Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Deschamps was the first of Zidane’s footmen, later succeeded by Patrick Vieira and Claude Makelele. The job does not just entail bringing the master the ball. In a friendly against England in 2000, a couple of minutes after Dennis Wise had overturned Zidane, Deschamps practically murdered Wise. “You don’t touch Zizou” was the message.

  Yet it didn’t help the French at the last World Cup. Zidane landed in Asia exhausted, injured, and distracted by the birth of his third child; missed France’s first two games; and after the third flew home with his eliminated team. The French had shown again how strangely dull they can be without him. Henry, Vieira, Robert Pires, et al. just aren’t quite enough. And the team’s spirit had dissolved in Seoul’s Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel under the self-absorbed captain, Marcel Desailly.

  The big question after the tournament was who would replace Desailly as captain. The answer turned out to be Desailly himself. The thirty-four-year-old, distinctly past it, was just too powerful to jettison in public. But France’s new coach, Jacques Santini, did get in the habit of not picking him. The captain’s armband—an important piece of cloth on this team—descended not on Vieira, as everyone had expected, but on Zidane, a man who hates speeches and fuss and who, as Valdano told me, “speaks only with the ball.”

  Yet as captain, Zidane reunited the French side. He chats with new players, making them feel welcome, and sometimes even addresses the team. People listen when he speaks.

  This summer, now mostly from the left flank, he again leads an unfairly strong French side. But this may be the last time. Zidane used to talk about retiring from the national team this year, and from club soccer the next. Then, this winter, he suddenly extended his contract with Real Madrid until 2007, when he will be thirty-four. Now the French hope he might play the World Cup in Germany after all.

  It is hard to believe. You often feel that Zidane’s physique has limits, that he is too delicate to keep carrying two such demanding teams, that one day that bent back will cave in. His talk of early retirement shows he feels age encroaching. Asked whether he will retire from les Bleus this summer, he replies: “I haven’t taken any decision. For the moment I am only thinking about the European championships.”

  Just in case this turns out to be the last time, watch carefully.

  Dennis Bergkamp

  May 2003

  It was Dennis Bergkamp’s first match at Highbury, a friendly against Inter Milan in August 1995. He had just fled Inter, where he had been teased as the dressing-room geek, and that evening in London, Nicola Berti, Inter’s midfield player, continued the treatment. When Berti began trash-talking him again, Bergkamp jogged off. Berti followed. Bergkamp led him to Tony Adams, who ordered the Italian to leave the lad alone. Berti ran off, so humiliated that minutes later he cuffed a ball boy.

  It was an early sign that Bergkamp was going to feel at home at Highbury. Eight years later, two days after his thirty-fourth birthday, perhaps about to collect his second FA Cup winner’s medal, he can reflect on a period that has defined his career. There has been no other player like the one Bergkamp became at Highbury.

  After that Inter match, two Dutch journalists and I sneaked into Highbury’s marble halls. Bergkamp’s family was already there, waiting for their boy to finish changing. The father, a plumber, was standing with his hands folded behind his back, studying framed pictures of Arsenal greats.

  He would have known most of them. Like many Dutchmen of his generation, Bergkamp Sr. is an Anglophile who named one son after Denis Law (the name became Dennis Nicolaas Maria Bergkamp, after an Amsterdam civil servant rejected the spelling Denis) and each summer crammed his boys into the car for a pilgrimage to England.

  While we waited for Bergkamp to arrive, Glenn Helder, the Dutch winger, and Ian Wright appeared. Wright shook our hands and addressed us slowly and loudly, as you do with foreigners or morons. Then Helder said, “Ian, show these guys what I taught you.” Wright concentrated intensely and began bouncing on the marble and shouting in Dutch, “Bog off! Dirty monkey!” Helder looked on like a proud father. The Dutch newcomers felt welcome at Highbury.

  Later that night, in the Highbury car park, Bergkamp recalled an article that had once appeared in Amsterdam’s local newspaper. Beneath the headline, “Does Dennis Bergkamp Like Girls?” it had identified him as the only Ajax player without a girlfriend. The article still bugged him. Bergkamp had never been at ease at Ajax. The club’s “pearls-and-poodles set” alienated the shy child from the Catholic family. Bergkamp was often on Ajax’s reserve and youth teams, was sometimes played at right-back, and was always on the verge of being kicked out.

  Summoned to the first team at seventeen, his response was, “I don’t want to.” He wasn’t worried about the level of play. What scared him was that he did not know anybody on the first team. That debut season, 1986–1987, he played mostly at outside right, away from scary central defenders. On May 13, 1987 (sixteen years ago tomorrow), he came on as substitute as Ajax beat Lokomotiv Leipzig 1–0 in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in Athens. Bergkamp was then still at school, taking his homework along on away trips.

  He played for Ajax until 1993, winning a lot of domestic prizes and a UEFA Cup, and scoring goals—often lobs—that some Dutch fans still remember. Then came Inter, where he was nicknamed Beavis after the cartoon character, and failed, though he did win another UEFA Cup in 1994. A year later Bruce Rioch, in his brief stint as Arsenal’s manager, liberated him. “It was good that my first manager here was an Englishman,” Bergkamp told the Dutch magazine Johan. “Rioch guided me through English soccer culture.” (Rioch is a Scot, but same difference.)

  English soccer culture turned out to consist of fourteen-pint sessions, tabloids that wrote off the “Flying Dutchman” after he failed to score instantly, and a Highbury crowd forever urging John Jensen, the nonscoring Danish midfield player, “Shoot!” The rest is history: Jensen’s banishment, Arsenal’s metamorphosis, and the renditions of “Walking in a Bergkamp Wonderland.” Bergkamp called Arsenal his “natural home.”

  Off the pitch, he has been just as happy. He turned out to be a southern Englishman with a Dutch passport. Bergkamp is a private person who tends his own garden. He is Suburban Man. Hertfordshire is his spiritual home. He has a dry, understated “English” wit. (Players think his jokes are nearly as funny as setting somebody’s underpants on fire. Dutch internationals still fondly recall a lunchtime double act between Bergkamp and Clarence Seedorf, discussing their plans to install chapels at home.)

  Bergkamp also liked the way the English experience soccer: with passion, but never really as a matter of life and death. Told about the replica shirts bearing his number and the name “God,” the pious Christian remarked, “Luckily in England there’s a bit of irony behind it. In Italy they really believe it.”

  The British press suited him, too. The tabloids proceed on the good-boy, bad-boy theory of human nature. After discovering how boring Bergkamp’s private life was—he is married with three children—they ignored him. In addition, having little interest in soccer itself, they did not judge players match by match, as the Italians had done. Once Bergkamp had revealed his quality, nobody demanded consistency. The odd flash was enough. And whereas the Italians had judged him primarily on goals, the British realized he was a more exotic animal.

  In fact, the Premiership allowed Bergkamp to effect a transformation: from a nippy, goalscoring “shadow striker” into a man of moments. Decades after this Saturday’s FA Cup final is forgotten, people will still remember a few of those moments: the instant flick and full-circle spin around Nikos Dabizas of Newcastle United, the instant flick and half-volley with the outside of the foot that took Holland past Argentina in the last minute of a World Cup quarterfinal, or the loblet that put Fredrik Ljungberg alone in front of the Juventus goal. “His moments are as great as anybody’s who has ever lived,” says David Winner, Arsenal fan and author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer.

  Winner thinks Bergk
amp has an “aura.” Ludicrous as this is, he may be right. Bergkamp’s pale face, sparse hair, and splinterlike build contribute to an impression of ethereal fragility. “It’s almost mathematical,” Winner says. “It’s not about taking your shirt off or falling to your knees or making the sign of the cross or belting it in from thirty yards like Roberto Carlos, or all the normal signs of greatness. It’s something interior. He has this vision. And when he scores one of his goals or does one of his passes, you realize he’s seen something that nobody else in the stadium could have seen.”

  To his compatriots, Bergkamp epitomizes Dutch soccer. Whereas Seedorf and Ruud Gullit were jeered when they came to play in the Amsterdam Arena, Bergkamp was applauded there in February, even after committing two bad tackles on Ajax players in the preceding match at Highbury.

  Like Bergkamp himself, the Dutch cannot understand why Arsène Wenger ever drops him. When Bergkamp is sent on with twenty minutes left, it seems an indignity, like keeping a Vermeer in the cellar.

  Not that Bergkamp is a great player—just a beautiful one. Henk Spaan, who compiled an all-time “top 100” Dutch players, ranked him only twelfth. Bergkamp never won the biggest international prizes, Spaan explains. He was seldom Arsenal’s most important player. At times, even Ray Parlour was more important to the team.

  You would never want Bergkamp playing for your life. To achieve his great moments, he appears to enter a trance, shutting out the match. “People really have no idea what goes into the making of those goals like that,” he told Johan.

  “My gift is not subject to decay,” Bergkamp once said. In fact, he probably has one last season to add some moments to our memories of fifty years from now.

  Clarence Seedorf

  May 2003

  On Wednesday, Clarence Seedorf could win his third European Cup with his third club. He is still only 27. He is a complete player. Yet in his native Netherlands, he is despised. “That Clarence Seedorf might win three Champions Leagues means nothing to me,” says Henk Spaan, compiler of the authoritative top 100 of his country’s best players and a guardian of Dutch soccer culture. Even Simon Zwartkruis, author of a hagiography published this month, Clarence Seedorf: De Biografie, said that the player has “pissing-post status” at home.

  Seedorf was always going to win a lot of European Cups. On October 28, 1992, at the age of 16 years and 211 days, he became Ajax’s youngest player, ahead of Johan Cruijff, Marco van Basten, Dennis Bergkamp, and so on. “For me, Clarence Seedorf is the player of the year 2000,” Louis van Gaal, the Ajax manager, said.

  Playing at center-back, left-half, winger, wherever Ajax needed him, Seedorf seemed to have nothing left to learn. Already he had a much bigger build than most players, not to say the most prominent backside in the game. In interviews—there was never any question of Rooneyesque protection—Seedorf sounded like a retired cabinet minister, pontificating about discipline, responsibility, and respect. It emerged, inevitably, that he had been de facto manager of his kindergarten, asked to skip a year in elementary school, and voted to his high school student council, as well as captaining all the national youth teams.

  He belonged to a brilliant generation. Since childhood he had played in Ajax’s youth teams with Patrick Kluivert, enjoying the best soccer education possible. In the first team they joined the De Boer twins, Edgar Davids, Frank Rijkaard, Edwin van der Sar, Kanu, Jari Litmanen, and the others who, in 1995, would win the European Cup, Seedorf’s first.

  However, an early warning of future troubles, documented by Zwartkruis, came when Seedorf was substituted during the final against AC Milan. While the match raged on, he rose from his seat on the bench to go and debate his substitution with Van Gaal. An alert reserve goalkeeper caught him and held him down until Seedorf, always an obliging character, decided to drop the matter. He was leaving Ajax anyway. After all, he was already nineteen. Sven-Göran Eriksson took him to Sampdoria, where Seedorf took four seconds to adjust. “I was able to develop my personality further, largely thanks to Eriksson,” Seedorf told Zwartkruis. “He is not a man who imposes things on you, not a man for whom there is no vision besides his own.”

  Innocuous as all this sounds, a problem was emerging. Soccer is a hierarchy topped by the manager, but Seedorf understood it as a sort of discussion group in which people could grow their personalities. Even more than soccer, he loves communication. His favorite mode is abstract speech about “positive energy” and how certain events are predestined and assist personality growth.

  This was calculated to irritate Dutch fans (who dislike psychobabble), other players (ditto), and managers (who hate players saying anything at all). Yet when Seedorf joined Real Madrid after a year at Sampdoria, five years after they had first tried to sign him, he took his psychobabble with him. A polite and painfully well-meaning man, he did not imagine that it would upset anyone. When he tried to explain tactics during one halftime to Fabio Capello, the Real manager, Capello tore off his jacket and chucked it at him, shouting, “If you know it all so well, you be the coach!”

  Although Seedorf won the European Cup with Real in 1998, beating Juventus in the final, he was not really accepted. His teammate Steve McManaman told me that at training sessions, after the manager had spoken, Seedorf would step forward and say, “You don’t want to do it like that. You want to do it like this. And then you want to pass to me.” He was sold to Inter Milan in January 2000.

  Meanwhile, despite having been a regular international player since the age of eighteen, he had alienated virtually his entire home country. One problem was his “Zidane complex.” A wonderful athlete, a sort of extremely fast concrete wall who could play one-touch, Seedorf wanted to be an old-fashioned playmaker. Some players have a personality that matches their style of play. Davids and Roy Keane, for instance, are extremely aggressive men and extremely aggressive players. Cruijff was a bossy man and a bossy player. But Seedorf’s personality—an extreme version of the responsible eldest son—impels him to play like a chief when he could be a great Indian.

  Holland’s managers would usually put him at right-half, but Seedorf, in the spirit of personality growth, would constantly pop up at number 10 instead. Because he can outrun opponents without any apparent effort and never seems to tire, he often seems not to be trying. His penchant for humorlessly declaiming boring abstractions in a monotone also annoyed the Dutch, as did his habit of taking and missing other people’s penalties and his activities as spokesman for black players.

  Seedorf was seen as the leader of a Surinamese separatist movement within the team. This was unfair. He was speaking for Kluivert only because he thought Kluivert was too dumb to speak for himself and for Davids because Davids was too tactless. The widely held opinion that he and Davids are best friends—“twins”—is a misconception derived from the fallacy that all black people are the same. “Edgar and I are two different personalities,” Seedorf said politely.

  Holland’s white players are mostly fond of Seedorf. When I asked Van der Sar about splits within the team, he said, “Those players you’re talking about—we’ve been through a lot with each other.” When Van der Sar and Davids were at Juventus, it was Van der Sar whom Seedorf used to phone. Yet Seedorf is often jeered during international matches (by Holland’s mostly white crowds), and in a poll during Euro 2000, 81 percent of the public voted him out of the national team. No Dutch player of recent decades has been more despised.

  Seedorf went through hard years. His mother would cry in the stands during international matches, and his father begged him to stop playing for Holland. Even Seedorf himself was affected. One Christmas he considered writing a poem to the Dutch people. (Speech not being enough for him, Seedorf is always doing extra communication through poems and songs.) At Inter he was getting on people’s nerves, too. He was often left on the bench. He has won nothing since the World Club Cup of 1998.

  Yet since he joined Milan last summer, everything seems to have come together for him. He was put in left midfield, with orders to
attack and defend, but allowed to drift to the center when his personality impelled him. Milan loved his body—the club’s computer program found that he had the maximum desirable amount of muscle, and he was banned from doing weight training. The club can also live with his growing personality.

  When Seedorf joined the club, Bruno de Michelis, Milan’s sports psychologist, told Zwartkruis: “He talked 10 per cent like a player, 70 per cent like a coach and 20 per cent like a general manager. But I also saw that he was doing it with a positive intention. In the years I’ve been working with Milan, I’ve never seen such a strong personality.”

  De Michelis said that the way soccer works is that if the manager tells the players to defecate in a corner of the practice field, everyone would oblige without question, and only the bravest player would ask: “Certainly, mister, but what colour should our shit be?” Only Seedorf would dispute the very principle of defecation. Soccer is not yet ready for him, but after a few more European Cups, recognition awaits as a psychotherapist or prime minister.

  *Seedorf is now on four Champions Leagues and counting, after eighteen years in top-level professional soccer.

  Freddy Adu

  November 2003

  I asked James Will, a Scottish policeman, what he thought of Freddy Adu. “Who’s he, then?” Will responded.

  Adu is a fourteen-year-old American soccer player hailed as the new Pele. This week he signed his first contract with DC United in the United States. He should achieve the rare double of playing professional soccer and graduating from high school before he turns fifteen. But first it is worth introducing James Will, because his story gives a sense of Adu’s chances of becoming Pele.

  Will was Scotland’s goalkeeper in the Under-17 World Cup final in 1989. They lost to Saudi Arabia in front of a crowd of fifty thousand, at Hampden Park, but Will received the Golden Ball as the competition’s best player. “I didn’t know there was such a thing until I’d actually won it,” he recalls by telephone from the Highlands. “It looks nice on the mantelpiece. That’s the one thing.”