Soccernomics (43 page)

2005–2006: EVEN AUSTRALIA

In this new climate, the best continental European coaches could pick their posts. Hiddink received many offers to take teams to the World Cup of 2006, but he chose the most marginal country of all: Australia.

In 1974, while Hiddink was still absorbing total soccer in the Back Corner, Australia had qualified for its first World Cup as Asia’s sole representatives. The Socceroos of the day were part-timers, and some had to give up their jobs to go to Germany. The German press was particularly interested in the milkman-cum-defender Manfred Schaefer, who had been born in Hitler’s Reich in 1943 and emigrated to Australia as a child refugee after the war. At one point in the tournament West Germany’s striker Gerd Müller asked him if he really was an amateur. Well, Schaefer proudly replied, he had earned forty-six hundred dollars by qualifying for the World Cup. “That’s what I earn a week,”

said Müller.

The Australians achieved one tie in three matches at the World Cup. “However,” writes Matthew Hall in his excellent book about 302

Australian soccer,
The Away Game
, “their thongs, super-tight Aussie Rules–style shorts and marsupial mascots endeared them to the German public.”

In the next thirty years, soccer sank so low in Australia that the country’s soccer federation was sometimes reduced to filming its own matches and giving them to TV channels for free. Australian club soccer was punctuated by weird vendettas between Balkan ethnic groups.

Only in 1997, during the new wave of globalization, were the Socceroos of 1974 publicly honored in their own country.

Then, in 2005, Hiddink landed with a mission to teach European soccer. First, he gathered the Australian team in a training camp in his native Back Corner. His first impression: “What a bunch of vagabonds.

Everyone came in wearing a cap, or flip-flops. One had on long trousers, another shorts, and another Bermuda shorts. I said, ‘What is this?’ ‘Well, that’s how we live.’ ‘Hello, but you probably play like that, too.’”

Hiddink spent Australia’s first training session in the Back Corner watching his new charges fly into each other like Kamikaze pilots. “You don’t have to chase these guys up,” he remarked. After a half hour he stopped the game. When the players’ cries of “Come on, Emmo!”

“Hold the ball, Johnno!” “Let’s go!” and the streams of “Fucking” had finally faded, Hiddink asked them to shout only when a teammate was in trouble and needed coaching. That would improve everyone’s vision of play, he said. The game resumed in near silence. It was Australia’s first baby step toward continental European soccer.

Just as he had with the Koreans, Hiddink was turning the Australians into Dutch soccer players. That meant giving them the intellectual discipline needed for the World Cup. The Australian way was to train hard, play hard, but then relax with late-night beers in the hotel bar. Hiddink wanted the players thinking on their own about their jobs. Working hard wasn’t enough. Since the Australians already had “commitment” and
passie
, Hiddink was teaching them to think like Dutchmen. The Socceroos tended to run to wherever the ball was. Hiddink forbade them from entering certain zones. In core C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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European soccer, doing the right things is always better than doing a lot of things.

He had noticed that at the Confederations Cup of 2005, shortly before he took over, where the Socceroos had lost all their three games and conceded ten goals, all four Australian defenders would often stay back to mark a single forward. That left them short elsewhere on the field. No semiprofessional Dutch team would be so naive.

Hiddink was surprised that the Australians were so willing to listen to him. They understood that they had a chance to learn the European style from the man himself. Hiddink had always excelled in dealing with difficult characters: Romario, Edgar Davids, or the Korean Ahn Jung-Hwan. He knew just how to touch them. But the Australians, he admitted, were “zero difficult.”

Except perhaps Mark Viduka, Australia’s best but not its most committed player. Hiddink recalled later, “He came in with, ‘Oh, I’d like to go to a World Cup, but it’s going to be difficult. We’ve never made it, and I’m not fit.’” Hiddink sent the Socceroos’ physiotherapist to work with Viduka at his club, Middlesbrough. This didn’t merely get the player fit. It made him feel wanted. Hiddink also made Viduka his captain, to make sure he would be inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in.

It was striking how quickly the Socceroos learned core European soccer. Once again, “culture” seemed to be no obstacle. In November 2005, only a couple of months after Hiddink had started part-time work with them (he was also coaching PSV at the other end of the globe), they beat Uruguay in a playoff to qualify for the World Cup.

Suddenly, the
Melbourne Herald Sun
found itself wondering whether the

“Aussie Rules” version of football could survive as the dominant sport in Australia’s southern states. Already more Australian children played soccer than Aussie Rules and both rugby codes combined.

The newspaper’s worries appeared justified when a few months later, just before the World Cup of 2006, an Australia-Greece friendly drew ninety-five thousand people to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In no city in Europe or Latin America could such a game have drawn such a 304

crowd. Australia had also just become approximately the last country on earth to acquire a national professional soccer league.

And then Hiddink led the Socceroos to the second round of the World Cup of 2006. Great crowds of Australians set their alarm clocks to watch at unearthly hours. What had happened on Uist more than a century before was now threatening to happen in Oz. A century from now, Aussie Rules might exist only at subsidized folklore festivals.

2006–2009: HIDDINK TO GHIDDINK

IN A MOSCOW HOTEL SUITE

After Australia, Hiddink could have had almost any job in soccer. In an ideal world, he would have liked to manage England. Of all the world’s marginal soccer countries, England had the most potential because it was rich and large and had recently rejoined the network of core countries.

Hiddink also relished the specific challenges of managing England.

He had the psychological expertise to inspire tired multimillionaires.

He loved dealing with difficult characters; Wayne Rooney would be a cinch for him. And he would have improved the thinking of a team that had everything but intellect. As a lover of the bohemian life, he would have been happy in London, and his girlfriend would have been an hour from her beloved Amsterdam. But Hiddink couldn’t bear the thought of British tabloids crawling over his family, and so he decided to spread his continental European know-how to Russia instead.

Admittedly, Russia’s population was collapsing rather than growing, as Russian men drank themselves to death. However, when he took the job, the country’s economy was moving the right way. In the decade from 1998, Russian income per capita nearly doubled. The country’s new oil money bought Hiddink’s brain.

As in Korea, Hiddink’s job was to force his players to be free. Traditionally, Russian soccer players had the “I only work here” demeanor of
Homo sovieticus
. They feared their coaches as much as they feared the mafiosi who stole their jeeps. They shoved safe sideways passes into C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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each other’s feet, because that way nobody could ever shout at them.

There was
zaorganizovannost,
overorganization.

Ghiddink, as the Russians call him, joked with his players, relaxed them. As a “punishment” in training, a player might have a ball kicked at his backside, while the rest of the squad stood around laughing. The times helped: this generation of Russian players could not remember the USSR. Armed with iPhones and SUVs, they had left the periphery and joined the global mainstream.

As he had in Korea, Hiddink practically ordered his players to think for themselves, to give riskier passes, to move into new positions without his telling them to. Marc Bennetts, author of
Football Dynamo:
Modern Russia and the People’s Game
, said, “It’s as if he’s beaten the Marxism-Leninism out of them.” At Euro 2008, Russia’s hammering of Ghiddink’s native Holland was the ultimate triumph of a marginal country over a core one. It also provided the almost unprecedented sight of Russian soccer players having fun. They swapped positions and dribbled, knowing that if they lost the ball no one would scream at them.

After the game, their best player, Andrei Arshavin, muttered something about “a wise Dutch coach” and cried.

Russia lost in the semis of Euro 2008 to another former marginal country, Spain. By then, after twenty-two years in the European Union, Spain was so networked that it didn’t even need a foreign coach to win the Euro.

Spain, Russia, and Turkey, another semifinalist at Euro 2008, were all beneficiaries of the spread of soccer know-how to marginal countries. When all countries have about the same soccer information, and converging incomes, the countries with the most inhabitants usually win. Three of the four semifinalists at Euro 2008 (Russia, Germany, and Turkey) had the largest populations in Europe. This was bad news for small core countries like Holland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. Their populations and economies are almost static, and they have exported their soccer knowledge. What made them unique between 1970 and 2000 was their networks. Now that the networks have ex-panded to include much of the world, they are probably doomed.

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2009–? THE PERIPHERY WINS THE WORLD CUP

Until the late 1990s the cliché in soccer was that an African country would “soon” win the World Cup. Everyone said it, from England’s manager Walter Winterbottom to Pelé. But it turned out not to be true, mostly because although African populations were growing, their incomes remained too low to import much good soccer experience. A better tip for future World Cups might be Iraq. If the country remains halfway stable, it’s likely to do even better than it did in its years of madness. However, the best bets for the future are probably Japan, the US, or China: the three largest economies on earth, which can afford coaches like Hiddink, where potential soccer players have enough to eat and don’t get terrible diseases. There are already omens of their rise: the US has the most young soccer players of any country, and has reached a World Cup quarter-final; Japan says it aims to host the World Cup again by 2050 and win it; China topped the medals table at the last Olympics. These countries will get to the top sooner than the Africans.

In the new world, distance no longer separates a country from the best soccer. Only poverty does.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dozens of people helped make this book possible. We received great help from Peter Allden, Dave Berri, Joe Boyle, Dennis Coates, Rod Fort, Bernd Frick, Brian Goff, Jahn Hakes, Pauline Harris, Brad Humphreys, Paul Husbands, Kai Konrad, Dan Kuper, Markus Kurscheidt, Mike Leeds, Wolfgang Maennig, John McMillan, Roger Noll, Andrew Oswald, Holger Preuss, Skip Sauer, and Lia Na’ama ten Brink for all their help.

We got ideas and information from Kevin Alavy, Rob Baade, Vendeline von Bredow, Carl Bromley, Tunde Buraimo, Pamela Druckerman, Russell Gerrard, Matti Goksøyr, Adam Kuper, Hannah Kuper, Kaz Mochlinski, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Ian Preston, Andreas Selliaas, and Paul in ‘t Hout; from Benjamin Cohen, Jonathan Hill, Mark O’Keefe, and Alex Phillips at UEFA; and from David O’Connor and Andrew Walsh at Sport+Markt.

The following were fantastic collaborators: Kevin Alavy, Wladimir Andreff, Giles Atkinson, Tunde Buraimo, Luigi Buzzacchi, Filippo dell’Osso, David Forrest, Pedro Garcia-del-Barrio, Steve Hall, David Harbord, Takeo Hirata, Tom Hoehn, Georgios Kavetsos, Stefan Késenne, Tim Kuypers, Umberto Lago, Stephanie Leach, Neil Longley, Susana Mourato, Susanne Parlasca, Ian Preston, Steve Ross, Rob Simmons, Ron Smith, Tommaso Valletti, and Andy Zimbalist.

Gordon Wise was a hardworking and imaginative agent. Carl Bromley thought from the start that this book should appear in the US, and he, San-dra Beris, and Annette Wenda helped make the American edition much better than it could have been without them.

We also want to thank all the interviewees quoted in the text.

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———.
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310

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