When I got the opportunity to read through “Masters of Modern Soccer: How the World’s Best Play the 21st-Century Game,” my initial reaction was pure shock that a publisher had agreed to encourage soccer journalist Grant Wahl to pursue such a book.
Not because it’s about soccer, but because it’s about soccer.
TOP 50 SUMMER TRANSFER TARGETS: Griezman, Bale, Hazard, Fekir among most sought-after players
It’s about tactics and techniques and strategy and mental agility and all the various qualities that go into performing at an elite level in the game, the insights all coming from soccer stars such as defender Vincent Kompany of Manchester City and Belgium; striker Chicharito from West Ham United and Mexico; goalkeeper Manuel Neuer of Bayern Munich and Germany; and young American star Christian Pulisic, who plays club soccer in Germany for Borussia Dortmund.
It is a marvelous, fascinating dive into the game that will be of value to young players, coaches and fans looking for more insight into how soccer works. It was beautifully composed by Wahl, who has been Sports Illustrated’s top soccer writer for nearly two decades and also does television work for Fox Sports. He gave some insights into the book — and the coming World Cup — in an interview with Sporting News.
SPORTING NEWS: Where did the idea come from, and how did you get a publisher to go along?
GRANT WAHL: I think give credit to George Will, who wrote the baseball book “Men at Work” back in the '90s, about the craft of baseball position by position. And that book is a really fascinating book, but it’s a hardcore baseball book, and yet it really sold well. I honestly think my publisher probably saw that, as part of my proposal, how it’s still viewed as one of the great baseball books ever done, and so they green-lit this book for soccer.
MORE: Wayne Rooney agrees to deal to join D.C. United of MLS, reports say
This is a little different, because it doesn’t have four figures, like his book. It has seven. But that was kind of the concept from the start.
Now, there were things I did not anticipate, like the focus on the theme of “modern soccer.” It kept coming up during the interviews in this two-year process of interviewing the guys. That was really neat, that you didn’t anticipate this and then it became such a theme, the demands of the modern game and how it’s different from what it used to be.
SN: For a lot of people who follow soccer now, this is the only game they’ve known, but reading some of what’s included, it’s striking how much different this book would be if you’d written it 30 years ago.
GW: I got the chance to watch a tape of the 1970 World Cup final, and this took place three years before I was born. I’d never seen the full game, and it was fascinating for me to watch the game and it was a completely different sport, almost. The game has changed so much. There were a lot more attackers on the field back then, and the defense was different. There wasn’t any of the full-field defensive pressure that is so constant, it seems, in today’s game.
SN: How did you decide which figures to interview for the book?
GW: A couple of the guys, I had relationships with previously, and I knew they combined what I was looking for — which was tremendous accomplishment and stature, but also intelligence at explaining what they do on the field.
CHAMPIONS LEAUGE 2018 FINAL: Liverpool vs. Real Madrid TV channel & live streams, teams, match preview
Xabi Alonso was a guy that I think I started interviewing back in 2011, and had always been really accessible. Getting access to Neuer, in addition to Xabi Alonso and also Vincent Kompany through Man City, I worked with those clubs before and they kind of knew me. Once I sold them the idea, I wasn’t asking for a tremendous amount of time. It’s a chapter on each figure. That’s kind of how it came together.
SN: Did you try Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi?
GW: I did not try Ronaldo. Messi is a guy who I have interviewed before. I did so for a cover story for SI back in 2016, and I thought in that interview he was more revealing than he’d been in a lot of interviews. But at the same time, I look at Messi as not ideal for this book for a couple of reasons: One, that what he does in my mind is genius, which is different than craft. To me, craft is something that is repeatable, and I don’t know how repeatable some of Messi’s moves are.
The other thing being that 95 percent of athletes aren't great at going into great detail about what they do on the field, and I really wanted to find special people on the extreme end of the ability scale to verbalize what it is they see in the game and how they experience it.
I was really impressed with Christian Pulisic, in part because he’s the only teenager in the book, and it’s very clear in his chapter how deeply he thinks the game and how smart he is about it, and also recognizing where he is right now and where he needs to improve if he wants to get to the top.
SN: You’ve got a soccer book coming out on the eve of the World Cup. That’s great. But it’s also a World Cup the United States did not reach. How much of an impact do you think that will have on its success?
GW: Obviously it would be great if the U.S. had made it, and it was cool to get the participation of the marquee U.S. men’s player, and the marquee Mexican player — who will be at the World Cup, Chicharito — who are two large figures in the U.S. Do I think (that) if the U.S. had made it, it could have brought more really mainstream sports fans who aren’t necessarily soccer fans into the mix? Sure. That is what it is. I do think this is a book that will hold up. The content isn’t something that will be out of date next week.
THE BIG AMERICAN SOCCER POLL: Who do you support?
And I think Pulisic is going to become an American sports superstar, and this book will still hold up, and you can learn a lot from him.
SN: How much do you think not making this World Cup affects Pulisic’s career progression?
GW: It certainly would have been an opportunity for Pulisic, this summer, to become a mainstream American sports superstar in a way that he can't be just playing for Borussia Dortmund. We'll see if he ends up making a move this summer, or next year, to an even bigger club, which I think is certainly possible. I just got back from Liverpool, and some of their hardcore followers think he's going to come this summer.
SN: One of the eye-opening quotes for me was when Vincent Kompany talked about Chicharito as there being not a big difference between him and the absolute best forwards. And I wondered then whether the difference is never really having a home, other than the national team.
GW: I think for Chicharito, I've talked to some Manchester United fans who don't think Man U should have let him go. I do think it was tough for Chicharito, and he talked about this, to not be a starter, to be viewed almost like a relief pitcher, a super sub. He performed well in that role, but everyone wants to start. I think that’s what ended up leading to his move to Leverkusen in Germany, where he did quite well. Things this season, at West Ham United, for a number of reasons didn’t work out great. That’s a team that had issues. And basically, the second David Moyes came in to manage — I don’t think Chicharito would have moved to West Ham had he known that David Moyes was going to be his manager, because it didn’t work out too well at Man United for him.
MORE: Can you name all 17 members of the USMNT 100-cap club?
It is fascinating that Chicharito has been at Manchester United and Real Madrid, which are basically the two biggest clubs in the world in terms of following, and he scored goals, and fans liked him, and yet he hasn’t stuck at those places.
SN: How big a World Cup do you expect Mexico to have? Obviously, they're in a difficult group with Germany, South Korea and Sweden.
GW: I think it's going to be tough to finish ahead of Germany; not impossible, but tough. The first game they have against Germany in Moscow is certainly one of the marquee games of the opening week. I think Mexico will advance from the group, and then the big question always with Mexico is can you get past the round of 16. That’s where they’ve been stopped every World Cup going back to ’94. It’s a little tough with the draw, because if Mexico finishes second in the group the likely round of 16 opponent is Brazil.
And yet, Brazil is a team Mexico played in the World Cup four years ago, and Brazil is a team I actually think Mexico feels pretty confident in having a shot at, if that’s how it turns out. I found it interesting that Chicharito talked in terms of "We think we can win the World Cup." I don’t know how many other people think that, but he’s pretty confident this is a team that can go deeper than a lot of people expect.
SN: What’s one thing you learned from doing this book, one thing you could say, "This really surprised me"?
GW: I think one thing that really surprised me was with Christian Pulisic, his total recall of every video moment I showed. These clips, it was about an hour’s worth of video we looked at together, and the clips weren't in any chronological order. It included games with the national team and with Borussia Dortmund, and within a fraction of a second of switching to the new clip, Pulisic could recommend that situation on the field and what he was thinking about and how it turned out, and then what he could have done.
Finally, I stopped him and said, "Dude, do you have a photographic memory or something?" And he said, "I remember everything on the field." The ability to do that, and then to be able to talk about it in real detail, I hadn't had that opportunity with a player before.
SN: After reading the chapter on Roberto Martinez, knowing his background and that he’s well known here from his work on ESPN, do you think he might finish this World Cup in charge of Belgium and then possibly become the next U.S. coach?
GW: Yes. My feeling is that both Roberto Martinez and Juan Carlos Osorio, who are prominent in the book, are potential U.S. men’s national team coaches, and I think there’s a chance they would be interested, so I'm glad that U.S. Soccer appears to be waiting until after the World Cup to hire a coach. They have to hire a GM, still.
I think both those guys have connections to the U.S., but also international experience that would be pretty valuable. My question with Martinez is, does he want to go back to club coaching? And also, if he wins the World Cup with Belgium, I wonder what that would mean for him in terms of interest around the world.
