The Football Men by Kuper Simon

Author:Kuper, Simon [Kuper, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857201614
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2011-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

Michael Essien

August 2005

The most surprising aspect of the Michael Essien saga, to his teammates, is that he has stopped smiling. A man of practically no words, the Ghanaian tends to sit beaming in a corner of a changing room when not bouncing around football fields so vigorously that you get tired just watching him.

Essien is upset because his club, Olympique Lyon, are blocking his transfer to Chelsea. Lyon want a fee of £31 million, which would make him the most expensive defensive midfielder in history. Chelsea, the world’s richest club, have offered £20 million. Manchester United may also be interested. Meanwhile, Essien has gone on strike at Lyon. This tug of war is happening because the mute monster is the model footballer of our time.

His story is suitably globalised. Essien grew up in the steamy Ghanaian capital of Accra with four sisters. He spent his childhood dribbling around trees and sometimes crashing into them. He first appeared on television while helping Ghana’s under-12s thrash Benin, was later spotted by scouts at a tournament in New Zealand and aged seventeen got a trial with Manchester United. He showed up at Old Trafford with a fellow Ghanaian trialist, whose bad behaviour irritated United. The club didn’t particularly like Essien either, but offered him a spell with its Belgian farm team, Royal Antwerp.

Essien said no. He mooched around his agent’s flat in Monaco distraught, until the agent phoned Bastia in Corsica and persuaded them to take the boy. There Essien grew into a monster. He is less than 6 feet tall, but his body is nearly as broad as his smile. He says he never gets tired. Mind you, he also says his hobby is sleeping.

Bastia were delighted: Essien didn’t even speak, which is exactly how football clubs like footballers. In 2003 they sold him to Lyon for €12 million. This May a Parisian court decided that part of that sum had been funnelled to the Corsican nationalist, terrorist and Bastia fan Charles Pieri, who was jailed for ten years.

At Lyon Essien kept getting bigger, as if in a horror movie. ‘Physically, he’s the most impressive person I’ve played with,’ says his teammate Sidney Govou. Another teammate nicknamed him ‘the Bison’. Essien himself remarks that he has yet to meet anyone who could knock him over.

An economist would note his multifactor productivity. The trend in sport is to measure more and more, and, whichever variable Lyon chose, Essien was best in the team. He touched the ball more times than anyone else, had the most tackles, most completed passes, most interceptions of opponents’ passes and sometimes the most shots on goal, but despite his penchant for sawing opponents in half he was rarely caught fouling. You could judge him without even watching him. Reading the stats was enough. He was voted France’s best footballer of last season.

In short, Essien exemplified the growing physicality of most sports, from tennis to baseball. The average footballer now runs almost 12 kilometres a match, nearly three times more than thirty years ago.

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