by Simon Kuper
On July 1, 1976, the day Patrick Kluivert was born in Amsterdam, Van Nistelrooy came to earth in the southern Dutch town of Oss. (That’s the story anyway; it’s more likely that they were separated at birth.) Kluivert’s parents were Surinamese immigrants, his father a former player whose name is still legendary in the Dutch West Indies. While in elementary school, the boy joined Ajax. Kluivert was born to greatness. Van Nistelrooy had to achieve it through his deeds. His father was a radiator mechanic, his grandfather a cattle farmer, his first soccer club named Nooit Gedacht (Never Thought of It), and he grew up in entirely the wrong place.
Van Nistelrooy was raised in the village of Geffen near Eindhoven, south of the great rivers that dissect the Netherlands. This is the province of Brabant, where the people are Catholics, more friendly and much less arrogant than in the North. They are more like Belgians than Dutchmen. The Dutch South doesn’t produce soccer players, just cyclists. Almost all the country’s great players—Cruijff, Van Hanegem, Krol, Rensenbrink, Van Basten, Gullit, Rijkaard, the De Boers, Bergkamp, Kluivert, and Davids, to name a few—are from north of the great rivers, mostly from Amsterdam or neighboring towns like Utrecht. Of current Dutch internationals, only Van Nistelrooy and Boudewijn Zenden (a Maastricht boy) come from south of the rivers.
The South doesn’t produce players because it doesn’t educate them properly. At Nooit Gedacht, Van Nistelrooy was raised by cheerful volunteers who, the Dutch would say, knew no more about soccer than the average Englishman (sorry). Van Nistelrooy, though not an exceptional talent, was dedicated to becoming a professional. He was diligent at school, but spent the rest of his time kicking balls against garage doors and writing to players for autographs. “On my birthday a picture with autograph arrived from John Bosman,” he recalled recently in the Dutch magazine Voetbal International. But he remains critical of the former Ajax keeper Stanley Menzo: “Menzo had been trying to see if his pen worked, so there were scrawls on the photograph. I thought that was very careless.”
This is how Dutch kids follow soccer: They follow players rather than teams. When Van Nistelrooy joined Manchester United, the British press ritually asked him whether he had supported the club as a child. To Van Nistelrooy, the question made no sense. He had supported Marco van Basten.
At fourteen, he left Nooit Gedacht for mighty Margriet in Oss. Soon FC Den Bosch, a local professional club, invited him for a trial match. The Den Bosch youth coach still remembers that after Van Nistelrooy scored in the game, instead of remaining blasé like a normal Dutch kid, he raced off cheering.
At seventeen, Van Nistelrooy made his debut for Den Bosch. He spent two more years at the club, mainly playing in central midfield, while Kluivert was scoring the winner in a Champions League final and playing for Holland. Then, to Van Nistelrooy’s tremendous excitement, he was signed by Heerenveen. It was there that a metamorphosis began. Until then Van Nistelrooy had been a clumsy player, quick and eager but with mediocre ball control and a modest reading of the game. In 1997, one Kluivert was worth about thirty Van Nistelrooys. But Foppe de Haan, the Heerenveen manager, decided that the player had something—in particular, his peculiar broad feet, which, the manager thought, had as much feeling as other people have in their hands. He sent Van Nistelrooy to a Holland match to study Dennis Bergkamp.
Desperate to learn, developing from slender youth into brawny man, and blessed with those broad feet, in nine months Van Nistelrooy outgrew Heerenveen. In 1998 PSV Eindhoven bid $7.8 million for him. It was the highest fee ever paid by a Dutch club, and everyone said it was ridiculous, but he went to Eindhoven and was told he would start on the bench. He was then still mainly an attacking midfielder.
Bobby Robson was lucky enough to be PSV’s manager that year. Muddling along without discernible tactics, the club was saved by Van Nistelrooy, who scored thirty-one league goals. He got to this point without much coaching, and it shows. Van Nistelrooy is a player from the Netherlands but not a “Dutch” player, just as Stam (another Dutch provincial) isn’t a “Dutch” player, while David Beckham (blond, beautiful pass, can’t tackle, in love with himself) is a Dutch player.
Again, the comparison with Kluivert is useful. Kluivert was raised the archetypal Dutch player. He is always looking for the clever pass and never blasts at the goal from a stupid angle or tries to beat two defenders for speed. That would be vulgar. Kluivert misses simple chances because anyone can score from a simple chance. Only proper players can give a clever pass. Van Nistelrooy plays like a South American: sprinting, pushing, throwing himself every which way, shooting all the time. His physique is similar to Kluivert’s (are they by any chance related?), but he uses it more. Van Basten is his hero, yet the striker Van Nistelrooy resembles most is Gabriel Batistuta. Both are all-around players built like bulls (both, curiously, with a family background in cattle farming), and neither wastes many shots. They almost always put the ball between the posts. It is a directness that other Dutch players disdain. Van Nistelrooy knows this. By the end of the 1990s, he was a more effective striker than Bergkamp, but he would have been horrified at the thought of taking Bergkamp’s place on the Dutch team. Bergkamp is Dutch soccer made flesh (or at least bone). Van Nistelrooy was just a country bumpkin who scored goals.
In October 1999 I saw him play for Holland against Brazil. He had obviously decided that in this exalted company his method of bursting through defenses and scoring had to be ditched. Instead, he played like a third-rate Kluivert, passing to no discernible end.
Yet by this time the Eindhoven airport was virtually scheduling extra flights to accommodate the influx of foreign soccer managers. Arsène Wenger came to watch PSV, Gianluca Vialli saw him for Chelsea, Real Madrid wanted him for their collection, and he was fashionable in Italy. No wonder: Twenty-three matches into the 1999–2000 season, he had twenty-nine league goals and was chasing the forty-three-year-old Dutch record of forty-three. Spookily, it was the third time in a decade that the Eindhoven club had found itself with the best young striker in the world: The previous two had been Romario and Ronaldo. This augurs well for the twenty-two-year-old Yugoslav striker Mateja Kezman, who in his first season with PSV last year scored twenty-four league goals.
Van Nistelrooy could have gone anywhere. He thought the Italian league was the best in the world, but feared that it was too difficult for strikers. English soccer seemed more suited to his direct and simple style. He was probably won for Manchester United by his meetings with Alex Ferguson. To Van Nistelrooy, it must have been like meeting Van Basten, or even Stanley Menzo. Ferguson was a famous soccer manager! Of course Van Nistelrooy agreed to sign. Maybe he got an autograph in return.
In his autobiography, Ferguson writes, “I was quite excited, for I could tell just by looking into his eyes that this was a young man of substance.” One sees what he means. Van Nistelrooy lives for soccer. An intelligent and sensible man, he never gets into the scandals that have embroiled Kluivert. The one blemish on his reputation is the claim by opponents two years ago that he occasionally dived. This briefly earned him the nickname Ruudje Matthäus, after the former German player who is regarded in Holland as the consummate diver.
In March 2000 things began to go wrong for Ruudje Matthaus. First, he injured a knee and failed his medical exam at United. Then, on the morning of Friday, April 28, while he was practicing headers at PSV, his cruciate ligament gave way. By chance a local television station was filming him, and many Dutch fans can still hear him scream. The next day at eight o’clock, Van Nistelrooy was awakened by a phone call from Ferguson, who promised that whatever happened, he would be coming to United. Soon afterward, Ferguson visited the player at home. Van Nistelrooy had surgery in Vail, Colorado. While there he watched Euro 2000 on satellite television, touching the Dutch by waving his crutches frantically in the air whenever Holland scored.
It took nearly a year for his knee to recover. In March 2001 he returned to soccer. In April, in camp with the Dutch national team preparing for a match against Cyprus, he
told his teammates at lunch that he had signed for United. They gave him an ovation. Maybe it’s a front and perhaps Van Nistelrooy is a bad guy underneath, but everyone who has met him seems to like him. “He’s just a good spontaneous guy,” says Stam.
Van Nistelrooy came on as a sub for Holland against Cyprus and scored. In June, he came on as a sub against Estonia and scored twice. This is worth mentioning because these are his sole appearances in competitive internationals. He has also played a handful of matches in the first round of the Champions League. In all his career he has played perhaps six competitive matches against top-class teams. In short, at twenty-five he has less big-match experience than Luke Chadwick, baby of the United squad. Van Nistelrooy may look a great striker, but he has never been tested. He also has a damaged knee. On paper, he isn’t worth $27 million (but then they don’t play on paper).
If anyone knows what it’s like to return from serious injury, it is Ronaldo. After watching Van Nistelrooy play for Holland this spring, the Brazilian remarked, “I was impressed by his eagerness. It showed that he doesn’t have any more fear. That’s the most important thing. That you can do what occurs to you, that you feel your body won’t let you down.” (Ronaldo added that he wanted one of Van Nistelrooy’s shirts. He may need it: Collecting clothes is the Brazilian’s hobby, and he changes outfits about six times a day.)
Van Nistelrooy is indeed playing like a man who has never been injured. The Dutchman has scored freely in the preseason, and already United’s fans have invented a chant for him (“Ruuuuud!”). He is also bonding with the players. In Singapore, they went out one night as a group, starting in the bar of the Raffles Hotel and proceeding through town. Both Van Nistelrooy and Verón—who speaks no Mancunian—said they were impressed. This did not happen in Italy, Verón conveyed.
Van Nistelrooy has begun making friends with Butt and Gary Neville—more influential off the field at United than on it—and he hasn’t stopped there. He has gone around Old Trafford and the training ground at Carrington shaking hands with secretaries, security men, and groundsmen: “Hello, I’m Ruud.” He and Fabien Barthez (a friendly man with a gift for physical comedy beloved by children) are improving United’s image. Van Nistelrooy isn’t soft, though. At a recent training session, he chastised Roy Keane about a pass. Untried and damaged he may be, but he will be fine at United.
Michael Ballack
April 2002
Michel Platini, innocently attending the Germany-Argentina game on Wednesday night, was cornered by German journalists and asked a tricky question: What did he think of Michael Ballack?
“I really don’t know much about him,” the Frenchman stammered. Suddenly, Platini had a characteristic flash of inspiration: Ballack was that big German who had scored those goals against Houllier’s team, what was it called, Liverpool, the header and the drive.
Ballack, said Platini, had scored “two different goals” against Liverpool. “Different goals—that’s important.”
Before leading little Leverkusen to the Champions League semifinals, Michael Ballack had managed to reach the age of twenty-five largely unnoticed abroad.
Few Germans consider this particularly strange. In German soccer, twenty-five years old is unfeasibly young, almost like being fourteen. Ballack is still considered a prodigy. Great hope is attached to him, though this does not mean that German fans like him.
Like many of his country’s best players, Ballack is an East German. He was raised in a Saxon village as the son of a construction engineer, played his early soccer for a communist corporation club called Motor Karl-Marx-Stadt, and also attended the local sport school.
This proved the perfect soccer education. Talented East German players were made to train and play nonstop, and those who did not burn out emerged with a wider range of skills than their Western counterparts, whose coaches were always trying to keep things fun. German soccer today depends heavily on Ossis such as Jens Jeremies, Carsten Jancker, Alexander Zickler, and Ballack’s Leverkusen teammate Ulf Kirsten, who at thirty-six is old enough to have once been an informer for the Stasi secret police.
Ballack was thirteen when the Berlin Wall fell. But when he arrived in the West at FC Kaiserslautern, he was still the stereotypical shy East German. When the club won the Bundesliga in 1998, he had yet to become a regular. Ballack was gifted but inconsistent, a little soft, and Kaiserslautern eventually sold him to Leverkusen for $4 million.
There he chose the number 13 shirt, once the property of local hero Rudi Völler, “to provoke a little.” Then he got injured. He went on to score an own goal that cost Leverkusen the Bundesliga title—he cried on the pitch afterward—and at Euro 2000 was granted only sixty-three minutes of play.
Then something happened. Ballack suddenly became a great player, courted by Real Madrid and Barcelona and signed by Bayern Munich for about $40 million, a move he will make after seeing out this season with Leverkusen. (The deal was before the company holding the rights to live Bundesliga matches collapsed, so Bayern may now regret the price.)
His transformation seems to have coincided with his move to attacking midfield. A player of enormous range, who can fly into the box and score with headers, he had previously been wasted at libero or in defensive midfield. Now he is the two-in-one, a central midfielder as good attacking as he is defending: the new Lothar Matthäus.
The other change occurred in Ballack’s mind. “I now see myself as a player who has self-confidence,” he says. So much so that Spiegel magazine, the guardian of German democracy, has published a long feature arguing that Ballack is arrogant. His father called the notion “rubbish with sauce,” but many still believe it. A sports magazine ranked Ballack third in a list of players most disliked by Bundesliga players.
This is partly a matter of appearances. To the untutored eye, Ballack resembles a caveman, but Germans think he is handsome, and he dresses well, which in Germany is considered suspect. He is also an elegant player, whose straight-backed run and curly dark hair have prompted comparisons with the young Franz Beckenbauer. Rainer Calmund, Leverkusen’s general manager, has called him “the little Kaiser.”
But he has a genuine egotistical streak, too. Though a team player, Ballack has never quite assimilated soccer’s collectivist ethic. Bayer Leverkusen, the works team of a chemicals company, is not a club anyone dreams of playing for as a child, and to say you would die for the jersey would sound hilarious, but Ballack takes his individualism a bit far.
After Euro 2000 he grumbled that the tournament had “brought him nothing,” which was true but tactless given the atmosphere of national mourning. At Bayer, he once Ballacked his coach, Berti Vogts, after being substituted. And when Real Madrid offered Leverkusen an astronomical transfer fee, he turned it down personally, saying that what mattered more was “what you earn yourself.”
“You can’t tell him anything anymore. He’s already a world champion,” says Christian Ziege of Spurs, a teammate with Germany. Asked about this, Ballack said Ziege was just angry because of a tackle at training. “I mowed him down. He said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I said, ‘Shut up. What do you want?’”
None of the criticism has unsettled Ballack. His father told Spiegel that his son was fortunately “not someone who thinks too much” and, furthermore, was “übercool.”
This has been his season. Having underperformed for Germany for years, culminating in that 5–1 defeat in Munich, he scored three goals in the playoff matches against Ukraine to take them to the World Cup. Playing in midfield, he is the second-highest scorer in the Bundesliga with fifteen. Thanks largely to him, Leverkusen is close to the league title and still in the Champions League.
To the 99.9 percent of German soccer fans who are not Leverkusen supporters, the semifinal against Manchester United is a mere prelude to the greater event of the summer. Germany is short on sporting heroes just now, not even very good at tennis anymore, and a nation’s sporting self-esteem has been resting on the Schumacher brothers.
Ballack
has emerged just in time for the World Cup. The German team is starting to look respectable again. But they aren’t about to win the World Cup, are they?
Rio Ferdinand
June 2002
Even Brazil must be wondering how to penetrate this England defense, which has not conceded a goal in three games. You might beat Danny Mills or possibly Ashley Cole to the byline, but then Rio Ferdinand and Sol Campbell will eat up the cross. The route through the middle, guarded by Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, looks daunting even for Rivaldo and Ronaldo.
Yesterday Sol Campbell took the left side of the central defense, Rio Ferdinand the right, and they provided a study in contrasting styles.
Campbell was usually marking Denmark’s striker Ebbe Sand, but there was more to it than that. While Campbell stands by his man, Ferdinand watches the whole game.
He moves the other defenders around, and when an extra Dane popped up in attack, Ferdinand seldom showed much interest, nor did anything more than glance at him. He generally watches as Campbell and Mills dive in.
Ferdinand is a supervisor, not a cleaner. Like David Beckham, he has blossomed as a leader thanks to Sven-Göran Eriksson’s rejuvenation of the team—and he is a more verbal leader than the captain.
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink says the two best center-halfs in England are Ferdinand and Martin Keown. Against Keown, says the Chelsea striker, you end the match covered in bruises. But Ferdinand “you almost don’t notice.”
The Leeds player is the thinking man’s center-back, who might barely touch you all game yet not give you a sniff of a goal.
Ferdinand is more interested in the direction of the attack than whoever happens to be in his neighborhood. While Campbell tends to go to where the ball comes, Ferdinand covers space behind and around him.
In his ease of movement he resembles Italy’s Alessandro Nesta: tall, fast, and comfortable on the ball, he is nearly the complete defender. Like Nesta, he does not merely defend but organizes his defense.