Getting Away with Murder

Hate figures are easy to come by in modern football. Every fan has a team they genuinely hate – and it’s not necessarily their clubs’ rivals. For example, I imagine there’s relatively few Chelsea fans who actually hate Fulham, such is the longstanding and still significant gulf between the clubs’ fortunes on the pitch. The same, of course, cannot be said of Manchester United or Liverpool fans, or, as we’ve already seen this year, West Ham and Millwall fans, for example. Equally, Real Madrid and Barcelona fans hate each other’s teams so much that in a recent poll where Barca fans were asked which they would prefer, Barcelona winning or Real Madrid losing, the prospect of a defeat for Los Merengues won by a clear majority.

The fact that it is the teams they hate is significant. It’s perfectly possible, all over the world, to see groups of friends, all of whom support different clubs, bantering quite happily (and notably not kicking the shit out of each other) while still expressing (and probably feeling) heartfelt animosity towards the actual clubs their friends support. I have certainly been part of such groups in the past and while it’s handy for exercising one’s Sky Sports round table discussion show pretensions, there’s no pretence towards balance; some teams we just hate.

And it’s absolutely not just teams that get picked on. Everyone has certain players they can’t stand, no matter what club they play for or what country they represent. Some people can fly into a spluttering rage at the sight of rival managers, former players, team owners (poor Mike Ashley, eh?) or even just the sight of a replica shirt or badge. Maybe it’s a controversial goal someone scored once, or some long-held grudge against a nation that knocked yours out of the World Cup twenty years ago. There are people who hate teams because of some perceived injustice that took place long before they were even born – grievances passed down from generation to generation like a festering, anxious and really rather silly family heirloom.

It is all silly – and totally irrational. I have my own personal hate figures in the game, of course, like everyone. The ones that really interest me, however, are those universal hate figures, the ones that everyone, whether they be on the TV, radio or down the pub, just can’t get on with, and can’t fathom why they’re allowed to exist at all – and often with good reason.

They come at all levels of the game. The standard choice, as far as players go, would be someone like Joey Barton. The very mention of his name in almost any football-literate company will elicit the same sort of responses – “thug”, “disgrace”, “ungrateful”, “should be banned for life”, et cetera. I say almost, because presumably he has his fans somewhere. All the bosses that have signed him despite knowing his track record, his appalling discipline, his unforgivable off-the-pitch behaviour. The team mates that have stuck by him and defended his character. And presumably his family must have a bit of a soft spot for him, too.

But there can’t be many. If anyone reading this doesn’t know Barton’s record, this is the player who, to name a few “incidents”: stubbed a cigar out in the eye of a Man City youth team player in a nightclub causing permanent scarring, assaulted a 15-year-old Everton fan during a tour of Thailand in 2005, beat up team mate Ousmane Dabo at City’s training ground, leaving him with a suspected detached retina, and, most famously, spent 77 days in prison in 2008 for assaulting a man at a McDonald’s restaurant in Liverpool city centre. The FA make a great deal of fuss about the need for footballers to be role models to young people – and yet he’s still permitted, clubs allowing, to play football at the highest level, enjoying the attendant luxurious lifestyle.

Other universal hate figures are found higher up. The biggest – because he’s right at the top, I suppose – is Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, President of FIFA. There is literally no one more important than him in the world of football, and yet whenever his name is mentioned in the press, by a pundit or by a fan, it is usually in the most derisory terms. How has Blatter, despite having held the title of President for 11 years, failed so spectacularly to endear himself to the common football fan?

There are a number of reasons. There’s the constant rumours of financial irregularities – including rights payments to FIFA mysteriously vanishing and ending up in the personal accounts of FIFA delegates, and the suspicious halting of an investigation into the loss of $100m by FIFA’s marketing partner in 2002; there’s his comments in 2008 declaring Cristiano Ronaldo to be a “slave” when Manchester United refused to sell him to Real Madrid (but mainly it was because Sepp just really, really hates the dominance of the Premier League); and, of course, his charming suggestion that to make women’s football more successful the players should “wear tighter shorts”.

Blatter is a magnet for ridicule – he is a symbol of everything that is just a little seedy and corrupt about the very top of modern football. And yet, despite damning books and articles by dedicated investigative journalists like Andrew Jennings, he remains FIFA President – and is unlikely to be unseated any time soon. With a global audience of fans who love declaring their hatred for teams, fans, referees, managers and administrators, why haven’t people like Blatter and his particularly odious Vice President Jack Warner (but more about him another time), Joey Barton and other petulant, undeserving players, felt a bit more of the wrath?

My theory is that in a sport, and in a culture, that is so used to polarised opinions, controversial on- and off-pitch events, and is quite comfortable with casual, irrational “hate”, that sometimes the truly deserving hate figures are allowed to go about their business – bringing the game into disrepute, often, engaging in morally repugnant criminal activity. Perhaps we need to focus less on irrational, decades-old grudges and throw a bit more hate the way of those who have genuinely done something to deserve it.

Zidane

It feels childish to talk about having a ‘favourite footballer’. It conjures up memories of swapping Panini stickers or the sort of cover feature that would regularly appear in the pages of Match magazine (or even, this month, the ostensibly more grown up FourFourTwo) – endless, meaningless lists attempting to divine the ‘best player in the world’.

I mentioned the FFT feature in question to a friend recently. “FourFourTwo have done a 100 best players in the world chart,” I said. “Messi?” he responded, with barely a moment’s thought. “Uh…yep.” “OK.”

The utter pointlessness of compiling lists and charts of the ‘best’ in such a non-scientific category as ‘being good at football’ is clear to see.

Apart from being fundamentally incomparable – is Cristiano Ronaldo’s goal scoring record as good as Petr Cech’s clean sheets record? How many of Iniesta’s passes are equal to one of Cannavaro’s tackles? – the very idea of it seems to bring out the worst in those involved, skews the transfer value of players made to look good in strong teams and allows the press regular self-congratulatory pieces declaring, “see, we said Messi was the best in the world and look, there he is, winning the Champions League! No one else saw that coming…”

The worst story that comes to mind, however, concerns the even-more-useless ‘greatest ever footballer’ lists that magazines and newspapers insist on churning out more and more often. Every single lazy interview with any retired footballer includes the question, “Who, in your opinion, was the greatest footballer who ever lived?” You get the standard answers – Pelé, Maradona, Di Stefano, depending on who’s asked. Or not – the names are almost interchangeable. More recently, though, chubby insane mouthpiece Maradona has begun sniping at Pelé, questioning his greatness as if his assumed spot at the top of this pointless league was up for grabs. If anything, Maradona needs to be aware that the good memories won’t last forever.

So what I’m really building up to here is a blog post about my favourite footballer, naturally. Again, it’s the sort of thing you should probably stop bothering to discuss when you’re a kid, but if asked I’d have to say one name: Zinedine Zidane.

Now, as the last two or three paragraphs might suggest, I’m certainly not planning to argue that Zidane was the greatest footballer ever – I don’t believe such a thing does or could ever exist. But he, and every piece of controversy and legend that surrounds him, has gone a long way to shaping my view on what makes football such a fascinating game.

Zidane – winner of the Ballon D’Or, two Scudetti in Italy with Juventus, one Spanish championship and the Champions League with Real Madrid, one World Cup and a European Championship with France and the FIFA World Player of the Year award three times (phew) –was a player who could be appreciated in still, snapshot images.

In my head he’s always motionless (though he rarely was on the pitch, of course) – his giant, Easter Island head with its thousand yard stare burns his image into any piece of paper or any screen, lending him a genuinely iconic and statuesque appearance to the extent that it’s hard to imagine he really exists at all. In my head is a picture of Zidane staring manically at an opponent, or up into the sky after missing a chance. It’s the picture of him ramming Marco Materazzi in the chest during the 2006 World Cup Final (surely the one genuinely memorable moment of the tournament, the one that will resonate for decades) and this picture of him walking past the World Cup for the last time:


I don’t think I’m the only one to have seen something classical in the great man and how he played. It seems strange now to imagine him alongside the other galacticos who arrived at Real Madrid in the early part of this decade. He seems too big, too lumbering – and not nearly pretty or glamorous enough to be a standard Bernabeu pin-up. And yet he inspired an intellectual response in those who watched him; he seemed to be a cultured, intelligent player who was a student of the game, rather than a mercurial talent who simply came to it naturally.

Belgian writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint wrote a short book entitled Le Mélancolie de Zidane shortly after the 2006 final, a ‘lyrical essay’ dealing with the infamous headbutt. It’s hard to imagine another player inspiring such a poetic response with a rash, explosive act of retaliatory violence.

Another reason I find Zidane so fascinating is the extent to which he was a hero to the poor, disenfranchised immigrant communities in France – and particularly in his hometown of Marseilles. Born to Algerian Muslims in 1972, his great success as a footballer made him a beacon for those many thousands of immigrants trapped in the social squalor of many French cities’ banlieues areas. I wish I could remember where I read this, but there was one intriguing theory about Zidane’s headbutt – his final act as a professional footballer – arguing that he felt he needed to do it to show his millions of adoring fans that he was fallible, still human and still prone to anger and stupidity. This is, I admit, a slightly romantic way to view a violent reaction to an insult about someone’s sister, but, hey – when it comes to football I’m nothing if not romantic.

I can’t finish talking about Zidane without mentioning the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. If you haven’t seen it and even if you have no interest in football – watch it. It’s barely about football anyway. For one league match at Real Madrid in 2005, 17 synchronised hi-definition cameras were trained on Zidane and their operators instructed to show only Zidane himself – and as little as possible of the game. What results is quite literally what the title says: a portrait. A beautiful, poetic and downright mesmerising portrait. For the full 90 minutes of the game we are able to study his every mannerism, his focus on the game, his rapport with his team mates – and his explosive temper. Football fans will appreciate the insight into how the quintessential ‘midfield general’ operated. Non-football fans will appreciate the chance to see a person fully immersed in that which they were made to do; including their skills, their triumphs and their character flaws.

I see this opportunity all through football – and I certainly saw it in Zidane.