This post contains to excellent writings on soccer, penned by Kissinger. The first was published in the Los Angeles Times during the 1986 World Cup. The second--on Pele--was published in Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
I have been an avid soccer fan ever since my youth in Fuerth, a soccer-mad city of southern Germany, which for some inexplicable reason won three championships in a three-year period. My father despaired of a son who preferred to stand for two hours (there were very few seats) watching a soccer game rather than sit in the comfort at the opera or be protected from the elements in a museum.
Soccer evokes extraordinary passions, especially during the quadrennial World Cup competition ending today in Mexico City. It has been estimated that the Brazilian gross national product suffers a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for every day Brazil plays, as rabid fans sit before television sets or radios. Statistics in other soccer citadels must be comparable.
Soccer lends itself to a competition of national teams because it requires an extraordinary combination of individual skill, teamwork and strategic sense. Since there are 11 players on each side engaged in continuous action, every game produces tactical necessities to be solved by improvisation on the playing field.
This was true even in my youth when soccer was much less complex and much more oriented to the offense. Then there were five forwards, three midfield players, two fullbacks and a goalie. The offense being numerically superior to the defense, goals were much more frequent then. By the late 1930s, managers sought to overcome this advantage by assigning the center half to shadow the opposing center forward. The creation of three de facto fullbacks constricted the attack which since time immemorial had been built around the center forward.
In the early 1950s, the Hungarians showed how to overwhelm this defense, turning their center forward into a decoy. He would move to the sidelines or toward midfield, drawing the shadowing defensive player out of position, creating an empty space in front of the goal.
But as in military strategy every offensive maneuver in soccer evokes a compensating defensive move. The answer to the roving center forward was a zone defense; defensive players were required to cover a certain area regardless of which player was attacking. Total soccer was invented soon thereafter; all players had to be able to defend as well as attack and to shift from one mode to another with extreme rapidity.
The modern style of soccer in fact emphasizes defense — with few exceptions like Brazil, Argentina and France. The basic alignment has become four defensive and four midfield players; the forwards have shrunk to two. Massed defenses can in general be overcome only by rapid thrusts involving very accurate passing. The result is a very tactical game, its complexity becoming a fascinating reflection of national attitudes.
The styles of leading soccer powers like West Germany, Brazil, Italy and England illustrate this point.
West Germany, a finalist today, is, with Italy and Brazil, the most successful team of the modern era. West German soccer entered the postwar era with no particular legacy. Postwar Germany's newly professional soccer being as novel as the frontiers of the state it represents, it could adopt total soccer with a vengeance. The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for the war; games are meticulously planned, each player skilled in both attack and defense. Intricate pass patterns evolve, starting right in front of the German goal. Anything achievable by human foresight, careful preparation and hard work is accounted for.
And there have been great successes. Of the last six prior World Cups, Germany has won two, was second twice, third once and out of the running only in 1978. At the same time, the German national team suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I. There is a limit to human foresight; psychological stress on those charged with executing excessively complex maneuvers cannot be calculated in advance. If the German team falls behind, or if its intricate approach yields no results, its game is shadowed by the underlying national premonition that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go unrewarded, by the nightmare that ultimately fate is cruel--a nightmare reinforced by the knowledge that the German media are unmerciful when high expectations go unfulfilled. The impression is unavoidable that an outstanding national soccer team has not brought a proportionate amount of joy to a people that may not in its heart of hearts believe joy is the ultimate national destiny.
Brazil suffers no such inhibitions. Its national teams are an assertion that virtue without joy is a contradiction in terms. Brazilian teams display a contagious exuberance; Brazilian fans cheer them on to the ecstatic beat of samba bands. Brazil always has the most acrobatic players, the individuals one cannot forget whatever the outcome of the match. But, as in Brazil's political institutions, this individualism is combined with an extraordinary ability to make the practical arrangements required for effective national performance. As a result, Brazil has appeared in more World Cups and won more than any other team. It was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the current competition partly as a result of an egregious seeding placing Italy, the old World Cup holder; France, the European champion, and two potential champions--Brazil and West Germany-- in the same half of a sudden-death elimination round, while the other half contained only one team, Argentina--today's other finalist--that has ever been in the final four.
To be sure, the Brazilians, being human, cannot avoid some weaknesses. The players sometimes are so intoxicated by their brilliant maneuvers that they occasionally forget the purpose of the exercise is to score goals. And I have never seen an outstanding Brazilian goal-keeper. Perhaps the task is too lonely; the goalkeeper after all has to stay put while his teammates enjoy themselves tracing clever pass patterns on the turf. Or perhaps the only purely defensive assignment on a team offends the Brazilian self-image.
Yet a Brazilian team on the attack--which is most of the time--looks like a dancing band at carnival. Wave after wave of yellow shirts roll against the opposing goal until the opposition is overwhelmed without being humiliated; it is no disgrace to be defeated by a team whose style no one else can imitate.
Italy's record places it among the top teams of world soccer although it fell victim to the same absurd seeding as Brazil. The Italian style reflects the national conviction, forged by the vicissitudes of an ancient history, that the grim struggle for survival must be based on a careful husbanding of energy for the main task. It presupposes a correct assessment of the opponent's character, paired with an unostentatious and matter-of-fact perseverance that obscures many intricate levels on which the competition takes place. The initial objective of Italian teams is to force the opponent out of his game plan, to wreck his concentration and to induce him to abandon his preferred style. In the early stages of a match, the Italian team tends to look destructive and purely defensive-- a style achievable only by extreme toughness and discipline. But once the Italian team has imposed its pattern, it can play some of the most effective, even beautiful soccer in the world--though it will never waste energy simply on looking good.
No discussion of national soccer styles can be complete without reference to England. Before World War II and for nearly a decade after, England was clearly the dominant power. I say England, because for purposes of international soccer, the United Kingdom fields four teams: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A single United Kingdom team using the best players from each would be even more formidable.
The decline in the fortunes of the English team is, in my view, primarily caused by a refusal to adapt to the tactics of the modern era. Before World War II, the English team overwhelmed its opponents with speed, power and condition. But as defenses massed, the English quick-breaking style lost much of its effectiveness; as most of Europe went over to professional soccer, the advantage of superior conditioning eroded. Yet England refused to adapt its tactical plan to the passing game needed to break open the modern defense.
The English national team had never lost a game at home until 1954, when Hungary prevailed with its roving center forward. Since then, the English team has gradually declined. It is steady, reliable, tough. It never yields to panic. It is never defeated one-sidedly. It achieves everything attainable by character and tenacity. Regrettably-- because I thought the pre-World War II game was more fun to watch-- it has also been somewhat pedantic, as if in nostalgic thrall to a bygone era. England has never won a European championship; it has prevailed only once in the World Cup and that was 20 years ago playing before its own fans. All of us who enjoy England's muscular game hope that England's relative success in the current matches heralds a real revival.
The World Cup arouses passions because it involves both an athletic competition and a contest of national styles. It can be no accident that the most offensive-minded and elegant European team is France, only recently become a soccer power; that no team from a communist country (except Hungary, in 1954) has ever reached the World Cup finals or semifinals. Too much stereotyped planning destroys the creativity indispensable for effective soccer.
Soccer has never taken hold in the United States partly because neither a national team nor a national style has been encouraged. Still, as an unreconstructed fan, I hope for another attempt to popularize the sport, perhaps by holding the next World Cup slated for the Western Hemisphere (1994) in this country.
On Pele
Heroes walk alone, but they become myths when they ennoble the lives and touch the hearts of all of us. For those who love soccer, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, generally known as Pele, is a hero.
Performance at a high level in any sport is to exceed the ordinary human scale. But Pele's performance transcended that of the ordinary star by as much as the star exceeds ordinary performance. He scored an average of a goal in every international game he played--the equivalent of a baseball player's hitting a home run in every World Series game over 15 years. Between 1956 and 1974, Pele scored a total of 1,220 goals--not unlike hitting an average of 70 home runs every year for a decade and a half.
While he played, Brazil won the World Cup, staged quadrennially, three times in 12 years. He scored five goals in a game six times, four goals 30 times and three goals 90 times. And he did so not aloofly or disdainfully--as do many modern stars--but with an infectious joy that caused even the teams over which he triumphed to share in his pleasure, for it is no disgrace to be defeated by a phenomenon defying emulation.
He was born across the mountains from the great coastal cities of Brazil, in the impoverished town of Tres Coracoes. Nicknamed Dico by his family, he was called Pele by soccer friends, a word whose origins escape him. Dico shined shoes until he was discovered at the age of 11 by one of the country's premier players, Waldemar de Brito. Four years later, De Brito brought Pele to Sao Paulo and declared to the disbelieving directors of the professional team in Santos, "This boy will be the greatest soccer player in the world." He was quickly legend. By the next season, he was the top scorer in his league. As the Times of London would later say, "How do you spell Pele? G-O-D." He has been known to stop war: both sides in Nigeria's civil war called a 48-hour cease-fire in 1967 so Pele could play an exhibition match in the capital of Lagos.
To understand Pele's role in soccer, some discussion of the nature of the game is necessary. No team sport evokes the same sort of primal, universal passion as soccer. During the World Cup, the matches of the national football teams impose television schedules on the rhythm of life. Last year I attended a dinner for leading members of the British establishment and distinguished guests from all over the world at the staid Spencer House in London. The hosts had the bad luck to have chosen the night of the match between England and Argentina--always a blood feud, compounded on this occasion by the memory of the Falklands crisis. The impeccable audience (or at least enough of it to influence the hosts) insisted that television sets be set up at strategic locations, during both the reception and the dinner. The match went into overtime and required a penalty shoot-out afterward, so the main speaker did not get to deliver his message until 11 p.m. And since England lost, the audience was not precisely in a mood for anything but mourning.
When France finally won the World Cup, Paris was paralyzed with joy for nearly 48 hours, Brazil by dejection for a similar period of time. I was in Brazil in 1962 when the national team won the World Cup in Chile. Everything stopped for two days while Rio celebrated a premature carnival.
I saw Pele at his peak only once, at the final of the World Cup in 1970. Brazil's opponent was Italy, which played its tough defense coupled with sudden thrusts to tie the game 1-1, demoralizing the Brazilians. Italy could very easily have massed its defense even more, until its frantic opponent began making the mistakes that would encompass its ruin. But, led by Pele, Brazil paid no attention. Attacking as if the Italians were a practice team, the Brazilians ran them into the ground, 4-1.
I saw Pele a few times afterward, when he was playing for the New York Cosmos. He was no longer as fast, but he was as exuberant as ever. By then, Pele had become an institution. Most modern fans never saw him play, yet they somehow feel he is part of their lives. He made the transition from superstar to mythic figure.
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