Soccer Men (41 page)

Yet by then Allison had already began the downhill slide that occupied most of the second half of his life. During the World Cup of 1970 he had worked as a television pundit. Handsome, articulate, and fond of smoking cigars on screen, he drew viewers. Women mobbed him in the streets. He became “Big Mal.” “Allison did not win a single thing in English soccer after the birth of Big Mal,” notes his biographer David Tossell. “It seems to be more than coincidence.”

At City, Allison insisted on being promoted from coach to manager. Shindler says he proved “a brilliant coach and a rotten manager.” Allison left the club for Crystal Palace in 1973, and from then on was known chiefly for what he did outside soccer. London offered gambling, nightclubs, champagne,
and blondes
.
Among his claimed conquests was Christine Keeler, siren of the Profumo affair.

Big Mal was a showman, famous for his sheepskin coat and fedora hat, though he could also give team talks shirtless, and took off even more to bathe with Richmond. He created that seventies phenomenon: the manager as hedonistic performer. Newspapers egged him on. A former “runner” for the press in Fleet Street in his youth, Allison understood media, and he fed journalists quotes and stories, sometimes while drunk. He would promise “to take soccer to the moon” or to “frighten the cowards of Europe.” He screamed at referees.

All these were distractions. He began to go from job to job: Plymouth and Manchester City again, Middlesbrough, Kuwait, Galatasaray in Turkey, and even Memphis, where he was fired before his first game. (“You’re not really a manager until you’ve been sacked,” Big Mal liked to say.) His brief American experience prompted him to advise Middlesbrough to dye their pitch orange. When he later sued Middlesbrough for wrongful dismissal, it emerged that in a three-month stay at a local hotel he had run up a bill of £3, 500 for brandy, champagne, and cigars.

He did win the Portuguese league with Sporting, but mostly he floundered without adult supervision. Like many of his contemporaries in English soccer, he was eaten away by alcohol. Wives and girlfriends came and went. He ended up alone with his Alzheimer’s in a one-room apartment in Middlesbrough. The Allison of Cassetari’s café and
Soccer for Thinkers
had disappeared long before—his loss, and English soccer’s.

January 2011

J
orge Valdano is trying to explain what Real Madrid is about—a question he’s better equipped to answer than perhaps anyone else—and the club’s director of soccer reaches into the past, to talk about a fellow Argentineturned-Madrilene. “You could say that Alfredo di Stefano incarnates Real,”
says Valdano. Di Stefano was the linchpin of the great Real that won the first five European Cups, from 1956 to 1960. Valdano explains, “After a defeat it was best not to look at Alfredo, because his eyes would be spitting fire. When things were going badly, he’d forget about beauty and just pursue the result. Everything that has happened at this club, in one way or another, has been influenced by the spirit of di Stefano. This is a club with a very bad relationship to defeat.”

Valdano is speaking as Real Madrid’s director of soccer, as a former player and coach of the club, but also as a gifted writer. Perhaps nobody inside the game can talk soccer better than he does. Ask him a question and he pauses a beat or two, before answering in complete sentences in his precise, Argentine-inflected Spanish.

We’re sitting in Real’s offices inside the Bernabéu stadium one evening, an hour before a game. On one wall is a black-and-white picture of di Stefano’s team. It shows the players standing up in open-topped cars, dressed in summer suits, driving through Madrid amid cheering crowds. General Franco’s policemen accompany them on motorbikes. The photo is Real triumphant—the club’s natural state. But in Valdano’s four spells at the club since he first came here in 1984, Real mostly hasn’t been like that.

There is something dysfunctional about post-Franco Real, and Valdano’s journey of these past twenty-five years helps illuminate what. The club has struggled to redefine its identity and regain the dominance it had in di Stefano’s era. Its present failure is baffling. There’s an almost iron law in soccer that money brings success, and Real is the world’s richest club: It had income of more than $565 million in the 2008–2009 season. Yet on the field it reliably gets humiliated by the world’s best team, its eternal rival, Barcelona. Real had better hurry up and win something soon—ideally the Champions League in London this May—for Valdano’s sake and its own.

 

Valdano was born in 1955 in a small town in the Argentine pampas
.
“When I was small,” he told me once, “I often heard: ‘You’re in a country where nobody is hungry, where it’s unthinkable that there’ll ever be war, and where you have the most beautiful women in the world.’ Now we only have the most beautiful women in the world.” He has called Argentina “the world’s first undeveloping country.”

But Valdano grew tall and strong on the then bounty of the pampas. He turned out to be good at everything, the man other men wanted to be. He devoured Jorge Luis Borges, briefly studied law, dressed as elegantly as he spoke, became a goalscoring striker, and in 1975 arrived in Spain to play for the little Basque club Deportivo Alavés. Franco died that same year, and so Valdano found himself a young left-wing intellectual in a free country just as young left-wing intellectuals in Argentina were being dropped from military helicopters into the River Plate. This shaped his thinking about soccer.

He admired the bony, chain-smoking closet communist Cesar Luis Menotti, the Argentine coach who brought the country its first World Cup in 1978. Menotti believed in “a soccer of the Left”: a creative game in which working-class people expressed their natural genius. By contrast, “soccer of the Right” was the thuggish game played by certain Argentine teams, whose players read up on the personal problems of their opponents in order to unsettle them, just in case biting and spitting failed.

Valdano, a subtle and funny man, only partly bought this spiel, yet the soccer he describes in his books is a
Menottista
soccer. It’s the soccer he always wanted his teams to play. That makes it so striking that last spring Real hired as its coach José Mourinho. The little Portuguese favors a defensive style that looks suspiciously like “soccer of the Right.” (More about Valdano and Mourinho later.)

As a player Valdano won two league titles with Real. However, his great moment was winning the World Cup with Argentina in 1986. Valdano scored in the final, and just as thrillingly got the chance to observe his teammate Diego Maradona from up close.

Valdano with Maradona, as in most of his relationships in soccer, was a literate, educated person who had wandered into an alien world. Other players often mock him as a pseudointellectual, and call him
El Filósofo
(The Philosopher), a nickname that’s intended an insult. On Spanish television’s version of the
Spitting Image
satirical puppet show, Valdano’s puppet was always blathering on about Plato.

Valdano never hides his bookishness, but he doesn’t think it’s very relevant. He knows that reading books doesn’t help you win soccer matches. I could describe Maradona’s goal [the dribble against England in 1986] much better than he could,” he once told me, “but I could never have scored it.”

This evening in Madrid’s offices we get talking about winning World Cups. Several of Real’s players pocketed one with Spain last year. Had that reminded him of his own triumph? “It seems pornographic to me that twenty-five years have passed, because I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. But when the Spanish players were being given their medals, my daughter asked, ‘Where’s your medal?’ My wife went off to search for it. Eventually, she found it. It’s now in a place where I can’t get to it,” he said, and laughed. Still, he insists he hardly ever thinks about lifting the cup.

A year after that, hepatitis forced him to retire from playing. He became a writer, and a coach, and in 1994 he returned to coach Real. The club was then in its dark decades. It hadn’t won its pet prize, the European Cup, since 1966. Worse, in 1992 Barcelona had won the trophy for the first time, and Catalans had taken to mocking Madrilenes for only winning the cup “in black and white.”

In fact, Spanish soccer was experiencing the same shift in power as Spanish politics: from the center to the regions. Under Franco, Real’s hegemony had been unchallenged. The general himself had made a point of catching the club’s games on the radio, taking a transistor with him if he went out partridge shooting, writes Jimmy Burns in
When Beckham Went to Spain.

None of this is to say that Real was a “fascist club,” as its detractors sometimes charge. In fact, notes Burns, during the Spanish civil war the club was briefly run “as a Soviet-style workers’ federation.” Yet Real did benefit from Franco. It’s not that he fixed referees or gave Real money. He didn’t need to. A dictator typically concentrates his country’s resources in the capital city. That’s where he, his bureaucrats, generals, and secret policemen live. It’s the last place where he wants an uprising. And so capitals and their soccer teams thrive under dictatorships. Every team from a dictatorship ever to win the European Cup (now called the Champions League) came from a capital city. By contrast, winning teams from democracies almost all come from provincial towns.

After Franco died, Spain’s regions rose. Barcelona in particular grew richer, and its soccer team improved. Real’s decline fed the daily hysteria that grips the club. In Spain there are newspapers and television stations that live off Real. “This is a club that moves amid great turbulence. It’s a universal focus of news,” says Valdano. He tries to remain ironic amid the hysteria.
When a journalist laid out two tape recorders in front of him prior to an interview recently, Valdano commented, “Ah! One to record my words, the other to record my thoughts.”

But at Real, the hysteria often crowds out everything else. The club’s inherited obligation is to rule Europe with the world’s best players playing attacking soccer. It’s an obligation no other club has. When Real stopped meeting this obligation, it got caught in an endless cycle of hubris and despair. The club’s president would hire a coach, buy new players, say that this at last was the perfect team, as good as di Stefano’s, and when they lost three matches running, he’d throw everyone out and start again. Valdano himself was sacked months after leading Real to the Spanish title in his only full season as the club’s coach. At Real, the coach’s function is to be a human sacrifice.

Real’s wealth did eventually buy more titles: the Champions League in 1998 (immediately after which the club sacked the winning coach) and 2000. UEFA, the European soccer association, named Real the club of the twentieth century. And in the summer of 2000, the Madrilene construction magnate Florentino Pérez was elected the club’s president with a mission to restore the glory days of di Stefano. Pérez made Valdano his technical director in charge of signing players. After a hiatus when Pérez was voted out of office in 2006, the two men returned to power in 2009. Today they are still chasing di Stefano’s legacy, watched from the stands by an impatient octogenarian di Stefano.

Pérez’s big idea was to buy
galacticos
, the world’s greatest players. Di Stefano’s team, too, had been full of
galacticos
. Santiago Segurola, a writer on soccer and buddy of Valdano’s, has a nice theory about this. When Pérez was four years old, in 1951, his father began taking him to the Bernabéu stadium to watch Real. Pérez loved his dad. And so some of his happiest childhood memories were formed in that great concrete bowl, watching di Stefano’s team. Pérez, explains Segurola, has a Freudian relationship with Real. In Pérez’s mind, that great team of the 1950s is tangled up with his beloved father. By trying to reassemble the 1950s team—now with Cristiano Ronaldo as di Stefano and the Brazilian Kaká as Raymond Kopa—he is communing with his father. John Carlin in
White Angels
, his book about Real, describes the photograph he once saw hanging over Pérez’s bed: Pérez posing on the Bernabéu grass among four of his
galacticos.
As the psychiatrist in
Fawlty Towers
says of Basil Fawlty: “There’s enough material there for an entire conference.”

In name Valdano was Real’s technical director, but working for the mercurial Pérez he often seemed more spokesman than policy maker. His job was to turn the club’s actions into beautiful words. It might have been frustrating, but everyone in soccer, even Jorge Valdano, wants to stay on the boat, especially at Real, and so everyone does what it takes. In 2003 I sat in this same room listening to Valdano tell me that Real’s team would consist entirely of
galacticos
and homegrown players. In his fine phrase, Real wouldn’t sign “middle-class players.”

In 2002 Real had won its ninth Champions League. But after that Pérez’s
galacticos
stopped producing. There were too many chiefs and almost no Indians. From 2004 through 2006 Real won exactly zero prizes. Looking back this evening, Valdano admits, “We lacked players of—you could say—the middle class. This time, as well as signing Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká, players with another profile have arrived to bring a greater stability. You always need players like Xabi Alonso. Guys who might not look spectacular, but who can read a match. Who can destroy a counterattack by taking one step left or right.”

While Pérez was out of office, in 2007 and 2008, Real won the Spanish league twice. Pérez and Valdano returned for the 2009–2010 season, and again won nothing. In Pérez’s two eras in charge Real has spent hundreds of millions of euros in transfer fees, almost certainly more than any other soccer club, and has gone through more than a coach a year. The club’s debt was nearly $800 million in 2008, and surely more now. Meanwhile, pundits are debating whether the current Barcelona side is the best soccer team ever, better than di Stefano’s Real.