Writer gets close to football's giants

The giants of modern football have talked to Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper, now living in Paris, and he recounts his encounters with skill and aplomb in a new collection of his articles on the  game.

Reuters

When Andres Iniesta was presented with the man of the match award after Spain had won the 2010 World Cup, he and a spectacularly built woman were ushered before a phalanx of photographers.

She towered above him and, amid the flashlights, he seemed startled that they were taking pictures of him rather than the cleavage and mile-wide smile just above his head.

Such is his (non-physical) stature.

Simon Kuper’s latest book The Football Men looks at the allure of Iniesta and a plethora of other talents dominating the landscape of the sport.

27:25

Interview

Paul Myers

The names are instantly recognisable. Paolo Maldini, Zinedine Zidane, Romario, Juan Sebastian Veron, Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba; all surveyed from early 1999 until late 2010.

It’s not new analysis - Kuper succumbed to the inner geek a few years back in Why England Lose - but rather a collection of some of his sports columns published in the Financial Times before he was allowed a wider brief for the newspaper.

So in a way it’s a valediction for those of us who came to know his skills via his evident love of football.

The book’s subhead - Up Close With The Giants Of The Modern Game - is misleading because a steely detachment informs many of the pieces.

Only immense objectivity could have salvaged something from the session in early 2008 with Chelsea star Nicolas Anelka after his PR tribe assembled photographers and a CNN crew for a fashion shoot for his new clothing line.

“According to the etiquette for international footballers, being two hours late for a meeting with someone from outside football does not count as late,” Kuper informs us.

“Anelka arrives four hours late, without apologies. The rumour is that he had some physio at Chelsea, but nobody has bothered telling us.”

But was waiting for Anelka of any use? For lovers of football trivia, yes. Ninety-seven million euros have been spent on him over nine transfers – more than for any other player.

His reputation for complexity and sulkiness went before him but here’s the joy (in hindsight of course): “I won already almost everything in my career," Anelka tells Kuper. "I think something missing like a World Cup and – I think, yeah, that’s it.”

Anelka’s meltdown with the French squad and his expulsion from the group in South Africa in 2010 means that bauble will never grace his trophy cabinet.

No such problem for little Iniesta. Spanish league titles – five of those, Uefa Champions League – three so far, a club world cup, a European championship with Spain and the breathless admiration of his peers.

Neither Iniesta nor his Barcelona team mates Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernandez stand more than 1m75 tall. But these are the giants of the game.

Kuper tells their stories as simply and exquisitely as their midfield passing patterns.

But I suspect a touch of pride in the eulogies. The author spent formative years in The Netherlands and has maintained close connections with the land.

He’s in with the coaches such as Guus Hiddink, the journalists, the players and a legend or two. He points out the link between the mouthy genius Johan Cruijff and the expansive expressiveness of the Barcelona team under the Dutchman’s protégé Pep Guardiola.
That garlanded coach is featured in the section on the managers such as Arsène Wenger, Glenn Hoddle and Jose Mourinho.

The Portuguese’s penchant for conspiracies is, as Kuper outlines, perhaps connected to his childhood when his family lost its estate in the 1974 Carnation Revolution that brought down fascism.

If this is cod psychology, indulge the writer because actually there does seem to be something in it. If only headlines.

Mourinho rants, highlights Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns at European football’s governing body Uefa, courts trouble with pathological brio and is the seething ogre to Guardiola’s sleek knight. That they head Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively just adds historical heft to the animosity.

Not so long ago modern football was predicated as a game of strength and power. Sure enough, Kuper looks at purveyors of those arts.

Chelsea’s Drogba and Florent Malouda are evaluated not only for their technique, but also for their journey to the top table of world football.

And it’s the presentation of these odysseys that protect The Football Men from the criticism that it’s money for old rope.

Essentially the pieces were interesting first time round.

As a frequent traveller on the Eurostar train between Paris and London, I used to grab the FT Weekend on a Sunday morning as I shuffled gingerly through the Eurostar lounge nursing some strain from the previous morning’s attempt at football.

Kuper’s columns about the people who really knew what they were doing were always illuminating but the same can't be said for their autobiographies.

He’s particularly vituperative about players’ self-analyses. Of Ashley Cole’s My Defence, he writes, “You close it feeling dirty and stupid for having read it, your main emotion surprise that his agent let him write it."

Wayne Rooney’s book "reads a bit like an essay that a child was forced to write at primary school," Kuper snarls. "Even with family photographs and school reports, he can barely get the book up to length.”

He also waded through the thoughts of Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Jamie Carragher. We’re left in no doubt that this is the less glamorous aspect of the sports writer's lot.

“These books help you understand the stages of a footballer’s life from boyhood to media victim. And they make you even feel slightly sorry for these men (though perhaps not for Cole).”

While his opinions on those tomes won’t have me rushing out to buy them, I was particularly pleased to see the inclusion of a column I remembered reading on the Eurostar on Dirk Kuyt’s transfer to Liverpool in September 2006.

It’s Kuper.

“I knew players like Dirk Kuyt even before he was born. As a kid I played against them in the dunes of his home village of Katwijk on the Dutch coast. I respected and feared the Kuyt type but I never imagined Liverpool Football Club signing one ...

“Kuyt’s rise implies that his colleagues, even those who aren’t sots, are performing below potential. If they all lived like Kuyt, professional football would be a better game. ‘Doing your best isn’t a chore, is it?' he asks. ‘I must thank God on my bare knees that I became a football player. And I do.’”

And yet no one brackets Kuyt in the superstar category. Quite simply, he is underrated. As we old football gabblers would say: he’s honest.

While Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez was extolling the Steven Gerrard - Fernando Torres combination and lamenting the absence of injury afflicted duo in failed title tilts, Kuyt and Xabi Alonso went unheralded. Benitez even courted Aston Villa’s Gareth Barry for Alonso’s role.

Liverpool’s potential as champions went askew once Alonso took his guile off to Real Madrid to be feared by … Iniesta and Xavi.

On the red half of Merseyside, Gerrard’s ailing body is still a cause for concern, Torres has departed the parish but Kuyt still stands strong despite the arrival of new darlings such as Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez.

Kuyt as Anfield colossus? That’s one for the discussion boards. But how often has the game been defined by fans, players and managers who don’t appreciate its worth until it's gone?

Never had that problem with the boy Kuper. We always knew we had a gem.