Soccernomics (42 page)

But by 1990 the so-called third wave of globalization was under way.

Increased world trade, cable television, and finally the Internet brought soccer to new territories. Roberto Fontanarrosa, the late Argentine car-toonist, novelist, and soccer nut, said, “If TV were only an invention to broadcast soccer, it would be justified.”

Suddenly, the Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and even some Indians could see soccer’s magic. They saw it even more clearly than the people of Uist had a century before. Soccer by now had the prestige of being the world’s biggest sport, and everyone wanted a piece of its fans’ pas-C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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sion. Soccer is often mocked for its low scores, but precisely because goals are so scarce, the release of joy is greater than in other sports.

When the former goalkeeper Osama bin Laden visited London in 1994, he watched four Arsenal matches, bought souvenirs for his sons in the club shop, and remarked that he had never seen as much passion as among soccer supporters.

Just then soccer was capturing the last holdouts. On May 15, 1993, Japan’s J-League kicked off. The next year China acquired a national professional league, and in 1996 the US and India followed. The new marginal countries began to hire European coaches who could quickly teach them the latest in soccer.

By the turn of the millennium, Hiddink was an obvious candidate for export. He had won the European Cup with PSV Eindhoven, had managed clubs in Turkey and Spain, and had taken Holland to the World Cup semifinal in 1998. After he passed fifty, he felt his ambition begin to wane. Never a workaholic to start with, the boy from the Back Corner had by now proven himself. He had met with triumph and disaster and treated those two impostors just the same. He had gone from villager to cosmopolitan. He had fallen in love with golf. Soccer was becoming just a hobby.

He took a break and in 2001 popped up in his first missionary posting, as manager of South Korea. As part of the globalization of soccer, the country was due to cohost the 2002 World Cup with Japan. South Korea had played in several World Cups before, but had never won a single match, and in 1998 had lost 5–0 to Hiddink’s Holland.

When Hiddink landed in Seoul, history was beginning to work in his favor. Like many emerging nations, the South Koreans were getting bigger. Thanks to increased wealth, the average height of a South Korean man had risen from five foot four in the 1930s to about five foot eight by 2002. That meant a bigger pool of men with the physique required to play international soccer. In an interview during a Korean training camp in the Back Corner, a year before the World Cup, Hiddink told us he’d caught Koreans using their smallness as an excuse in soccer. He added,

“But I won’t allow that. I won’t let them say beforehand, ‘They’re a bit 296

bigger and broader; we’re small and sad.’ And gradually, I notice that some of our players are big, too, and know how to look after themselves.”

The “height effect” was also quietly lifting many other emerging soccer countries, from China to Turkey.

But the Koreans had other problems. The Dutch psychological quirk had been squabbling. The Korean disease, as Hiddink soon discovered, was hierarchy. In Korean soccer, the older the player, the higher his status. A thirty-one-year-old veteran international was so respected he could coast. At meals, the group of older players would sit down at the table first, and the youngest last.

Whereas Dutch players talked too much, Koreans were practically mute. “
Slavishness
is a big word,” Hiddink said that day in the Back Corner, “but they do have something like: if the commander says it, we’ll follow it blindly. They are used to thinking, ‘I’m a soldier. I’ll do what’s asked of me.’ And you have to go a step further if you want to make a team really mature. You need people who can and will take the team in their hands.” Hiddink wanted autonomous, thinking “Dutch,”

players: a center half who at a certain point in the game sees he should push into midfield, a striker who drops back a few yards. He was teaching the Koreans the Dutch variant of the continental European style.

Hiddink said of his players: “Commitment is not their problem. Almost too much. But if your commitment is too high, you often lose the strategic overview.”

Hiddink had started out in Korea by kicking a couple of the older players out of his squad. He made a young man captain. He asked his players to make their own decisions on the field. “That makes them a bit freer, easier,” he said. Shortly before the World Cup, he brought back the jilted older players, who by then were pretty motivated.

However, the educational process in Korea was always two-way.

During his eighteen months in the country, Hiddink learned a few things himself. Already during his stints in Turkey and Spain, he had begun freeing himself from the national superiority complex that pervades Dutch soccer: the belief that the Dutch way is the only way. In Holland, soccer is a thinking man’s game. When the Dutch talk about C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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it, the concepts to which they always return are
techniek
and
tactiek
.

Passie
, or passion, was a quality they associated with unsophisticated soccer players from other countries. In Korea, Hiddink learned that it was actually pretty important. Even when speaking Dutch he tends to describe this quality with the English word
commitment
, perhaps because there is no obvious Dutch equivalent.

He had also learned what every successful missionary knows: respect the native way of life, or at least pretend to, because otherwise the natives won’t listen to you. That afternoon in the Back Corner he said, “I don’t go to work on the culture of the country. I just leave it; I respect it. I only do something about the conditions that they need to perform on the pitch. And of course there are a couple of things off the field that do influence that.”

At the 2002 World Cup the Koreans played with a fervor rarely seen in soccer. Helped by bizarre refereeing decisions, the country from soccer’s periphery reached the semifinal.

Korea had craved global recognition, and Hiddink achieved it. Korean cities planned statues in his honor, and a caricature of his face appeared on Korean stamps. Hiddink’s autobiography appeared in a Korean print run of a half million, despite having to compete with an estimated sixteen Hiddink biographies. In the Back Corner, Korean tour buses made pilgrimages to the Hiddink ancestral home. Soon after the World Cup, the man himself dropped by to visit his octogenarian parents. “Well, it wasn’t bad,” admitted his father. “Coffee?”

2002–2004: THE PERIPHERY

TAKES OVER INTERNATIONAL SOCCER

During that World Cup of 2002, other peripheral soccer countries were emerging, too. Japan reached the second round, the US got to the quarters, and Korea’s conqueror in the match for third place was Turkey, which hadn’t even played in a World Cup since 1954.

We said at the start of this book that a country’s success in soccer correlates strongly with three variables: its population, its income per 298

capita, and its experience in soccer. For Turkey as for many other emerging countries, all three variables were improving fast.

We have seen that from 1980 through 2001, Turkey was the second-worst underperformer in European soccer. It scored a full goal per game fewer than it should have done given its vast population, decent experience in international soccer, and admittedly low incomes.

But just as the period we measured was ending, the Turks were beginning their rise. It is no coincidence that the country went from being a pathetic soccer team to one of the best in Europe at the same time as it grew from a midsize European state into the continent’s third-most-populous nation. Turkey had 19 million inhabitants in 1945, double that by 1973, and about 72 million by 2008. In Europe, only Russia and Germany have more. While Turkey’s population grows, most European countries are losing people. Add several million Turks in the diaspora, and the youth of most Turks, and the country starts to rival even Germany in its soccer potential. And Turkey is just one of many developing countries whose population is fast outstripping that of rich countries.

At the same time Turkey’s economy was booming, and it was using some of the new money to import soccer knowledge. In that early chapter, we had measured a country’s soccer experience by how many matches its national team had played. However, there is a shortcut to gaining experience: import it. This process began for Turkey in June 1984, when West Germany got knocked out of the European championship. The Germans sacked their coach, Jupp Derwall. That year he joined Galatasaray and began to import the continental European style of soccer into Turkey.

Derwall and other German coaches (as well as the Englishman Gordon Milne at Besiktas) got Turkish players actually working. They also introduced the novel idea of training on grass. Turkish television began showing foreign matches, which introduced some Turkish viewers to the concept of the pass.

Before Derwall’s arrival, the average Turkish player had been a tiny, selfish dribbler. Derwall shipped German-born Turks into Galatasaray.

The German Turks were bigger than Turkish Turks thanks to a better C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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diet, and they trained like Germans. Admittedly, soon after arrival in Istanbul they were exposed to the sultanesque harem lifestyle of many Turkish players and their game deteriorated, but it was a start. Diaspora Turks—mostly from Germany—have continued to give Turkey a fast track to European soccer know-how. No other national team in Europe includes as many players who grew up in other European countries.

In 1996, Turkey qualified for its first major tournament since 1954.

Though it didn’t score a goal or register a point at Euro ’96, it was judged to have done quite well. It has since reached two semis and a quarter-final at major tournaments.

In short, globalization saved Turkish soccer. Turks came to the realization that every marginal country needs: there is only one way to play good soccer—you combine Italian defending with German work ethic and Dutch passing into the European style. (“Industrial soccer,” some Turks sulkily call it.) In soccer, national styles don’t work. You have to have all the different elements. You cannot win international matches playing traditional Turkish soccer. You need to play continental European soccer.

Both Hiddink’s and Turkey’s experiences point to an important truth: in soccer, “culture” doesn’t matter much. Perhaps, as the former French president Giscard d’Estaing said when he drafted the European Union’s failed constitution, Turkey had “a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life,” but it didn’t stop the Turks in soccer.

Cultures are not eternal and unalterable. When they have an incentive to change—like the prospect of winning more soccer matches, or perhaps the prospect of getting richer—they can change.

Turkey was one of the first countries brave enough to jettison its traditional soccer culture. Most countries on the fringes of Europe had dysfunctional indigenous playing styles. The ones on the southern fringe—Greece, Turkey, Portugal—favored pointless dribbling, while the British and Scandinavians played kick-and-rush. Gradually, they came to accept that these styles didn’t work.

Nobody did better out of abandoning their roots and adopting continental European soccer than Turkey’s friends across the water, the 300

Greeks. The Greek national team had traditionally played terrible soccer in front of a couple of thousand spectators. During foreign trips, their camp followers—friends, journalists, and miscellaneous—would hang around the team hotel drinking espressos with players until the early morning. When Greece somehow made it to the World Cup of 1994, it ended up regretting it. At the team’s training sessions outside Boston, an outfield player would stand in the goal while the others blasted shots into the bushes. They spent most of the tournament traveling the East Coast to receptions with Greek Americans, though they did find time to be thrashed in three matches. In 2002, Greece gave up on the Greek style and imported a vast chunk of experience in the person of an aging German manager, Otto Rehhagel.

The Rhinelander was the prototypical postwar West German collectivist. He had grown up a short drive across the border from Hiddink, amid the ruins of postwar western Germany. An apprentice house-painter and bone-hard defender, Rehhagel was brought up on the “German virtues” of hard work and discipline. As a coach in Germany for decades, he aimed to sign only collectivist European-type players whose personality had been vetted by his wife over dinner in the Rehhagel home. Everywhere he tried to build an organization. Sacked as manager of Arminia Bielefeld, he sighed, “At least thanks to me there is now a toilet at the training ground.” On later visits to Bielefeld with other clubs, he always inquired about his toilet.

Rehhagel quickly rooted out Greece’s cult of the soloist, introduced core European soccer, and took the team to Euro 2004 in Portugal. There he went around saying things like, “Now that I am coaching Greece, I want to make one philosophical statement. Please write it down: man needs nothing more than other people.” Banal as this sounded, it must have resonated in postwar West Germany. Certainly, the Greek players, who pre-Rehhagel never seemed to have heard of collective spirit, had begun preaching the notion in many languages. “We was very good organized,” said Zisis Vryzas after Greece beat France in the quarter-finals.

Andreas Charisteas, the reserve at Werder Bremen who would become C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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highest scorer of Euro 2004, eulogized, “We have a German coach, he has a German mentality, and we play like a German team.” In fact, Greece had made the same journey as Turkey: from midget dribblers to boring European soccer thanks to German coaching.

Rehhagel himself called it “learning from European soccer.” Becoming “European”—code for becoming organized—is the aspiration of many marginal European countries, in soccer and outside. Just as these countries were joining the European Union, they were absorbing European soccer. The final of Euro 2004 pitted Greece against another recently marginal country. The Greeks beat the Portuguese 1–0 thanks to another header from Charisteas, who soon afterward would be a reserve again at Ajax. It turned out that with merely half-decent players, a good continental European coach, and time to prepare, almost any marginal country could do well.