Vieira: My Autobiography by Patrick Vieira with Debbie Beckerman
(Orion, £18.99)
Click here to buy Patrick Viera's autobiography from amazon.co.uk
Vieira /Ohohohoh /He comes from Senegal /He plays for Arsenal /Vieira /Ohohohoh
Sung by Arsenal supporters to the tune of Volare, this became one of the most famous of English football chants. A star at the club from 1996 until 2005, Vieira did come from Senegal before emigrating to France as a child. But his father, whom he never knew, was from Gabon, while his mother came from the Cape Verde islands. His book confirms that soccer beats banking as the world's most globalised industry.
The immigrants' sons who populate the French soccer team tend to be sentimental about their roots. Vieira is no exception: when he loses with France to Senegal at the 2002 world cup, he admits to "slightly mixed feelings." Yet he was so nervous about visiting his native land that he put off his return for 20 years. "I dreaded the thought that I might disappoint those people who had waited all this time for me," he writes. He felt the need to bring something back with him, and so, when he finally flew "home" in 2003, it was with a project to open a football academy in Senegal.
He appears to have worried about being too rich to go back home—a common fear among footballers. In Dakar he is taken to his old home where former neighbours tell him stories of their times together. He remembers nothing. "I was embarrassed, ill at ease," he admits. He concludes that having lived so intensely in football, he has little mental space for other memories.
Vieira was seven when his family emigrated to France. At first they lived in the Parisian suburb of Trappes, and later in Dreux, a town 60 miles outside Paris. The child Vieira, his mother testifies in the book, "was constantly kicking a football about." This sounds like a cliché. In fact it helps explain why ethnic minorities—half the current Dutch team, most of the French team—dominate Euro-pean football. Raised in small apartments, with few means of entertainment, and little nagging from parents to do their homework, these kids spent hours each day playing football outside. That is why they became better footballers than the white middle classes. It wasn't because they saw sport as an escape from poverty, or because it's "in their blood." If genius is the propensity to practise ceaselessly, they had it.
I have never seen a better tackler than Vieira. One long leg will suddenly dart out, while the other moves to block his opponent's escape route. He also possesses impeccable ball control, and can take in much of the pitch in a glance. He knows how good he is. But in this book he tells us disappointingly little about football itself: how you tackle, how you change the pace of a match. Instead there are accounts of long-dead matches and complaints about ancient penalty decisions. In this it is an authentic Premiership document.
Vieira was only 19 and already captain of Cannes when, in 1995, he was bundled into a helicopter and flown to AC Milan's club headquarters to sign a contract on the spot. He had no idea what the sums in Italian lire meant—not very much, it turned out—but signed anyway. His angry agent quickly negotiated a new contract, for about £300,000 a year, or four times as much as he was getting at Cannes. At Milan, Vieira rarely played. Watching the team from the stands, he got to know the Alsatian Frenchman Arsène Wenger, who was a regular spectator despite coaching in Japan at the time. When Wenger joined Arsenal, he persuaded Vieira to be his first signing. In fact, the player arrived weeks before the manager did, and was initially deposited in the reserves.
Vieira's debut for Arsenal in 1996 is now a club legend. Coming on as a substitute against Sheffield Wednesday, he instantly conquered the midfield and turned a 0-1 deficit into a 4-1 victory. It proved a microcosm of the next nine years. Off the field, he was initially more timid. When I met him in 1997, he mumbled inaudibly in French with his head down, and could say nothing in English. A year later, still only 21, he won the double with Arsenal and the world cup with France. Being world champion does wonders for the confidence. It helped to turn Vieira into a big man with firm views of people in football. He finds Marcel Desailly self-absorbed and Tony Adams jealous, and he despises Ruud van Nistelrooy.
After the world cup triumph, the French team was awarded the Légion d'Honneur. The ultimate badge of French acceptance thrilled Vieira's grandfather, a Senegalese who had fought in the French army. When Vieira was later named captain of France, his mother and grandfather "were the two happiest people on earth."
Vieira himself never found his origins a disadvantage. Apart from one or two racist incidents in matches abroad, he says he has "never suffered as a result of my skin colour." His London companions were black and white Frenchmen, but the two former teammates with whom he stays in regular touch are David Seaman and Martin Keown, both white Englishmen.
There is little discrimination in top-class football (youth football is another matter) because talent is so obvious to both insiders and spectators. Vieira also found London remarkably colour-blind. "When I first arrived," he writes, "I was impressed when watching television that there were people of all colours and races on it—that doesn't happen in France or Italy."
He settled in Hampstead, home of the intelligentsia. "I was always hanging out with my teammates at our favourite café in the middle of Hampstead," he writes in a curious echo of bygone philosophers and comedians, "surrounded by shoppers, and no one ever bothered us."
Wenger has always been wary of swamping Arsenal's traditions with foreignness. Before naming Vieira captain, he consulted his assistant Pat Rice, who had spent decades at Arsenal. Rice approved. Vieira, as a battler, was a traditional Arsenal player. His passport was irrelevant. Arsenal fans are as fond of their team now that it contains ten foreigners as they were when it was all hard-drinking Brits and Irishmen.
French football supporters tend to be less cosmopolitan. Long before the banlieues exploded in the riots of last November, it was clear that the multicoloured "black-blanc-beur" national team had failed to integrate France. Each year the country's National Consultative Committee on Human Rights surveys French racist attitudes. In 1999 and 2000, the survey found increased racism despite the team's triumphs at the world cup of 1998 and at Euro 2000, and as many as 36 per cent thought that there were "too many players of foreign origin in the French football team."
When Real Madrid attempted to woo Vieira in 2004, it was his off-the-field life in London that persuaded him to stay as much as anything to do with football or money. Since then, Roman Abramovich's cash has made Chelsea possibly the world's best football team. Last summer Vieira did resume his journey, when Arsenal let him return to Italy to join Juventus. Vieira and most fans believe Wenger made the wrong decision.
