by Simon Kuper
Will you return to France after your career?
“I have already my flat in Paris. Of course I will come back to Paris because it’s my city, and France is my country.”
Thierry Henry obsessively watches soccer on television, even games in the French second division. Anelka once said he never watches soccer.
Still not?
“Sometimes, when I have the chance to watch. If I have to choose I won’t watch any games, because, errr, I do it every day. Soccer is a beautiful game, but it’s also work that I have to do every day. It’s not like when you are kids and you play soccer just like a hobby. When I’m off the pitch, I try to think about something else.”
Has soccer often made you unhappy?
“No. Even in difficult time, I had people around me, and my family, and even in difficult time we were happy, because when you know you didn’t do anything, nothing can happen to you because you are not as bad as people try to make people believe. And when you believe in God, you know the reverse will come, because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
In interviews Anelka often asserts his own happiness, perhaps to show that the world can’t touch him.
At twenty-nine, he is now late-phase Anelka. The next two or three years are the most crucial of his career. They can turn him into more than just a story of “what might have been.” This January, nearly six years after he left Liverpool, he finally returned to a big club: Chelsea, which paid $30 million to bring him from Bolton. Avram Grant, the club’s manager, admitted, “He had a bad reputation ten years ago, but I could say the same about any one of us.”
Do you know the significance of the figure of £85 million? (It’s the total amount that has now been paid for him in transfer fees, spread over nine transfers, more than for any other player ever.)
“Yeah.”
Does that sum make you proud?
“No. I don’t care about records, because first of all I don’t look at the money they spend on me. If you want to look at the money, it’s people outside.”
So what does make you proud in your career?
“Work. I had a lot of—how do you say?—difficult times, but even in difficult times I kept my head . . .” He tilts his head upward. “How do you say? Up? And I think I’m happy about where I am today and what I did.”
What do you mean by “difficult time”?
“When people try to make story about my character and everything. When people try to say things about me that was wrong. It was difficult, when you know you didn’t do anything.”
Have you been waiting years to rejoin a big club?
“I think so, because I played in the beginning of my career in big clubs, and I knew I have the quality to play in the big clubs. I stayed focused. I wanted to come back in a big club. And I did it. Now I’m twenty-nine. I don’t need to move again. Because I have a club who can give me Champions League; it can give me a title every year.”
He knows that this is his last chance. Nobody doubts his gifts. However, he has gone through seven thin years, and his scoring record lags the best. Anelka averages one goal every three league games over his career and one every four games for France. Peers like Michael Owen and Thierry Henry average one goal every two league games, and Ruud van Nistelrooy does better. Admittedly, Anelka has played for worse clubs than they did, but that is part of his problem.
The photo shoot is finally over, and we sit down at a table in a quiet room.
You’re twenty-nine now. You must be a man in a hurry.
“A hurry for what?”
To achieve everything now.
“No. I live my life like I have to live it.”
So you’re not a man who’s set yourself goals like winning a big prize with France, because you’ve been unlucky with the French team. Or winning the—
“I won already almost everything in my career. I think something missing like a World Cup and—I think, yeah, that’s it.”
How would you describe yourself as a player, as a striker?
“Mmmm. I’m a striker, but I can play in midfield. I like to play with the ball, I like to participate on the pitch, so I’m not the same striker I was ten years ago. I like football; I like to touch the ball. I’m not thinking like a striker, who wants to only score goals. I like to pass the ball; I like to create. So I can describe me now like a nine and a half. Not like a nine, or not like ten.”
So you could see yourself dropping back a little?
“I did it already. I did it when I was playing in Turkey, and I loved my time there, my position.”
To celebrate the end of the interview, Anelka cuts himself a small slice of sponge cake.
Didier Drogba
May 2008
Didier Drogba never wanted to play for Chelsea. He writes in his new autobiography, published in French this week, that when Chelsea bought him for $44 million in 2004, “It just wasn’t the team I wanted to join.”1 But Marseille wanted to sell him, and his agent said he’d be stupid to turn down the salary. Then Drogba hoped he’d fail his medical exam at Chelsea. “I was disgusted to sign for Chelsea,” he admits.
This makes bizarre reading before Drogba’s farewell match for the club, Wednesday’s Champions League final against Manchester United in Moscow. The Ivorian center-forward has won two English titles with Chelsea, yet the autobiography describes a man who’s never been ecstatic to be there. No wonder C’était pas gagné will only appear in English in August, when Drogba will have safely emigrated. But the book’s strangest passages concern Drogba’s unconsummated love affair with Chelsea’s previous manager, José Mourinho.
The central event of Drogba’s life is his exile from the Ivory Coast at age five. In the book is a photograph of a child standing between a baggage cart and two worried parents at the Abidjan airport. He was moving to France to live with an uncle, a professional player. The six-hour flight, alone with his favorite toy, passed in a blur of tears and tissues.
He was right to be scared. His uncle constantly changed clubs, and each year Drogba found himself in a new school, usually the only black boy in class. Later, he, his parents, and five siblings lived in a room of just over one hundred square feet in a Parisian suburb.
At twenty-three he was still “almost a substitute of a substitute” with Le Mans in France’s second division. Three years later he gets to Chelsea, but the move echoes his childhood exile. In London the sun sets before four o’clock, and at Chelsea he feels like the new boy. “I had the impression, at first, of not being accepted by the English [players],” he recalls. In the locker room, Englishmen John Terry and Frank Lampard sit together, and the Africans have their corner. Gradually, Drogba concludes that this is natural: “A black goes to a black, a Portuguese to a Portuguese, an Englishman to an Englishman.”
Then he starts playing brilliantly. He becomes famous, especially in the Ivory Coast, where some babies are christened “Didier-Drogba.” In his country’s civil war, he says he becomes “an icon of reconciliation.”
Yet he’s constantly thinking of leaving Chelsea. He stays because of Mourinho. When Drogba writes about him, the book’s tone shifts from merely overwrought to cheap romantic novel. The two first meet when Drogba’s Marseille plays Mourinho’s Porto in 2003. At halftime Mourinho asks him, “Do you have a brother or cousin in Ivory Coast, because I don’t have the money to bring you to Porto?” Mourinho’s “charming smile” and “mastery of French” seduce Drogba. It is love at first sight.
At Chelsea, they are finally together. Mourinho assembles his players and tells them, “You have never won anything. I have just won the Champions League with Porto.” The handsome Portuguese is a great professional who gives his players pages of notes on every opposing team, even tiny Scunthorpe. Moreover, he’s psychic. “On the bench I’ve heard him describe what would happen in an almost surgical way,” writes Drogba. “Sometimes this was almost disquieting. As if he could see the future.”
Late in last year’s FA Cup final, an exhausted Drogba hears
Mourinho calling to him from the bench: “Continue. You’ll score. Stay concentrated.” Banal as this may sound to nonbelievers, Drogba is inspired. He scores. Like a horse whisperer with horses, Mourinho knows how to talk to players. Afterward, Drogba hunts him down in the stadium’s catacombs, and they cry in each other’s arms.
When Mourinho is sacked, the two are tragically parted. But Drogba is “intimately convinced” they will meet again. He adds, “With his gift of divination, he must know the date precisely.” However, Mourinho, in his pretentious preface to the book, merely guesses at it: “When we’re old, Drogba retired from soccer and me rolling around in a wheelchair? Whatever, Didier will always be in my heart.” Cue sunset over fields of swaying corn.
Mourinho’s successor, Avram Grant, is treated rather differently. In fact, he isn’t treated at all. Whereas Drogba analyzes all his other coaches, he doesn’t even mention Grant.
This summer Drogba will leave Chelsea, either to follow the man of his dreams, or to join his beloved AC Milan. The Sun has serialized Drogba’s account of a visit to Milan, where he miraculously “happens to run into Adriano Galliani, Milan’s vice-president.” (I too am forever happening to run into Galliani while in Milan.) Drogba tells Galliani he’ll join Milan “whenever you want.” Mourinho hears of the rendezvous and is furious. He and Drogba don’t speak for two weeks. Then they suddenly joke about it, look into each other’s eyes, and laugh. “Our only moment of misunderstanding is erased,” writes Drogba.
Lost amid the fuss is the truly remarkable aspect of the Milanese visit. Drogba had to see his dentist in Paris, so of course he chartered a private plane. When the dentist cancels, Drogba flies to Milan to party instead. Here, at last, is the solution to global warming: Ban professional soccer.
*I was wrong. Drogba didn’t follow Mourinho to Italy after all. In hindsight, I overestimated the role of friendship—or even love—in soccer. Players do what’s best for their own careers. The people they meet along the way are secondary.
Franck Ribéry
July 2008
His shorts look too long for him, as if he’s a player from the 1950s, or he’s wearing his dad’s gear. He has the scarred face of a losing featherweight boxer. Like Charlie Chaplin, Franck Ribéry (five foot six) is the little man personified. He is also one of the most exciting soccer players alive. He’s the reason for some of us Parisians to trek out to the ghetto of Saint-Denis on freezing nights to watch France in the Stade de France, even despite Raymond Domenech and the sense of watching an over-thirty-fives team whose players don’t like each other anymore. He is the reason Bayern Munich might just win the Champions League this season. (The Bundesliga title is taken for granted.)
When Ribéry recovers from the torn ligaments that mercifully liberated him from France’s European championship shortly before it ended in tears, we will have our new model player back: the peasant as hero. His unlikely rise is a story of the French north and its underclass transplanted to a villa outside Munich.
Central to the Ribéry myth are his origins. He comes from Boulognesur-Mer, a poor town on the Channel coast facing England, where he grew up in a largely immigrant quartier with unemployment rates of up to 60 percent. “As a kid I spent all my time with Muslims,” Ribéry has said. One of them became his wife, who converted him to Islam. His Muslim name is Bilal, after Islam’s first black convert. Claude Boli, a French historian who specializes in black sportsmen, says that Ribéry’s religion and his humble origins make him as much of an outsider in mainstream France as are his black and brown teammates on the national team.
The North is not where the French dream is. Its place in the French imagination is nicely captured by the new comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, which this spring became the highest-grossing French film ever. It features a postmaster who is transferred from Provence—where the French dream is—to a rainy town in the North where people eat fries and drink and hang around the cobblestoned streets. The Ch’tis are revealed as lovable after all.
Ribéry is a Ch’ti. “Ti Franck” speaks the Ch’ti dialect with Flemish influences and was once an unemployed Boulogne dropout hanging around the streets. His status as one of life’s victims is made visual by the scar that runs across the right side of his face and his forehead, legacy of the time when, aged two, he flew through his dad’s car’s windshield. Ribéry bears his stigmata with pride. “In a certain way this accident helped me,” he has said. “As a child it motivated me. God gave me this difference. The scars are part of me, and people will just have to take me the way I am.”
The one thing the young Ribéry could do reasonably well was play soccer. “Since I was very small I haven’t stopped running,” he says. “It’s a quality that not many professional soccer players have.” He got into Lille’s soccer academy, but was soon kicked out for failing at school. Later he earned €150 a month playing for his hometown team.
“I’ve had difficult moments,” he admits. He was offered a chance at Alès in southern France, drove there overnight, played a game in the heat of the next afternoon with blisters on his feet, and got a small contract. Then Alès went bankrupt, leaving Ribéry overdrawn at the bank. One of his many agents has said that Ribéry then was incapable of even filling in a form for social security. The teenager briefly worked on a building site with his dad. “I really didn’t think about the French team then, but I did about turning pro,” he says. Finally, Brest, in France’s third division, offered him a giant contract: €2500 a month!
He got better fast, but had dubious agents with a taste for financially iffy clubs. After a brief stint with Galatasaray in Turkey, he joined Olympique Marseille. There, in late 2005, the contours of today’s unique player started to emerge through the northern fog. Ribéry is a rare soccer player who can dribble the ball a few yards forward in almost any situation. He crouches over the thing, guarding it like a miser, knowing just how far he can take it before pushing a pass into a hole nobody else had seen. Bernard Lacombe, director of soccer at France’s eternal champions Olympique Lyon, and owner of one of the best pairs of eyes in the game, explains that on the pitch Ribéry does everything different from everyone else.
Ribéry was the great Zinedine Zidane reborn as a small crab. But he also had something “Zizou” never had: He was a perpetual-motion machine, chopping the air with his little hands as he ran. He moved even as he received the ball, which, as Thierry Henry notes, made him “a nightmare for defenders.” He dribbled like a Brazilian, passed like a Dutchman, and ran like a Brit.
In the spring of 2006, Ribéry was the antihero the French public was waiting for. The French were growing bored with their globalized multimillionaire players who had hogged the spots in les Bleus for a decade. The team felt like an exclusive gentlemen’s club. The public embraced the little Ch’ti who hung out with his Ch’ti relatives rather than with fellow celebrities. He seemed more fan than player: Indeed, in July 1998, when several of the French players who flopped at Euro 2008 were already on the pitch winning the World Cup, little Ribéry was celebrating on the streets. When he posed in France Football magazine recently for a photo with some of the magazine’s readers, he looked as ordinary as they did, if perhaps smaller and uglier. The one hint of his stardom was his finely honed goatee. Much of the public also approved of the fact that he was white, unlike all other French forward players to have emerged since 1998.
Finally, two weeks before the World Cup began, he made his debut for France against Mexico. Barely a minute after coming on as a sub, to cheers from the crowd, he already stood out by the simple measure of running into space and calling for the ball, something the other Bleus seemed too old and blasé to do. A newspaper poll showed that 69 percent of the French wanted him on the World Cup squad. France’s coach, Raymond Domenech, responded with a grin: “Sixty-nine—I like this number.” Eventually, Ribéry was picked. “The coach put my name in twenty-third and last position,” he notes. Watching the news at home on the sofa, he burst into tears and fell into the arms
of his sick dad. It was like a scene from Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis. He would be the public’s representative in les Bleus.
Zidane, whom Ribéry had always followed as a fan, adopted him as a sort of nephew. Ribéry soon got used to eating meals with the great man, and even began to joke with him. At Bayern too, Ribéry loves the puerile gags that characterize soccer locker rooms. From the start with les Bleus, he told L’Equipe, the palace gazette of French soccer, “I wasn’t alone in my corner. I joked, I teased everyone, they teased me.”
Still, he admits that before France’s first match of the World Cup, a deadly dull 0–0 draw with Switzerland, “I was stressed. I suddenly realized that this was the World Cup.” Zidane had told him to ration his energy in the heat, but Ribéry forgot and ran himself into the ground. In one early game, there was the sight of Henry wagging an index finger as he lectured the new kid wearing the schlemiel’s number 22. That was the hierarchy then. Ribéry admits that at first on the field he would sometimes just stand there watching Zidane like a fan.
But during the World Cup, Ribéry seemed not merely to play better each game but actually to become a better player. At first, he often played with his head looking down at the ball. Turning his back on a defender, he would sometimes block his own view forward. But by the second round, when he scored a solo goal against Spain, he was a real international. Offers poured in, from Arsenal, Real Madrid, almost every big club in Europe. The world’s 1 billion Muslims liked his public prayers before matches. He almost won France the World Cup, too, but late in the final against Italy—only forty-three days after his debut for France—his shot rolled just past the post. “If I had scored . . . ,” he mused in France Football. “Ah! If I had scored, my friend. I still haven’t got over this match.”
He returned home confused by his new status. He still invariably described himself as “simple.” But from a cheery ugly little Ch’ti nobody had ever heard of, he had been transformed into a cheery ugly little Ch’ti who was the national hero. Sometimes his new status helped: He persuaded the small northern club Calais to sign his younger brother, François. (The boys’ father, also François, clearly didn’t have much imagination when it came to names). Third-division Calais seemed the sort of ambience where Franck himself would look more at home than at the Stade de France.