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and has great speed. So what I lack, I think, is speed. In a race over long distance, I have speed. In the sprint, not so much.”
    Now he has to be photographed in the gear of his sponsor, Mizuno. His Nokia phone keeps ringing, so he gives the thing to Manuel. Everyone is calling to congratulate him, because various media are reporting that he has won the Golden Ball. Manuel reads Rivaldo the telephone numbers that appear on the screen. I’m not here, says Rivaldo, who is posing with a ball that unfortunately is flat. “Is he now officially Player of the Year?” I ask Manuel. “Well, I don’t know,” says Manuel. “We haven’t heard anything.”
    “Call France Football ,” Rivaldo suggests. Good idea. Manuel enters the number, and the telephone rings for a long time. Finally, somebody in Paris answers.
    “Vincent!” says Manuel. Rivaldo goes and stands next to him and listens in. Vincent confirms that Rivaldo is the European Player of the Year. We congratulate Rivaldo.
    “Thank you,” says Rivaldo. He takes the phone from Manuel and walks onto the roof terrace. Alone he looks across the city toward the dark mountains. Directly in front of him is a branch of El Corte Ingles, a Spanish department store. The clock on the outside wall of the store states that the time is 7:23 p.m. and the temperature 10.5 degrees Celsius. From now on Rivaldo is officially a legend, a player who forty years from now will still be discussed in taxis in Montevideo and Damascus.
    “Did you already know he’d won?” asks Mark Kaiway of Mizuno.
    “Yes,” Manuel grins. “He had to pose for a photograph with the Golden Ball.”
    “Has he celebrated yet?” I ask.
    “Celebrated? He hasn’t even had his lunch today! He’s just been busy.”
    Rivaldo gives the phone back to Manuel and resumes posing. Manuel shows me the thing. The screen constantly reports that three callers are waiting. When one of them hangs up, a new one appears immediately.
    Then Rivaldo has to sit for an hour in a small, dark, hot room under a barrage of television lights. It’s like a scene from the Marx Brothers: a roomful of people having themselves photographed with Rivaldo, getting his autograph, kissing him. At about nine o’clock Rivaldo finally reaches the hotel lobby, where he skillfully feints his way past a group of journalists. He has
almost made it to his Mercedes SUV when the hotel concierge tackles him. Rivaldo is imprisoned in his hug. The journalists catch up. Rivaldo struggles into his Mercedes, but they go and stand in front of it. The standoff lasts minutes, but then he is finally allowed to drive to his empty house. In the bath he’ll have a chance to think about the day.
    The next day Van Gaal kicks him out of the Barcelona squad. It’s a bit complicated.

Ruud Gullit
    February 2000
    A confused old man remarks to another spectator, “Do you know, that could be Ruud Gullit’s brother.”
    “It is Ruud Gullit,” the spectator replies.
    “Are you kidding me?” demands the old man.
    “It’s true. He plays for the AFC fifth team now.”
    The old man takes another look at the large, dreadlocked sweeper in the red shirt and exclaims: “He was on the Dutch team!”
    We are in a sports park just outside Amsterdam, two miles down the highway from the Ajax stadium, on a glorious, still winter’s Saturday. In the canteen beside the ground old men play cards and ignore the soccer. OSDO thirdstring versus AFC fifth-string has drawn twenty spectators, most of them the toddler offspring of the players. The toddlers join in the warming up.
    They have caught Gullit on a bad day. Even as the Felliniesque figure performs his unmistakable broad-shouldered jog onto the muddy pitch, his team is falling apart: Before the game can start, the woman referee dispatches several AFCers to find shin pads.
    The AFC coach, a bad-tempered man with a cell phone, confides that, because of vacations, he has had to call up reinforcements from lower teams. Granted,