Soccer Men (28 page)

Rooney spends his leisure time watching television partly because players need to rest, partly because he has few other interests, but partly also because despite having a bodyguard, he cannot leave his house without being hassled. “It’s difficult to do ‘ordinary’ things, like going to the pub or even Asda [a supermarket],” he admits. “There’s always someone who claims he’s an Everton fan and wants to insult me, or someone who hates Manchester Utd and wants to have a go.” So Rooney has become a multimillionaire semicaptive. Had he been a great Spanish or German player, life would have been easier.

Then his managers wanted control, too. David Moyes, his manager at Everton, tried to protect the boy in the man’s milieu. Rooney didn’t want to be protected. He was perfectly happy in the milieu. He felt that Moyes was jealous of him and upset not to have been invited to his eighteenth birthday party. More important, even at eighteen, Rooney knew he was too good for Everton. So—despite the clan’s links to the club—he left for Manchester United.

United’s fans became another group who wanted their piece of Rooney. Like many of Everton’s fans in 2004, they were enraged to discover this month that he would contemplate leaving their club. On the field Rooney, his face reddened with effort, doing the defensive running that the most gifted players sometimes disdain, gives the impression of devotion to the cause. He looks like the British fan’s ideal: a fan in a jersey. Surely, he would want to stay at United forever. If he didn’t, he must just be greedy.

This dichotomy drawn by fans and media—you’re either loyal or greedy—misunderstands how players think. The word players use to describe themselves is
professionals
. Professionals—whether they are players, academics, or bankers—don’t choose between love and money. They pursue success in their
careers
(another favorite players’ word). If they can get success, then money will follow.

A player knows his club will dump him if he isn’t good enough, and so he will dump the club if it isn’t good enough. Rooney was good, and so he left Everton for United. Players regard clubs not as magical entities but as employers. Like most professionals, they will move if they can find a better
job. The better job isn’t necessarily a better-paid one. Rooney could reportedly have earned more than $280,000 a week at Manchester City, and if he had put himself on the market, Real Madrid might have offered him more too. But United’s total package—the chance of prizes, the familiar surroundings, plus pay—seems to have appealed most. This is careerism rather than greed.

By convention, players always talk as if only the team’s performance matters. Of course, they don’t think that way. Rooney knows exactly how many goals he scored in each season of his career and has set himself the target of always bettering the previous year’s tally. Even when United finished without prizes in 2006, Rooney judged it “a decent season for me.” He never seems to have adopted the view of life that Ferguson tries to inculcate in his players: United against the world. Rather, Rooney is a careerist.

Players hardly ever come out as careerists. That’s because the game is pervaded with the rhetoric of lifelong love for club: Players are always trying to keep fans happy by kissing their club’s badge or talking about how they have supported the club since childhood. Yet probably no professional player is “loyal” in the sense that fans use the word. Pundits sometimes rhapsodize about the old days, when players often spent their entire careers at one club, but that was because clubs could then simply forbid them to move. No longer.

Contrary to popular opinion, Rooney is not especially selfish. He’s just typical of his profession. Nowadays he is often contrasted with teammates like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, and Gary Neville, who have supposedly stayed “loyal” to United all their careers. But it would be more accurate to say that these men have a happy employer-employee relationship with United. Had United benched Giggs for a while in his prime, he would surely have been out the door fast. Instead, United was the perfect workplace for him. It didn’t suit Rooney as well.

Alex Ferguson is a paternalist employer: He tries to create father-son relationships with his players. That’s why he doesn’t mind that at sixty-eight he is generationally out of touch with them. When Cristiano Ronaldo was trying to leave United for Real Madrid in 2008, Ferguson persistently talked about “the boy” as if he were his child. He said, “If it was your son, you’d give him the best advice possible on his career. Now, I honestly believe that could be the worst thing he could do—go to Real Madrid.” Some players enjoy this type of working relationship. Giggs, whose own father abandoned
the family, has thrived under Ferguson for twenty years. But it’s not the relationship Rooney wants.

When he threatened to leave United, he like Ronaldo was treated as a thankless child. “Since the minute he’s come to the club, we’ve always been a harbor for him,” Ferguson complained. “Anytime he has been in trouble, we have done nothing but help him. I was even prepared to give him financial advice, many times. I don’t know how many times we have helped him in terms of his private life and other matters.”

Ferguson sees intervening in Rooney’s private life as central to his remit. Like many English fans, the manager has in his head the “Gazza” narrative: Great British talent falls prey to temptations and forfeits his career. (This month alone, Gascoigne has admitted drunk driving and been arrested for suspected possession of Class A drugs.) Ferguson always thought that Gascoigne’s career might have been saved if he had joined United. Rooney, another talent from the underclass, is often likened to Gascoigne. Indeed, Rooney’s nickname inside the game is “Wazza” (partly because
wazz
is British slang for “urination”).

British talents have traditionally needed a father figure. But Rooney doesn’t. In fact, he barely seems to need a manager at all. His thoughts on his first meeting with Ferguson show his typical lack of interest in and insight into people from outside his clan: “I was surprised by how tall Sir Alex Ferguson was.”

Rooney has his own father, and uncles, and if he has a second father, it’s his agent. In autobiographies of modern players, the agent typically emerges as a rare close friend made in adulthood: Everyone else the player meets wants a piece of him, and the agent, though he also wants a piece, acts as the gatekeeper. Paul Stretford won a ferocious battle among agents for control of Rooney, has represented him all his career, and also represents Coleen in her work on television and as an all-purpose celebrity.

This month’s battle for Rooney’s signature was in part a battle between two wannabe father figures. When Stretford threatened that Rooney would leave United, he was obviously bargaining for a better contract, but he was also showing Ferguson how weak the manager’s grip on the player is.

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.

October 2010

O
ne 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.