Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  In the air Ferdinand and Campbell may be the defensive combination of the World Cup. Together they nullified Argentina’s policy of hitting crosses for Gabriel Batistuta, and yesterday the Danes won no headers. Ferdinand and Campbell have also scored two of England’s five goals so far from corners. (“Rio’s goal was an own goal!” insisted Kieron Dyer. “So don’t give it to him.”)

  In Niigata Ferdinand was even granted a couple of brief chants of “Rio!”—a rare honor for a defender. And Dyer gave an unprompted encomium. Without anyone even having asked him about Ferdinand, Dyer said, “I honestly believe that on present form we have the best player in the world, in Rio Ferdinand. Not just the best defender, but the best player.”

  Dyer said the England squad, which received British television channels in their hotel, had seen Viv Anderson state before the tournament that Ferdinand was “not world-class.”

  “After forty-five minutes against Nigeria, Anderson came on air and said, ‘He is world-class,’” the Newcastle player concluded triumphantly. Foreign journalists concur that Ferdinand is one of the two or three best defenders of the competition. They are struck by his aura. One told me that Ferdinand appears even taller than he is, while a German journalist said that Ferdinand, like Oliver Kahn, is acquiring the sort of mythical status that discourages strikers even before he dispossesses them.

  But before we get too carried away with the twenty-three-year-old “New Bobby Moore” (and I gather the nation is getting a bit carried away), it is worth pointing out some shortcomings.

  Ferdinand is not a great tackler. He almost always remains upright. This contributes to his elegance, but sometimes a center-half needs to get his shorts dirty. Just before halftime he let a Dane nip dangerously past him to the byline, and when Sand or Jesper Gronkjaer brought the ball into the box, Ferdinand tended not to confront them but to stand off, trying to guide them away from the goal. At moments like that you wish he were more of an old-fashioned English center-half.

  He seldom hits a lazy pass, but nor is he a Baresi or Beckenbauer. In the first half he regularly collected the ball from David Seaman, curbing the keeper’s love of punting long. But he tends to slot the ball short distances, ideally into midfield or (more perilously) to Mills or Campbell. Still, it is nice to see England defenders pass the ball around with an air of knowing more or less where it is going.

  Brazil (unless Belgium stuns the world tomorrow) will be the biggest test of Ferdinand’s career. Not just because it is Brazil in a World Cup quarterfinal, but because Brazil is rare at this World Cup in fielding two center-forwards, one of them a genius. Behind them is Rivaldo, who likes nothing better than dribbling through the center of a defense (unless it is shooting from fifty yards). Against Brazil on Friday, Ferdinand will have to do some tackling.

  Roberto Carlos

  December 2002

  It’s not about me,” Roberto Carlos says, warming himself over a coffee in the Real Madrid canteen (these Spanish winters are tough). “The award is not about Roberto Carlos himself. I think the time has come to honor the job of the defender. Also, I won’t have a better chance of winning it. I can’t do more than I have done this year. It’s impossible to win more titles in just 365 days! I have been a starter in every game, with my club and with my national side. I worked my socks off in every match. What else do I have to do to get the award?”

  The Golden Ball for European Player of the Year ought indeed to end up in the trunk of his red Ferrari, but it won’t. Today, Ronaldo will be declared the winner. Carlos will finish second and Oliver Kahn, the Germany goalkeeper, third. However, Real Madrid’s supermidget—winner of the European Cup, the World Cup, the European Supercup, and the World Club Cup in recent months—unquestionably deserves the prize.

  Born in a small town near São Paulo twenty-nine years ago, Carlos was named after a one-legged Brazilian crooner. Perhaps in compensation, he developed thighs the size of Muhammad Ali’s at his peak, which is impressive for a man just five feet six. He himself attributes his build to a childhood spent cycling and hauling heavy pieces of farm machinery, but if that were true, every third world village would be thronging with cartoon superheroes.

  The thighs took him to Palmeiras, and by the time he toured Europe with the Brazilian national team in the summer of 1995, he was telling everyone, “I’m going to be the best left back in the world. I’m better than Paolo Maldini.”

  If this was youthful hubris, he never lost it. Like Ali himself, Carlos is forever trash-talking opponents and predicting easy victories. Before the World Cup semifinal, he said Brazil would need only 60 to 70 percent of its potential to beat Turkey, and even that was kinder than the 40 percent he had estimated previously.

  Opponents generally remain silent, because they know he is right. Carlos has the simplicity of an untortured soul who has become a multimillionaire thanks to natural gifts. Consequently, he is always smiling. The staff at Real’s canteen prefer him to the prissy introvert Raul. So do most journalists, though one Brazilian says that while watching Carlos chuckling in training camp all day with his chum Denilson, he was reminded of “two idiots.”

  In 1995, Carlos joined Inter Milan, whose manager, Roy Hodgson, practically forbade him to cross the halfway line. A year later, Inter sold him to Real Madrid for $5.4 million, less than they paid for him.

  Of all the walking reproaches to Inter’s transfer policy, Carlos remains number 1. Perhaps no other human being packs more potency per inch. Carlos runs the hundred meters in 10.6 seconds, his throw-ins regularly travel thirty yards, and his tiny feet—small even by the standards of great players or ancient Chinese ladies—can send a ball flying ninety miles an hour. And he never gets injured. No one else has played more top-level matches in the past five years.

  Unfortunately, nobody cares about left backs. It is the position for hiding the feeble. Hence, Carlos passed largely unnoticed until the age of twenty-four, when he hit a free kick for Brazil against France that was speeding well past the goal before changing its mind and bending several yards to finish in the net. France’s keeper, Fabien Barthez, never moved.

  Carlos imparts the swerve by hitting the ball with his outside three toes. This is a pretty inefficient way of taking a free kick, and he nets fewer than Sinisa Mihajlovic or Gianfranco Zola, but no one else shoots more thrillingly. To quote a great malapropism of British football commentating: “He is one of those players who is so unique.”

  In fact, it comes as a surprise when he names a role model: “Branco, who played in my position just before me for Brazil,” he says. “He used to join the attack as often as I do and was also considered a free-kick specialist.”

  Oh, and Carlos can tackle, too. Because of his unmatched reflexes, he can wait until the last split second when the striker has committed himself. Wherever you are on the field, you are never safe from him. Perhaps the definitive moment of the European Cup final of 2000 occurred somewhere in midfield. Gaizka Mendieta, of Valencia, popped up in yards of space down Real’s left, and just as he was about to do something clever, there was a flash of white and Carlos went steaming off in possession. (Only Ronaldo runs as quickly with the ball; without it, practically only Tim Montgomery does, and he is the 100 meters world record holder.) By the time Mendieta turned to see what had happened, Supermidget had almost vanished from sight. Psychologically, the final was over.

  Carlos has three Champions League medals, but until this summer he had never won the World Cup. In Brazil, this marks you out as a mediocrity who gets snickered at in the street. “Brazilians aren’t so fond of him. He is one of those players that has been away so long that he’s almost considered a European and not a Brazilian,” says Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life.

  Carlos may look like the average stunted Brazilian pauper—a posh Rio woman, encountering him at the apartment of his Real teammate Flavio Conceicao, took him for a servant—but his lifestyle of Rolexes and jewelry irks people back home.

  To get a litt
le respect, he had to win the World Cup. Quite early in this year’s competition, he seemed to know he would. Pundits said after the first few matches that Brazil was weak at the back, but in fact Carlos and Cafu just could not be bothered to defend against teams like Belgium or Costa Rica. They would rather have fun, and who cared what Brazil’s manager, Felipe Scolari, thought? (Who is bigger, metaphorically speaking anyway, Carlos or Big Phil? Carlos or Vicente del Bosque, the Real boss?) When Brazil met England, things got marginally more serious, and Carlos revealed his gift for irritation. Behaving as if he owned the pitch, he would pick up the ball whenever the referee awarded a free kick to either team. Everyone else who wasted time at the World Cup got a yellow card, but no referee had the nerve to penalize Carlos. (Who is bigger, metaphorically speaking? . . .) Even after Michael Owen’s goal, Carlos continued to delay every England free kick. At first, the English players would instinctively wrestle for the ball, but after a while, realizing they were ahead anyway, they began wandering off and leaving him to it.

  Whereupon Carlos began pressing them to take their free kicks instantly. His aim, it emerged, was not to waste time but to control the pace of the game, as well as to patronize opponents and referees in the spirit of Stephen Potter’s Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. If there were an award for the world’s most irritating player, Carlos would win it annually, and Jose Luis Chilavert, the Paraguay goalkeeper, must reflect with satisfaction at having spat in his face during an international, even if this meant that he started the World Cup suspended. “I’d do it again because Carlos showed me his testicles and insulted my country,” Chilavert explained.

  Speed, power, and gracelessness: It is a recipe for success. In fact, the only qualities Carlos lacks are vision and concentration.

  Playing AC Milan in the Champions League last month, he kept hitting beautiful fifty-yard square balls. All were pointless, and a couple were intercepted in dangerous positions, but no one else could have hit them more sweetly. The most surprising aspect of the Milan match was that he was there at all. He had just flown back from a friendly in South Korea with Brazil and was about to return to the Far East for the World Club Cup final in Yokohama. However, Carlos does not miss matches. You would have thought that winning a World Cup might be tiring, but which Real Madrid player has played the most matches so far this season? Yes, it’s Carlos, with twenty-three. A trickier question: Who is Real Madrid’s reserve left back? Perhaps there is no such thing.

  Carlos is more useful to a manager than the cameo genius Ronaldo, and he also saves money on employing a left half, who would only get trampled underfoot anyway. Real’s left flank consists of a midget and a pretty winger.

  That Carlos was denied the Golden Ball because he is a defender is doubly frustrating, since he is not primarily a defender. Since hardly any team is crazy enough to field wingers against Brazil or Real Madrid, he is usually free to make the play. Yet Johan Cruijff blithely judges, “He is a defender, and I think he has less qualities than the other candidates.”

  In the canteen, Carlos says, “It seems that soccer has just an attacking face, and that’s not right. I also think there are weird things going on in this voting. I have a feeling that this award could be dominated by marketing interests.”

  Still, it could be worse. “Ronaldo is a very good friend of mine and a teammate. What more can I ask for from a Golden Ball winner?” he said. “He also became the World Cup top scorer and scored in the Intercontinental Cup final, though people shouldn’t forget that I gave him the pass for that goal. At that moment, I realized I had clinched the award for him.”

  In short, he has only himself to blame.

  Zinedine Zidane

  April 2003

  The night after France won the World Cup final, I sat in a chic café near the Paris Opera watching a beautiful blonde Frenchwoman dance for hours in a “Zidane 10” French shirt. France had changed in an evening. Millions of people had suddenly materialized in Paris’s streets, for the first time ever demonstrating for soccer, and for one player in particular: “Zidane Président!” Zidane has since become the property of the world. Today he is usually imagined in the Real Madrid shirt. Yet his role on the French team—and in French life—is greater. The French just hope it won’t end this summer.

  Zinedine “Yazid” Zidane is the product of Marseille’s Place Tartane, a square now famous as the backdrop to some of his Adidas advertisements. What mattered on the square was not winning, but how you controlled the ball. Yazid was not the best player on the square, just bigger and more diligent than the others. His signature trick, the roulette—rolling the ball back beneath his right sole, pirouetting, then dribbling off—he has practiced every day for more than fifteen years. “What counted for him was soccer, and perhaps also judo,” recalls his mother, Malika. But it was a particular type of soccer. On the Place Tartane, Zidane rarely bothered using his left foot, and he never headed. When at the age of fifteen he moved two hours up the coast to play for Cannes and a coach first threw a ball at his head, he ducked.

  The teenage Yazid was polite, shy, and apparently without ego. Cannes made him complete a 240-question personality test, which found that he was very motivated, had low self-esteem, and never placed his own interests above other people’s. The last quality was rare in such a gifted player. Zidane was a queen bee with the attitude of a worker. To this day, he usually passes when he could shoot. This helps explain why his scoring record for France lags behind that of Michel Platini, his predecessor: “Zizou” has twenty-two goals in eighty-seven internationals, while “Platoche” got forty-one in seventy-two.

  Zidane progressed from Cannes to Bordeaux and in 1994, at age twenty-two, made his debut for France. Coming on for the last half hour of so against the Czech Republic, with the French losing 0–2, he scored twice to tie the match. Afterward, he phoned the coach who had scouted him for Cannes: “Did you see? One goal with my head, and one with my left foot!” Zidane has such balance, and diligence, that a few years after belatedly starting work on his wrong foot, he could prompt Franz Beckenbauer to remark, “He has equal precision and power in both feet. I have never seen anyone else like it except Andreas Brehme.”

  He gradually emerged as France’s playmaker. In the crowded midfield of modern soccer, which Real Madrid’s technical director, Jorge Valdano, calls “a good place to meet people,” Zidane alone regularly finds the time on the ball to make telling passes. It’s a matter of both vision and unearthly technique.

  It was supposed to come together at the 1998 World Cup, in his own country. However, after a match and a half Zidane got himself sent off for retaliation against Saudi Arabia. Suspended for two matches, he was then quiet in the quarterfinal against Italy and the semi against Croatia. France’s best player—or so the French had been assuring an unconvinced world—had a forgettable tournament before those two goals in the final. His manager, Aimé Jacquet, noting that the Brazilians marked laxly on corners, had advised him to “take a stroll towards the front post.” If fifteen years earlier you had seen a skinny dark Arab boy doing step-overs on the Place Tartane, you might have imagined him scoring twice in a World Cup final. But never with headers.

  That night Zidane’s picture was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. In the six years since it has been plastered all over France. He is replacing Marianne as the national symbol. You see him on the front door of elementary schools, promoting some worthy goal or other; on television, criticizing the Far Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen; and as a rather apelike puppet on the French version of Spitting Image, Les guignols de l’info. Nicolas Cantaloup, who mimics his voice on the program, explains, “He speaks very little, in a very low tone of voice. So to imitate him, you have to accentuate that. Make him almost apologize for speaking. It’s difficult for an imitator to parody Zinedine Zidane because he doesn’t have much asperity. It’s also hard because everybody loves him. So I’ve chosen to provoke humor by playing on his relentless stardom. There’s a scene at an airport where he
unthinkingly signs an autograph for a dog.”

  This is not far from the truth. Euro 2000, Zidane’s best tournament, made him a French immortal. Not injured, not sent off, not even particularly tired, he led France to a second prize in two years. The day after the final he delayed his holiday to go and say farewell to a dying old man he had known in Marseilles. Each six months the French now vote for Zidane as their favorite Frenchman in the regular poll held by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. He is seen as humble and kind, and however deeply you probe, it seems genuine. Nobody has ever come forward to say, “Actually, Zizou is an arrogant wife beater.”

  His personality is more than a detail. It has helped make les Bleus into a unit. You see the team’s collective personality at work when an unfortunate opponent wins the ball and is immediately submerged under a swarm of blue shirts.

  As Lilian Thuram, the most thoughtful of les Bleus (he had once hoped to become a priest), explained in his autobiography, “We have that spirit because our emblematic player is humble. I think Zidane has obliged each of us to carry ourselves irreproachably on the pitch. In the past the French side had some very skilful generations, but their star players lacked modesty. Zidane never throws a dirty look at a player who makes a bad pass. He never neglects to try to win the ball simply because his name is Zidane. On the contrary.”

  All his colleagues seem to regard Zidane with that sort of reverence. Soccer is about the ball. Everyone who has ever touched the thing has struggled to master it. Zidane comes closest to achieving it. His fellow players can therefore best appreciate his gift. Didier Deschamps, captain of France in 1998 and 2000, remarks, “Zidane achieves on the field what everyone dreams of doing just once. Even if I had trained day and night, I would never have got there.”