Soccer Men (10 page)

His transformation seems to have coincided with his move to attacking midfield. A player of enormous range, who can fly into the box and score with headers, he had previously been wasted at libero or in defensive midfield. Now he is the two-in-one, a central midfielder as good attacking as he is defending: the new Lothar Matthäus.

The other change occurred in Ballack’s mind. “I now see myself as a player who has self-confidence,” he says. So much so that
Spiegel
magazine, the guardian of German democracy, has published a long feature arguing that Ballack is arrogant. His father called the notion “rubbish with sauce,” but many still believe it. A sports magazine ranked Ballack third in a list of players most disliked by Bundesliga players.

This is partly a matter of appearances. To the untutored eye, Ballack resembles a caveman, but Germans think he is handsome, and he dresses well, which in Germany is considered suspect. He is also an elegant player, whose straight-backed run and curly dark hair have prompted comparisons with the young Franz Beckenbauer. Rainer Calmund, Leverkusen’s general manager, has called him “the little Kaiser.”

But he has a genuine egotistical streak, too. Though a team player, Ballack has never quite assimilated soccer’s collectivist ethic. Bayer Leverkusen, the works team of a chemicals company, is not a club anyone dreams of playing for as a child, and to say you would die for the jersey would sound hilarious, but Ballack takes his individualism a bit far.

After Euro 2000 he grumbled that the tournament had “brought him nothing,” which was true but tactless given the atmosphere of national mourning. At Bayer, he once Ballacked his coach, Berti Vogts, after being substituted. And when Real Madrid offered Leverkusen an astronomical transfer fee, he turned it down personally, saying that what mattered more was “what you earn yourself.”

“You can’t tell him anything anymore. He’s already a world champion,” says Christian Ziege of Spurs, a teammate with Germany. Asked about this, Ballack said Ziege was just angry because of a tackle at training. “I mowed him down. He said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I said, ‘Shut up. What do you want?’”

None of the criticism has unsettled Ballack. His father told
Spiegel
that his son was fortunately “not someone who thinks too much” and, furthermore, was “übercool.”

This has been his season. Having underperformed for Germany for years, culminating in that 5–1 defeat in Munich, he scored three goals in the playoff matches against Ukraine to take them to the World Cup. Playing in midfield, he is the second-highest scorer in the Bundesliga with fifteen. Thanks largely to him, Leverkusen is close to the league title and still in the Champions League.

To the 99.9 percent of German soccer fans who are not Leverkusen supporters, the semifinal against Manchester United is a mere prelude to the greater event of the summer. Germany is short on sporting heroes just now, not even very good at tennis anymore, and a nation’s sporting self-esteem has been resting on the Schumacher brothers.

Ballack has emerged just in time for the World Cup. The German team is starting to look respectable again. But they aren’t about to win the World Cup, are they?

June 2002

E
ven Brazil must be wondering how to penetrate this England defense, which has not conceded a goal in three games. You might beat Danny Mills or possibly Ashley Cole to the byline, but then Rio Ferdinand and Sol Campbell will eat up the cross. The route through the middle, guarded by Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, looks daunting even for Rivaldo and Ronaldo.

Yesterday Sol Campbell took the left side of the central defense, Rio Ferdinand the right, and they provided a study in contrasting styles.

Campbell was usually marking Denmark’s striker Ebbe Sand, but there was more to it than that. While Campbell stands by his man, Ferdinand watches the whole game.

He moves the other defenders around, and when an extra Dane popped up in attack, Ferdinand seldom showed much interest, nor did anything more than glance at him. He generally watches as Campbell and Mills dive in.

Ferdinand is a supervisor, not a cleaner. Like David Beckham, he has blossomed as a leader thanks to Sven-Göran Eriksson’s rejuvenation of the team—and he is a more verbal leader than the captain.

Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink says the two best center-halfs in England are Ferdinand and Martin Keown. Against Keown, says the Chelsea striker, you end the match covered in bruises. But Ferdinand “you almost don’t notice.”

The Leeds player is the thinking man’s center-back, who might barely touch you all game yet not give you a sniff of a goal.

Ferdinand is more interested in the direction of the attack than whoever happens to be in his neighborhood. While Campbell tends to go to where the ball comes, Ferdinand covers space behind and around him.

In his ease of movement he resembles Italy’s Alessandro Nesta: tall, fast, and comfortable on the ball, he is nearly the complete defender. Like Nesta, he does not merely defend but organizes his defense.

In the air Ferdinand and Campbell may be the defensive combination of the World Cup. Together they nullified Argentina’s policy of hitting crosses for Gabriel Batistuta, and yesterday the Danes won no headers. Ferdinand and Campbell have also scored two of England’s five goals so far from corners. (“Rio’s goal was an own goal!” insisted Kieron Dyer. “So don’t give it to him.”)

In Niigata Ferdinand was even granted a couple of brief chants of “Rio!”—a rare honor for a defender. And Dyer gave an unprompted encomium. Without anyone even having asked him about Ferdinand, Dyer said, “I honestly believe that on present form we have the best player in the world, in Rio Ferdinand. Not just the best defender, but the best player.”

Dyer said the England squad, which received British television channels in their hotel, had seen Viv Anderson state before the tournament that Ferdinand was “not world-class.”

“After forty-five minutes against Nigeria, Anderson came on air and said, ‘He is world-class,’” the Newcastle player concluded triumphantly. Foreign journalists concur that Ferdinand is one of the two or three best defenders of the competition. They are struck by his aura. One told me that Ferdinand
appears even taller than he is, while a German journalist said that Ferdinand, like Oliver Kahn, is acquiring the sort of mythical status that discourages strikers even before he dispossesses them.

But before we get too carried away with the twenty-three-year-old “New Bobby Moore” (and I gather the nation is getting a bit carried away), it is worth pointing out some shortcomings.

Ferdinand is not a great tackler. He almost always remains upright. This contributes to his elegance, but sometimes a center-half needs to get his shorts dirty. Just before halftime he let a Dane nip dangerously past him to the byline, and when Sand or Jesper Gronkjaer brought the ball into the box, Ferdinand tended not to confront them but to stand off, trying to guide them away from the goal. At moments like that you wish he were more of an old-fashioned English center-half.

He seldom hits a lazy pass, but nor is he a Baresi or Beckenbauer. In the first half he regularly collected the ball from David Seaman, curbing the keeper’s love of punting long. But he tends to slot the ball short distances, ideally into midfield or (more perilously) to Mills or Campbell. Still, it is nice to see England defenders pass the ball around with an air of knowing more or less where it is going.

Brazil (unless Belgium stuns the world tomorrow) will be the biggest test of Ferdinand’s career. Not just because it is Brazil in a World Cup quarterfinal, but because Brazil is rare at this World Cup in fielding two center-forwards, one of them a genius. Behind them is Rivaldo, who likes nothing better than dribbling through the center of a defense (unless it is shooting from fifty yards). Against Brazil on Friday, Ferdinand will have to do some tackling.

December 2002

I
t’s not about me,” Roberto Carlos says, warming himself over a coffee in the Real Madrid canteen (these Spanish winters are tough). “The award is not about Roberto Carlos himself. I think the time has come to honor the
job of the defender. Also, I won’t have a better chance of winning it. I can’t do more than I have done this year. It’s impossible to win more titles in just 365 days! I have been a starter in every game, with my club and with my national side. I worked my socks off in every match. What else do I have to do to get the award?”

The Golden Ball for European Player of the Year ought indeed to end up in the trunk of his red Ferrari, but it won’t. Today, Ronaldo will be declared the winner. Carlos will finish second and Oliver Kahn, the Germany goalkeeper, third. However, Real Madrid’s supermidget—winner of the European Cup, the World Cup, the European Supercup, and the World Club Cup in recent months—unquestionably deserves the prize.

Born in a small town near São Paulo twenty-nine years ago, Carlos was named after a one-legged Brazilian crooner. Perhaps in compensation, he developed thighs the size of Muhammad Ali’s at his peak, which is impressive for a man just five feet six. He himself attributes his build to a childhood spent cycling and hauling heavy pieces of farm machinery, but if that were true, every third world village would be thronging with cartoon superheroes.

The thighs took him to Palmeiras, and by the time he toured Europe with the Brazilian national team in the summer of 1995, he was telling everyone, “I’m going to be the best left back in the world. I’m better than Paolo Maldini.”

If this was youthful hubris, he never lost it. Like Ali himself, Carlos is forever trash-talking opponents and predicting easy victories. Before the World Cup semifinal, he said Brazil would need only 60 to 70 percent of its potential to beat Turkey, and even that was kinder than the 40 percent he had estimated previously.

Opponents generally remain silent, because they know he is right. Carlos has the simplicity of an untortured soul who has become a multimillionaire thanks to natural gifts. Consequently, he is always smiling. The staff at Real’s canteen prefer him to the prissy introvert Raul. So do most journalists, though one Brazilian says that while watching Carlos chuckling in training camp all day with his chum Denilson, he was reminded of “two idiots.”

In 1995, Carlos joined Inter Milan, whose manager, Roy Hodgson, practically forbade him to cross the halfway line. A year later, Inter sold him to Real Madrid for $5.4 million, less than they paid for him.

Of all the walking reproaches to Inter’s transfer policy, Carlos remains number 1. Perhaps no other human being packs more potency per inch. Carlos runs the hundred meters in 10.6 seconds, his throw-ins regularly travel thirty yards, and his tiny feet—small even by the standards of great players or ancient Chinese ladies—can send a ball flying ninety miles an hour. And he never gets injured. No one else has played more top-level matches in the past five years.

Unfortunately, nobody cares about left backs. It is the position for hiding the feeble. Hence, Carlos passed largely unnoticed until the age of twenty-four, when he hit a free kick for Brazil against France that was speeding well past the goal before changing its mind and bending several yards to finish in the net. France’s keeper, Fabien Barthez, never moved.

Carlos imparts the swerve by hitting the ball with his outside three toes. This is a pretty inefficient way of taking a free kick, and he nets fewer than Sinisa Mihajlovic or Gianfranco Zola, but no one else shoots more thrillingly. To quote a great malapropism of British football commentating: “He is one of those players who is so unique.”

In fact, it comes as a surprise when he names a role model: “Branco, who played in my position just before me for Brazil,” he says. “He used to join the attack as often as I do and was also considered a free-kick specialist.”

Oh, and Carlos can tackle, too. Because of his unmatched reflexes, he can wait until the last split second when the striker has committed himself. Wherever you are on the field, you are never safe from him. Perhaps the definitive moment of the European Cup final of 2000 occurred somewhere in midfield. Gaizka Mendieta, of Valencia, popped up in yards of space down Real’s left, and just as he was about to do something clever, there was a flash of white and Carlos went steaming off in possession. (Only Ronaldo runs as quickly with the ball; without it, practically only Tim Montgomery does, and he is the 100 meters world record holder.) By the time Mendieta turned to see what had happened, Supermidget had almost vanished from sight. Psychologically, the final was over.

Carlos has three Champions League medals, but until this summer he had never won the World Cup. In Brazil, this marks you out as a mediocrity who gets snickered at in the street. “Brazilians aren’t so fond of him. He is one of those players that has been away so long that he’s almost considered
a European and not a Brazilian,” says Alex Bellos, author of
Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life
.

Carlos may look like the average stunted Brazilian pauper—a posh Rio woman, encountering him at the apartment of his Real teammate Flavio Conceicao, took him for a servant—but his lifestyle of Rolexes and jewelry irks people back home.

To get a little respect, he had to win the World Cup. Quite early in this year’s competition, he seemed to know he would. Pundits said after the first few matches that Brazil was weak at the back, but in fact Carlos and Cafu just could not be bothered to defend against teams like Belgium or Costa Rica. They would rather have fun, and who cared what Brazil’s manager, Felipe Scolari, thought? (Who is bigger, metaphorically speaking anyway, Carlos or Big Phil? Carlos or Vicente del Bosque, the Real boss?) When Brazil met England, things got marginally more serious, and Carlos revealed his gift for irritation. Behaving as if he owned the pitch, he would pick up the ball whenever the referee awarded a free kick to either team. Everyone else who wasted time at the World Cup got a yellow card, but no referee had the nerve to penalize Carlos. (Who is bigger, metaphorically speaking? . . .) Even after Michael Owen’s goal, Carlos continued to delay every England free kick. At first, the English players would instinctively wrestle for the ball, but after a while, realizing they were ahead anyway, they began wandering off and leaving him to it.