And Cristiano Ronaldo, with his tremendous character. But I think these players—and this club—needed a coach with these characteristics.

  Is the Mourinho he sees the loud and shouty one that the rest of us watch from afar?

  No! In the way great players and coaches are perceived in the media, there is often a colossal misunderstanding. The Mourinho you see from a distance would not have the support of all his players—let alone of his ex-players. Almost nobody who has worked under his discipline speaks badly of Mourinho. I’ve seen the same thing with many players, like Raúl: great players who are nonetheless great unknowns. It’s incredible in this society of the image, with the projection in the media that players have today, that this situation is so common.

  Actually, admits Valdano, even he now struggles to penetrate to the players. “Twenty-five years ago, the contact between the club and the player was very direct. It was all much simpler. A player was the club’s employee, with rights but above all obligations. Now there are many layers between club and player. Sometimes your interlocutor is still the player himself. But sometimes the interlocutor is the player’s father, the player’s agent, the player’s communications director, the player’s girlfriend. The complexity has increased.”

  One thing hasn’t changed: Real’s “enormous passion for triumph.” The club is currently chasing Barcelona in the Spanish league, and seeking its tenth European title, la décima. Valdano promises: “When Barcelona awakens from its dream, el Madrid will be there, to occupy the place it’s always had in the history of soccer.”

  Well, possibly.

  *In May 2011 Valdano lost the power struggle with Mourinho and was sacked by Pérez.

  Billy Beane
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  April 2011

  At first you think it’s the junk room: a cellar where they dump old, broken things. But gradually it dawns on you: This really is the Oakland A’s clubhouse. Billy Beane, the A’s general manager, is sprawled on a battered sofa, his giant feet on the grubby beige carpet. It’s February, the off-season, but here and there a yellow-and-green baseball shirt hangs in one of the players’ open lockers. The Oakland Coliseum has barely changed since 1981 when my dad drove me up from Palo Alto, a rabid eleven-year-old A’s fan, to see the A’s beat the Red Sox 4–3 on a Tony Armas homer. It must now be the most dilapidated stadium in the Major Leagues.

  In this very junk room not long ago, Beane and Brad Pitt sat eating takeout pizza from Zachary’s in Berkeley. Pitt was hanging around with Beane, preparatory to playing him in the movie Moneyball, and as Beane explains, “He’s not the kind of guy you can just walk down to the local restaurant.” Pitt also sneaked a visit to Beane’s house, in the hills near Oakland. “I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Beane says, “but my wife and the nanny seemed to think it was. They were up at five in the morning getting ready, which is the first time my wife’s got up at five in the morning.”

  Beane spends a lot of time sitting in this junk room watching European soccer on the big television. While he watches soccer, the A’s players watch him. They’re bemused as to what their boss sees in the girls’ sport. Beane remembers sitting on his battered sofa last year when Arjen Robben volleyed in the shot that knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League. Beane, nearly fifty now, jumped vertically into the air and whooped. An A’s player looked up from his locker and laughed: what an absurd sight. You didn’t often see Beane whooping when his own team won a ball game.