I quietly started counting consecutive touches by Spain—one, two, three, all the way to nineteen, opening up the field, making Paraguay work. It took a while, and a lucky bounce or two, but ultimately Spain controlled the ball for 60 percent of the match. David Villa scored after a deflection in the eighty-third minute, and the Spanish keeper Iker Casillas made a superb kick save for the 1–0 victory that put Spain into the semifinals, at last. They looked even better in person, as they used the whole field, and you did not have to depend on what the television director let you see. There goes Sergio Ramos down the right side. Xavi puts the ball on his instep.
In my first seven World Cups, relative outsiders had often reached the semifinals, including Portugal in 2006, Turkey and South Korea in 2002, Croatia in 1998, Bulgaria and Sweden in 1994, Belgium in 1986, and Poland in 1982. But never the nation of Real Madrid, the land of Barça. The only time Spain had finished in the top four was 1950, when it qualified for a four-team round robin—and finished last.
After the Paraguay match, Pepe Reina, the backup goalkeeper, who played for Liverpool and spoke decent English, graciously served up quotes to the teeming Anglophone horde of reporters. “We are proud to be here,” Reina said. “And we are still hungry. Now we play Germany, the best team in the tournament.”
He talked as if the European tournament had been a tiny dish of tapas. Players often become old or sated or unlucky in the two years between the Euros and the World Cup, but Spain had done the opposite. It was maturing, improving, before our eyes.
* * *
One of the saddest parts of my short stay was having to choose between two cities, two semifinals. Friends of mine from Cape Town, who live in New York, let me know that I was insane to miss their beautiful city, and I probably was, but I knew I had to see Spain face Germany, and so I chose to go to Durban.
This trip involved a door-to-door car ride, with Jeffrey Marcus driving. I admit, I thought about Chris Clarey’s running into a dead horse on the highway. True story. The only way Clarey had been able to get from one match to another was via an overnight drive from Port Elizabeth to Durban. Seeing warnings of a slowdown ahead, Chris remembered being told never to stop at night. So at fifty miles per hour, he plowed straight into a dead horse in the road and lived to tell the tale in the International Herald Tribune. Made it to the next match, too.
On July 4, I was once again on the road on my birthday, not mentioning it to anybody. Marcus drove the toll road, with two lanes in each direction and often nothing but a yellow line separating us from the oncoming traffic, at a closing speed of 150 miles per hour. Jeffrey is a good driver, and I relaxed as we sped through the dry wintry highlands. As it grew dark, we started to descend, passing the wreckage of four or five cars, and then I opened the car window and could smell the sea.
At our hotel, on the so-called Golden Mile, two pert clerks greeted us with smiles and chatter. Omigosh, I thought, I was in India. I knew Mahatma Gandhi had made his activist start in Durban, with its large Indian population. My wife has been to India thirteen times as a child-care volunteer; we have an adopted Indian granddaughter; and I have learned to love the chatter as well as the curry. I was home.
The next morning I looked out and saw the Indian Ocean—Mumbai 4,275 miles across the water, wide sidewalks and piers and the beach, a sign showing the midday temperature at seventy-eight degrees. Somebody told me the Golden Mile had another nickname—Mugger’s Mile—but it had been cleaned up for the World Cup. I put on my shorts and T-shirt and sneakers and my headset and went to the beach, choosing Brian Wilson’s quirky comeback album, That Lucky Old Sun, sounds of Southern California, different ocean.
I saw elaborate sand sculptures made—a lion gnawing on a stag, a snakelike beast devouring the upper torso of a woman in a thong, a little weird. One sculptor posted a sign, Support the Arts, so I did, with 10 rand (about $1.29). I saw dozens of surfers, most white, some black, in the roiling waves. African women along the boardwalk tried to sell me stuff. Two Spanish fans in matador costumes attracted gawkers along the boardwalk. At lunch, Wayne, the gregarious hotel manager, was wearing a Manchester United jersey, talking about changes in South Africa, mostly for the good of people of color, he said.
The next day, we watched the semifinal in Cape Town on TV, as the Netherlands outlasted Uruguay, 3–2, displaying a much chippier game than the old Orange version of Total Football. And on Wednesday, I covered the semifinal in Durban between emerging Spain and perpetual Germany, managed by Joachim Löw, with his Beatle mop haircut and his reputation as Klinsmann’s strategist in 2006. Löw had the right idea—go out and get the ball, which cut Spain’s possession rate from 60 percent against Paraguay to 52 percent. But Spain was patient, too.
Arriba, Puyol! Right behind the open media section, a Spanish fan kept exhorting the powerful defender with his ringlets flapping. Carles Puyol was a product of the Barcelona youth program, relatively short, like Franco Baresi, only five feet ten inches tall, but able to stay with the German mastiffs up front. Total Football lived in Puyol’s stout Catalan heart. In the seventy-third minute, he moved forward after a nice run by Iniesta, his teammate from Barça, to set up a corner kick by Xavi, another Barça stalwart.
Arriba, Puyol! He elevated himself above Germans many inches taller than him and, with his curls flying, headed home the only goal of the match.
Afterward, gracious as ever, Löw put things in perspective: “The past two, three years, Spain has been the most skilled team of all, and they showed it tonight. They circulated the ball quickly, and we weren’t able to get back to our plan. We had our inhibitions. I think Spain deserved to win this match, absolutely.”
Löw’s demeanor showed why Germany was the solid gold standard of these World Cups. They were almost always there; they were almost always classy.
* * *
I hated to leave Durban, particularly upon checking out with the same chatty Indian clerks who had greeted us three nights before.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you take us with you?” one of the clerks said.
I love the saucy Indian sense of humor.
“If only we could…,” I said.
Jeffrey drove back from pungent salt air to the wintry chill of Johannesburg. My travel agent had let me down. In the entire fortress of Johannesburg and Sandton not a hotel room was to be found, so she put me up in a suburban bed-and-breakfast, run by a pleasant young couple. My quarters were private, spacious, modern, with great breakfasts, but behind barbed wire atop thick walls in a pretty neighborhood that was also a fortress. I immediately developed a massive case of claustrophobia.
The next day I did venture out for a walk to a shopping street with restaurants, where I noticed a few black women and white women having lunch together in the emerging South Africa, the gift of Mandela, something far more precious than a tournament.
On Sunday, I took the media bus out to Soccer City, a stadium in Soweto Townships, rebuilt and expanded for this event.
Before the match, Nelson Mandela, about to turn ninety-two, was given a victory lap to celebrate the World Cup—and the nation he had helped create. After the tribute, it was time for the kickoff between two grand soccer nations that had never won a World Cup, the two nations I had mentioned before the tournament, the two nations linked by style and history.
“I think Spain is the country playing the best football in the past few years,” Netherlands coach Bert van Marwijk had said Saturday. “I’ve been the coach of the national squad for two years now, and during that time, it has crossed my mind that I would love to play Spain, and now it is happening.”
While praising Spain, Van Marwijk apparently made the calculation that his team could not possibly match Spain in artistry so it would have to overwhelm it with crudity.
The spirit of Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, and Ruud Gullit howled in the cold township night as the Dutch kicked and shoved and elbowed the Spanish. The tactic held down the
offense, with Spain accumulating five yellow cards against eight for the Netherlands, and both teams were scoreless after regulation time, the horror of any final.
In the 109th minute, the bill came due for the Dutch. John Heitinga picked up his second yellow card and was ejected, leaving way too much open space to the spiritual grandchildren of Cruyff. Seven minutes later, Cesc Fàbregas, a late sub, pushed the ball ahead to the very smooth Iniesta, who got to the right of the decimated Dutch back line and crossed a shot inside the post. The Spaniards held on for a 1–0 victory, not only shedding their reputation for folding but in a way punishing the Netherlands for violating its own heritage of positive, offensive soccer. With short passes and trust and optimism, Spain had expanded the sport, taken us to a new age.
* * *
As I packed to leave South Africa, I thought about the farewell press conference on Saturday, when Danny Jordaan, the head of the organizing committee, assured us that everything had been safe and positive. I could not argue with that. People who run World Cups don’t like to talk about the bills that arrive after everybody leaves town.
But there was something else. Jordaan, with his mixed Khoi and Dutch ancestry, had been classified as “coloured” well into middle age. Now he had helped his homeland become the first African nation to stage the World Cup.
Jordaan often used an African word, ubuntu, which means “we are all interconnected.” On Saturday he had quoted John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” which includes the words “No man is an island.” I took Jordaan’s voice and Donne’s words as my lasting memory from this first African World Cup, in the homeland of Mandela.
18
BLATTER SCORES AN OWN GOAL
NEW YORK, 2013
For a highly political survivor, Sepp Blatter made a stunningly stupid move in 2010: he mandated a double vote for the sites of two future World Cups—a European host for 2018 and a host for 2022 from what could be called the third world of soccer.
As a consequence, the delegates chose Russia to host the 2018 World Cup and Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup; the latter choice soon came to be seen as impractical, perhaps also tainted. After half a dozen top officials, close associates of Blatter’s, left soccer in financial scandals, every action by FIFA was suspect.
Theoretically, skipping the old bastions of Latin America and Europe and opening up the World Cup to other regions had been an idealistic move, much as FIFA had done in choosing South Africa as the host in 2010. However, anybody who had studied political science in junior high school could have told Blatter that the linked votes inevitably encouraged deal making. European candidates were sure to seek support from outside their region for 2018 in return for European support for 2022.
The United States was a bit player in world soccer, partially because of its lack of success on the field and also because its sunshine laws and moderately open business customs frightened FIFA. Considered part of the outer circle, the United States submitted a bid for the 2022 World Cup that followed its successful blueprint for 1994, featuring stadiums, hotels, and electronics already in place, plus American corporations eager to sponsor and a world full of tourists eager to visit America. This time, the United States also had a growing domestic league in place.
Qatar has neither a significant national soccer league nor a significant national team nor a supply of soccer stadiums. What Qatar does have is oil and money. It based its bid on building stadiums in the desert, for matches to be played in the heat of summer (average high 105 degrees Fahrenheit, but daytime highs of 130 in the desert). Why not? Qatar certainly had the oil to run the proposed air-conditioning systems. Qatar promised to dismantle the stadiums at the end of the World Cup and give them to poor nations.
After the last decade, there was considerable reason to be suspicious of anything FIFA did, what with the mysterious disappearance in 2000 of the New Zealand delegate that gave the 2006 World Cup to Germany and the blatant forcing of Nelson Mandela to visit the big man Jack Warner in Trinidad in 2004 to lobby for the 2010 bid.
Also, Blatter’s public squashing of his own secretary general, Michael Zen-Ruffinen, and his refusal to listen to critical delegates during the FIFA meeting in Seoul in 2002 had exposed Blatter’s autocratic style. Now, with this double vote for 2018 and 2022, nations and delegates and power brokers were openly lobbying with one another.
In order to become the host in 2022, the U.S. Soccer Federation needed votes from its regional federation, CONCACAF, which was run by the odd couple—Jack Warner, the president, from Port of Spain, and Chuck Blazer, the general secretary, a New Yorker who handled much of CONCACAF’s financial and television dealings, usually without benefit of legal or accounting oversight.
“For two decades, Blazer and Warner had been close allies,” wrote the New York Times. “They had grown Concacaf from a nearly insolvent regional governing body to one with a yearly income averaging $40 million and headquarters in Trump Tower in New York.” Blazer also lived in that expensive Trump building and had an apartment in Miami’s South Beach and at a gambling resort in the Bahamas, all subsidized by CONCACAF.
As the 2010 vote approached, two of the twenty-four voting FIFA members were barred after the Times of London caught them offering to sell their votes. The BBC ran information from Andrew Jennings, a persistent reporter from England, who claimed that three executive members—Ricardo Teixeira of Brazil, Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, and Nicolás Leoz of Paraguay, the longtime leader of the South American federation—had taken payoffs in the past from FIFA’s defunct marketing agency, International Sports and Leisure (ISL). They denied the charges.
The United States was courting the support of Michel Platini, once an elegant star for France and Juventus, now the highly ambitious president of the European federation, UEFA. But French president Nicolas Sarkozy was strongly in favor of Qatar.
“Sport does not belong to a few countries,” Sarkozy said weeks before the vote. “It belongs to the world.… I don’t understand those who say that events should always be held in the same countries and the same continents.”
It was subsequently learned that on November 23, 2010, Sarkozy held a luncheon at the Élysée Palace with guests including the crown prince of Qatar, along with Platini, and, according to French journals, a representative of the investment fund that owned the prominent club Paris Saint-Germain.
On December 2, 2010, in Zurich, Russia was chosen as host for 2018, and Qatar won the vote for 2022. Sunil Gulati, the president of the U.S. federation, an economist with a world view, politely praised FIFA for moving the World Cup to a new region. What else could he say?
This vote seemed to catch Blatter by surprise. The International Olympic Committee, in choosing its host cities, presents voluminous analysis of all the bids, even if the eventual voting is secret. FIFA’s standards were far more opaque.
After the vote, reporters and gay-rights activists around the world pointed out that Qatar had strong laws against homosexuality. Asked whether gay fans should attend the tournament in Qatar, Blatter blurted out, “I would say they should refrain from any sexual activities.” He quickly apologized, but his latest verbal blunder seemed to move him even further from the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he had been lobbying for years.
Qatar was suddenly a player in world soccer. Six weeks after the vote, Qatar purchased the Paris Saint-Germain club, and in 2012, the Al Jazeera television network, owned by Qatar, introduced a French sports channel, beIN Sport, with the rights to televise French soccer until 2016.
FIFA was now in the spotlight as never before.
In 2011, the New York Times described FIFA this way: “Since its founding in 1904 in Paris, FIFA has grown into an extremely rich organization, with reserves of almost $1.3 billion and revenues last year of $1.2 billion from the sales of television and marketing rights all over the world. It has also benefited from a tax exemption for Swiss sports organizations, a bountiful perk that is beginning to raise political heat in the local cantons in light of the vario
us corruption scandals.”
When pressed for details about FIFA, including his salary, Blatter often cited the legal codes of Europe, which give far more privacy to companies and tax-exempt nonprofits than the United States did.
FIFA generally had not been pursued by investigative journalism, but in recent years, Blatter had a bit of bad luck when the British reporter Andrew Jennings turned his attention from the International Olympic Committee to FIFA. Blatter tried to ban Jennings from press meetings and generally discredit him, but Jennings began to discover gems like this:
In 1996, before a crucial vote of FIFA, the Haitian delegate, Jean-Marie Kyss, could not travel from Haiti to Zurich. Knowing that, Horace Burrell, the president of Jamaica’s federation, arranged for his girlfriend, Vincy Jalal, who was neither Haitian nor male, to use Kyss’s credential. The next time a vote was needed, Burrell used a male voter. Kyss apparently found out much later that others had voted in his place. There was no indication Blatter knew of this chicanery, but it was the way FIFA was run in the age of Blatter. Most people cut their own deals.
Jennings also began to ask questions about International Sports and Leisure, the marketing partner of FIFA, which collapsed in 2001 with the disappearance of many millions of dollars, sometimes estimated at $300 million. There was no suggestion that Blatter had profited, but FIFA and ISL were close partners, and millions of dollars had vanished somewhere.
* * *
Shortly after Qatar was chosen in 2010, powerful soccer figures began to vanish as well. The leader of its World Cup bid, Mohamed bin Hammam, announced he would run against Blatter for president of FIFA. Soon after that, bin Hammam was banned for life for bribing delegates in that presidential election although he and FIFA both denied that Qatar had bribed voters in choosing the host for 2022.
Eight World Cups Page 25