Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  So the reality of poor performances matters less than the greater truth of English superiority. Let’s leave it to a wiser man to provide the final judgment. “The real reason behind England’s short stay in Germany is simple,” writes Gerrard. “We were just not as good as we think we are.” It was “stupid” of him and the other players to go around “constantly claiming we could win the world cup.” It mustn’t happen again, he says. “In future tournaments, we must learn to be humble.”

  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out like that in South Africa. The golden generation is on its way out, and most of its books now fill the warehouses of secondhand Internet bookstores, waiting to be pulped.

  Edwin van der Sar

  March 2011

  One April afternoon in 1991, Ajax Amsterdam’s goalkeeper, a hulking bear called Stanley Menzo, limped off injured. When his replacement bounded on, you wanted to laugh. The twenty-year-old Edwin van der Sar was bigeared, rail-thin, and dressed entirely in purple, with tiny shorts. By way of warming up, he literally skipped around the penalty area. He looked like a particularly campy gymnast. Then he began to keep, and never stopped. Twenty years later, as Manchester United’s keeper prepares to retire at the end of the season, he has redefined goalkeeping.

  The pre-Sarian goalkeeper—who still lives on in some of the more primitive regions of Britain—was a hulking bear who kept goal because he couldn’t play soccer. He could barely kick a ball in the right direction. He got applauded for spectacular saves. He lived up to the old adage that “goalkeepers are crazy.” He had a longer career than outfield players, but still tended to get out of the game in his midthirties before he began to look silly. Managers rarely paid him much attention unless he let a ball through his legs. But Van der Sar has changed what we expect from goalkeepers.

  I’ve followed him for twenty years. We’re just a year apart in age, and he grew up five miles from me in the Netherlands. He looks just like the villagers we used to play against on windy Saturdays in the bulb fields, near the North Sea: At six foot seven, he isn’t far off average height for the region, and his long, pale, gloomy face, that of a Calvinist pastor circa 1872, is typical too. As a boy he liked playing soccer—as opposed to keeping goal—but never dreamed of turning pro.

  Still, his coach at his amateur club spotted his potential. In 1988 Ajax summoned him to play an evening trial match for their second team. The stadium was empty, except for a gaggle of the keeper’s friends who positioned themselves at one end with a banner that said, “Van der Sar in Oranje.” He’d end up playing a record 130 matches for Oranje, the Dutch national team.

  When Ajax signed him, his old amateur coach got a finder’s fee of 1,500 guilders (then about $800) in an envelope. That was the going rate for a young goalkeeper. But quite soon, it became clear that Van der Sar was the goalkeeper that Holland had been looking for since the late 1960s. When Johan Cruijff and Rinus Michels first dreamed up the country’s distinctive style of “total football,” Cruijff had a vision of the perfect goalkeeper: an outfield player in gloves. It had always bothered Cruijff that the typical goalkeeper just stopped balls. It was a waste of a player, Cruijff thought. The goalkeeper should start attacks, passing like an outfield player. Wouldn’t it be perfect, he mused, if you could combine with eleven men rather than ten, and it just happened that one of them could save a ball when necessary?

  Van der Sar was that outfield player in gloves, total football’s missing link. (David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange, the book about the Dutch game, muses that perhaps Holland should have taken the seven-year-old Van der Sar to the World Cup of 1978 instead of the hopeless goalie Jan Jongbloed, who ended up conceding three goals in the final.) Van der Sar, two-footed, adept at the one-touch pass, given to dribbling past opposing strikers when the mood took him, could have been a professional outfield player and perhaps more than that. At the World Cup of 1994, he played in the outfield in Holland’s training sessions in Florida and looked to be one of the better performers. Cruijff would later call him “Ajax’s best attacker.”

  The start of his career coincided with one of soccer’s rare rule changes: After 1992, goalkeepers could no longer pick up passes from their teammates. That made a keeper’s foot skills more important even than Cruijff had imagined. Van der Sar pointed the way for his profession.

  But he was a new model keeper in other ways, too. Traditionally, keepers got praised for their saves. Van der Sar tried not to make saves. He organized his defense so that he wouldn’t need to make them. Every save meant that something had gone wrong beforehand. He read the game so well, positioned himself so perfectly, that strikers seemed to shoot straight at him. You rarely noticed Van der Sar—he was quite a boring keeper—but he rarely let in goals, either. On the other hand, when he had to make a save, he generally did. When other keepers discuss him, the point they return to is that he seldom errs. In Cruijff’s phrase, he is “very complete”—equally happy whether catching crosses, making reflex saves, or standing up in a one-on-one against the forward and forcing the guy to shoot at him.

  He also had the perfect keeper’s temperament. The Dutch call him an ijskonijn, an “ice rabbit.” Van der Sar never seems to enter the emotional state of losing oneself that is characteristic of soccer. This goalkeeper isn’t crazy. Even after great victories, he has fought off teammates who grabbed him too boisterously during the celebrations. He says, “I sometimes see nice, quiet boys go nuts on the pitch. Then I think: they can say I’m a ‘dead one,’ but I don’t think those guys are 100 per cent.” Van der Sar rebuffs the emotion around him with a chilled irony that usually falls short of being actually funny.

  Last, there was his shape: perfect for the modern game. The big, burly English keeper, who could fight his way through a crowded penalty area to a cross (think Arsenal’s David Seaman), was going out of fashion by the 1990s. Even in England referees were no longer letting forwards push and foul the way they used to. In the new genteel game, Seamans were redundant. The new model keeper had to be both a giant and a gymnast—a rare combination. Van der Sar has it, as does the era’s other preeminent keeper, Gianluigi Buffon.

  His first career went brilliantly. Keepers are meant to start slowly, but by age twenty-four he had become Holland’s automatic number one and had won the Champions League of 1995 with what was practically an Ajax boys team. (It’s a tribute to that side’s youth and love of soccer that sixteen years later, four of its members still play professionally: Van der Sar, Clarence Seedorf at Milan, Nwankwo Kanu at Portsmouth, and Jari Litmanen for Finland and now in training with the Finnish champions HJK Helsinki, while Edgar Davids is currently on trial with Sheffield Wednesday.)

  In 1999, generally considered the world’s best goalkeeper, Van der Sar agreed to move from Ajax to Juventus. The story goes that as he waited in the Amsterdam airport to fly down to Italy to sign, his phone rang. It was Alex Ferguson. Did Van der Sar fancy joining Manchester United? The keeper apologized: He’d already said yes to Juventus. For years afterward, as United went through substandard keeper after keeper, Ferguson would regret having called Van der Sar a day late.

  Van der Sar probably regretted it, too. His years at Juventus were his worst. For the only time in his career, he lost confidence and committed what the Italians called papere—keeper’s errors. The Italian media dubbed him Van der Gol, for “goal.” Juventus asked him to have his eyes tested. In 2001 they packed him off to little Fulham in London.

  In Dublin on September 1, 2001, I was present at the nadir of Van der Sar’s career. Holland lost 1–0 to Ireland and missed qualifying for the next year’s World Cup. After the final whistle, Van der Sar strode off in what, by his standards, was a state of high emotion. He passed a small table that stood beside the field. It looked doomed. Van der Sar lifted a long leg to administer the coup de grâce. But then, instead of shattering the table, he lifted his leg an inch higher and merely flicked a plastic cup off the tabletop. That was Van der Sar: the ice rabbit with perfect foot
work.

  His best then seemed behind him. Fulham had assured him it was bound for glory, but the money dried up, and the former world’s best goalkeeper ended up spending four years at a West London neighborhood club. Manchester United and Arsenal seemed content soldiering on with substandard keepers. Whereas in the Netherlands a goalkeeper was expected to be an outfield player and in Italy an infallible shot stopper, in England little seemed expected of him at all.

  Most soccer managers undervalue and misunderstand goalkeepers. When the sports economist Bernd Frick studied salaries in Germany’s Bundesliga, he found that keepers earned less than outfield players, despite mostly being older. They also command lower transfer fees: The British record for a keeper is a mere $18 million, paid by Sunderland for Craig Gordon in 2007. Perhaps the main reason is managerial ignorance. Even great managers like Ferguson or Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger view keeping as an alien craft, like flower arranging. Since they barely understand what keepers do, they are loath to pay much for them.

  Finally, in 2005, Ferguson risked shelling out $3.5 million on Van der Sar. The keeper was pleased and surprised. At thirty-four, he had thought his career was winding down. He was looking forward to returning to the dunes by the North Sea, where he’d play center-forward for his old amateur club. “Scoring goals is the most fun,” he says.

  In fact, his career was restarting. At United he won three straight league titles, and, early one morning in Moscow in 2008, the keeper you barely noticed finally became the hero. The Champions League final between United and Chelsea went to a penalty shoot-out. Van der Sar had a bad record in shoot-outs: With him in goal, Holland had exited Euro 96, Euro 2000, and the World Cup of 1998 on penalties. If he’d mastered this one particular keeping art as he has all others, the Dutch would probably have won another trophy.

  Chelsea had spotted Van der Sar’s fatal flaw: On penalties, he dives too often to his right. Chelsea’s first six kickers shot to his left. He didn’t save a shot. In fact, by this point he’d deserved to lose the shoot-out. However, the legendary slip by Chelsea’s captain John Terry saved United.

  Then, after six penalties, Van der Sar figured out what was happening. As Nicolas Anelka prepared to take Chelsea’s seventh, the keeper pointed a giant glove to his own left. (This is where prose as a medium fails. I urge you to watch the shoot-out on YouTube.) “That’s where you’re all putting it, isn’t it?” Van der Sar was saying. Anelka froze. The keeper had found him out. Reduced to a bag of nerves, he hit a gentle shot at midheight to the keeper’s right. Van der Sar, smiling as he dived, stopped it. “That one, all-decisive save is yet to come,” he had said years before. Here it was. Later that morning, records United’s unofficial historian Jim White, the ice rabbit breakfasted on two small packets of Cocoa Puffs and a banana.

  Van der Sar had never imagined being so good so old. He kept expecting to decay. Surely, his eyesight must be going. It wasn’t. “Everybody doubts themselves,” he said recently after a mistake at Liverpool. “Every writer doubts themselves, every artist doubts himself and every soccer player does. That is what certain players thrive on.” (Note the reference to writers. After Roy Keane’s departure, Van der Sar became the only member of United’s reading circle.)

  Van der Sar has peaked later than he had ever imagined, later than anyone had thought goalkeepers could. Yet that makes sense and will help change the conventional wisdom about goalkeepers’ careers. Soccer’s ideal generally is old heads on young legs, but that’s particularly true for keepers. Joop Hiele, Van der Sar’s former keeping coach, once explained, “Goalkeeping is registering the situation, recognizing it and finding the solution. The more often you do it, the easier it gets.” An older keeper is so familiar with the structure of attacks that he has time to organize his defense. Younger keepers can’t. All they have is their talent. And when they make mistakes, they start doubting themselves. That’s exactly what happened to United’s young American Tim Howard, the club’s last failed keeper before Van der Sar.

  Other old players get sick of soccer, but not Van der Sar. He mused recently, “There was a point last year when it was four degrees and the rain was pouring down. Ben Foster [then United’s deputy keeper] asked me whether I still wanted to do it in such rubbish weather. I said I loved it.”

  He might have continued for even longer but for the brain hemorrhage that felled his wife around Christmas 2009. She seems to have recovered well, but she needs regular treatment in the Netherlands. Asked when he decided to retire, he says, “Let’s just say that it was playing on my mind from the moment Annemarie had her stroke.” Van der Sar feels it’s time for him to become a house husband for a while—preferably after pocketing the treble of league, Champions League, and FA Cup.

  Anyway, he couldn’t go on forever (could he?). “He made the point himself: It is pointless trying to be Superman into your forties,” reports Ferguson. In the showers at work one day, Wayne Rooney lobbied the Dutchman to continue, but to no avail. It was left to another teammate, Rio Ferdinand, to deliver the encomium. “To be honest,” the center-back told United’s official magazine, “he’s changed my thinking when it comes to goalkeepers. If I ever become a manager, then I’ll be looking for my goalkeeper to exhibit as many of Edwin’s traits as possible.” And so says everyone in the game.

  PART II:

  Managers and General Managers

  Glenn Hoddle and Tony Blair

  June 1998

  Are Glenn Hoddle, England’s soccer coach, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, in any way related?

  The evidence is piling up. Hoddle, a devout Christian and keen singer, spent a formative spell in France with Monaco before getting his first big break as a team manager with Chelsea. Two years ago he became the youngest ever England coach, replacing the scandal-hit Terry Venables.

  Hoddle made Paul Gascoigne the key member of his team, but the moment Gazza stepped out of line he dropped him from the World Cup squad. Now Hoddle is the undisputed boss of the England side.

  Blair, a devout Christian and keen singer, spent a formative spell in France as a Paris bartender before joining the Labour Party in Chelsea. Last year he became the youngest British prime minister in two centuries, replacing the scandal-hit Tory government. He made Gordon Brown the key member of his cabinet, but the moment Brown stepped out of line, complaining that the prime minister’s job should have been his, Blair’s aides leaked to the press that Brown had “psychological flaws.” Brown remains minister of finance, but Blair sets the agenda.

  Few of the similarities between the two men are coincidental. The mood in British soccer and politics in recent years has been uncannily alike. Blair and Hoddle have come to power on the same wave.

  What unites them is that they are outsiders: Blair within the Labour Party and Hoddle in English soccer. Labour was wary of Blair because he was not a member of the tribe. He had not worked in the mines, at sea, or in the railways; he had soft hands and was married to a lawyer. It was said that he did not know “The Red Flag,” Labour’s unofficial anthem, by heart.

  Nor does he belong to any particular British class or region. He was born in Scotland but soon moved to England, and his father, who had been adopted by a working-class family, rose in the world. Blair went to private school and, in a school election at the age of twelve, briefly stood as a Conservative candidate.

  Hoddle was not a member of the soccer tribe. He grew up in Harlow, Essex, an antiseptic, anonymous New Town, not the traditional working-class background of most players.

  He became even more isolated within the game when, on a soccer trip to Bethlehem, he found God. After that he would not swear or do anything to excess, which made many other players regard him with suspicion. Furthermore, he stood out in English soccer as an artist among battlers.

  As outsiders, Blair and Hoddle would not normally have risen to the top. However, their luck was that the more traditional leaders had failed. Labour, led by members of the party tribe, had lost four general elec
tions in a row, and in desperation turned to Blair. Soon afterward the UK did too, after years of sleaze and decay. English soccer had been decaying too, though Venables, who took charge in 1994, had improved things. But image remained his problem, and so the Football Association turned to Hoddle.

  These two outsiders were not interested in tradition. Blair knew the UK had won World War II and that it had long been a sovereign state, just as Hoddle knew that England had won the World Cup in 1966—he had run through Harlow that day waving a banner. But neither man thought these memories should determine policy. Blair, for instance, decided to treat European monetary union as an economic issue alone. Hoddle deserted England’s traditional long-ball game.

  Both also deserted the romantic schools that had helped shape them. Blair, who joined a far-left Labour Party, has been cruel to the Left in power. Hoddle, once the star of a Tottenham side that played romantic soccer, has turned out a dull but competent England team.

  What these two men care about is not history but achievement. Blair wants to make the UK a modern economy; Hoddle wants to win the World Cup. This means keeping up with best practices around the world. Blair has borrowed key policies, such as welfare-to-work, from the United States, while Hoddle draws more from continental Europe. When England held Italy to a 0–0 draw in Rome last October, it was much commented on that his team played like an Italian side.

  Success and failure become apparent much more quickly in soccer than in politics. If Hoddle’s England does well in the World Cup, it will be seen as an omen for Blair’s UK. Yet Blair would do well to resist crawling over any England success, as he has in the past, because this alienates the public. Instead, he should congratulate his long-lost brother quietly.