A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Read online

  FC Porto’s coach, who had inspired Pinto da Costa to attempt to lure Enke northwards, was José Mourinho.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Robert repeated.

  ‘Ten million euros after tax is so much money that you sign that one contract and you’ll never have to do anything ever again,’ said Jörg Neblung.

  They had to meet Pinto da Costa at least once, they were agreed on that.

  The previous summer Alex Ferguson may have phoned Robert to woo him but most player transfers don’t involve anything as direct as that. In southern countries in particular, a class of intermediarios, or middlemen, has sprung up. Pinto da Costa had his personal intermediario, a special agent who didn’t have an official post at FC Porto but who was always dispatched to sound out the interest of a potential new recruit.

  The president was waiting for them in his summer villa – empty for the winter – in Cascais, the middleman informed them.

  The front gate opened slowly when Jörg and Robert reached the villa in Robert’s Opel. You’ve got to get yourself a bigger car – you’re a star, after all, his fans had often told him. Why should he buy himself a car when a sponsor provided one? Robert had always countered. How good it was that he drove such an inconspicuous car, he thought now for the first time. A captain of Benfica who was spotted negotiating with the president of FC Porto wouldn’t dare turn up for training the following day.

  The middleman opened the door to them. The president, wearing rimless glasses and a dark suit, was inside, sitting in a plush chair. The guests weren’t offered anything to drink, not even a glass of water. A lamp was lit. The blinds were down.

  Jörg can recall no exchange of pleasantries, no small talk. ‘It could be that we spent twenty or thirty minutes in the villa,’ he says, ‘but in terms of my perception of it, the meeting didn’t last longer than five minutes. It felt as if we were doing a drugs deal.’

  ‘We thank you for your interest,’ Jörg said to Pinto da Costa, ‘and of course it’s clear that we must talk, given the sum under discussion. Ten million euros after tax for three years is a handsome offer.’

  Robert translated. Pinto da Costa replied in Portuguese, but Jörg didn’t need Robert’s translation. He could read everything he needed to know in the president’s gestures.

  Where do you get that figure from, ten million? That was never discussed. We’ve never mentioned a figure.

  The middleman who had aired that supposed offer two weeks earlier sat still next to him, his features frozen.

  Robert and Jörg checked with a glance that they were thinking the same thing. A fake offer had been made to Robert to bring him to the negotiating table.

  ‘But we’re really very interested in Robert Enke,’ Pinto da Costa continued.

  ‘We came here on the assumption that ten million euros were on offer. You know it’s actually impossible for a Benficista like Robert to switch to FC Porto. So it seems inevitable that such a risky step would be financially compensated. One might imagine that you’d invited us here under false pretences.’

  ‘Please, let’s not argue now. We’ll make Robert an extremely satisfactory offer, though it certainly won’t be ten million euros post-tax for three years.’

  ‘We’re sorry, but we can’t negotiate further on that basis.’

  Robert and Jörg stood up. They politely shook hands with the president and the middleman. Then Pinto da Costa said something else to Robert in Portuguese: ‘If you do switch to FC Porto we’ll keep it secret until the start of the season, and on the day of the team presentation you’ll suddenly surprise everyone, standing in the Dragon Stadium.’

  At crucial moments Robert and Jörg often exchanged a silent glance to reach an agreement.

  That’s it, the glance said. We can live without Porto.

  A few days later a written offer arrived from the club. As expected, there was no mention of ten million euros, but it was the most lucrative offer Robert had ever received in his career.

  ‘But I don’t want to betray Benfica for that money, I’d rather play somewhere else for less,’ he tried to convince himself.

  In her black diary, Teresa recorded the comings and goings of early 2002.

  5 February. Balou fought with a strange dog on the beach. Robbi cross with me.

  10 February. Porto against Benfica. Bremen comes to watch. Exciting.

  11 February. Kaiserslautern want him!

  It was an era when the professional clubs were doing everything they could not to have to rely on luck in their search for players. They deployed scouts who looked for talent from Buenos Aires to Belgrade; they set up complex computer files so that when you pressed a button a list of sixteen right-sided defenders appeared with all the details of their skills. In the end, however, many transfers still tended to be based more on chance and personal contacts.

  Werder Bremen employed two scouts: Hune Fazlic, the best in the Bundesliga, and Mirko Votava, who had got the job chiefly because he had played for the club in the past. Votava travelled to Porto. Benfica lost 3–2. Votava analysed the goalkeeper he was sent to study in the style of an armchair critic: ‘Enke faces three shots and lets three goals in – what do you want me to say?’

  Werder Bremen told Jörg that they had no interest in signing Robert Enke.

  No one from 1 FC Kaiserslautern came to watch Robert. Coach Andreas Brehme phoned Jupp Heynckes just once to hear his judgement.

  25 February. Robbi talked to Brehme. Jörg is meeting Kaiserslautern’s sporting director. I hope everything goes well.

  In the meantime a few rumours were circulating in Lisbon. Robert Enke was going to leave Benfica! Robert Enke was going to switch to FC Porto! After his bad experiences leaving Mönchengladbach he had hoped he would be able to keep his transfer plans secret until the end of the season.

  ‘I don’t get how people I don’t know can say on television that I’ve signed for Porto. It’s simply a lie!’ Robert said, half-truthfully.

  Fica Enke! yelled the fans. Fica Enke! The words billowed in the wind on home-made banners in the Stadium of Light. One television channel handed him half a dozen video cassettes. They were full of messages from the fans. Fica Enke! Enke, stay!

  He was touched. But he had to go ever further, ever higher.

  He refused Benfica’s offer to extend his contract. Then his plans to move came out in the most surprising and unambiguous way.

  4 March. Robbi is taken out of goal. Moreira plays.

  When the sportswriters saw him sitting on the substitutes bench again for no good footballing reason three months before the end of his contract it wasn’t hard to draw conclusions. Robert had to hold a press conference. ‘I’m going to leave Benfica,’ he stated. It was reported on the evening news by the state broadcaster, RTP.

  He wouldn’t be playing in the remaining nine games, coach Jesualdo Ferreira told him.

  ‘After he had sat on the substitutes bench against Gil Vicente, he was suddenly injured for the rest of the season,’ says Moreira. ‘My suspicion was that he made up that injury to spare himself the humiliation, and I would be the last person not to understand that. Robert was here at a dark time for Benfica, a time when there were many, many problems, and eventually he had enough. But he was always there, helping me with advice and support, even when I was suddenly playing.’

  Teresa simply can’t remember whether he actually did fake an injury or whether he was injured. At the time it seemed beside the point.

  11 March. Kaiserslautern said no to Jörg. Luck isn’t on our side. Let’s wait for the sun.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Teresa shouts and slaps her palm against her forehead when she rereads the entry in her diary in 2010. ‘There you can see how spoilt we were by life at the time. If we thought those were the dark days: Kaiserslautern says no.’

  After Jörg had told them the bad news from Germany, they drove to the beach with the dogs. ‘It promptly started raining,’ Robert said, adding – as you might say, without thinking – ‘And that made the depre
ssion complete.’

  Robert’s longing for places like Kaiserslautern and Bremen grew with each refusal he got from the Bundesliga. At home in Sassoeiros he watched German football on satellite TV, and felt hurt that German football wasn’t watching him. ‘It seems peoople in Germany are thinking: Enke has had a great time in Portugal, lying on the beach for three years.’ He was wanted by the biggest clubs in the world, like Manchester United, he was a star in Portugal, but in Germany he was just an overlooked world-class goalkeeper. It had little to do with his performances but with Portugal being on the edge of Europe. The Primeira Liga was largely ignored in Germany, and with Benfica he had never qualified for the Champions League – one of the supposed attract ions of moving to Lisbon in 1999. In that third season, too, they would finish only fourth in the domestic league. Benfica had been Portuguese champions twenty-seven times, but the last time had been in 1994. Robert only turned up in the German media from time to time as a tour guide to Portugal, when he was able to report that ‘they don’t drink sparkling water here, it swells the stomach too much’, and ‘you can’t be in too much of a hurry at the cashier in Lisbon supermarkets’. In three years only one German sports reporter had come to see him play for Benfica.

  In the garden in Sassoeiros, Robert wore the green Werder Bremen replica jersey his friend Marc had given him.

  Jörg Neblung didn’t share Teresa and Robert’s sudden love of quiet German cities. ‘Robert felt like the lost son of the Bundesliga, but I thought, my God, they love you in England and Spain, the countries with the strongest leagues, you don’t have to curry favour with Germany.’ He’d had offers from Alavés and Espanyol Barcelona from the Spanish Primera División, two ambitious mid-level clubs.

  A few months earlier Jörg had gone freelance as a sports agent and persuaded Robert to come with him. At first the only other people on his books were another goalkeeper, Alexander Bade, the number two at 1 FC Cologne, and Olympic long-jump champion Heike Drechsler. ‘I knew Robert’s transfer was vital for me.’ He looked at the top international clubs. FC Barcelona, the guardian of the beautiful game, might have been looking for a goalkeeper: the coach there had recently switched back and forth several times between Roberto Bonano and Pepe Reina – always a sign of latent discontent. ‘But Jörg Neblung, a rookie from Cologne, couldn’t simply ring up Barça,’ Jörg says.

  He needed a middleman.

  A few days later he had two.

  Bernd Schuster, the blond angel of the eighties, whose cross-field passes had shown the footballing public the meaning of beauty, was the only German ever to have played for Barça. One special attraction in those days had been his wife Gaby, who acted as his manager. She was always happy to phone up her old contacts, especially if a commission was likely to come out of it. She told Barça’s sporting director Anton Parera that there was a talented goalkeeper in Portugal available on a free transfer, and that Manchester United had been already interested in signing him.

  At a club like Barça, with twenty members on the board who all want to push their own agendas, there are no secrets. Someone from Barça’s board of directors said to Portuguese agent José Veiga: our sporting director is interested in Benfica’s goalkeeper, perhaps you could pick that up. And Jörg immediately had Veiga on the phone. He could open a few doors for him at Barça. Veiga had rushed through the transfer of the decade, Luis Figo from Barça to Real Madrid. Jörg took him on as second middleman.

  If the transfer happened, the agents would be able to share more than half a million euros in commission.

  Veiga arranged an appointment with Parera for Jörg. They were interested in Enke, Parera said.

  ‘That could mean everything or nothing,’ said Jörg.

  In the coming weeks he regularly received calls from middlemen who all talked about their really quite extraordinary relationships with Barça’s sporting director and board of directors. In professional football there’s an army of such men who don’t represent a single player but offer the clubs all possible players, chancing their arms. But Jörg heard nothing more from Barça themselves.

  In Portugal, the season was coming to an end. Teresa and Robert had terminated their rental contract in Sassoeiros and didn’t know where they would go next.

  It was reported in the papers that Barcelona planned to sign a new goalkeeper, the Frenchman Ulrich Ramé of Girondins Bordeaux.

  Robert travelled with Jörg to Vitoria, to have a look at Alavés. The club was like the northern Spanish town: charming, but small.

  Back in Lisbon, Teresa and Robert went on a final drive with a video camera to all the places that meant so much to them – the beach at Estoril, La Villa, Marc’s record shop, Monsanto forest park. They stopped at each spot and waved, smiled and cried, ‘Adeus Lisboa!’

  It wasn’t hard for them to leave. After their lovely time in Lisbon they simply thought everything would be fine wherever they went.

  The previous summer they had taken a driving holiday – three thousand kilometres in two days – to Germany. They didn’t know how else to transport the dogs. This time they left them with Marc in Lisbon and took a plane to Frankfurt. They would just be on holiday for a little while.

  Jörg flew to Majorca for a photo-shoot with Heike Drechsler. From there he wanted to go to Catalonia for negotiations with Espanyol Barcelona – 28 May would be ideal.

  One or two days before then Jörg received another call from Barcelona. Barça’s sporting director Anton Parera wanted to see him.

  On 28 May, on his way to the meeting with FC Barcelona, Jörg became aware that he was travelling on a ticket paid for by Barça’s city rival Espanyol.

  EIGHT

  Feet

  IN BARCELONA YOU can stand a few hundred metres away from Camp Nou and not see the stadium. It’s situated in the middle of the city, hidden by apartment blocks; you can’t guess its size from outside. If you’re sitting inside, the grandeur of Camp Nou suddenly overwhelms you.

  Oval and gigantic, it’s more like the Colosseum than a football arena. The terraces rise so high that they merge with the sky. When a hundred thousand fans are there they look down on a spectacle of human fragility. The footballers look so small and vulnerable far below. If you sit alone in the empty stadium, the sound of silence brings to life all the battles you never saw but which you can suddenly imagine very clearly – Kubala on the wing, Zubizarreta in the air, Goikoetxea on the ground, in a black fury, having been laid low by a foul by the angel Schuster, to the roaring approval of the hundred thousand, their fists in the air.

  In the world of football, Camp Nou is the stronghold of all that is beautiful, good and true. The rest of the world had declared the juego bonito – the beautiful game – as finished once and for all after Brazil’s heart-breaking failure in the 1982 World Cup; realpolitik football now predominated, sticking to compact defensive formations before switching to attack in a flash. Only in Barcelona did they refuse to admit that reality. Fundamentalist devotees of grace, they bravely went on the attack with an intoxicating short-passing game.

  People have their theories about why Barça is so uncompromisingly committed to beauty. Because their eternal rival, Real Madrid, always won more games, they say, so Barça sought consolation in saying: yes, but our game is more beautiful! Or because the Catalans want to make the point that they are different and independent. The truth is more banal: FC Barcelona had their first great success with the perpetuum mobile of a passing game. In 1992 the club won the Champions League for the first time under Johan Cruyff, and from that point on they became devout followers of the beautiful way.

  The reality in 2002 was less grand. Luis Figo, who personified Barça, who dribbled to a melody, had deserted to Real two years earlier, as the most expensive footballer in the world. The trauma lingered. President Joan Gaspart, a man of frantic gestures and pounding heart, tried to inspire the club into action. A neurotic environment wasn’t particularly helpful.

  But the myth of Barça outshone the reality.r />
  On 28 May, Jörg Neblung left Anton Parera’s office with the feeling that he wouldn’t be able to keep his joy to himself for long. It was too big for that. Barça wanted to sign Robert Enke.

  They might not have heard anything from Barça for weeks, but the club had been making conscientious enquiries about Robert. Barça’s goalkeeping coach Frans Hoek dissected his game on video. ‘He had incredible reflexes,’ says Hoek, ‘and that was odd, because at the same time he wasn’t your typical muscle-bound German goalkeeper type like Kahn, Köpke or Schumacher, who basically only plays on the goal-line. If he’d been like that he would have been out of the question as far as Barça was concerned. Here the goalkeeper has to be able to join in; he has to act, not only react.’ Just to be on the safe side, Hoek rang an acquaintance who knew about Portuguese football. ‘I had a word with José Mourinho.’ As the coach at FC Porto Mourinho still hoped to sign Enke himself, but he praised the keeper with such honesty in conversation with Hoek that Barça decided to whip Enke away without delay.

  Parera had immediately agreed Robert’s salary with Jörg. The chief executive would have to take a look at the contract – a formality. He was in Madrid right now, but he was supposed to be back in the office the following day. ‘So you could come to Barcelona on Thursday and sign the contract,’ Jörg said to Robert on the phone.

  ‘I don’t actually want to go to Barcelona,’ said Teresa.

  Her voice was serious. It still is today, when she talks about this part of her life.

  ‘We’d just managed to learn Portuguese in three years, and I was horrified by the idea of going to another country and starting all over again when, with the offer from Porto, we could have stayed in Portugal, or perhaps even gone back to Germany.’

  ‘Dear Teresa, please forgive me, but I’ve got to contradict you there,’ said Jörg. ‘If Barça calls, you run to get there.’