A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (17 page)

In Portugal, the season was coming to an end. Teresa and Robert had terminated their rental contract in Sassoeiros and didn’t know where they would go next.

It was reported in the papers that Barcelona planned to sign
a
new goalkeeper, the Frenchman Ulrich Ramé of Girondins Bordeaux.

Robert travelled with Jörg to Vitoria, to have a look at Alavés. The club was like the northern Spanish town: charming, but small.

Back in Lisbon, Teresa and Robert went on a final drive with a video camera to all the places that meant so much to them – the beach at Estoril, La Villa, Marc’s record shop, Monsanto forest park. They stopped at each spot and waved, smiled and cried, ‘
Adeus Lisboa!
’

It wasn’t hard for them to leave. After their lovely time in Lisbon they simply thought everything would be fine wherever they went.

The previous summer they had taken a driving holiday – three thousand kilometres in two days – to Germany. They didn’t know how else to transport the dogs. This time they left them with Marc in Lisbon and took a plane to Frankfurt. They would just be on holiday for a little while.

Jörg flew to Majorca for a photo-shoot with Heike Drechsler. From there he wanted to go to Catalonia for negotiations with Espanyol Barcelona – 28 May would be ideal.

One or two days before then Jörg received another call from Barcelona. Barça’s sporting director Anton Parera wanted to see him.

On 28 May, on his way to the meeting with FC Barcelona, Jörg became aware that he was travelling on a ticket paid for by Barça’s city rival Espanyol.

IN BARCELONA YOU
can stand a few hundred metres away from Camp Nou and not see the stadium. It’s situated in the middle of the city, hidden by apartment blocks; you can’t guess its size from outside. If you’re sitting inside, the grandeur of Camp Nou suddenly overwhelms you.

Oval and gigantic, it’s more like the Colosseum than a football arena. The terraces rise so high that they merge with the sky. When a hundred thousand fans are there they look down on a spectacle of human fragility. The footballers look so small and vulnerable far below. If you sit alone in the empty stadium, the sound of silence brings to life all the battles you never saw but which you can suddenly imagine very clearly – Kubala on the wing, Zubizarreta in the air, Goikoetxea on the ground, in a black fury, having been laid low by a foul by the angel Schuster, to the roaring approval of the hundred thousand, their fists in the air.

In the world of football, Camp Nou is the stronghold of all that is beautiful, good and true. The rest of the world had declared the
juego bonito
– the beautiful game – as finished once and for all after Brazil’s heart-breaking failure in the 1982 World Cup; realpolitik football now predominated, sticking to compact defensive formations before switching to attack in a flash. Only in Barcelona did they refuse to admit that reality. Fundamentalist devotees of grace, they bravely went on the attack with an intoxicating short-passing game.

People have their theories about why Barça is so uncompromisingly committed to beauty. Because their eternal rival,
Real
Madrid, always won more games, they say, so Barça sought consolation in saying: yes, but our game is more beautiful! Or because the Catalans want to make the point that they are different and independent. The truth is more banal: FC Barcelona had their first great success with the perpetuum mobile of a passing game. In 1992 the club won the Champions League for the first time under Johan Cruyff, and from that point on they became devout followers of the beautiful way.

The reality in 2002 was less grand. Luis Figo, who personified Barça, who dribbled to a melody, had deserted to Real two years earlier, as the most expensive footballer in the world. The trauma lingered. President Joan Gaspart, a man of frantic gestures and pounding heart, tried to inspire the club into action. A neurotic environment wasn’t particularly helpful.

But the myth of Barça outshone the reality.

On 28 May, Jörg Neblung left Anton Parera’s office with the feeling that he wouldn’t be able to keep his joy to himself for long. It was too big for that. Barça wanted to sign Robert Enke.

They might not have heard anything from Barça for weeks, but the club had been making conscientious enquiries about Robert. Barça’s goalkeeping coach Frans Hoek dissected his game on video. ‘He had incredible reflexes,’ says Hoek, ‘and that was odd, because at the same time he wasn’t your typical muscle-bound German goalkeeper type like Kahn, Köpke or Schumacher, who basically only plays on the goal-line. If he’d been like that he would have been out of the question as far as Barça was concerned. Here the goalkeeper has to be able to join in; he has to act, not only react.’ Just to be on the safe side, Hoek rang an acquaintance who knew about Portuguese football. ‘I had a word with José Mourinho.’ As the coach at FC Porto Mourinho still hoped to sign Enke himself, but he praised the keeper with such honesty in conversation with Hoek that Barça decided to whip Enke away without delay.

Parera had immediately agreed Robert’s salary with Jörg. The
chief
executive would have to take a look at the contract – a formality. He was in Madrid right now, but he was supposed to be back in the office the following day. ‘So you could come to Barcelona on Thursday and sign the contract,’ Jörg said to Robert on the phone.

‘I don’t actually want to go to Barcelona,’ said Teresa.

Her voice was serious. It still is today, when she talks about this part of her life.

‘We’d just managed to learn Portuguese in three years, and I was horrified by the idea of going to another country and starting all over again when, with the offer from Porto, we could have stayed in Portugal, or perhaps even gone back to Germany.’

‘Dear Teresa, please forgive me, but I’ve got to contradict you there,’ said Jörg. ‘If Barça calls, you run to get there.’

The next day he had another phone conversation with Parera. The contract had been set up. It would be best if Robert came in the following day to sign.

‘Enke joins Barça’ reported
A Bola
in Lisbon, and the news spread quickly.

A Swiss private bank called Jörg. They would pay Robert and him a lump sum of six million euros. In return, the player and his agent would hand over all rights, the salary, signing on fee and commissions from Barça would go to the bank. ‘Think about it: you and the player have six million guaranteed and don’t have to worry about any details of the contract. We’ll take over negotiations with Barça.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jörg, thinking: mostly because it’ll be a good story later on.

The president of Espanyol, Daniel Sánchez Llibre, who had bought Jörg his plane tickets to Barcelona but never got a chance to negotiate with him, wasn’t pleased. ‘I’m fed up with this. We do good work here. Our sporting director discovered Enke two months ago, and then along comes this other club and copies our idea. I feel as if I’ve been taken for a ride by Enke’s representatives.’

Teresa and Robert landed in Barcelona. As if they were awaiting a national delegation, waving from grand flagpoles
outside
Barça’s office were the flags of the club, the city and the country – Catalonia, not Spain. In Parera’s outer office Jörg hesitated. The middlemen weren’t there. They were welcomed not by Gaby Schuster but by a dark-haired young man who was careful only to shave every three days. She had sent her assistant Wim Vogel. José Veiga, the second middleman, rang Jörg’s mobile from a noisy room and said he’d got stuck at Rome airport, he was really sorry. Normally middlemen appear punctually at contract-signings, because that’s when the money gets divided.

Barça’s managing director turned up, and Parera asked them in. Teresa stayed in the outer office. When Parera’s office door opened again, she tried in vain to make eye-contact with Robert. He was staring at the floor. She looked at Jörg. He shook his head.

In the contract, net had suddenly turned to gross.

Jörg had stared for a long time at the figures in front of them, and all of a sudden he understood why Gaby Schuster and Veiga weren’t present. They would already have guessed that these negotiations wouldn’t be concluded in a single morning, without an attempt by the club to bring down the salary.

‘That isn’t the salary we agreed the day before yesterday,’ said Jörg. ‘That’s illegitimate!’

Parera smiled benignly.

Jörg looked at Robert and knew what he was thinking.

They flew back to Germany the same evening.

‘Enke transfer off’ wrote
A Bola
.

‘Barça wants Fabián Carini of Juventus as its new goalkeeper’ reported
Tuttosport
.

‘Are Barça doing to Enke what they did to Köpke?’ asked
Bild
.

Andreas Köpke, Germany’s goalkeeper in the nineties, still has a contract from Barça ready for signing among the files in his house in Nuremberg. When he was about to sign it in 1996, Barça suddenly signed the Portuguese number one Vitor Baía.

On the flight back, Robert and Teresa barely spoke a word.

Two days after the snub at Camp Nou, Robert consoled himself with the thought that there were goalkeepers in much worse
situations
than his. Back in Bad Windsheim with Teresa’s parents, he watched the desperate exploits of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Al-Deayea on television who conceded eight goals to Germany. The World Cup in Japan and South Korea had started.

He wanted to be at the next World Cup, in Germany in 2006. But at the moment he didn’t even know who he’d be playing for come the start of the 2002–03 season. He was nervous, not angry. If Barça played with you, you stayed quiet and hoped things would somehow work out.

Jörg phoned Anton Parera. They were still interested in Robert Enke. They would have to talk to each other again.

Barça wanted to take Carini on loan for the coming season, Juventus said.

Call the coach, Jörg said to Robert.

When the contract negotiations had been under way, they had asked Parera for Louis van Gaal’s mobile phone number. The Dutch coach had been taken on by Barça a few weeks earlier and Robert wanted to know whether van Gaal saw him as first-choice goalkeeper or as a substitute. Now the phone-call had assumed a new urgency. Could van Gaal say whether Barça were still taking him seriously?

The coach was on holiday in Aruba. ‘Yes, very clever of you to call, Mr Enke, that’s good. Because I’m the one who decides who plays for Barça.’

He was just phoning to find out what part he would play in his plans.

‘I’m not the one who’s going to sign you up. The sporting director wants you. I don’t even know you. Each of the three goalkeepers in pre-season gets the same chance to make it as number one, even you, if you sign.’

When he had hung up, Robert told Jörg that it had been a good conversation. Van Gaal seemed at least to accept his obligations, and would treat him fairly.

Years later, when Robert told me about this telephone conversation, he stressed that van Gaal had barked at him straight away: ‘I don’t even know you.’

Four days after breaking off contractual discussions, Robert was on his way back to Barcelona. He wore jeans and a favourite old torn greyish-blue pullover, the sort of clothes you wear when you don’t think you’ll be seeing anybody in particular. When he and Teresa landed at seven o’clock, Jörg was waiting for them. They immediately learned a bit about Spanish habits. Seven o’clock is still the afternoon in Spain. They were still working in the Camp Nou office.

Jörg wanted to be prepared for fresh disappointments. He had a contract with him. From FC Porto. He had had the document, already signed by president Pinto da Costa, faxed to him. If Barça wanted to go on playing their little game, Robert would sign for Porto while he was still in Barcelona.

Jörg went alone to Camp Nou. ‘My heart was pounding,’ he says. Teresa and Robert were to wait in the hotel on Avenida Diagonal until the salary they had originally been promised appeared in the contract; or until Jörg came back empty-handed.

Robert never drank much alcohol, but in their hotel room he and Teresa opened the Cava from the minibar. Then the beer. On television they were showing, over and over again, the 1999 World Footballer of the Year Rivaldo throwing his hands over his face and falling to the ground, screaming. The Turkish player Hakan Ünsal had just hit him in the thigh with the ball, but the referee fell for Rivaldo’s melodrama and showed the Turkish player the red card. It was the highlight of that day’s play in the World Cup.

Nine o’clock came and went, and ten o’clock. Still nothing was moving apart from Rivaldo.

When his phone eventually rang, after eleven, Robert knew who it would be.

‘You can come now,’ Jorg said.

In 103 years only two German footballers had been signed by FC Barcelona, Bernd Schuster and now Robert Enke. It was after midnight and he was at Camp Nou surrounded by radio reporters broadcasting the new goalkeeper’s words
live
. He spoke in Portuguese. On Spanish sports radio, where eccentricity is the order of the day, no one minded much. From midnight, a time when they should really be sleeping or doing something else, millions of Spaniards listen to sports broadcasts on the radio. Footballers are expected to take calls for interviews even at that time of night. On Cadena Ser, the most popular channel, the presenters also like to sing the commercials themselves.

Robert was properly introduced in Spain the following day – by Porto’s coach José Mourinho. ‘Robert’s a safe bet for Barça. We wanted him too, but then Barça joined the running,’ he wrote in a piece for the Catalan sports newspaper
El Mundo Deportivo
. ‘Robert’s a great choice, both as a keeper and as a human being.’ Since many people in Barcelona drew their image of Germans exclusively from Bernd Schuster, he added, ‘Robert isn’t your typical German, introverted and a bit ponderous – quite the contrary.’

Robert still had a good month of holiday ahead of him before the adventure with Barça began. He couldn’t wait. When he visited Marco Villa, who was now playing for 1 FC Nuremberg, he and his friend went to the club’s training-ground.