by Simon Kuper
*Poor Minghella died in March 2008, aged fifty-four, after a botched operation. Portsmouth hadn’t won a prize in his lifetime. Two months after his death, it won the FA Cup. I thought of him that day.
Jacques Herzog
May 2005
Jacques Herzog, the Swiss architect, sits in a leather armchair looking out over the Munich soccer stadium he has just built. Thin and shaven-headed, Herzog exudes nervous energy as he scours the gray stands.
In 2001 Herzog and Jacques de Meuron, his business partner and friend since kindergarten in Basle, won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel. They got it mainly for their Tate Modern Gallery in London, but Munich’s Allianz Arena will displace the Tate as their best-known building next year when it hosts the opening match of soccer’s World Cup. Hundreds of millions of people will see it. The Allianz Arena—named by the insurance group—opens with friendly matches next week. Herzog won’t be there: He is booked for the opening of an exhibition of his firm’s work at the Tate.
Today he is seeing his finished stadium for the first time. He has just marched through it in yellow helmet, raincoat, and sneakers. What does he think? He sighs, “Like always, unfortunately, you discover those little things that you would have liked to have done otherwise, and that jump at your eye. But it works very well, I think.” What should he have done differently? “Let’s say, I wish I had added a bit more color. But the people, and the illumination, that’s also an integral part of the whole thing.” When the stadium’s full, he says, you’ll hardly notice the gray stands.
Few famous architects had sullied their hands with stadiums before Herzog and de Meuron did so in Basle (for the club they support, FC Basel) and Munich. They are still building Beijing’s Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Games. All this signals a new era: Stadiums are becoming keynote urban buildings, as cathedrals were in the Middle Ages and opera houses more recently. When Norman Foster’s new Wembley opens in 2006, it will be his first stadium in more than forty years in architecture.
Months ago, in the converted villa in which he works in Basle, Herzog mused about stadiums, “This is a new issue, like museums were at some point. It was for a long time the domain of more technically oriented people. It was totally neglected. It was done with very little money. A lot of stadiums were built with pride by the community, but if you look very closely, lots of things were not thought through.”
Over the past century, after many mistakes (and while Americans have approximated the ultimate baseball ground), Europeans have learned what makes the ideal soccer stadium. The Allianz Arena is Herzog’s attempt to build it. Some things he has gotten right. Some he hasn’t, because cities have changed. In sum, his attempt illuminates the nearly 3,000-year history of stadiums.
The first one, Olympia, opened in Greece in 776 BC and lasted 1,145 years. The Colosseum in Rome survived about half as long, until the sixth century AD. After that people got along fine without stadiums for nearly 1,500 years, notes Simon Inglis, the great chronicler of the breed. (Few topics are so dominated by one writer, evidence of how much stadiums have been neglected.)
After the Victorians invented modern team sports, stadiums reappeared, still looking rather like the Colosseum. These English grounds were built on the cheap: barns to house the devoted. Most of the legendary ones—Old Trafford, Anfield, Highbury, Ibrox, Twickenham, Craven Cottage—were partly or wholly the work of an obscure Glaswegian architect called Archibald Leitch. When Leitch died in 1939 he seems to have had just one obituary, a brief notice by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, which didn’t mention stadiums. In a sign of what Americans call the “ballpark renaissance,” Inglis has just published a biography, Engineering Archie: Archibald Leitch—Football Ground Designer.
Leitch didn’t bother making his stadiums look good. His clients didn’t care about looks. To quote Inglis’s maxim on soccer stadiums, “Form follows whatever the club chairman’s builder pal from the Rotary Club could come up with at a cut-price.” Herzog, who has possibly never heard of Leitch, says, “The stadiums I love—Anfield or Old Trafford—are ugly stadiums on the outside.”
Yet Leitch created what would become Herzog’s inspiration: the traditional English stadium. The type was usually surrounded by terraced streets. To save space, its stands towered steeply from the edge of the field. There was no athletics track, because athletics didn’t pay. The stadium’s roof was cheap and simple. The great baseball grounds of the early twentieth century, such as Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, looked similar.
Comparisons between religion and soccer are overused, but European stadiums undeniably took over certain functions from the emptying cathedrals. It was increasingly in stadiums that twentieth-century citizens gathered in community, sang, cried, and felt part of something larger than themselves. An English stadium, says Herzog, was “the living room of a religious community.” The stadium also became the home of civic pride: the biggest and best-known building in many cities.
Traditional stadiums started disappearing in the United States first. By the 1950s, most American families owned cars. They moved to the suburbs, and the stadiums followed them because there wasn’t enough parking in their old neighborhoods. As fans grew richer, they also demanded more food, toilets, and comfort. Stadiums had to be big, with parking garages, and next to a highway.
In 1988, just when everyone was sure the “urban ballparks” were dying out, a minor-league baseball team opened one in the decaying city of Buffalo. Pilot Field stood not in the suburbs but downtown. It even made reference to the old urban buildings around it, with its white brick and big arched windows. The seats were very near the foul lines. Fans liked this “retro ballpark,” and they came in droves. Pilot Field, incidentally, was built by an architecture firm called HOK. Though little known outside sports, HOK is responsible for most extant baseball stadiums, Sydney’s Olympic Stadium, Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, Arsenal’s future stadium, and Wimbledon’s new center court.
Pilot Field (now called Dunn Tire Park) inspired minor-league baseball teams everywhere to build retro ballparks. In 1992 the major-league Baltimore Orioles opened Camden Yards, and that settled the matter. Camden Yards, built by HOK, is downtown, in redbrick, and has an asymmetrical field with real grass just like the old ballparks. At the front is a statue of local boy Babe Ruth. Fans love it, and retro ballparks have since conquered the major leagues.
In Europe, the ballpark renaissance has taken a different turn. Few European city centers have the deserted stadium-size spaces found in the downtowns of the United States. In Munich and across the Continent, the new stadiums are outside town. Here too, however, architects have learned from the past. The new stadiums don’t have athletics tracks, which ruined the atmosphere by keeping fans far from the action. Soccer and athletics simply don’t mix.
What soccer fans crave in a stadium is communal emotion. Leitch’s stadiums offer it. He built perfect places for soccer, chiefly because he put fans near the pitch. His grounds inspired the Allianz Arena. “It’s somehow an attempt to go back to the roots of soccer,” says Herzog, “to take some of these archaic ingredients. The Shakespearean theater, probably it was even a model for the soccer stadium in England—this closeness between the actors and crowd. If you can achieve this proximity, the people become the architecture.” The Swiss quips that the Allianz is “too good for Germany.” “I would rather have made the stadiums for Manchester United or Liverpool,” he says.
Sitting in the Allianz’s top tier, he points almost straight down toward the pitch. The stands here climb as steeply as the law allows, keeping all 66,000 fans close to the action. There’s no track: There would be little point, as soccer now attracts more spectators than any athletics event. The roof is simple and dark and shuts out all but a small patch of sky, leaving fans with nothing to look at except the field. This is the traditional emotional soccer stadium—“the witch’s cauldron,” as the Germans call the type—taken to its extreme.
It’s a perfect place to watch soccer. However, it is traditional only while you are watching. The arena’s catacombs are stuffed with restaurants and business lounges unthinkable in Leitch’s day. These novelties irritate some fans, including apparently Herzog himself. Striding through the business club, he gestures at the ceiling: “It’s gold, or goldish, referring to the Mastercard or whatever.” He accepts this corporate lacquer as inevitable. “Older versions of soccer stadiums were working-class cathedrals. Here there is no more working class: It’s a totally different public. It’s a kind of contemporary opera house. You could ask me, do I like the name Allianz Arena? No, I don’t. But this is a fact. We cannot be moral in this respect.”
The arena’s worst breach of tradition, however, is on the outside. The stadium is in the middle of nowhere, near an industrial terrain. Herzog has hit upon a clever device to connect it to the world: During games, the stadium lights up on the outside. It will glow red when Bayern Munich play, blue for 1860 Munich, and white for Germany. But whereas in the Basle of Herzog’s childhood, cheers for a goal would resound through the surrounding neighborhood, now even the drivers passing the arena on the highway won’t hear them.
The other thing lacking from the Allianz Arena are the details that, as Herzog has observed, make a stadium feel like home to the fans: a clock, a statue, the sign in Liverpool’s tunnel saying “This Is Anfield.” The Allianz Arena lacks local touches, Herzog admits, partly because the stadium was built for three different home teams, and partly because the teams scarcely bothered talking to him. He explains, “Even though architecture is so visible now, soccer is still much more in the living room of the whole world, so soccer teams don’t need architecture to highlight their identity.”
As we sit in a business lounge, a familiar figure materializes on the turf below: Michael Ballack, Germany’s greatest current player. The script has him leading Germany to victory in the World Cup next year. Today he is filming an advertisement. Herzog starts, “Ballack is here! It’s amazing how young they look.”
Ballack, by contrast, would probably never have recognized the old gent upstairs. Stadiums may be the new cathedrals, but their architects are not yet the new soccer players.
*Not all Herzog’s stadiums get built. When I visited the firm’s offices in Basel in 2008, I was introduced to three bright young people who were designing a “stunning waterfront stadium” for Portsmouth FC. Peter Storrie, the club’s then chief executive, said at the time: “We have only one word to describe this stadium: perfection.”
Unfortunately, the perfect stadium has not yet been built. Early in 2010, when a debt-laden Portsmouth appeared in bankruptcy court, the spendthrift club became the new symbol not just of spendthrift English soccer but of spendthrift Britain itself.
Franz Beckenbauer
January 2006
On a roof terrace in Lisbon, Franz Beckenbauer makes the X-thousandth speech of his life. “I loved Lisbon before I had ever been here,” the most celebrated living German reveals in that soothing Bavarian singsong, “because aged about twenty I read all of Erich Maria Remarque’s work, some of it several times, and I loved The Night in Lisbon.”
Even seasoned Franz watchers are surprised. Few people have read any of Remarque’s novels other than All Quiet on the Western Front, let alone several times, and anyway, Beckenbauer was supposed to produce a bland hymn to Portugal. The Kaiser has charmed yet another audience.
Every year is Beckenbauer’s year, but 2006 is more so than usual. The man who won one World Cup as a player, another as a manager, and a third as a campaigner when he snagged this year’s event for Germany is now organizing the tournament. His niche in the postwar German psyche just keeps expanding.
Beckenbauer is the phoenix from Nazi Germany’s ashes. Conceived in the country’s darkest winter, he was born in a bombed-out Munich in September 1945, Germany’s “Hour Zero.” His father worked in the post office. The Beckenbauers didn’t eat meat often. Franz worked as an insurance agent and signed a semiprofessional contract with Bayern Munich, then a smallish local club.
He became a libero, a defender with a free role, and a unique German player. The country’s soccer, still shaped by a Nazi ethic, mostly produced Kämpfer, or battlers, like the German team that won the World Cup in the mud of Berne in 1954. But Beckenbauer ran with a straight back, his head up, and with such elegance that he was seldom tackled: It would have seemed like lèse-majesté.
Off the field he exemplified the ambitious young money-oriented Federal Republic. Never a hippie or a lefty, Beckenbauer was an instinctive bourgeois. He was barely of age when he married the first in a parade of elegant blondes, bought himself a semidetached house with a mortgage, and took elocution lessons. He always allied himself with the establishment: with the right-wing Christian Social Union in Bavaria, every big German company or television channel, and the country’s biggest tabloid, Bild Zeitung.
But he also, always, had charm: good looks, wit, and a lightness of touch. When I asked one of his fellow world champions of 1974 whether Beckenbauer was a tough nut, the man replied, “No! He is so nice. If you speak to him, the next time he sees you, he will remember everything about you, drape his arm around you, ask how you are.”
When soccer became commercialized, Beckenbauer was present at the birth, plugging soup on television in the midsixties. It was the start of four decades as the poster boy of German industry. Having represented almost every German multinational, he is now practically their collective face. The former teammate mimes Beckenbauer ducking as companies throw money at him: “Here’s €1 million! Here’s another €1 million!”
Beckenbauer’s first apotheosis came in 1974, the last time the Federal Republic hosted a World Cup. The team started off badly. After it lost a grudge game against East Germany, its manager, Helmut Schön, panicked. He sent out his captain, Beckenbauer, to represent him at a press conference. Beckenbauer told the press that from now on Germany would play more “realistic” soccer. Several players were dropped—probably at the captain’s instigation—and a little later, Beckenbauer was lifting the World Cup in his hometown. His smile as he does it is one of the great happy images of the Federal Republic.
During that World Cup Beckenbauer had also banned a German tradition: swearing an oath of loyalty to the fatherland in the locker room before each match. He thought it didn’t motivate multimillionaire players. It wasn’t that he feared overblown German patriotism: Beckenbauer appears to have spent very little time contemplating the Nazi past. Rather, he just wasn’t interested in it. His own date of birth absolved him from German sin. He saw little point in looking back. Campaigning in 1998 to bring the 2006 World Cup to Germany, he said, “All over the world they’re still showing those old films harking back to things that happened forty, fifty years ago. That gives a wrong impression of this country. . . . A World Cup gives you a chance to present yourself to the world for a solid five weeks.”
The rest of his playing career after 1974 passed in glory with only one blip: In 1977 it was revealed that he hadn’t paid all his taxes. Shamed, and with another marriage collapsing, he fled to New York to play for the Cosmos. There he learned decent English, an essential attribute in his later global rise.
He retired as a player in 1982. Two years later he was appointed Germany’s manager, charged with saving the country’s decaying soccer. In 1986 he took his team to the World Cup final in Mexico. The side played ugly, battling soccer, and during its matches the eye was drawn easily to the elegant figure of Beckenbauer, standing upright beside his dugout, with such poise that one overlooked his startling checkered trousers. He always, then and thereafter, took care to disassociate himself from the shortcomings of post-Kaiserzeit German soccer. Days before that final, chatting to friends, he said the names of several of his players aloud and guffawed. “What was so funny?” he was asked. “Just think of it,” said Beckenbauer. “In a day or two these guys could be world champions!” They weren’t: They lost to Argentina.
“Luckily, because if we’d won it would have been a defeat for soccer,” Beckenbauer wrote later.
In 1990 his German team did win the World Cup, though again without playing beautifully. Beckenbauer as manager always produced “realistic soccer” rather than the beautiful game he himself had played. That night in Rome, while his players went wild, Beckenbauer strolled alone across the pitch, gold medal around his neck, looking around him like a man walking his dog. He later explained that he had been saying good-bye to soccer.
It was more an auf Wiedersehen: See you later. He soon returned in his third incarnation as soccer politician. Alone among soccer’s former greats, he was born to the role: Beckenbauer isn’t a squabbler like Johan Cruijff or a dullard like Bobby Charlton or a drunk like George Best or a recovering drug addict like Diego Maradona or a weak character like Michel Platini or a talking puppet like Pele. Despite being German, Beckenbauer is liked worldwide.
At home he no longer has to ally himself with the establishment. It tries to ally itself with him. Every German politician tries to attach himself to the Kaiser. When Beckenbauer would drop in on his former fan Gerhard Schröder in the chancellory, and Schröder would crack open a bottle of red, it was clear which man needed the meeting most. When Schröder pushed through a major tax reform, German comedian Harald Schmidt joked, “And the greatest surprise is: without the help of Franz Beckenbauer!”
Nothing seems to damage him in Germany: not his constant contradictory statements to the nearest microphone nor the inevitable split with his latest blonde. The former teammate told me, “The thing about Franz, his greatest gift is in his . . . ,” and the teammate gestured at his crotch. “But he makes all his women happy! They all go away with money.” Beckenbauer, with his facility to laugh about himself, always happily admits his mistakes, and the German public always forgives him. In a country sick of upheaval, he represents a reassuring continuity. The Federal Republic is no longer very successful at soccer or anything else, but Beckenbauer still represents the Germany that wins with a smile.
