Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  Afterward, Ferguson tried to cast the new contract as an errant son returning to the fold. He said, “I think Wayne now understands what a great club Manchester United is.” Rooney was made to apologize to his teammates and to Ferguson.

  Yet the affair showed that United need Rooney more than he needs them. True, it would be hard for Rooney to move to another English club: Uncomprehending fans would make his life a misery. And he seems poorly equipped to move to Spain. Rooney once scored 0 percent on a Spanish exam at school, and Spain is far from his clan. Still, he does have an unlimited choice of willing employers.

  United, by contrast, is short of superstars. They have several aging players who will need replacing at great expense soon: Giggs, Scholes, Neville, Rio Ferdinand, and Edwin van der Sar. The talent in the club’s pipeline tends to disappoint: United has produced no great youth player since Beckham’s generation emerged fifteen years ago. The club’s frugal owners, the Glazer family, limit spending on new players. Without Rooney, United looks a little thin.

  It’s the story of Rooney’s life: Other people want a piece of him. That isn’t always fun. This spring United kept playing him exhausted and hurt. By the time the World Cup came around, he was empty. He played poorly for England, and the nation’s fans—who weren’t getting their piece of him—booed him. After one game he shouted into a nearby television camera (and if you’re Rooney, there is always a nearby television camera), “Nice to see your own fans booing you. If that’s what loyal support is, for fuck’s sake.”

  Rooney knows that fans, managers, media, and agents love him only because they need him. Their “loyalty” quickly turns into anger, intrusion, exploitation, or mockery. He has no intention of being “loyal” in return. That means that sooner or later, this month’s spat with United will probably be repeated.

  Frank Lampard

  October 2010

  One of the delights of soccer is watching Frank Lampard prepare to shoot. He stands almost perfectly upright, and raises his head for a good look at the goal. The right arm is held out for balance, the left arm is flung out for power, and the inside of the right foot strikes the ball just off center, so that its swerve will confuse the keeper. Lampard kicks only as hard as he needs to. Rarely do you see him trouble the crowd in the second tier. In short, he could be a photograph in a training manual. “He scored between twenty and twenty-five every year,” reminisces Guus Hiddink, who briefly coached him at Chelsea.

  Lampard is not far off from being the perfect player. He’s possibly Chelsea’s fittest player and one of the quickest, and he can tackle and pass and get everywhere. But like most players he will be remembered chiefly for what he did with his national team, and so he will be remembered above all as a failure. Lampard belongs to England’s “golden generation,” which was supposed to win trophies but never got past the quarterfinals of any major tournament. He is the symbol of his generation: an apparently brilliant failure.

  The question is why his generation failed. You could call it the Frank Lampard question. Some argue that the players simply weren’t that good. Others—English fans in particular—diagnose a “lack of spirit.” As Jonathan Wilson notes in his Anatomy of England, that’s been the standard domestic critique of English players through the ages. For some players, “the triple lion badge of England could be three old tabby cats,” lamented the Daily Express in 1966, and at many World Cups since.

  Hiddink has a different explanation. The Dutchman got to know Lampard during his happy stint as Chelsea’s caretaker-manager in 2009. As someone who almost became England’s manager in 2006, Hiddink watched the player with particular interest on television during the South African World Cup. Over a late-night men’s dinner in Amsterdam, and in a five-star hotel lobby (Hiddink’s natural habitat) in Istanbul, the chatty Dutchman tried to answer the Frank Lampard question: What does Lampard lack?

  When Hiddink arrived at Chelsea in February 2009, he immediately began looking for interpersonal conflicts in the team. That’s what he always does. At Chelsea, he didn’t find any. Hiddink told Didier Drogba to stop dropping back into midfield, explaining that Drogba lacked the technique to prosper there, and Drogba agreed. Being Dutch, Hiddink kept a close watch on the German Michael Ballack, but even Ballack never gave him any trouble.

  As for Lampard, Hiddink somewhat inadvertently tested him by substituting him in a game against Barcelona. When the board with Lampard’s number was held up, someone else on the bench murmured, “Be careful. Lampard never gets taken off.” Indeed, Chelsea’s staff had always struggled to persuade Lampard that he ever needed any rest. That night, the player did take a moment to clock that he really was being substituted. But then he trotted straight to the bench and never mentioned the matter afterward. He was the perfect pro.

  Yet that wasn’t good enough for Hiddink. The Dutchman has never been a workaholic, he is a habitué of the golf course, and his jowly face over his ritual drink of cappuccino reveals a man who enjoys the good life. Perhaps his own tastes equipped him to spot Lampard’s flaw: The player’s problem was precisely that he did too much.

  “Frank is a box-to-box player, as they call it in England,” Hiddink reflected in the hotel lobby in Istanbul. English players, Hiddink said, need to be set limits: “‘This is your area and this is your task.’ If you don’t do that, Frank has so much energy, so much drive, that he often does too much. In my early days at Chelsea too, he’d come back to his own defense, collect the ball, worm himself forward through the midfield, and then he’d actually score quite often, I must say,” Hiddink chuckled fondly, “in his energy-eating style.”

  Of course, being everywhere is precisely what Lampard had been brought up to do. In his autobiography, Totally Frank, he explains that his father, the former West Ham defender Frank Lampard Sr., had always told him “to make things happen.” That meant he had to have the ball. When Lampard joined Chelsea, his dad advised him, “Shout for the ball every time you’re near it and make things happen. Only then will people say that Frank Lampard won that game or this game for us.” Lampard agreed. He aims, he explains, to be “someone who was involved in all aspects of the play, from defending to making the final pass, as well as hitting the back of the net regularly.” Surely, any manager would want a player like that. “If you can demonstrate these qualities then you become indispensable,” Lampard believes.

  But that’s not what Hiddink wanted. He’d often sit down with Lampard at Chelsea’s training ground and say, “Surely, we should be able to build up towards you, so that you can more easily get through a season of sixty games, and not be completely finished every four weeks. With Essien and Jon Obi and Ballack behind you, we should be capable of limiting you to your zone.” And Lampard would reply: “Oh, yes. Yes, yes. I never really thought about that.” Hiddink chuckles fondly again at the memory.

  Hiddink wasn’t just worried about saving Lampard’s energy, about leaving him power for the crucial moments in a game when you need it most. He also saw that Lampard, by going everywhere, was slowing down Chelsea’s attacks. The ball moves forward faster when a midfielder doesn’t come to fetch it. Hiddink felt that Lampard at Chelsea, like his box-to-box twin, Steven Gerrard with England, was taking too much responsibility for moving the game along. At the World Cup in South Africa, Hiddink said, you’d see Gerrard collecting the ball in England’s defense and then running twenty yards with it. Gerrard was working as hard as he could, showing spirit. However, the effect of his work was to slow England’s attacks. His running gave the opposition’s defense time to move into position.

  Other teams—most notably Arsenal, Germany, and increasingly also Brazil—like to strike the moment the opposition loses the ball. In basketball, this is known as the moment of “turnover.” When the ball is turned over from one team to the other, the team that has lost it is fractionally out of position. That’s when you need to move play forward in three quick passes. But England’s galloping midfielders do that too rarely. That’s one reason England has go
tten so little use out of Michael Owen—the ultimate “turnover” striker—since his hat trick in Munich in 2001. Nor has England found much purpose for the nippy counterattackers Theo Walcott and Aaron Lennon, beyond Walcott’s hat trick in Croatia in 2008. England just doesn’t open spaces for its speedsters with three swift passes. The image of England in the matches it loses is either hefty center-backs punting the ball upfield or Gerrard lumbering forward with it.

  Most good coaches surely know that Lampard and Gerrard do too much. The first time Rafael Benitez met Gerrard, he told him, “I’ve watched your games on video. Your problem is you run around too much.” Jamie Carragher, present in the room, recalls that he “stared at Stevie and could see the deflation.” After all, running around is precisely what Gerrard has always been praised for. English fans love it. A month after the World Cup of 2010, I attended a meeting of the LondonEnglandFans supporters’ club, and the fans themselves briefly debated whether they shared any blame for England’s failure in South Africa. One woman noted that when England was passing the ball around at the back, fans would shout, “Get it forward!” or “Get stuck in!” They tended to like players who ran around a lot. So do the fearsome tabloids. Lampard and Gerrard are responding to English cues. At the moment suprême, they will tend to forget the words of Hiddink and Benitez (and presumably Fabio Capello) and do too much.

  Yet Lampard and Gerrard perform better with Chelsea and Liverpool than they do with England. I asked Hiddink why that might be. He raised the issue of “coaching” on the field. At big clubs, great players coach wayward colleagues: “Drop back!” “Take it easy,” or simply, “Stop running around so much and stay in your zone.” At Chelsea or Liverpool, experienced continental players reinforce the coach’s message in real time. But watching England labor in South Africa, Hiddink had noticed almost none of that. He said, “If you look at [Gareth] Barry, he could have played more intelligently. He ends up swimming because he’s not coaching in midfield, and so is forced into playing left-back or right-back. You don’t see that internal coordination in the English team. The center of your team, defensive midfield and central defense, is really the nerve center. England wasn’t sending out any impulses saying, ‘This is how we must do it.’ You can see if coaching is happening, and there was none or almost none.”

  Hiddink thought he knew why that didn’t happen. Players like Lampard and Gerrard had become demigods in their own country, he pointed out. “At a certain point players get a status—sometimes rightly, sometimes forced—that creates a sort of screen around them. Others think, ‘Oh, I can’t touch him or make demands on someone who’s such a big name in England.’” The demigods themselves might want to be coached, Hiddink said, but their teammates don’t dare. And so the demigods are allowed to run around too much.

  Lampard’s flaw—and the golden generation’s—isn’t a lack of spirit. It’s an excess of it.

  The Autobiographies of Jamie Carragher, Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and Wayne Rooney

  October 2010

  Frank Lampard emerges naked from the showers after a training session with Chelsea. Suddenly, his new manager, José Mourinho, pops up and looks him meaningfully in the eye. “All right, boss?” asks Lampard

  “You are the best player in the world,” replies Mourinho.

  The naked player doesn’t know quite what to say.

  “You,” continues Mourinho, “are the best player in the world. But now you need to prove it and win trophies. You understand?”

  Now Lampard is thrilled or, as he recalls in his autobiography, “walking on air.” He calls his mother to tell her what Mourinho said.

  “Yes,” she replies, “I already knew you were the best in the world.”

  For the next couple of days, says Lampard, “I felt ten feet tall and trained harder than ever. Everything I tried came off.” Mourinho had actually lifted him.

  It’s one of the odder scenes in this collection of autobiographies by five leading members of England’s golden generation.3 Players’ autobiographies are a much-derided genre—“Is there a more debased literary currency?” asks the game’s chief historian, David Goldblatt—and certainly there was something bizarre about HarperCollins paying Wayne Rooney $9 million for his story in five volumes, only one fewer than Winston Churchill’s complete history of World War II. “Hopefully there will be a lot of things to read about,” said Rooney, signing his contract in tracksuit bottoms and a hood.

  Yet the strange thing is: There are a lot of things to read about in these books. Even though most of them didn’t sell and are already out of print, taken together they illuminate what it is like to be a leading English player today.

  Of course, some of the books are worse than others. You close Ashley Cole’s My Defence feeling dirty and stupid for having read it, your main emotion surprise that his agent let him write it. Rooney’s book reads a bit like an essay that a child has been forced to write in elementary school. Even with family photographs and school reports, he can barely get up to book length. The experience must have been a comedown for his ghostwriter, Hunter Davies, a former biographer of the Beatles (he got to sit in on Lennon and McCartney’s composing sessions) and of Wordsworth (a sort of eighteenth-century forebear of Rooney’s). Yet even Cole’s and Rooney’s books reveal a lot about their subjects, sometimes inadvertently. Lampard’s book is the dullest and smuggest of the five, yet that fact too seems to be a true reflection of the man as well as of his ghostwriter.

  All these five players already have very clear public images, shaped by the tabloid newspapers that they despise (yet read). This is their chance to reach us without their words getting distorted. That must have been why they wrote these books. Only Rooney presumably did it for the money; the others can scarcely have been paid enough even to feed a journalist.

  Lampard, Gerrard, and Carragher are positively eager to speak to us. It’s questionable how many people need five hundred pages of Jamie Carragher, but his is the best of these books. In part, Carra is a reflection on the whole genre. “I’ve read most players’ autobiographies,” he claims. “I had a fair idea in my mind what makes a good read.” Lampard is keen to demonstrate that he was in the right in every dispute of his career, and Gerrard’s effort was actually named Sports Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. These three men gave us more pages than their publishers probably wanted. In other words, players’ autobiographies aren’t all empty. The very fact that agents, lawyers, and club media officers will have taken a red pencil to every line helps the players speak. They can trust this medium. Usually, the most we get from them is thirty seconds of platitudes after a match. These books are the longest public statements that they will make during their careers.

  Reading them, you get to know these players rather as they seem to get to know each other during long weeks in team hotels abroad before England gets eliminated. “I suppose that’s the upside of boredom,” Cole reflects. “It makes you talk more and get to know each other better. I came away from Germany knowing more about Stevie Gerrard, Wazza and Lamps than I ever did.” These books help you understand the stages of a player’s life, from boyhood to media victim. And they even make you feel slightly sorry for these men (though perhaps not for Cole).

  STAGE 1: BOYHOOD

  “I was nearly called Adrian” are the first words of Rooney’s projected five volumes. “That was what my father wanted. A bit posh, I suppose, and doesn’t quite sound like me. In the end, though, my mum talked my Dad out of it.”

  All these books are keen to establish the author’s social origins at once: as a member of a tight-knit, loving working-class family. The message is that however much the player earns per week, he remains anchored and authentic. Early on in each book, each writer offers a long paean to his family. “I’m looking for my Mum in the jubilant crowd” is how Cole opens his story, while Lampard tells us he has inherited “my Mum’s perception, humanity and sensitivity,” and “my Dad’s ambition, hard work and vision.” Gerra
rd, like Rooney, has happy memories of childhood summer vacations at Butlins with the extended family.

  You inevitably suspect pretense, yet it makes sense that the players should feel this way. After all, childhood in the family home was about the only time in their lives that they were not treated as celebrities. Only then did people relate naturally to them. Almost everyone they meet afterward has ulterior motives for the relationship. No wonder the players feel nostalgic for childhood. “Family means everything to me, all together, sitting around and laughing, under one roof,” says Gerrard. “However crazy my life became with Liverpool and England, I wanted that protective wall of my family around me.”

  Reading about their origins is strangely repetitive in another way, too: The five of them between them come from just two regions, Liverpool and East London. (The Northeast seems to have had its day as a source of English talent.) Cole’s first club, Senrab in the East End of London, also produced Ledley King, Lee Bowyer, John Terry, and Bobby Zamora; Lampard played for Senrab’s local rival, Heath Park, in greener Essex suburbia. Another future member of the golden generation soon shows up, too. When Lampard is thirteen or fourteen and playing for West Ham, he is sent to the training pitch to “watch a young boy play because he was so good. We were told he was the best prospect to come to the club in years.” Joe Cole was ten at the time.

  By that sort of age, the players are spending much of their time among future professionals. Lampard has been doing so since birth: his father is Frank Lampard Sr., the West Ham stalwart, his uncle is Harry Redknapp, and his elder cousin is the future England international Jamie Redknapp. Lampard grows up playing keep-away with Jamie in Uncle Harry’s garden and going to the local park for fierce private training sessions with his dad, who also scouts Rio Ferdinand for West Ham. (Ferdinand and the other children in his neighborhood are most impressed when Lampard Sr. pulls up at his family apartment in poor Peckham in a black Mercedes.) Sometimes Bobby Moore drops by the Lampard home for tea, biscuits, and a chat about soccer. “It never occurred to me,” Lampard says, “that the man who had lifted the World Cup as captain of England was sitting on my couch.”