Free Soccer Men by Simon Kuper

rather too well. He barely plays at all.
Barça now want to sell him, but Litmanen feels mistreated and insists on staying while pocketing his weekly net salary of $60,000.
    This may make the above paean to his brilliance sound hyperbolic. However, Litmanen’s main problem at Barça is probably that he is a Finn. Being a great Finnish player is like being a great Czech car: You never get the respect you deserve. Had Litmanen not been Finnish, he would surely have been voted European Player of the Year in 1995, when Ajax won the Champions League and World Club Cup. Instead, George Weah won, and the Finn came third.
    Notionally, Wednesday’s game is a World Cup qualifier. In fact, the closest Litmanen will ever get to a World Cup is his hard-drinking tour of France 98 with a bunch of old ice-hockey friends. Bound for undeserved oblivion, poor old Litmanen will soon be just a quiz question himself.
    *As I write, Litmanen, aged forty, is somehow still officially playing soccer and is even vice captain of Finland. In April 2011 he signed for the Finnish champions HJK Helsinki. Seven months earlier he had scored for his club Lahti against AC Oulo with a bicycle kick. Litmanen has now played international soccer in four decades, and (in case you ever get asked this quiz question) has long since broken Ari Hjelm’s Finnish record of caps. His retirement is rumored but may in fact never happen. The man just really likes playing soccer.

Juan Sebastián Verón
    July 2001
    I n the first minute of the Arsenal-Lazio match last year, Juan Sebastián Verón lofted a fifty-yard free kick with the outside of his right boot that landed at the feet of the sprinting Pavel Nedved. It was the sort of pass Michel Platini used to make. Verón, the twenty-six-year-old Argentine midfielder who joined Manchester United last week for $39 million, is potentially the world’s best player. He is a two-in-one, combining much of Zinedine Zidane with something of Roy Keane. Painfully thin and six foot two, with a tattoo
of Che Guevara, a shaven head, and a goatee, he looks as if he should be a pirate, but in fact his physique is designed for soccer. However, there is a reason he is joining United for a little more than half the price that Real Madrid just paid for Zidane—three years his senior—and it is not just that Real is more profligate than United (although it is).
    Verón’s career began before he was born. His father, Juan Ramon Verón, an Estudiantes left-winger known as La Bruja (The Witch), scored the goal at Old Trafford on September 25, 1968, that deprived United of the World Club Cup (a trophy taken seriously in South America). Sodden Argentine fans at the ground sang, “If you see a witch mounted on a broomstick—it’s Verón, Verón, Verón.”
    Juan Sebastián Verón was born in La Plata in 1975 and before long had scored thirteen goals in a game. He would steal his father’s car (“I’ve always been a nut”), skip school (“My marks were about zero”), and at the age of fifteen embark on a remarkable sex life (“Like everybody, with a prostitute”). However, the boy could read the game, pass, and tackle, too. Brujita (Little Witch) had barely turned pro with Estudiantes when Diego Maradona pronounced, “I’ve seen a brave and young player. He’s called Verón. He’ll be successful.”
    Six years, six clubs, and several Ferraris later, that is only arguably true. Viewed one way, Verón’s career has been a steady forward march: from Estudiantes through Boca Juniors, Sampdoria, Parma, and Lazio to Manchester United. He is no longer a walking tabloid story. Everyone ranks him among the world’s best players. Impressively, he’s managed this while playing below his potential. There was another telling moment at Highbury in that Champions League game when he fired the ball forty yards at the head of a team-mate on the touchline. A beautiful strike, impossible to control, it was hit to show off. Lazio, a flaky team, lost