Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Yet his methods worked: he was not Il Mago for nothing. Even when Inter replaced him, they chose a man named Heriberto Herrera, always known in the press as HH 2.

  As well as winning two European Cups, Inter reached the final in 1967, when they lost to Jock Stein’s Celtic in Lisbon. At the banquet after that match, on order from Liverpool’s Bill Shankly, two Celtic coaches sat abusing Herrera. Shankly had a grudge against Herrera. In 1965, Inter had knocked out Liverpool in the semifinal of the European Cup thanks to two dubious goals in Milan: Corso scored directly from an indirect free kick, and Peiro kicked the ball out of the keeper’s hands for another. It seemed as if Dezso Solti had been at work again.

  Solti’s job, Glanville has shown, was to buy referees for Inter. The Hungarian is a blot on Herrera’s Italian triumphs, but I did not bother to raise the topic with Herrera himself. I merely asked him if soccer was an honest world, and he said yes. Certainly he has no Olympic spirit in him: so competitive was he that Shankly, the man who thought soccer was much more important than life or death, called him “a cutthroat man who wanted to win.”

  Cutthroat was not the half of it. Told by doctors at AS Roma that his young forward Taccola had a heart murmur, Herrera heard the news with faint interest. Then, when Roma visited Cagliari, he took Taccola along for the ride, but made him train with the squad on a cold beach the morning before the match. Taccola caught a fever, watched the match, and died.

  Herrera and I stopped for lunch, and at the table he pressed food on me. “Don’t torture him. He’s not one of your players,” chided his wife. Herrera looked ashamed. They were kind. We had a mutual friend in Leeds, and I asked them about their holiday there. “Leeds! What is there to say about this city?” exclaimed Mrs Herrera. “Nothing. It’s pleasant enough.” “I liked the stadium,” ventured Herrera.

  After lunch, we walked through the streets to his dentist. He seemed activated by the familiar situation, and clasped my arm and began asking me about myself, as if we were preparing to play Real Madrid. A dictator, yes, but a solicitous dictator. He told me that his favorite player had been Real’s Alfredo di Stefano. “Cruyff is not in Pelé’s style, he is in Di Stefano’s, but at a lower level. Di Stefano was the greatest player of all time and I’ll tell you why. People used to say to me, ‘Pelé is the first violinist in the orchestra,’ and I would answer, ‘Yes, but Di Stefano is the whole orchestra!’ ” He was in defense, in midfield, in attack, he never stopped running, and he would shout at the other players to run too. He’d say, ‘You’re playing with my money!’ Because Di Stefano was like this,” and Herrera rubbed forefinger and thumb together in the international sign for money.

  I mentioned the rumor that as manager of Spain at the World Cup in 1962, Herrera had had a personality clash with Di Stefano, who played not a minute at his only World Cup. “No, he was injured,” Herrera insisted. “It is true that the first time the team came together, at the Soccer Federation office in Spain, Di Stefano refused to shake my hand. The press in Madrid was attacking me because I was Barcelona manager, and because I had picked almost the entire Barcelona team. Of course I had kept my eyes open over the years,” he made the gesture, “and collected my people. Also, Di Stefano was not happy at first because in those days it was the players who ran the teams. You had the team of Di Stefano, the team of Mazzola, the team of Sivori, and the trainer was the man who carries the bags,” and he mimicked an overburdened porter. Herrera was a gifted mimic, and I wondered what he did as a TV commentator. “I changed all that. I said, ‘I am the manager, so I am the boss.’ And after that managers started to earn good money,” and gleefully he rubbed finger and thumb together again. “Later Di Stefano said, ‘I understand now that Señor Herrera is a great manager. ’ But at the World Cup, he was injured.”

  Herrera was managing Spain in 1962 because he had had to resign as assistant manager of Italy. There had been rumors that Inter players were taking drugs, and Herrera had celebrated too openly when Inter’s rivals Juventus were knocked out of the European Cup. He could make Brian Clough look shy at times. On taking over at AS Roma, he had told the press that the club had won its one league title, in 1941, only “because Mussolini was the manager.” The fans were upset. I asked whether a manager could afford to be controversial. “It hurts if you are a little manager. A manager like me, forgive me for saying it, can tell the directors, ‘If you have confidence in me, bon. If not . . .’ ”

  Club presidents, he added, “are all mafiosi! Well, not all. They sit there to earn money. If it is two million, they write down one million and stick the other million in their pockets.” Barcelona, I said, had a particular tradition of directors interfering with managers. “They were jealous of me,” replied Herrera, “they were jealous of Maradona too. I always said, ‘It is my team,’ ” and he cupped his hands protectively. “I am the only one who talks to the players.”

  It was time to ask again about the place of national character in soccer, about Italy and catenaccio. Herrera is a Cosmopolitan. He is trilingual in Spanish, French and Italian (and speaks passable Arabic), and he has worked with the best teams and best players of various countries.

  I began by reminding him that he had been a scourge of the British game. “You in England,” he had told journalists at Birmingham Airport in 1960, after his Barcelona had beaten Wolves 5-2 at Molineux, “are playing now in the style we Continentals used so many years ago, with much physical strength, but no method, no technique.” I quoted this back to him and he smiled fondly. “Yes,” he agreed. “Now, there is still dispute about where the modern game was invented. ‘It was in China!,’ ‘No, in Italy!,’ ‘No, in England!’ There is no doubt that modern soccer was invented in England, and English railway workers brought it to places like Huelva and Bilbao. They would play, and Spaniards would think, ‘Oh, that is a good pastime, ’ and run off to do it also. That is why when I came to Spain, my players called me ‘Señor Mister’: they thought ‘Mister’ was the word for coach, because until then their coaches had always been Britons!” (In fact managers in Spain are still known as “Mister.”)

  “But,” he added sternly, “when it came to modern soccer, the Britons missed the evolution. That was the case when we played Wolves. Though they have caught up now, and now sometimes Italy is best, sometimes Germany, sometimes the English. It changes, as it should.” Why had the English missed the evolution before? “The English are creatures of habit: tea at five.” Later, quite by chance, his wife brought us tea at 5 P.M., and he shouted with delight as if his point had been proven.

  We were where I wanted to be. I asked, “So players from different countries have different characteristics?” He agreed. At Barcelona he had played his tricky foreigners in attack, and in defense, “my big Catalans. To the Catalans I talked, ‘Colors of Catalonia, play for your nation,’ and to the foreigners I talked money.” He smiled whenever he mentioned the word. “I talked about their wives and kids. You have 25 players, you don’t say the same thing to everyone.”

  What were the differences between the nationalities? “Hungarians are more reserved.” He hunched his shoulders and screwed up his face in imitation, “so I mixed them, not Czibor and Kocsis together in one room. I wanted all to be the same, I wanted friendship. That is why we retired to training camp, why we ate together. And it created a new category of players: before, you had players who took a whisky, a whore, even though they were married! Mazzola and Facchetti, at Inter, were a new generation, serious and well-mannered. (When you return to England, I advise you to marry.) Once, I took the wives on holiday with us!” He took as an affront my suggestion that he had failed to make his players identical.

  Going from Barça to Inter, had he found a difference in mentality between the two teams? “No, the Latins are alike. When I was sitting at the head of the table at Inter, I would look at the players and think, ‘Is this Inter, or Barça?’ ”

  He then dismissed the question: “You know, in soccer the drive is gagner”—a word that mean
s both to win and to earn. But had his Cosmopolitan background shaped him? “Yes.” Then suddenly he said, “Perfectionist.” I was baffled. “Perfectionist,” he repeated, “that is the word I have been searching for all the time!”

  I tried once more: Did different tactics suit different nations? “No, I always put the same imprint on a team, wherever I was. The secret is putting players in the right place, because if you put Pelé in the wrong place he is only 30 percent.”

  But by his own admission, I said, Herrera had used catenaccio at Italy and not at Barcelona. “It is true,” he said unhappily. “In France I was the first libero who ever played. I abandoned that in Spain, but when I came to Italy they had copied catenaccio from France where it had become general.” Some theorists, I said, argued that catenaccio suited Italians because they were supposedly physically weak. Herrera was scornful. So each nation does not have its own style? “No. If things are right, the system is the same everywhere.”

  The previous Sunday, the day I had seen Lazio and Parma score seven goals, 48 were notched in all of Serie A to break an Italian matchday record. At that stage of the season, the goals-per-game average was 3.45; the best for a whole season stood at 3.32 for 1949-50. “It is the Death of Catenaccio,” was the headline in Il Messagero , and certainly Milan, with Baresi at libero playing in front of his defense, must have irked Herrera. He shook his head. You had to have man-to-man marking, he told me. Milan took too many risks. “When you play away, you have to watch out!” he said again. Then he suddenly made a pragmatic point: “You have a tactic, you concede a goal, tactic—pfff!”

  CHAPTER 10

  FC BARCELONA AND THE SCOTTISH QUESTION

  FC BARCELONA’S MOTTO IS “More than a club,” and next to Barça, Juventus looks like a village team. Juve does not have a weekly satirical BBC TV program devoted to them, and nor do they run an art competition so prestigious that Salvador Dali once submitted an entry, nor boast the Pope as season-ticket holder no. 108,000. Even the Barça museum is the best attended in the city: more visitors than the Picasso Museum.

  I arrived in Barcelona in October 1992, which was a good time for the city. The loudspeakers in the metro played genuine music, and every day shop signs in Spanish went down and were replaced by Catalan signs. The city had just staged an Olympic Games free of terrorists, drugs and boycotts, and was growing richer by the day, while that May, against Sampdoria at Wembley, Barça had won its first ever European Cup. A week after leaving Barcelona I returned to post-Black Wednesday in Britain, and noticed a different mood.

  Fittingly, Barça’s Nou Camp stadium is in the center of town. One weekday morning I looked down from the fourth tier of the empty stadium, and felt that a team that dared face Barça here must regret it the moment they peered out of the tunnel. The stadium is a city in itself: it seats 120,000 people, or the entire population of Norwich, and is currently being enlarged. “There comes a point when the people in the top tier need telescopes, and then you have to stop building,” laments the club.

  In the catacombs of the Nou Camp that morning, 25 journalists were waiting by the changing rooms for the squad to emerge after practice. These men and women have a hard life. Every day, they must wring quotes from Barça players who are trying to say nothing, and then improve the spoils. When half an hour had passed a senior quote collector shrieked, “Cruf!,” indicating that Johan Cruyff, the manager, had appeared, and that if caught quickly would surely reveal great secrets. A couple of hopefuls charged forward and returned to derisive laughter. Eventually Michael Laudrup appeared, tastefully dressed for a man of his income. Denmark was playing Ireland that night, but Laudrup was still refusing to play for his country, so the journalists asked him about Möller-Nielsen. Naturally he answered in platitudes, which were eagerly noted. Then a club official announced that Cruyff would not be seeing the press that day. So who was going to fill the papers?

  FC Barcelona may be the biggest club in any country, in any sport, in the world. Why is this? There is a reason for everything.

  I was granted an interview with Nicolau Casaus, first vice president of Barça. I was told he had no English, but while waiting outside his room I heard him repeat several times, in an American accent, the word “Siddown!” He seemed to be practising. When I came in he spoke Spanish and had a big cigar in his mouth. I remarked on the club’s motto and asked whether it referred to FC Barcelona’s status as a political item in Spain. Casaus denied Barça any political significance. He said that people of different parties and religions supported the club. Why, then, that motto? “Barcelonism is a great passion,” he answered vaguely.

  Club directors—at Rangers, at Celtic, at Barcelona—always prefer to say that their club is just a club. Nor do players tend to worry about their employers’ political status. But what players and directors think is beside the point, because a club is what it means to its fans. Barça has fans everywhere—they have a fan club in Tianjin, China—but they belong to Barcelona, and to Catalonia, the region of which Barcelona is the capital.

  The Catalans feel Catalan first and Spanish second, and to prove it they have long fought wars and made revolts against Madrid. Until recently they always lost. This century, for instance, in the civil war of the 1930s, Catalonia held out longest against General Franco, but then suffered under his yoke until he died in 1975. Now Catalonia has its own regional government, the Generalitat . But the five million Catalans want more: a state of their own, perhaps. “Catalonia is the most powerful nation without a state in Europe,” Jordi Torrebadella, a young Barcelona economist and Barça fan told me. “You can’t compare us to Scotland, because we’re far more powerful within our state than Scotland is in the UK. We subsidize the rest of Spain, whereas Scotland is subsidized by England.” Or as Cruyff learned when he came to play for Barça in 1973: “We earn it, and in Madrid they eat it up.”

  I asked Professor Lluís Flaquer, a Catalan sociologist, if he could recommend any books on Barça, but he could only come up with one, and it was 20 years old. I asked why academics had neglected the club. “There are some subjects,” said Flaquer, “which are considered too sacred to write about, and there are also subjects that are thought too profane.” I took it he was going to call soccer profane, but he concluded: “Barça is still too sacred.”

  Barça is a hundred times more famous than Catalonia itself, and is the main source of Catalan pride. When Franco ruled Spain, they were the only source. Why, I asked a Catalan woman bored by soccer, do you care about Barça beating Real Madrid? She replied: “Franco destroyed our autonomy and forbade our language, and he supported Real Madrid.” It was said that El Caudillo could recite Real lineups going back decades, and when Real visited Barcelona during his reign there were always banned Catalan flags in the Nou Camp. Barça’s fans went home from these matches as exhausted as the players. “You couldn’t shout ‘Franco, you murderer!’ on the streets,” explained Flaquer, “so people shouted at Real Madrid players instead. It’s a psychological phenomenon: if you can’t shout at your father, you shout at someone else.” Only at the Nou Camp did Catalonia still exist, and the only Catalan symbol Franco never dared touch was Barça.

  It is natural that when a region is silenced it turns to soccer. Yet Franco is long dead and Barça remain the symbol of Catalonia. “When I go to the Nou Camp, I feel as though I am suddenly back in the days of Franco,” one woman told me. In 1992, when Barcelona introduced a new strip design that included a thin white stripe on the famous red and blue, there was an uproar: white was the color of Real. “I brought in the stripe,” Josep Lluís Núñez, the club president, argued paradoxically, “because I don’t want to be known as the president who introduced shirt advertising here.” (To preserve the sanctity of their colors, Barcelona refuses to wear advertising.) Even today, Catalans confuse Real with rule from Madrid, and find it confusing that a few cabinet ministers now support Barça. They take bias from Madrid for granted, and the Nou Camp often subjects referees to a hail of cushions. Cruyff a
nd Núñez like to speak of political refereeing. After all, José Plaza, ancient boss of Spanish referees, is a self-confessed Real fan.

  The passion persists, which becomes even harder to explain when you know that a great many citizens of Barcelona—fans of the club—are not even Catalans. So many, that some say there is no such thing as a Catalan working class: the lower classes in Barcelona are migrants from the rest of Spain. The typical migrant arrived in the 1960s, when the Catalan boom began. He jumped off the train, took a room where he could, found a job, and then made a choice: either to support Barça or Español.

  Español is the second club in the city, and they play around the corner from the Nou Camp, in the Sarria Stadium. Their founders, in 1900, chose the name Español—“Spanish”—as a gibe at foreign Barça, whose founder, Joan Gamper, was Swiss. From Messrs Harris, Parssons, Wild, and Witty in 1899, to Gary Lineker, Mark Hughes, and Steve Archibald in the 1980s, to the present day, Barça has always depended on foreigners. I asked Torrebadella whether Catalans would prefer to win without help from outside. “Ah, of course!” he replied. “But that is what we call Catalan ‘pactisme’ ”—our capacity to make pacts with other peoples. Because we are a nation without a state, we have always had to make such pacts if we want to win championships, or achieve anything at all.”

  Barça is undeniably foreign, but the name “Español” proved a blunder. As Barça became the symbol of Catalonia, so the smaller club came to stand for Spain. Español attracted many Catalan families, but also the migrants who continued to feel Spanish, and particularly the civil servants, soldiers and policemen whom Franco sent to run Barcelona. Inevitably, the club has close ties with Real. They often invite Real to their summer tournament, and when Barça plays Real at the Nou Camp, there are fireworks when Barça scores, but also when Real scores. Español came to be known as the Fascist club, and their hooligans, Las Brigadas Blanco y Azules, are still that way inclined.