by Alexander Osang
I grew up in East Berlin. After reunification, I no longer had a team. Now, once again, I do
Shortly before Germany played in the quarter-finals of the 2002 World Cup, Fritz Walter, former captain of the national team, died at home in Kaiserslautern. I heard the news in the Korean baseball hall of fame, on the island of Chefu, where the German team was holding its daily press conference. The director of the football federation took to the stage and said: "Germany's Ehrensportführer Fritz Walter is dead." He asked us to stand for a minute of silence. We stood up like spa guests going to pool aerobics. Through the open door I saw someone carefully stocking a refrigerator with Bitburger beer, Germany's World Cup sponsor.
"Ehrensportführer"—distinguished sports champion—echoed in my head. In 1954, Fritz Walter, leader of the team that invented the German soccer virtues, took the national side to its first World Cup, in Switzerland. In the final, Walter's West Germans came back from 2-0 down to beat the magical Hungarians, the best team in the world, 3-2, despite the fact that the Germans had already lost 8-3 to Hungary in the preliminary round. It was raining, the ground was sodden, but they never gave up. Walter's team overpowered the Hungarians just as they would go on to beat all the other teams who played beautiful soccer: England in '70, Holland in '74, France in '82—the German national team always rose again. Walter was responsible for its reputation as a tournament team, a team that was never beautiful, but always the best, and the most determined when the game depended on it. For the first time since the war, Walter gave a little self-confidence back to Germany. A famous photo shows him on the shoulders of his teammates, dark, wet hair falling in his face, exhausted but redeemed.
I didn't cry. Fritz Walter wasn't my Ehrensportführer. I stood in the Korean baseball federation pavilion hoping my mobile wouldn't ring. It was a long minute of silence. I was at the wrong funeral.
For me, the most important World Cup wasn't in 1954 but 1974. It was the first to be held on German soil, but this meant nothing to me. I was 12 years old and lived in East Germany—Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich lay on the other side of the wall, as inaccessible to me as Rio de Janeiro. But my country, the smaller Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), had qualified for the first and only time. This was my German team. We played against Chile, Australia and then, in Hamburg, the Federal Republic of Germany, the big Germany. It was the most important game of my life.
The GDR won 1-0 with a goal in the 78th minute by the Magdeburger forward Jürgen Sparwasser. I jumped around on the dark brown linoleum of my newly built East Berlin flat and screamed as I've never screamed again. I can still see the smoky living-room curtains, the black and white television on top of a thin steel stand in the corner, outside the still, East German world, my father away somewhere in it, and I see myself in a victory leap. It is a moment that captures my childhood.
I was born in East Berlin in 1962, a year after the wall was built. I was 27 when it fell in 1989. I became an adult in that small, narrow country, a man who always felt he was wearing the wrong shoes, an insecure man; a very German man. In the middle of this 27-year span, at its high point, came the East German goal. Of course, our swimmers, oarswomen and bobsled drivers won all the gold medals in the world, but no Berliner youth wants to become a bobsledder. I wanted to be a footballer, and the most famous German footballers lived on the other side of the wall.
At the age of ten I wrote postcards to two of them, Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller, whose fanmail addresses I found in a friend's well-thumbed West German magazine. Beckenbauer was the sweeper of the West German team, Müller its centre-forward. They played for Bayern Munich. I explained my situation behind the iron curtain, and asked for an autographed picture. Then, while I waited, I imagined how their reply would change my life. I owned a trading sticker of Müller in flight, legs scissoring the air, scoring against England in the 1970 quarter-final. I had a picture of Uwe Seeler trading his jersey with Gianni Rivera. And I had a photograph of the rock band Uriah Heep. With an autographed photo of Müller and Beckenbauer, I would have been a new man in East Germany. They never wrote back.
So begin lifelong enmities.
After that I found it hard not to notice certain things: when Bayern Munich came to Dresden or Magdeburg for a European Cup game, they brought their own cook, because they didn't trust ours. They laughed at us. They had the bigger country, the better cars, the better chewing-gum, the better trainers and, of course, better national team jerseys—the numbers on ours always looked as if they had been sewn on by hand. But on that summer evening in Hamburg in 1974, we beat them. I beat them.
It was a victory from which I have never recovered. Neither did the GDR football team. It dropped out in the next round and never qualified for an international tournament again. Later, even the goalscorer, Jürgen Sparwasser, fled to the west. The big Germany went on to become world champions for the second time that year, beating the Netherlands 2-1 in the final. The Dutch and the English—both regularly defeated by Germany—represented my interests in the tournaments of the 1980s and 1990s. The Netherlands was a small country and England was an island. My world was small and island-like, too.
With reunification there came an opportunity for change—but I couldn't let go of the past. I watched the 1990 World Cup semi-final, between Germany and England, on a big screen in the Berlin Lustgarten, with thousands of people. England's Paul Gascoigne cried, and I cried too when Germany won. I stood among rejoicing German fans, very alone. I couldn't watch the final against Argentina. I drove my 17-year-old Polski Fiat, a gift from my brother-in-law before he fled to the west, to a residential area in Berlin and parked there for 90 minutes. I sat in the stillness of the city and waited. When I heard the screams and the fireworks, I knew that it was over. Germany had won and I had lost again. Later I learned that the game had been decided by a penalty, taken by Andreas Brehme, a blond defender: a typical German goal. After winning the championship, Franz Beckenbauer, who had coached the team, predicted that a reunified Germany would be undefeated for years.
In 1999, I moved to New York to leave it all behind. I didn't have a football team any more—why not live in a country that didn't care about football? Things went well. I only encountered the game in the tiny tables at the back of the New York Times sports section, or sometimes, watching my son play in the local park, when another father made a friendly reference to the great German soccer tradition, and I'd nod, smiling. Some things you just can't explain.
In the summer of 2002, Der Spiegel sent me to Japan and Korea to cover the World Cup, and everything rose up in me again. It would be the second most important World Cup of my life.
Fritz Walter's German virtues carried the national team through the easy preliminary round. It advanced into the last eight with a 1-0 win over Paraguay; and in the quarter-final the players wore black armbands and defeated the US by the same score. The Americans were the better team and should have had a penalty. Everything happened like it always did. The teams who played beautiful soccer were tired or haughty: the Netherlands hadn't even managed to qualify for the tournament; Portugal, Italy and Spain lost to the pumped-up South Koreans; France to Senegal; Argentina to England; England to Brazil. But Germany were happy and effective throughout: the perfect tournament team.
After the quarter-final I met Franz Beckenbauer, the man who started my German soccer crisis. Though he had not responded to my autograph request 30 years before, Beckenbauer was personable, not the arrogant figure I'd come to expect. For three days we travelled together through Japan, a country as foreign to him as it was to me; but I found that he was at home everywhere, boarding the Japanese Shinkansen-Express as if it were a German intercity train. Though he'd lived in New York, he could still barely order a dish off an English menu, but he grasped things intuitively. It was this quality that had helped him secure the 2006 World Cup for Germany. As a football ambassador, he travelled the globe for two years, stood on hotel terraces in African cities whose names he could no longer remember, drinking wine, smoking cigars and feeling perfectly at home.
As both player and coach, Beckenbauer was a World Cup champion; now, as an organiser and diplomat, he has brought home the entire tournament. A sweeper, he has a light touch in sport and in life. One evening we stood together in a bar in Tokyo, drank beer and watched England play Nigeria. His comments were sporadic—"Sheringham is a blind man"—and I wrote them down. We were a strange pair. Because "Osang" sounded somehow Asian to him, he called me the "half-Chinese from the Spiegel," and I was flattered.
I never told him about the postcard. But I began to suspect that he'd never received it. Perhaps everything was a misunderstanding. Great enmities often begin with misunderstandings. (A year later, in Munich, I met Beckenbauer's teammate, Gerd Müller, the man who has scored more World Cup goals than anyone else in the world, and the other recipient of a postcard from East Germany. Müller was a small man in sweats and oversized glasses. He looked like a caretaker. The friend who introduced us took a picture in which I look like the champion.)
In the 2002 semi-final, Germany met South Korea in Seoul. The Koreans had exceeded all expectations, playing six unbelievably fast, dogged, inexhaustible matches, and transporting the entire country into a state of euphoria. Before the semi-final, the government had given an entire island in the Yellow sea to the team's Dutch coach, Guus Hiddink, as a thank-you gift. They were content just to be semi-finalists. But Germany wasn't. Germany wouldn't give up until everything was over. And in the 75th minute they scored. The game ended 1-0, of course.
I stood in the stadium, filled with 70,000 South Korean fans in t-shirts emblazoned with the word "Reds," feeling caught up in a cultural revolution. They were in good spirits, despite their loss. Strangely enough, I wasn't in bad spirits either. Like the Koreans, I had also conceded to German superiority. I'd been in Japan and Korea for three weeks, running to distant stadiums that emerged out of the haze of tea plantations, and sleeping on circular beds in hotel rooms. I was homesick. And the men down there on the turf in Seoul were the closest thing to my native country. My father in Berlin was a fan of the German team and so was my son in New York. On that humid summer night in Seoul, I made my peace with the national team.
I looked at the turf, at the exhausted men with their angular German faces. My defence fell apart. I didn't rejoice—I relaxed. I took the road home.
The German team met their first real opposition in the final, and they lost. Oliver Kahn, the German captain and goalie, the most perfect, grimmest player on the team, made the decisive error. It was a fitting end to a bizarre World Cup. I sat in the huge concrete bowl of Yokohama Stadium and groaned as Ronaldo approached with fast, strong steps and poked Kahn's fumble into the German goal. Brazil were the world champions, and the German players celebrated second place in a windowless Yokohama banquet hall, along with the chancellor, who had rushed over for the occasion.
Outside, the rainy season began.
It reminded me of the minute of silence for the Ehrensportführer. I felt that something was coming to an end. Germany's two most important politicians, Gerhard Schröder and Edmund Stoiber, were photographed with the German players. There was a cold buffet, a roast, potatoes and Bitburger beer. Oliver Kahn had a thick bandage on the hand that hadn't been able to hold on to the ball. The bandage signified that he had given everything. A German pop band named PUR stood on a stage and sang the national soccer song: "There's only one Rudi Völler." Coach Völler smiled bravely. As a player he had been a world champion, and now, as a coach, he was runner-up to the world champions. But he didn't look like a winner, he looked like a man of days past.
I left the party early and took a taxi back to Tokyo in the black, ceaseless rain. Fritz Walter was dead. The German virtues weren't enough anymore. I didn't know that Gerhard Schröder and Rudi Völler would step down, but I sensed it. Things wouldn't continue the way they had.
Before leaving I bought a silver-grey German jersey in a Tokyo sports shop, and brought it back to New York for my son. I bought the Italian jersey for myself. It just looked better.
Four years later, in Frankfurt, the new German national team jerseys were presented. They are red. We now have a new coach and a new chancellor too. The coach is Jürgen Klinsmann, the son of a baker from Swabia who broke out into the big wide world. The chancellor is Angela Merkel, the daughter of an east German pastor who broke out into the big wide world. Both have picked their fights with the old West German system and won. In Michael Ballack, Klinsmann has made an East German team captain. Merkel has defeated Helmut Kohl and Schröder, the big men of West German politics. Klinsmann has played in Italy, England and Monaco, and now lives in California, where he sometimes plays for a semi-pro team in Orange County. Merkel is a physicist, a cool protestant in the excitable man's world of career politicians. She speaks Russian. Both have broken the German defence.
Red jerseys, not bad.
Klinsmann lives in America like me. Angela Merkel comes from East Germany like me. Maybe, in the end, I really will win.
Alexander Osang is a journalist and writer. Translated from the German by Annie Falk. Reprinted from "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" (Time Warner), ed Matt Weiland
Ghana United
by Caryl Phillips
How do African teams blend international superstars with underpaid local players?
Two months later, Ghana qualified for its first appearance at a World Cup. A surprising weekend in early October saw the giants of African football, Nigeria, Cameroon and South Africa—all of whom were, to some extent, disorganised, casual and a little overconfident—fail to qualify, while relative minnows Togo, Ivory Coast, Angola and Ghana all secured their places for Germany 2006, along with Tunisia. Of these newcomers, Ghana has by far the most impressive pedigree. It has won the African Cup of Nations four times, triumphed twice in the world under-17 championships, and been runner-up twice at the world youth championships. But despite its proven ability, Ghana has never, until now, shown off its talent at the World Cup finals.
I first visited Ghana in 1990 during the Italy World Cup, and discovered a football-crazy nation. The whole country seemed to grind to a halt whenever near-neighbours Cameroon took to the field. I watched the Cameroon vs England quarter-final at the home of my head of department at the University of Ghana. Having grown up in England as a staunch football fan, I thought I possessed unimpeachable loyalties when it came to supporting "my" national team. However, within minutes of the kick-off I found myself swept up in the hysteria of African football. I wanted England to win, but I marvelled at the exuberance of the Cameroon-ians: the ostentatious displays of individual skill rising above the team effort, and the circus acrobatics when celebrating a goal.
Of all the African newcomers to the 2006 World Cup, Ghana has the finest grassroots infrastructure and commitment to the game. National investment in the sport remains high, the league system is highly organised, and sponsorship—both state and commercial—is generous. Spectators turn up in great numbers, and local rivalries abound. John Kufuor, the Ghanaian president, is a former chairman of the club side in the second city of Kumasi. Interest in the English game is strong in Ghana, but it cannot compete for interest with local rivalries. (By contrast, the situation in neighbouring Sierra Leone is much less healthy after the recent civil war. On a recent trip there, I was disturbed to see how quickly interest in the local game has been replaced by crowds of youths packed into bars at the weekend to watch English Premiership matches on satellite television.)
In the late 1980s, my club team—Leeds United—signed a Ghanaian player, Tony Yeboah. He was, at the time, one of the most feared strikers in Europe. Captain of the German team Eintracht Frankfurt, he immediately became a cult figure at Leeds. Nothing warmed my heart more than travelling to Ghana and seeing men and boys sporting Leeds shirts bearing the name "Yeboah" on the back. However, Tony Yeboah was not a man who was unsure of his value, and if he felt slighted he would let you know. His differences with the Leeds manager eventually led to his premature departure from the club, but at the national level there were also problems. Yeboah did not see eye to eye with the other outstanding Ghanaian star of the period, the France-based Abedi Ayew Pelé, who in the early 1990s was named African player of the year in three consecutive years. From different tribes, and possessing different temperaments, both men saw themselves as leaders of the national team, and during the 1990s their squabbling and in-fighting contributed to the almost chronic underachievement of what, on paper at least, should have been an internationally successful team.
At the start of the 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign, similar problems of temperament looked as though they might once again defeat the Black Stars. Sammy Kuffour, a Ghanaian defender with Roma in Italy's Serie A, and one of the team's handful of European-based players, decided that his own needs were more important than those of the national side. Ghanaian fans began to fear that another potentially successful campaign would be hijacked by disharmony and squabbling. In recent years, most African national teams have struggled to come to terms with how to blend their overseas-based elite players (with their huge salaries and often self-serving demands) with the more modestly rewarded local players. The key to resolving this has always been strong leadership from the manager backed up by the national governing body. In November 2004, the Ghanaian Football Association appointed a Serb, Ratomir Dujkovic, as coach of the national side, and his first task was to suspend the "superstar" Kuffour when the defender failed to turn up for training. He told him that if he had no desire to be a team player then he could stay in Rome. This no-nonsense approach did not please everybody, but the new manager was confident that the Black Stars could qualify for their first World Cup finals—as long as they trained, played and thought as a team. On Saturday 8th October, in their last World Cup qualifying match with the Cape Verde islands, Dujkovic was proved right: a 4-0 victory ensured that Ghana finished top of its group and therefore qualified for Germany 2006. Kuffour has since rejoined the squad and should be playing in Germany.
Two months earlier, as my plane began its descent into Accra's Kotoka airport, the player who had borrowed my newspaper leaned over to hand it back. "Do you think you'll qualify for Germany?" I asked him. He smiled, then laughed nervously. "If we stay together then we will qualify," he said. "If we stay together then we can achieve anything." I was sceptical. Michael Essien had stayed behind with Chelsea, and even as we spoke, the Ghanaian captain, Stephen Appiah, was travelling to Turkey, where he now plays for Fenerbahce following a $10m transfer from Juventus. Even more disturbing is the case of the young Fredua Koranteng Adu, Tony Yeboah's nephew and the player who should represent Ghana's "future." Although he was born in the fishing port of Tema some 20 miles outside of Accra, Adu is now known to the world as Freddy Adu and plays for [Washington] DC United. He has embraced both American citizenship and a huge contract from Nike, and will probably never play for the country of his birth. Still, three months later the player who had returned my newspaper was, like his manager, proved right.
A majority of African players at the 2002 World Cup played their club football abroad, and the globalisation of footballing talent has accelerated since—a third of the players at January's African Cup of Nations came from European clubs. The trend of continually exporting home-grown African talent to countries that not only welcome them into their richly funded and well-rewarded league systems, but—as we can see in the case of Freddy Adu—even absorb them into their national sides, may destroy the chances of any African country ever winning the World Cup. Pelé was once quoted as saying that an African nation would win the cup by the end of the 20th century. It didn't happen, and the realities of the marketplace, as well as increasingly flexible national affiliations, will continue to threaten the ability of African nations to produce resolute and focused national teams. Ghana's Black Stars may have finally got it right under Dujkovic, but football will be increasingly subject to the influence of money and sponsorship. Germany 2006 will be the first, and probably the best, chance for a united Ghanaian team to show the world what they have been missing for the past 20 years. Their arrival is long overdue.
Caryl Phillips's latest novel is "Dancing in the Dark" (Secker & Warburg). Reprinted from "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" (Time Warner), ed Matt Weiland
Here come the Yanks
by Steve Kelly
Football is finally catching on in the US, and the national team is ranked fourth in the world
The team may struggle this time around—it is in a difficult group with Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. But the broader trends are clear. Football in the US is growing rapidly. It is the second highest youth participation sport, behind basketball, and is steadily catching up. Unlike the rest of the world, football in the US is growing from a middle-class base—it can cost $1,000 or more for a teenager to join a club (which may be one reason for the failure of America's growing Hispanic population to break into the domestic game). But the big guarantor of football's continued expansion is the amount of money being poured into it. The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) has reportedly signed an endorsement deal with Nike worth $120m over ten years. That money will finance national programmes from youth level up. Major League Soccer (MLS), the professional soccer league, has struck a similar deal with Adidas.
An impressive list of billionaires is also investing in the US game, most notably Phil Anschutz, whose company AEG owns the league franchises at LA, Chicago, DC United and Houston. AEG recently sold the New York franchise to drinks giant Red Bull for more than $50m. Add to these the Kraft family, recently linked to a possible acquisition of Liverpool FC, and Lamar Hunt of the Hunt family, one of the founding investors in MLS, and you have some big hitters. These people did not attain their current status by investing in no-hope speculations.
What about the domestic game? MLS, which features the likes of Kansas City Wizards, LA Galaxy and Houston Dynamo, looks likely to have more staying power than the spectacular but short-lived North American Soccer League (NASL), which went bust in 1984 after attracting a range of ageing superstars like Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer. The MLS is made up of 12 teams, divided into western and eastern "conferences," and average crowds are approaching 20,000—more than the NASL managed. Last year a crowd of 21,193 at the Pizza Hut Park in Dallas saw LA Galaxy defeat New England Revolution 1-0 to take the MLS Cup. By the time the US qualifies for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the MLS will have grown to at least 16 teams. The country will also have 12 "soccer specific" stadiums by 2010. Unsurprisingly, US football is beginning to attract interest from some of the game's superstars—David Beckham has expressed interest in moving to the US after Spain, and his Real Madrid teammate Ronaldo has also hinted at a move across the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, the US is now more of an exporter rather than importer of talent. Almost half the World Cup squad plays its football in Europe, and the relatively low salaries in the MLS mean that many home-grown players would move to European clubs given the chance. American players are now, for the first time, a big part of the British game, with around 15 players involved with teams in our top two divisions—Blackburn's Brad Friedel, Manchester City's Claudio Reyna and Manchester United's Jonathan Spector are well-known examples. Several more Americans are regulars for teams in northern Europe. Current stars include Steve Cherundolo, captain of Hannover 96, DaMarcus Beasley of PSV Eindhoven and Conor Casey, at Mainz in Germany. Of domestic talent, the Ghanaian-born Freddy Adu has been rather over-hyped—perhaps because of a desire to encourage interest among black Americans—but if he is half as good as his reputation he will be leading the US to triumph in 2010.
Steve Kelly is a licensed football agent who has worked extensively with the USSF
Anyone but England
Harry Reid
The English team represents everything that is wrong with England. I hope they get thrashed
I hope that the England team fails dismally in the World Cup finals in Germany. I hope that the players come back humiliated after their first three games. I am Scottish, but I greatly admire England and the English. The problem is that the English national football team and the circus that surrounds it seem to me to be utterly un-English. There is a chronic disconnection between the England football team and what I understand to be Englishness.
I associate the English football team and its hangers-on with undignified brashness, xenophobia and an opportunistic commercialism—a complete negation of the traditional Corinthian sporting values.
Like many other Scots, I manage, without any sense of contradiction, to be an enthusiastic supporter of the English cricket team while being a fervent opponent of the football team. Despite the hysteria that surrounded the wonderful Ashes victory last summer, and despite the occasional excesses of the travelling "barmy army," cricket is managing to modernise while keeping in touch with its soul.
I have spent only four years of my life in England (in two very different places—three years as an undergraduate at Oxford, and a year at Newcastle learning how to be a journalist). These four years were among the best of my life. I even wrote a book trying to understand Englishness and would far rather see a proper revival of Englishness than Gordon Brown's
self-interested Britishness.
I recently read Sir Alf, Leo McKinstry's excellent biography of Alf Ramsey. North of the border, Ramsey has always been regarded as a xenophobic boor whose irrational detestation of Scots was matched only by his detestation of inventive, imaginative football. McKinstry's book did little to dispel either view.
Yet as I read the biography I was converted. Here was a man, admittedly limited and unimaginative, but possessed of great virtues: self-discipline, modesty, and a total lack of cynicism or greed. Above all he was loyal, to his family, to his country and to the players, despite receiving, from some of them, persistent provocation and mockery. Yet the FA treated him with contempt and humiliated him. He gave his all to his country through the only way he knew, football, and it betrayed him. McKinstry's fine book confirmed my view that at the heart of English football there lies something rotten.
Harry Reid's book "The Final Whistle? Scottish Football: The Best and Worst of Times" is published by Birlinn
