Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  “David Beckham, so handsome,” the woman said. To her, he represented the nation. The St. George’s Cross, once chiefly associated with tubby soccer hooligans, came to be identified with England’s handsome captain and began appearing on fashion items worldwide. His Order of the British Empire is a tiny recognition of his marketing efforts for Britain.

  Beckham never seemed quite able to comprehend the reach of his brand. “You just can’t think about it,” he would tell friends. He could grasp it only narcissistically: His wife reported him dancing around the house chanting, “I’m a gay icon!”

  He grew into the most powerful individual brand that soccer ever produced, but the game itself never made enough of him. Partly that’s because inside soccer, the collective always takes precedence over the individual. Ferguson, for instance, admired the honest professional Beckham, but he distrusted the Beckham brand. He hated the way the media sometimes made it seem that United’s squad consisted of just one player. It outraged Ferguson that internal incidents, such as the boot he kicked into Beckham’s face in 2003, made the newspapers. (Beckham didn’t leak the stories. His wife’s PR people did, in the interests of her ceaseless self-promotion.)

  United’s commercial executives wanted to use Beckham’s brand to sell the club abroad. They understood that United gained its tens of millions of foreign fans largely thanks to its trio of “pop stars”: George Best, Eric Cantona, and Beckham. But brands meant nothing to Ferguson. When Beckham’s form finally faltered in 2003, the manager pounced. He benched Beckham and then packed him and his brand off to Madrid.

  In part, soccer clubs were simply too incompetent to use Beckham’s brand. On the June day that Real agreed to buy him, after weeks of negotiations, it emerged that the club had prepared no replica shirts bearing his name. “It’s a bit tricky because we don’t know what number Beckham will get—and we may not know for quite some time,” a club spokesman said. Yet he also claimed that Real had received more than 2 million inquiries for Beckham shirts.

  It was a repeat of the earlier signing of the Brazilian Ronaldo. Then, too, the club had prepared no shirts, and so counterfeiters printed fake “Ronaldo 9” shirts to meet demand. When Real finally got its act together, it had to give Ronaldo the number 10 in order to create demand for its own replicas. With Beckham, again, counterfeiters probably pocketed most of the early profits. When Real finally named his number, two weeks after signing him, it was the manifestly unsexy 23. (Michael Jordan’s old number meant nothing to most soccer fans.) And so most of the value of the Beckham brand has accrued to companies outside soccer.

  Now the brand will have to transition to a new existence after soccer. In England, late-career Beckham is becoming a “national treasure.” This happens to the most famous Britons when they grow older, and, as it were, exit the game. It’s a sad fate: an upscale version of redundancy. The queen mother was the ultimate national treasure, but other examples include Tony Benn, Ronnie Biggs, and even Churchill in the 1950s. Beckham is next. The biggest stains on his brand (the red card in St. Etienne, the affair with Rebecca Loos) appear largely forgotten in Britain.

  Beckham’s brand managers now need to recast their property for a career after soccer. The man’s inarticulateness precludes a future as coach or pundit. And so his best postcareer models are not the well-spoken Johan Cruijff or Franz Beckenbauer, let alone the undirected Diego Maradona, but Pele. The Brazilian has never had anything to say, either. He thrives as a smiling doll who travels the world shaking hands for global corporations.

  Beckham can do that better. As a professional, managed by professionals like Fuller, he won’t toss away his brand. His Hollywood friends will teach him to preserve the patina of youth even in middle age. Companies outside soccer will find better uses for him than his clubs ever did. The mockers won’t be rid of Beckham for decades yet.

  Wayne Rooney

  October 2010

  One day in 2004, Wayne Rooney was doing what he usually does when he isn’t playing soccer: watching television. At the time he was breaking with Everton, the club his clan had always supported. Sky TV was reading out text messages from viewers who called him a rat, a greedy traitor, and so on. Watching at home, Rooney grew fed up. He texted the program himself: “I left because the club was doing my head in—Wayne Rooney.”

  At first Sky assumed the text was fake. “Would the people pretending to be Wayne Rooney stop sending text messages?” asked the presenter. Later, though, the presenter said something like, “We know Wayne Rooney is watching—and we are watching him.”

  At this, Rooney became paranoid. It was dark outside. He had already been receiving death threats from disgruntled Everton fans. Was someone stalking him with a secret camera?

  It was a scene that captured many of the difficulties of being Wayne Rooney. On the upside, he is the most accomplished English player since Bobby Charlton. On the downside, everyone wants a piece of him: fans, the media, his agent, Manchester United, and United’s manager, Alex Ferguson. In fact, due to his peculiar historical circumstances—a great English player living in contemporary England—Rooney may be the most grabbed-for player ever.

  The latest battle for Wayne Rooney, this month, transfixed much of the nation. First, Rooney suddenly let it be known that he was leaving United, the club where everyone had assumed he would play forever. Fans and Ferguson expressed surprise. Again, as in 2004, he was called a greedy traitor. Again, he got death threats. Then, equally suddenly, Rooney signed a new and improved five-year contract with United worth an estimated $280,000 a week. Once again, everyone was surprised.

  It’s hard to know what Rooney thinks, because he rarely speaks in public, and has never been heard to say an interesting sentence in his life. Yet from his seat in front of his television, watching the world talk about him, he must marvel at how everyone gets him wrong. None of the people who want a piece of Rooney—not even Ferguson—seems to understand what it’s like to be him.

  There are two types of English player, those from the working class and those from the underclass, and Rooney is the latter. Born in 1985, he was raised in the poor Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, initially in a onebedroom council house that later became a drug rehabilitation center. His father (also Wayne) was an intermittently employed casual laborer. His mother worked as a lunch lady and stayed in the job, earning “about £287 a month” by Rooney’s estimate, even after her son grew rich.

  They were a tight-knit Catholic family, part of the Irish diaspora that had crossed the sea to Liverpool over the previous two hundred years. Eight branches of the Rooney clan lived in Croxteth. Every summer they would rent a bus and head off en masse for the vacation camp Butlins. Rooney grew up knowing not only his cousins but also his future wife, Coleen, and her extended family, too.

  He never dreamed of becoming a professional player; he always knew he was going to become one. At nine, he joined Everton’s academy. Soon afterward, in a boys match against Manchester United, he scored with an overhead kick from ten or fifteen yards. Initially, there was silence, but after a few seconds even the parents of the opposing team broke into applause. That doesn’t often happen in children’s soccer.

  Rooney spent much of his childhood kicking the ball against the wall of his grandmother’s house. He sometimes pretended to be a Ninja Turtle, and at school showed an interest in the life of Jesus but not in much else. He left education at sixteen with no certificates—a rare feat in today’s Britain—and almost immediately broke into Everton’s first team.

  Seventeen years and 111 days old, he became the youngest man ever to play for England. Afterward, a friend drove him back to Croxteth (Rooney didn’t yet have a driver’s license), where he spent the evening eating potato chips, drinking Coke, and kicking a ball around with his pals, who wanted to know what Beckham was really like.

  English soccer wasn’t supposed to work like that. Traditionally, players were picked for their country only once they had served their time and established themselves
as “honest pros.” As in most British working-class occupations, seniority mattered. But Rooney broke all the rules. At one early training session with England, the boy dribbled past several players and then, as was his habit, lobbed the keeper. Initially, there was silence. Then his fellow internationals spontaneously broke into applause.

  Like every new celebrity in modern Britain, Rooney became the object of hype. At first, he was very popular. He was treated as the authentic masculine counterweight to Beckham’s constructed effeminate beauty. There are two types of British player: ugly ones like Rooney, Paul Gascoigne, and Nobby Stiles and pretty ones like Beckham and Michael Owen. The British public usually prefers the ugly ones.

  And English fans had been waiting decades for Rooney to arrive. Not only did he score goals, but he was that rare thing in English soccer: a player who sees space. Soccer is best understood as a dance for space. The team that can open spaces when it attacks, and close down spaces when it defends, generally wins. There are two kinds of passers: ones like Beckham, who pass the ball straight to a teammate, and ones like Lionel Messi, who pass into empty space. Rooney finds space. It’s partly because he has perfect control of the ball, which means that he never has to look down at it and instead can run with his head up looking for space.

  The few previous Englishmen who could see space—chiefly Gascoigne and several so-called mavericks in the 1970s—ruined themselves with alcohol and various other vices. Rooney hasn’t. He has been England’s main man since he was eighteen. The country’s need for him often segues into dependence. Among the many groups who want their piece of him, England’s fans often appear the most desperate.

  Rooney was never surprised or confused by his own rapid rise. He liked playing for England at seventeen. It was good soccer, and he knew he was good enough. Before kickoff, while experienced internationals would sit around the locker room like bags of nerves, he would be banging a ball against the wall as if he were back home in Croxteth. He couldn’t wait to go out and play. “I have never gone around pinching myself, saying this is unbelievable, isn’t it amazing what I’m doing,” he says in his autobiography, a revealing document despite being aimed at nine-year-olds. “Of course it’s fantastic playing for Man Utd, brilliant playing for England, but my main thought when I turn out for either of them is the same—I deserve it.” On the soccer field Rooney is happy because he controls events. Off the field, by contrast, other people often control him.

  He first noticed this when the tabloids revealed his taste for prostitutes. Like every public figure in the UK, Rooney has forfeited his private life. He became a way for Britons to mock the supposed habits of members of the underclass or, in British slang, “chavs.” Rooney rose during the country’s boom years, when even some of the poorest Britons had discretionary cash, and Coleen’s shopping habits and tan were scrutinized for “chav” markers. The clan’s parties were written about with breathless derision. Rooney says that the worst thing about being a professional player is “press intrusion into your private life.” Eventually, he learned to keep secrets from close friends and relatives, in case they inadvertently let something slip and it got into the tabloids. “Every time I got in the car, I was looking in the mirror to see if I was followed,” he says in his autobiography. His recent loss of form may be connected to new tabloid stories about his dealings with prostitutes.

  Rooney spends his leisure time watching television partly because players need to rest, partly because he has few other interests, but partly also because despite having a bodyguard, he cannot leave his house without being hassled. “It’s difficult to do ‘ordinary’ things, like going to the pub or even Asda [a supermarket],” he admits. “There’s always someone who claims he’s an Everton fan and wants to insult me, or someone who hates Manchester Utd and wants to have a go.” So Rooney has become a multimillionaire semicaptive. Had he been a great Spanish or German player, life would have been easier.

  Then his managers wanted control, too. David Moyes, his manager at Everton, tried to protect the boy in the man’s milieu. Rooney didn’t want to be protected. He was perfectly happy in the milieu. He felt that Moyes was jealous of him and upset not to have been invited to his eighteenth birthday party. More important, even at eighteen, Rooney knew he was too good for Everton. So—despite the clan’s links to the club—he left for Manchester United.

  United’s fans became another group who wanted their piece of Rooney. Like many of Everton’s fans in 2004, they were enraged to discover this month that he would contemplate leaving their club. On the field Rooney, his face reddened with effort, doing the defensive running that the most gifted players sometimes disdain, gives the impression of devotion to the cause. He looks like the British fan’s ideal: a fan in a jersey. Surely, he would want to stay at United forever. If he didn’t, he must just be greedy.

  This dichotomy drawn by fans and media—you’re either loyal or greedy—misunderstands how players think. The word players use to describe themselves is professionals. Professionals—whether they are players, academics, or bankers—don’t choose between love and money. They pursue success in their careers (another favorite players’ word). If they can get success, then money will follow.

  A player knows his club will dump him if he isn’t good enough, and so he will dump the club if it isn’t good enough. Rooney was good, and so he left Everton for United. Players regard clubs not as magical entities but as employers. Like most professionals, they will move if they can find a better job. The better job isn’t necessarily a better-paid one. Rooney could reportedly have earned more than $280,000 a week at Manchester City, and if he had put himself on the market, Real Madrid might have offered him more too. But United’s total package—the chance of prizes, the familiar surroundings, plus pay—seems to have appealed most. This is careerism rather than greed.

  By convention, players always talk as if only the team’s performance matters. Of course, they don’t think that way. Rooney knows exactly how many goals he scored in each season of his career and has set himself the target of always bettering the previous year’s tally. Even when United finished without prizes in 2006, Rooney judged it “a decent season for me.” He never seems to have adopted the view of life that Ferguson tries to inculcate in his players: United against the world. Rather, Rooney is a careerist.

  Players hardly ever come out as careerists. That’s because the game is pervaded with the rhetoric of lifelong love for club: Players are always trying to keep fans happy by kissing their club’s badge or talking about how they have supported the club since childhood. Yet probably no professional player is “loyal” in the sense that fans use the word. Pundits sometimes rhapsodize about the old days, when players often spent their entire careers at one club, but that was because clubs could then simply forbid them to move. No longer.

  Contrary to popular opinion, Rooney is not especially selfish. He’s just typical of his profession. Nowadays he is often contrasted with teammates like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, and Gary Neville, who have supposedly stayed “loyal” to United all their careers. But it would be more accurate to say that these men have a happy employer-employee relationship with United. Had United benched Giggs for a while in his prime, he would surely have been out the door fast. Instead, United was the perfect workplace for him. It didn’t suit Rooney as well.

  Alex Ferguson is a paternalist employer: He tries to create father-son relationships with his players. That’s why he doesn’t mind that at sixty-eight he is generationally out of touch with them. When Cristiano Ronaldo was trying to leave United for Real Madrid in 2008, Ferguson persistently talked about “the boy” as if he were his child. He said, “If it was your son, you’d give him the best advice possible on his career. Now, I honestly believe that could be the worst thing he could do—go to Real Madrid.” Some players enjoy this type of working relationship. Giggs, whose own father abandoned the family, has thrived under Ferguson for twenty years. But it’s not the relationship Rooney wants.

 
When he threatened to leave United, he like Ronaldo was treated as a thankless child. “Since the minute he’s come to the club, we’ve always been a harbor for him,” Ferguson complained. “Anytime he has been in trouble, we have done nothing but help him. I was even prepared to give him financial advice, many times. I don’t know how many times we have helped him in terms of his private life and other matters.”

  Ferguson sees intervening in Rooney’s private life as central to his remit. Like many English fans, the manager has in his head the “Gazza” narrative: Great British talent falls prey to temptations and forfeits his career. (This month alone, Gascoigne has admitted drunk driving and been arrested for suspected possession of Class A drugs.) Ferguson always thought that Gascoigne’s career might have been saved if he had joined United. Rooney, another talent from the underclass, is often likened to Gascoigne. Indeed, Rooney’s nickname inside the game is “Wazza” (partly because wazz is British slang for “urination”).

  British talents have traditionally needed a father figure. But Rooney doesn’t. In fact, he barely seems to need a manager at all. His thoughts on his first meeting with Ferguson show his typical lack of interest in and insight into people from outside his clan: “I was surprised by how tall Sir Alex Ferguson was.”

  Rooney has his own father, and uncles, and if he has a second father, it’s his agent. In autobiographies of modern players, the agent typically emerges as a rare close friend made in adulthood: Everyone else the player meets wants a piece of him, and the agent, though he also wants a piece, acts as the gatekeeper. Paul Stretford won a ferocious battle among agents for control of Rooney, has represented him all his career, and also represents Coleen in her work on television and as an all-purpose celebrity.

  This month’s battle for Rooney’s signature was in part a battle between two wannabe father figures. When Stretford threatened that Rooney would leave United, he was obviously bargaining for a better contract, but he was also showing Ferguson how weak the manager’s grip on the player is.