Read Soccer Men for Free Online Page B

and Rinus Michels, Gullit has become a very nice guy by the simple expedient of retiring from top-class soccer.
    Walking back out for the second half, he throws a glance at the men playing cards in the canteen. They don’t look back. They should have, though, because in the second half AFC is transformed. Is it creatine? In any case, the outside-right Alfons soon creates a goal with a brilliant solo run.
    “Alfie!” bellows Gullit. “He is fit! He is sharp!”
    AFC wins a penalty. Not Gullit, but Guido, the center-forward, takes it. He scores.

    Then Guido makes it 5–3. Gradually, however, the AFC revival stalls. As the end approaches, the OSDO players’ wives start singing the club song: “OSDO is our club / We have won!”
    Then, with only a minute to go, a cross from Guido reaches Ruud Gullit alone in front of an empty goal. This is his moment. But he is caught flatfooted. He tries to jump, cannot get off the ground, and as he contorts his body the ball sails over his head. Ruud Gullit has become a parks soccer player.
    The referee ends the game. AFC has lost 5–3, and Ruud goes around shaking hands. He congratulates the referee at length, and to no one in particular he exclaims, “The second half was better!”
    He pops into the canteen afterward wearing a gray woolen Italianate coat: the Best Dressed Man in Britain 1996. He has a drink with his teammates (not alcohol, never alcohol) and after five minutes says good-bye and is off in his “people carrier” (the new thing among continental players, who are emerging from the Sports Car Age), which has what looks like a small boat strapped to the roof. From the canteen there is nary a backward glance.
    It is not that the Amsterdammers have forgotten Gullit. They just don’t go in for idols. This is a town where if you spotted Jesus Christ having a drink with Nelson Mandela at the next café table, it would be uncool to notice. Rembrandt was declared bankrupt here, Spinoza expelled from the synagogue, Cruijff nicknamed the Money Wolf, and when John Lennon and Yoko Ono left town after their bed-in for peace at the Hilton, they had to return their honorary white bicycles to the local hippies. So nobody mobs Gullit. An Amsterdammer himself, he says he likes that about the place.
    He could easily slip into former celebritydom. He is no longer even the most famous Ruud in Holland, having been outstripped by the brilliant young goalscorer Ruud van Nistelrooy (who should command the biggest transfer fee in Europe this summer) and Ruud, the character in the real-life soap opera Big Brother , who vomited on national television.
    He probably shouldn’t go to Fulham.
    *The year 2000, incidentally, was the year Dutch television invented “Big Brother.”
    Gullit’s career has only declined since his days on AFC’s fifth team. He is currently manager of Terez Grozny, the Chechen club run by the Chechen president and warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who just happens to have pots of money to invest in soccer.

Lothar Matthäus, the Tabloid Reader
    June 2000
    Y ou know what?” suggests Lothar Matthäus. “Let’s go ‘round the room one more time, and everyone can ask a question about his own country.” We all shake our heads. We already know everything we need to know about Matthäus.
    It’s a Monday evening in February 2000, and seven journalists from around Europe are sitting in the Atlantic meeting room of a neo-Stalinist hotel outside Amsterdam. Matthäus, who is preparing for a Holland-Germany friendly, has summoned us here. In seventeen days the best German player of his era will end his European career at the age of thirty-nine, to go off and have some fun in New York.
    Our interview was supposed to start at eight o’clock, but at eight a line of German players trudges into the Atlantic for a tactical talk. At the back of the group is a small middle-aged man with a big head, who waves at us and makes funny faces. This is Lothar Matthäus.
    One crucial attribute