Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Maldini is brilliant, handsome, and nice. Nobody dislikes him. Even Tommaso Pellizzari, a fan of Inter Milan who wrote a book against AC Milan called No Milan, admits, “In twenty years of soccer, he never did something you remember as bad or ugly.” Since many of us hope to achieve eternal perfection, the question is how Maldini does it.

  It began with his father. Cesare Maldini had captained Milan himself, and his son seems to have constructed his life around seeking the old man’s approval. “From the moment I first remember seeing a picture of him holding the European Cup,” says Maldini, “I wanted to copy his success.” Cesare, from Trieste, had the grinta (grit) that typifies players of that region, and so Paolo, who had more natural gifts than his father, developed grinta.

  When Milan moved him to left-back in his teens, Maldini achieved through grinta and practice something almost unfeasible for anyone older than twelve: He made his left foot as good as his right. “He still surprises me every day with his quest to always improve and to look inside as well,” says his father. Alberto Zaccheroni, who coached Maldini at Milan, recalls, “He plays the friendly game of the Thursday afternoon, against our youth team or an amateur side, as if it were the Champions League final.”

  In the Champions League semifinal against PSV Eindhoven earlier this month, Maldini threw his head in front of a Dutch striker winding up for a shot. He was kicked in the face and stretchered off. Within a minute or so, he had resumed work. To maintain this level of grinta, you have to believe in the institution for which you work. Hardly any players love their clubs—they leave that to fans—yet Maldini actually seems to, even though he supported Juventus as a boy. No doubt this love is connected to love of father: at seventy-three, Cesare still scouts for Milan. Paolo regularly turned down better offers from clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea, and once, when Milan pleaded financial trouble, accepted a pay cut of 30 percent. He talks often about the importance of playing in his city of birth and admits it distresses him that Milan signs so many foreigners.

  Maldini has subordinated ego to club. This make him a walking reproach to players who seek status through anything but performance. Wayne Rooney, who often seeks macho confrontation, got a pat on the head from Maldini. Robbie Savage, a Welsh player who before a Wales-Italy match threw away a Maldini shirt on television, was not granted a response at all. Maldini seldom speaks, but when he does it keeps his teammates in line.

  Yet none of this quite covers him. There is something supernatural about his body, as if he were a Greek god poorly disguised as a human. To remain a great player aged thirty-six—as hardly anyone in history has—you must always have taken perfect care of yourself.

  Milan’s training ground, Milanello, offers glimmers of an explanation. This sunny idyll on a hill above Lake Como comes alive a few minutes before ten each morning, when a parade of SUVs carrying multimillionaire players pushes past the armed guards. Maldini has made this commute for twenty years. Between training sessions, he sleeps in his Milanello bedroom. He says, “It’s almost as though all your worries stop at the gates. This is the ideal manner to get the best out of you.”

  It would appear so, for Maldini is not alone at Milan. The back four likely to face Liverpool have an average age of thirty-three, with thirty-nine-year-old Billy Costacurta in reserve. This is because the “Milan Lab,” the club’s medical team, has discovered the secret of eternal youth. The lab is always testing players’ muscles, brains, hearts, breathing, psyches, and so on, and then analyzing the data with computers. Whereas other teams still run laps together, each player at Milan follows his own customized regime. It works, particularly if you are a Greek god to start with. Adriano Galliani, Milan’s vice president, reports, “Paolo’s biological age is much lower than his actual age. The tests we have done now are better than three or four years ago.”

  As they say, it’s partly a matter of how old you feel. Maldini believes that stress consumes energy. He tries to avoid it by not thinking about soccer outside work hours. He never reads the Gazzetta dello Sport, Italian soccer’s daily pink bible, never appears on television or in gossip rags, and never talks about soccer with his wife and sons and seldom even with his dad. Almost a decade ago he stopped appearing as a disc jockey on radio. David Endt, an official at the Dutch club Ajax, cites Maldini to young players as the example of how to manage their lives. When Endt told Maldini this, Maldini replied that he felt honored. Not only that, he actually looked honored. This is another trick of the mind required to remain great: Despite knowing you are great, you have to feel humble. Everyone talks about this; few manage it.

  If Maldini ever retires, the Milan Lab will presumably clone him.

  *In February 2009, when the forty-year-old Maldini played his last derby against Inter before retiring, the Inter fans held up a banner that said: “For 20 years our opponent, but in life always loyal.” On the other hand, at his last-ever game a few months later, hard-core fans of his own club held up a banner that said, “On the field you were a never-ending champion but you lacked respect for those who made you rich.” He had only played twenty-four years for Milan. If he did lack respect for certain people, you could sort of understand why.

  Fernando Torres

  August 2007

  Last summer, for a couple of scorching days in Leipzig and Stuttgart, Spain was the best team in the World Cup. Briefly, there were thrilling scenes. In the famous Spanish phrase, “We played like never before, and lost as usual.” But before they lost, the most thrilling sight of all was their blond kid up front, Fernando Torres.

  Today Torres, twenty-three, kicks off the English soccer season with his new club, Liverpool, at Aston Villa. Whatever his precise transfer fee—perhaps $40 million—he is the most expensive Spaniard ever sold, and the most expensive player Liverpool has ever bought. However, his transfer is even more momentous than that implies. For years people eulogized Torres’s loyalty to Atletico Madrid, the club he had joined at age eleven and supported for much longer. Despite being too good for Atletico, he stayed. He was feted as the last player as fan. His move proves that the two are in fact different species.

  As the Torres legend goes, when he was four or five his grandfather began urging him to play for “Atleti.” The old man dreamed of seeing Fernando wear the red and white in the first division. “Luckily he was able to see me play in the Calderón before he died,” says Torres, “though not in the first division.”

  When Torres made his professional debut at seventeen, Atletico was suffering its “two years in hell” in the second division. The team of the Madrilene working classes is historically Spain’s third-largest club, but it is dwarfed by its neighbor Real, habitually wastes money, and plays beside a gasworks on the dirty banks of the Manzanares River. Atletico is a biggish club that acts like a little one.

  The local boy was immediately appointed Atletico’s idol in residence. At nineteen he became club captain. Eventually, he practically became Atletico itself.

  You can see why. Physically, Torres is acrobat, strongman, and sprinter in one. A mark of his quality is that he scores many different kinds of goals: dribbles, headers, lobs, and drives with both feet. In fact, the outside of his right foot is a source of weirdly brilliant lobs.

  Torres has mastered perpetual motion. “He has a tremendous degree of fitness, a tremendous energy,” Spain’s coach, Luis Aragones, said last summer. Torres’s three goals at the World Cup came in the last twenty minutes of matches, when exhausted defenders could no longer match his runs. However, noted Aragones, “We want to work on a couple of technical details.”

  Rafael Benitez, Liverpool’s manager, confirmed immediately after forking out the record fee, “He needs to improve some things.”

  Partly because Torres does everything at top speed, his control is deficient. That explains why he scores less than he should: Excluding penalties, he averaged fewer than twelve league goals a season over the past four years.

  Still, every summer some very big teams courted him.
Every summer he stayed at Atletico. He seemed to think like a fan.

  Yet this was a delusion. Torres himself, a thoughtful man, has explained it well: “When you’re a supporter you think and dream about your club every day. You only see the good parts. When you cross the line and become a player, you see everything. That’s not always pretty.” Behind the curtain you see that a club is composed of venal humans muddling along. Everyone who ever gets on the inside of soccer feels this. A friend of mine, a Sunderland fan, says that when he became a journalist and stood in the tunnel beside the Sunderland players before a game, the illusion suddenly fell away for him. He never cared as much again.

  Some players do remain fans on the side. Here’s a scene from a Madrid hotel bar in 2002: Steve McManaman, then a player with Real, the world’s biggest club, had just won a European game 3–0, but his thoughts were with the club he supported, Everton. “Macca” was working his cell phone to discuss Everton’s sacking of their manager, Walter Smith. “I feel for him,” sighed McManaman. “As a manager you’re only as good as your material. They lost 3–0 at the weekend—three individual errors.”

  Yet the suggestion that McManaman should play for Everton just because he supported them would have struck him as absurd. Like anyone who ever worked to convert a raw talent, Macca had a career.

  Torres does too. Given the choice between betraying his club and betraying his talent, he left Atletico. He returned from the ends of the earth (a Polynesian vacation) to talk to Liverpool. Yet even at his new club he still feels obliged to talk like a fan. He recounts how years ago some of his Madrilene friends got tattoos with Liverpool’s slogan, “You’ll never walk alone.” Because of his job Torres couldn’t get the tattoo, but his friends bought him an armband bearing the slogan.

  In truth, a professional player always walks alone. Nonetheless, Torres represents a coup for Benitez. Spain’s best players rarely emigrate. Like British players, they struggle with foreign languages in strange towns. Torres once said his game was not suited to England.

  Benitez, a Spaniard himself, can reassure Spanish players that his Liverpool is a small corner of Spain. That’s a sentiment that matters to professional players. Fandom does not.

  *Torres has since joined Chelsea, angering some Liverpool fans who had believed that he loved their club.

  Florent Malouda

  August 2007

  One freezing January in 2003 I trekked to Brittany to witness a French peculiarity: a village of 8,000 people with a soccer stadium that could fit twice as many. The village, Guingamp, which on the map occupied much the same spot as Asterix’s cartoon village, somehow had a team in France’s highest division. They even had a pair of promising players, called Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda.

  That evening Guingamp were receiving Le Havre. Practically every villager walked to the stadium, evoking French wartime scenes of entire towns taking to the road. The crowd of 12,728 (approximately 13 of them from Le Havre) was impressive considering it was so cold that no sane human could have wanted to be outdoors. Malouda played terribly. Guingamp lost 1–2. They looked like a village team.

  Tomorrow Malouda, now twenty-seven, should make his official debut for Chelsea alongside Drogba in the Community Shield match against Manchester United. This is the story of how a boy from the edge of the earth erased his personality to become the perfect professional.

  Malouda grew up in French Guyana, on South America’s northern tip, a skinny little brown kid nicknamed “Foufoup.” He puttered about on his motorcycle, studied hard at school, always got home by seven thirty, and was already preparing for life as a professional player. His dad was a local coach, who after each match would be waiting beside the field with an analysis: “Florent, you gave twelve crosses, four of them bad. You keep the ball too long before shooting. Your four goals . . .”

  Malouda arrived in mainland France at fifteen. A year later he was playing in the French second division. Rather like an MBA student, he had a career plan. “He was always a serious boy,” explains his mother. “He left home knowing he would become a player in the French team.” He joined Guingamp at twenty, Lyon at twenty-three, and at twenty-four made his debut for France.

  One summer afternoon in 2005 I watched him train with the national team in the forest of Rambouillet. He was a new boy in a side with hierarchies as strict as the court of Louis XIV, but that day, during a dispute in a game of musical chairs, Malouda threw a mock karate kick at the king himself, Zinedine Zidane. Then the French split into sides for tennis soccer. Patrick Vieira, dauphin to Zidane, was made a team captain, and announced he had sold one of his players for twenty euros. Yet when a quarrel erupted over the score, Malouda took on Vieira. “Foufoup” understood hierarchies, but he also knew his own worth, and just how far he was permitted to go. The next summer he was France’s best player for much of the World Cup final, yet accepted a lecture in the tunnel at halftime from his hierarchical superior, Thierry Henry.

  By then he was the complete player. Malouda has no weaknesses. He can dribble, tackle, run, score, and cross with either foot. He can play in most positions. A stringy five foot ten, he looks as if he designed his own body to play professional soccer. Like most of Lyon’s players, he is fit enough to play two games consecutively. (Instead of buying Malouda, Chelsea could have cut out the middleman and signed Lyon’s brilliant fitness coach, Robert Duverne.)

  Everybody in France admires Malouda. Last season he was voted the league’s best player. Yet hardly anyone loves or hates him. He is the player as robot, a purveyor of statements like “What matters is the team.” As he told the newspaper L’Equipe: “Since my arrival in metropolitan France, I’ve erased certain traits of my character to avoid being rejected by the system, to the point where I get reproached for nonchalance even though I’m an electric battery.”

  A French journalist explained to me the difference between Malouda and France’s dopey working-class hero Franck Ribéry: “If Ribéry rode the Tour de France and were caught taking drugs, everyone would forgive him. With Malouda, everyone would say, ‘You see? That explains it.’”

  This summer Malouda’s career plan indicated a move to a megaclub. Several showed an interest, including Real Madrid, but Malouda was determined to join Chelsea. He knew that Real absentmindedly buys dozens of players, who are often forgotten until they get discovered months later screaming inside closets. He also presumably knew that as a Stakhanovite athlete, he was made for Chelsea.

  The only hitch was that the Londoners—for years soccer’s biggest spenders—appeared almost out of cash. In 2005, when Chelsea paid Lyon $35 million for Michael Essien, they still followed the “reassuringly expensive” philosophy of shopping. This summer they spent weeks fishing behind sofas for bits of change, struggling to reach Lyon’s minimum price of $27.7 million for Malouda. Lyon revealed that Chelsea’s general manager, Peter Kenyon, even flew to Moscow to touch the club’s multibillionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, for more cash.

  Malouda will be worth it. That day in Guingamp, a club director told me, “From time to time we have a little fantasy: A Brazilian player comes, or Szarmach, the Pole who played three World Cups.” With hindsight, having Malouda and Drogba on the village team wasn’t a bad fantasy, either.

  Michael Owen

  September 2007

  That first goal against Russia said a lot about Michael Owen. It looked so easy. England’s John Terry and two large Russians jumped for a corner, missed it, and little Owen, who seemed to be coincidentally loitering by himself behind them, stopped the ball and placed it in the net off the inside of the post. It was his thirty-ninth goal for England. He added a fortieth that night.

  It looks easy, yet hardly anyone else can do it: anticipating where the ball will land, finding space, and placing it like a golfer sinking a putt. The category of men who have scored as easily as Owen in international soccer for as many years is small: Today only Miroslav Klose, Ruud van Nistelrooy, and Thierry Henry can make a case.

 
; Without Owen’s gift, England was threatening to miss qualification for Euro 2008. With him back from injury, the English could win the title. In his years of injuries Owen has often been written off, but he himself may believe that at twenty-seven he is better than the unravaged eighteen-year-old who stunned the world at the World Cup of 1998. “You come into your peak in your late twenties,” he told me when I met him five years ago. Whereas Owen 1.0 of 1998 was the product of nature, today’s Owen—Owen 2.0, if you like—is the result of a career plan.

  Owen grew up the son of a professional player in the Welsh town of Hawarden. He boxed a bit and was an obsessive golfer, team captain at the Hawarden Cricket Club, a good rugby player, and a decent sprinter who also enjoyed snooker and darts. There are British towns where the entire population put together plays less sport than Owen did, because they’re too busy arguing in the pub about Manchester United. Owen has never read an entire book and only once seen an entire film: When he had a trial at Arsenal as a kid, the club took his group to the cinema, and out of courtesy Owen didn’t leave. But he has no outside interests.

  Whereas other gifted kids dream of becoming professional players, Owen always knew he would be one. Even as a small kid he played like a pro, running into space instead of chasing the ball and, when he shot, picking his spot instead of blasting. Long before turning pro, he was planning how he would behave when he got there. English players tend to divide into two social types. Players of the first type are so thoughtless and inarticulate that they would struggle in any profession but soccer: Think Paul Gascoigne, Lee Bowyer, Jonathan Woodgate. Then there is a minority type that thinks hard about the game: Gary Lineker, Gareth Southgate, or Tony Adams after giving up alcohol.

  Owen told me that as a boy he watched Lineker and Alan Shearer “to get tips off playing, but also tips off how to conduct yourself off the pitch as well. If there was such a thing as someone copying exactly what they do and following in their footsteps, I don’t think you’d go far wrong with players like that.” His project—almost revolutionary in English soccer—involved not behaving like a half-wit.