Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  When I went to the Español offices to get a press ticket, I found men chatting, children hanging around, and after the behemoth that is Barça, a quiet, subdued mood. Español struck me as a small family club, a Spanish Ipswich, and, in Catalonia, a club of outcasts. A couple of days before, the Español president had complained to the press again that people undervalued his club. I saw Español draw with Seville, who had an off-form Maradona in their ranks.

  Yet many migrants chose Barça rather than Español, and understandably so. It is hard for a Scot to move to London, but it is even harder for an Andalusian to come to Catalonia, because the Catalans speak a different language. Barça President Núñez, himself a migrant, speaks abominable Catalan.

  If the migrant to Catalonia wants to belong, his best chance is to get behind the symbol of his new home. It gives him something to talk about at work, and becoming a socio makes him a little more like the middle-class Catalans who dominate the Nou Camp. “Barcelona has 110,000 socios . . .” I was saying to Torrebadella, when he interrupted me: “I am not a socio, but I have watched Barça a hundred times and I have never yet paid for my ticket. A father will buy cards for his wife, and for all his kids when they are born, even though a socio card costs at least £300 a year, because that is a kind of tradition. Maybe his family never goes to watch, but they all have cards, and I borrow them.”

  FC Barcelona is the symbol of Catalonia, and historically they have underperformed. Just as Madrid ruled Barcelona, so in the Franco era Real Madrid won all the soccer prizes. Barcelona has now won one European Cup; Real have six. In the league, Helenio Herrera took Barça to two championships in a row, but in the 30 years after the fans chased him away the club won only two more, one of them under Terry Venables. “What did you think of Herrera?” one Barça fan asked me, and I said, “He has a high opinion of himself.” “I know,” replied the man. “All our coaches have a high opinion of themselves. They need it, to take this job.” Cesar Luis Menotti (who failed in Barcelona) called Barça “the most difficult club in the world.”

  The men to blame for the Catalan failures are the directors. They are ambitious, any defeat is a disaster, and so they interfere. Chief culprit is President Núñez. He has held his post since 1978 and has seen off coaches like Venables, Menotti and Udo Lattek. I asked one Barça fan why a millionaire businessman like Núñez was so keen to be president of a soccer club. “You know the Small Man Theory of History?” the fan asked me. “Well, Núñez is very small.”

  Often, he has only narrowly survived. In 1979, when Barça brought home the European Cupwinners’ Cup, he waved the trophy around at the airport and carried it into the team bus as if he had clinched it personally with a hat trick. The watching fans were livid. Núñez had just refused to renew the contract of Johan Neeskens, their Dutch idol, and they chanted, “Núñez no, Neeskens yes!” Núñez burst into tears and resigned on the spot, and Neeskens, moved by the chants, burst into tears beside him. But the Barça directors talked their president into staying, and Neeskens left for the New York Cosmos.

  Sixte Cambra, a Barcelona businessman, challenged Núñez in the Barça presidential elections of 1989. FC Barcelona’s elections always matter, for the winner becomes a big player in the city, but this one was particularly momentous. The Catalan Nationalist Party backed Cambra, which meant that a victory for him would link the club to a political party—rather as if, because Liverpool is a left-wing city, a Liverpool league title were to bring glory to the Labour Party. The Socialist Party backed Núñez, though he is personally more right-wing than Cambra, and the city filled up with rival banners and adverts. Núñez pointed out that Cambra was married to a woman from Madrid, and boycotted the television debate, claiming that Catalan TV was partisan. He won the election.

  Now Barça is one of the best teams in the world, and from 1991 to 1993 they won the Spanish championship three times in a row. The man who has tamed Núñez is the Dutchman Johan Cruyff. Cruyff played for Barcelona in the 1970s, and returned to manage the club in 1988. By now Barcelona is his adopted home, and he can often be seen whizzing through the city on his motorbike. His wife, Danny, likes Barcelona because although the stress is as bad as in Amsterdam, the weather is better. Their son, Jordi, named for the patron saint of Catalonia, is in the Barça squad, and Chantal, their eldest daughter, has married one of the club’s goalkeepers and is already a force in one of the Barça factions. The Cruyffs are as good as Catalan, except that Cruyff himself has failed to master the local language. Even his Spanish is suspect, and the weekly satirical TV program on Barça portrays him constantly repeating his favorite phase, “en un momento dado.” Cruyff uses it to mean “at a certain moment,” but the phrase doesn’t exist in Spanish.

  On his first day at Barça, Cruyff told Núñez (in Spanish): “The changing room is for me and the players alone.” The president resisted in vain. For perhaps the first time, a Barça manager had defeated the board. “Cruyff,” I was told by Pilar Calvo, of the daily Sport, which devotes most of its pages to the club, and which is owned by Joan Gaspart, another Barça vice president, “has won because of his playing career. Venables was a nobody when he came to Barcelona. Menotti had a name, but he also had a personality more open to manipulation than Cruyff’s.” Cruyff never compromises. He says, “I am better off than the club, financially and in my private life,” and he knows he can resign if he wants. Herrera, the last Barça manager to succeed, was another strong man who kept the directors out. (It upsets him that Cruyff alone has won the European Cup.)

  Naturally, Cruyff’s European Cup immediately became a political tool. Because Cambra lost to Núñez, all parties can still use Barça for their own ends, and they do whenever Barça wins a trophy. When this happens, the players display it to the crowd at the Plaça Sant Jaume, a square with two political buildings: the Generalitat, and the Town Hall. At the celebrations, Jordi Pujol, president of the Generalitat, a sharp-featured character in a suit, always shouts from his balcony: “Visca Barça, visca el Cataluña!” Which, the nuances no doubt lost in translation, means, “Barça wins, Catalonia wins!” The crowd always cheers. But the city’s Mayor in 1992, Pasqual Madragall, socio no. 107,024, was a Socialist, and thus opposed to separatism. So when the European Cup arrived, and Pujol had had his shout, Madragall told the crowd: “Barça is no longer ‘more than a club,’ and it has become the best club in Europe.”

  And he was right. Cruyff has changed Barça. No longer are the fans happy as long as their team beats Real. Now they demand proper success. And by changing the club, the Dutchman has changed Catalonia. When Barça was ailing, this hurt Catalonia in the way that the royal divorces hurt Britain. The symbol of the nation was tarnished. Now that the club is doing well, the political impact is immediate. The city is suddenly confident. In 1992, after the Wembley victory and the Olympics, Madragall officially proposed that Spain become a federal state with two capitals, Madrid and Barcelona. “So winning the European Cup helps Madragall make this proposal?” I asked Torrebadella, and he replied, “Absolutely.”

  It is rare for Barcelona to make a concrete proposal to Madrid. For a decade now, the Catalans have argued among themselves over whether they should seek independence from Spain. Pujol himself is unsure. He may call himself a Nationalist, but he has never called for secession, though he hints at it a lot. The debate goes on endlessly, but what is at issue became most clear during the Olympics of 1992. (How did Barcelona get the Olympics? Juan Samaranch, head of the International Olympic Committee, is socio no. 7,965.)

  From the first, Pujol tried to make it clear that the Games were being held in Catalonia and not in Spain. The Catalan crowds at the opening ceremony gave an extra cheer to teams from newly independent nations like Lithuania or Croatia, and politicians in Madrid panicked. The Spanish Olympic soccer team dreaded Barcelona. The full Spanish team never play there—for Catalans, Barça is the national team—and the fixtures for the Olympic team were arranged so that they could play in Valencia as long as they
kept winning. But came the final, against Poland, and the Olympic eleven had to move to the Nou Camp. A Catalan demonstration was feared, or an empty stadium. Instead, Sport’s daily rival, El Mundo Deportivo, could describe the crowd as “95,000 spectators . . . with Spanish flags.” Spain won 2-1, and later that night fans were heard chanting, “Pujol nos engaña/Cataluña es España”—“Pujol is deceiving us/Catalonia is Spain.” It appeared that Catalans do not despise Spaniards after all, or at least not if they win gold.

  (On the other hand, Catalan TV made time during the Games to show in full Barça’s pre-season friendlies against northern Dutch provincial teams.)

  When it comes to it, few Scots want to leave the Union, and few Catalans do either. They have done well enough as part of Spain. “Most people here would say, ‘We don’t need a state, but on the other hand we’re more than just a region,’ ” Torrebadella told me. “It’s more a matter of symbols.” The Catalans do not want a state of their own, but they do want something vaguer than that, symbols to prove that they are a separate people. During the Games, many foreign observers read the Catalan flags that draped Barcelona as a demand for independence, but in fact the flags themselves satisfied people: all Catalans want is the symbols of a nation. When Pujol stands on the balcony and shouts, “Visca Barça, visca el Cataluña,” he is doing nothing more than restating Catalan symbols. People like to hear him say it. It makes them feel good.

  And that is why Barça is possibly the biggest club in the world, why they have 110,000 socios. They are the symbol that this nation needs in lieu of a state. “And,” one Catalan told me, “some people watch Barça because they like soccer.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DUTCH AND ENGLISH: WHY BOBBY ROBSON FAILED IN HOLLAND

  BOBBY ROBSON MANAGED THE Dutch club PSV Eindhoven from 1990 to 1992. He failed at PSV because he failed to understand the Dutch.

  Before I start, I must establish that Robson did fail in Holland. He himself would disagree: after all, he won two league titles in his two years at PSV. Here is his first failure to understand. In England, the league championship is the prize every club wants most. In Holland, it is not. Robson never understood that PSV took the Dutch championship almost for granted—they had won it three times in the four years before his arrival—and wanted European success.

  “PSV OFF BUNGLER BOBBY,” opined one British tabloid when news of the England manager’s impending move leaked a few days before the 1990 World Cup. The Dutch press was quite as dismayed. Voetbal International, an intelligent soccer magazine read by professional soccer players, managers, and directors (I know of no British equivalent) ran an editorial headlined, “Why Bobby Robson?” It claimed that Robson “is a typical coach of the British school with too little tactical baggage to fathom continental soccer.”

  To the Dutch, Bobby Robson stood for the Insular Englishman. He ran one of the less sophisticated international teams, occasionally wore a cloth cap, and spoke only one language. (He studied Dutch for a while, but never got far.) He arrived in Holland with a buffoonish image and never shed it.

  At PSV, he took over a group of players that even more than most in Holland was used to having its say. The season before, the squad had split into rival factions whose members hardly even spoke to one another, and this cost Robson’s predecessor his job. Kees Ploegsma, PSV’s general manager, was looking for a coach who would keep the players quiet. A Briton was the obvious choice.

  The British game has a code of honor. If a player comments on tactics, he is “bringing the game into disrepute.” If he quarrels with his manager, he is transferred. He never speaks out of turn, except when he retires and runs out of money and sells his “story” to the Sun. Alex Ferguson will not let Ryan Giggs speak to journalists, and Manchester United players generally give few interviews (most of them to John Motson). Brian Clough terrified adults like Des Walker and Stuart Pearce out of talking to the press altogether. A British player obeys his superior. He is a soldier. Before the Dutchman Ray Atteveld came to England for a trial with Everton, he phoned John Metgod, formerly of Nottingham Forest and Spurs, to ask his advice. “Get a haircut, wear a suit, and yell a lot at practice,” Metgod told him. Everton took Atteveld.

  By contrast, foreigners who come to Holland all make the same discovery: “The coach doesn’t say that much. It’s always the players who are talking,” marvelled Ajah Wilson Ogechukwu, a Nigerian at Roda Kerkrade. Dutch players love to talk, and interviews in soccer magazines run to four pages. When the Dutch go abroad they carry on talking, and in the vernacular too. They advise their managers on tactics and team selection. The AC Milan manager Arrigo Sacchi reported that Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, and Marco van Basten had given him “new ideas and views,” and he said it was largely down to them that “a new style was introduced that diverged from the traditional, Italian mode of thought and style of play.” (Later, when Van Basten decided that Milan needed an even newer style, Sacchi had to leave.) But usually the Dutch advice is unwanted. John van’t Schip joined Genoa and was dropped from the team for five weeks for debating tactics with his manager.

  “I’ve got a reputation of having my own opinion and they don’t like that in Great Britain,” reported Hans Gillhaus, who spent four years with Aberdeen. “As a soccer player there you’re just a number and you do what the boss says. That’s what you call the manager: ‘Boss.’ At halftime or after the match, it was customary for the manager to swear for a while at a couple of players. Most players accepted it. The Dutch boys would go against it, and then there’d be a row.”

  “We Dutchmen are pigheaded,” summed up Johan Cruyff, the greatest of them all (and the most pigheaded). “Even when we’re on the other side of the world, we’re always telling people how to do things. In that respect, we’re an unpleasant nation.”

  Unpleasant perhaps, but successful. Dutch soccer works. It seems that if you let players think for themselves they win soccer matches. Over the last 20 years, no other small nation (and of the large nations, only Germany and Argentina) has won as much as Holland. No one else has played as gloriously. It is precisely because the Dutch talk so much that they can play the way they do. A player must understand his role. He has to know when to overlap or to cover for the man in front of him, when to leave his man and chase the ball. British players play the British brand of 4-4-2 from childhood on, and so they have little to learn about it. By the age of 20, a British fullback knows, for instance, that he must cover his center backs when there is an attack over the other wing. The system is simple. When he has the ball, he can always hit it into space over the top of the opposition’s defense, and when he is in trouble he can hit it into touch. But if the player is called upon to play in a new way, or to do more difficult things—to keep the ball in the team, for instance—he has to learn again. He can learn a lot from just playing the new system, but not enough. One Genoa manager tried to make his team play total soccer like Ajax, and failed. Vant Schip commented: “To play the Ajax system you have to understand it, and especially talk about it a lot.”

  The drawback to talking a lot is that personality clashes happen. Holland in 1990 could have won the World Cup, but the players preferred to squabble. The PSV squad that Robson inherited was torn by rows: Wim Kieft versus Gerald Vanenburg, Romario versus the rest of the squad.

  It was all new to Robson. The English method barely gives players a chance to argue: there is simply no debate, and so team spirit is the best in the world. It does seem that the England squad at the 1990 World Cup helped persuade Robson to use a sweeper, but that was nothing compared to the power of the Dutch squad. It refused even to go to the World Cup with its manager, Thijs Libregts, and Libregts was fired. The difference is down to Dutch working-class culture. The Dutch working classes value debate. They are Calvinists (even Dutch Catholics have strong Calvinist traits) and Calvin told the faithful to ignore priests and to read the Bible themselves. The result is that a 20-year-old Dutch soccer player assumes that he is as likely to have the Trut
h as his manager. The British view is that the manager is the manager. He is older than his players and so he must be right. That is why, when Robson is heckled, he cites his record and the number of years he has been in the game.

  “The players are all much more interested over here in tactics—how we play and how we change things,” he told World Soccer after 18 months at PSV. He spent most of his time in Eindhoven trying to decide whether the club should play a British-style 4-4-2 system or not, and his players entered the debate energetically. Only PSV’s sweeper, Gica Popescu, shared Robson’s attitude: “I think soccer players should play soccer, and apart from that shut up. The coach must talk, we must listen.” Popescu grew up in Ceaucescu’s Rumania.

  Robson told Voetbal International: “An English pro accepts the manager’s decision. After every match here, the substitutes come and visit me.” He pulled off John Bosman against Montpellier and Bosman asked for an explanation, but Robson would only say, “Players only understand substitutions when they become managers.” Dutch players demand proper reasons. English players always do their best, but when the Dutch disagree with the manager they sulk, as Holland did at the 1990 World Cup.

  Robson got on best with PSV’s most “British” players: the eager teenager Twan Scheepers and the muscular stopper Stan Valckx. He took Valckx with him to Sporting Lisbon where he even made him team captain, despite Valckx’s utter inability to speak Portuguese. Robson said of Scheepers: “He’s got strength, he runs very well, he’s strong in the tackle, and he’s got desire. You can see it in his eyes.” Those are the qualities with which Robson feels comfortable.