Soccer Men (42 page)

When I ask Valdano about his second spell as technical director, he says, “That’s what is more difficult: Barcelona. It’s the strongest Barcelona in history.”

Isn’t Barcelona’s beautiful game—invented by Valdano’s own hero Johan Cruijff—exactly the soccer Valdano has always had in his head? “No,” he smiles. “I’m from South America, not from Europe. I’ve always been a great admirer of Cruijff. But for me, Brazil of 1970 was the platonic dream of soccer.”

Still, doesn’t Barcelona benefit from a fixed style? That gives the club a stability that Real seems to lack. Valdano interrupts:

I once witnessed Real’s “enormous passion for triumph” close-up in Valdano himself. It was a few minutes after Real had lost a group match in the Champions League away against Milan. The defeat didn’t matter much. Real eventually progressed to the next round anyway. When I passed Valdano on the staircase leaving the San Siro stadium, I greeted him cheerily. He glared at me, “eyes spitting fire,” as he had described di Stefano after a defeat, and strode off. The usual courteous funny
Filósofo
had vanished. Like Real, Valdano has a very bad relationship with defeat.

That’s why last spring the club hired the coach who is, match for match, probably the winningest in soccer history. It was unfortunate that a couple of years earlier Valdano had described the defensive soccer played by Mourinho’s then team Chelsea as “shit on a stick.” Unveiling the Portuguese at a press conference, Valdano admitted that he had once been “aggressive” about Mourinho’s style. However, he added, the two men had “resolved our differences in a personal meeting.” Since then Valdano, Pérez, and Mourinho have formed an uneasy trinity.

Some companies get so obsessed with their internal processes that they lose sight of outcomes. In appointing Mourinho, Real showed that it has the opposite problem: it’s so obsessed with outcomes that it barely seems to care about processes.

Why did Valdano appoint his ideological opposite? He says, “My idea of soccer is expressed in five books, and in the teams I coached at Tenerife, Real Madrid, and Valencia. All my teams had the same style. But in the position I am in now, I’m an interpreter of Real Madrid—not of my own ideas. And Real Madrid, at this moment, with our reorganization of the team, needed a very strong leadership, and nobody represented that better than Mourinho.”

“In two years we have replaced almost the entire team. Now we have a side with an average age of twenty-four. Marcelo is twenty-two, Özil is twenty-two, Khedira is twenty-three. It’s a team with a lot of future.” The young men have played well under Mourinho, especially if you forget the 5–0 thrashing by Barcelona on November 30.

How has the Portuguese changed Real? “If this team has a quality,” says Valdano, “it is its devotion. We haven’t yet lost a point because the players weren’t trying hard enough. Surely, that must have something to do with the coach’s personality.”

Is the Mourinho he sees the loud and shouty one that the rest of us watch from afar?

Actually, admits Valdano, even he now struggles to penetrate to the players. “Twenty-five years ago, the contact between the club and the player was very direct. It was all much simpler. A player was the club’s employee, with rights but above all obligations. Now there are many layers between club and
player. Sometimes your interlocutor is still the player himself. But sometimes the interlocutor is the player’s father, the player’s agent, the player’s communications director, the player’s girlfriend. The complexity has increased.”

One thing hasn’t changed: Real’s “enormous passion for triumph.” The club is currently chasing Barcelona in the Spanish league, and seeking its tenth European title,
la décima.
Valdano promises: “When Barcelona awakens from its dream,
el Madrid
will be there, to occupy the place it’s always had in the history of soccer.”

Well, possibly.

April 2011

A
t first you think it’s the junk room: a cellar where they dump old, broken things. But gradually it dawns on you: This really is the Oakland A’s clubhouse. Billy Beane, the A’s general manager, is sprawled on a battered sofa, his giant feet on the grubby beige carpet. It’s February, the off-season, but here and there a yellow-and-green baseball shirt hangs in one of the players’ open lockers. The Oakland Coliseum has barely changed since 1981 when my dad drove me up from Palo Alto, a rabid eleven-year-old A’s fan, to see the A’s beat the Red Sox 4–3 on a Tony Armas homer. It must now be the most dilapidated stadium in the Major Leagues.

In this very junk room not long ago, Beane and Brad Pitt sat eating takeout pizza from Zachary’s in Berkeley. Pitt was hanging around with Beane, preparatory to playing him in the movie
Moneyball
, and as Beane explains, “He’s not the kind of guy you can just walk down to the local restaurant.” Pitt also sneaked a visit to Beane’s house, in the hills near Oakland. “I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Beane says, “but my wife and the nanny seemed to think it was. They were up at five in the morning getting ready, which is the first time my wife’s got up at five in the morning.”

Beane spends a lot of time sitting in this junk room watching European soccer on the big television. While he watches soccer, the A’s players watch him. They’re bemused as to what their boss sees in the girls’ sport. Beane remembers sitting on his battered sofa last year when Arjen Robben volleyed in the shot that knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League. Beane, nearly fifty now, jumped vertically into the air and whooped. An A’s player looked up from his locker and laughed: what an absurd sight. You didn’t often see Beane whooping when his own team won a ball game.

“Just watch that goal,” Beane instructed the player, and because Beane is the boss and six foot four and still sports the Charles Atlas physique that once lured half the baseball and football scouts in the United States to his parents’ house in San Diego (his exercise machine stands beside the battered sofa), the A’s player watched the replay. And the second replay. Finally the A’s player got it: That skinny bald little European with knock-knees was as great an athlete as the A’s player himself. “Wow,” said the A’s player, though maybe he said it only to please the boss.

Like millions of other Americans this past decade, Beane has come to follow soccer with the almost unhealthy fervor of a convert. “I watch as many of the games as I can,” he tells us this morning in the junk room. Often he’s up watching at five thirty in the morning. Sometimes he has to battle his wife for the remote control: He’ll be watching Fox Soccer Channel, and she wants to see the baseball highlights on
SportsCenter
. However, his study of soccer goes much further. On his morning commute through the northern Californian hills, or while the A’s are playing in the evening, he often listens to obscure soccer podcasts—for up to five hours a day, according to the
Toronto Star
. “I’m a bit of a junkie,” he admits.

And he’s also a soccer revolutionary. Five thousand miles from Europe, almost unseen by the media, Beane influences the thinking of Chelsea and Manchester City. He regards Arsène Wenger as a soul mate, and you could even call him the brain behind John Henry’s Liverpool. Beane and his followers are now changing soccer just as he previously changed baseball.

 

Sometime in late 2009, an e-mail arrived in my in-box from Billy Beane. “Sorry to intrude,” it began. Chelsea’s performance director, Mike Forde, had given him my address. Beane had read my book
Soccernomics
and wanted
to chat. Of course he’d read the book. He reads all soccer books. He was once raving to me about David Goldblatt’s 978-page history of soccer,
The Ball is Round
, and when I said that if he liked I could put him in touch with Goldblatt, he exclaimed, with what sounded like genuine excitement, “That would be great!” In fact, he seemed to admire Goldblatt in much the same way that Goldblatt and I admire great athletes like Beane.

Beane and I began phoning and e-mailing each other to chat about soccer. I first met him in real life in October 2010, at a conference in London. He turned out to be an unusual mix: an amiable Californian, with a boyish quiff and big eyes behind his round glasses, and at the same time a bonehard American businessman. I found the contact enjoyable, but also slightly surreal. I had trouble seeing Beane as a real person. Like millions of other readers, I already knew him from Michael Lewis’s book
Moneyball.
To me Beane was above all a great literary character, like Winston Smith or Holden Caulfield. Once we became e-mail buddies, I was often reminded of Woody Allen’s story
The Kugelmass Episode
, in which sweaty old twentieth-century Professor Kugelmass finds himself having an affair with Madame Bovary from the nineteenth-century novel. Sometimes, when Beane rang me from the highway in the California morning, I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I’d already read it in
Moneyball.

We know most of the life story from the book: son of a naval officer in San Diego grows up to be brilliant teenage athlete, a living Greek statue, courted by Major League baseball clubs and college football programs. In the junk room this morning, I ask him whether as a kid he ever played soccer.

“Not once,” says Beane.

Did he never even kick a ball?

“We had a hybrid game at junior high which we called speedball, which would really disgust anybody from outside the United States. You could actually catch it in the air and throw it. I did have a Pele poster on my wall from the Cosmos. Most Americans in the ‘70s knew Pele. They weren’t quite sure what he did, but they knew of him.”

In the classic American high school divide, Beane was both jock and nerd. His parents, who had married young and never had a shot at college, wanted Billy to use his brain. “Our family wasn’t particularly well off,” says
Beane. “Really, the reason my dad introduced me to sports was the ability to acquire a college scholarship. It was just a way to pay for college.”

That’s why in 1980 the Beane family was excited when Stanford tried to recruit him as a quarterback. Beane likes to joke that if he’d accepted the scholarship, you’d never have heard of the guy who was then Stanford’s quarterback, John Elway. The A’s media officer, a feisty lady who used to work at Stanford, likes to retort that if Beane had gone to Stanford he’d have spent three years riding the bench behind Elway and nobody would ever have heard of Billy Beane. Anyway, Beane turned down Stanford. The New York Mets were offering him $125,000 to play baseball, and the military middle-class kid felt he ought to take the money. As Lewis records in
Moneyball
, a family friend advised the Beanes to sink the $125,000 in a real-estate project. The project tanked, and the $125,000 evaporated. Beane missed out on college.

“I don’t look at it as a regret now,” he says in the junk room. “I’d say
missed opportunity
is probably a better word. The people that you’re going to school with, what you’re exposed to in future world leaders, senators—I missed that opportunity, and I don’t think you can really put a price tag on that. But it was a great life lesson.” Beane (although a Republican) has tried never again to make a decision based on money alone.

As I’ve gotten to know him slightly, I’ve come to think of this missed opportunity as his great formative moment. Over the past thirty years, Beane has created his own Stanford. His scientific revolution in baseball, the clever people and books with which he surrounds himself, and his current deep study of soccer: It all seems to me an attempt to catch up on the education he missed at age eighteen.

Beane began playing Minor League Baseball, but from the beginning he had inklings of having chosen the wrong profession. He recalls: