In the stirring World
Cup final on Sunday between the national men’s soccer teams from Germany
and Argentina, an American played a role on the field in Rio de Janeiro
despite the United States team’s having been eliminated. Sitting and
occasionally pacing tensely along the German sideline was Mark
Verstegen, the team’s trainer.
Mr. Verstegen, the
founder and president of EXOS, a Phoenix-based company that trains
professional and recreational athletes and corporate executives, was
appointed in 2004 by Jurgen Klinsmann, then the coach of the German team
and now the United States coach. He was brought in to improve the
players’ fitness, agility, nutrition and resilience. At the time, the
Germans were at a low ebb by their high standards, having not won a
World Cup since 1990 or a European championship since 1996. Mr.
Verstegen said his appointment was met with widespread incredulity among
German fans, news media and even some players.
“They wondered what Americans could possibly teach” the German squad, he said.
Then the Germans
advanced to the semifinals of the 2006 World Cup, performing better than
expected, and on Sunday, the team won this year’s edition, defeating
Argentina, 1-0, in extra time after having routed the host Brazilian
squad, 7-1, a few days earlier. There aren’t many skeptics about Mr.
Verstegen’s training methods now.
To learn more about
how he trained the German team and how the rest of us might adapt some
of their routines at home, ,I spoke and emailed with Mr. Verstegen in
the days leading to and just after Germany’s title victory. (His book,
“Every Day is Game Day,” was published in January.) What follows are
excerpts from our conversations.
Q.
What were the logistics of training the German team at the World Cup, given that the team was traveling from city to city?
A.
We have a pretty
amazing mobile training camp. It’s a 4,000- or 5,000-square foot
structure that we erect adjacent to the pitch. It holds the latest
cardiovascular machines, weights, fitness and recovery gear, treatment
tables and so on.
Q.
What would a typical World Cup training session in that facility look like?
A.
It would depend on
how close we were to the next game, but we’d often divide the structure
into four stations, a mini-circuit, with a different exercise at each
station. We might have the players do things like a T-Hip rotation exercise
at one station and a miniband lateral walk at another. That’s where you
strap a band across the thighs or ankles and walk sideways. We were
ridiculed in 2004 when we had players exercise that way. But hip
stability is essential for soccer performance and injury mitigation.
People don’t laugh about it now.
Q.
After a session in the facility, then what?
A.
The team goes onto
the field and does drills, lots of drills, working on agility and
acceleration and building power. We might have them do lateral and cross
sprints, drop squats, running with the parachute or the Bullet belt [a
harness worn by the player and attached to a long rope held by a coach].
After that, there’d be technical and tactical work with the ball.
Q.
How different are these sessions from the training that the German team did before you arrived?
A.
There was more
emphasis then on the technical and tactical elements. The physical
training was very general, with lots of long runs. Now the players still
spend lots of time working on technique and tactics, but their physical
training is more focused and individualized. We constantly assess
players’ movement patterns, for instance, watching as they perform every
exercise. Precision is very important. If they’re slightly off in their
movements on any particular day, we correct things right away. It’s
like running an antivirus program on a computer. You want to get rid of
the junk and keep the movements precise.
Q.
Just how fit is the German team?
A.
I can give you
precise numbers on that. The German players covered 113.8 kilometers, or
about 71 miles, on average as a team per game in the group phase. Only
the Americans ran more as a team. In the quarterfinal round against
France, German players ran 7.5 kilometers, or about 4.6 miles, more as a
team than did the French side. That translates to about three-quarters
of a player more on the pitch.
Q.
How can you tell how much players are running?
A.
All of the players
wear monitors in their cleats that track their mileage, movements, where
they are on the field, when they stop and start, and all sorts of
additional data. We track every player’s every heartbeat and keep and
compare data from practice to practice and game to game. We repeat
certain drills, and if someone is performing the same drill with a lower
heart rate or faster speed, we know he’s improving. If he’s slower or
his heart rate stays elevated, we monitor him to make sure that’s he’s
not becoming overly fatigued or ill, then get him to push himself a bit
more.
Q.
Any suggestions on
which aspects of the German team’s training program those of us at home
might usefully incorporate into our exercise routines, even if we aren’t
soccer players?
A.
The broad elements of
the training program apply to anyone. Concentrate on your mind-set,
nutrition, movement patterns and recovery. On a practical level, get
plenty of sleep, which is extremely important and often overlooked. Kick
the electronics out of the bedroom. At the other end of the day, when
you first wake up, do a few push-ups or yoga poses, anything that gets
your body and mind primed for activity. You’ll be more receptive to
activity throughout the day. Then try to do whatever exercise you do a
bit better every day. You don’t have to be doing split squats with
kettle bells, but do something that pushes you a bit. The point is that
the body and the brain respond positively to having demands put on them.
That’s really the key to fitness.
Q.
Are you happy with the outcome of that last World Cup game?
A.
Utter elation. We had
put in 10 focused years of attention to details. There are no givens in
sports, but once that whistle blew, it was utter joy.
Roll Your Glutes Like Bastian Schweinsteiger
To lessen the chance
of injury and improve performance, we all should ease into exercise with
an orchestrated warm-up, Mr. Verstegen said. These eight exercises
approximate a typical warm-up for the German national soccer team, so
for many of us, they “might be a workout in itself at first,” he said.
But persevere, and the moves will become easier, he said, and your
subsequent workouts will be more productive. These exercises require a
foam roller and resistance band, which are available at many gyms or can
be purchased at sporting goods stores. They are best performed in the
order listed.
Rather than make a real plan, they abandoned themselves to romantic notions of passion and desire.
The German team could sense Brazil was starting to short-circuit.
Photo by Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil—Most people
are terrible singers, and yet football crowds are good at picking out a
tune. Crowds are often flat on the high notes and tend to rush the
tempo, but generally the combination of thousands of wrongs adds up to
one big right.
The Brazilian national anthem last night was different. All around
the Mineirão people stood and roared it so loud that their eyes bulged.
The words resounded with startling clarity but much too loudly for any
music to be heard.
Down on the field David Luiz and Júlio César were holding aloft the shirt of Neymar
like a holy relic. The camera picked out a woman holding a placard that
read, “Don’t worry—Neymar’s soul is here!” It was as though Neymar had
died and was looking down at his former teammates from heaven, rather
than watching them on television.
The collective emotional frenzy of the scene was awe-inspiring. For a
moment every Brazilian, and many neutrals, succumbed to the same
seductive illusion. What force could stand against the combined passion
of these 11 Brazilian warriors, the soul of Neymar, the heart of Thiago
Silva, and 200 million supporters?
On the field, the men in red and black stood and watched and let the
noise wash over them. They too had lost an important teammate to injury,
but it would never have occurred to them to create a cult of the fallen
Marco Reus. They knew that most of the forces arrayed against them were
imaginary. To the Germans, this was a simple matter of 11 against 11.
* * *
Germany’s first blow struck Brazil at their strongest point.
Neymar has been the corporate face of Brazil’s campaign but on the
field David Luiz has been the true star, a rampaging, inspirational,
all-action superhero. Luiz’s big hair makes him the most obvious player
on the pitch, so that his feats of athleticism and bravery never go
unnoticed.
He is such an easy player for spectators to pick out that although
the penalty area was crowded, everybody could see that it was David Luiz
who had arrived too late to stop Thomas Müller from volleying Germany
into the lead off a corner in the 11th minute.
Having toppled Brazil’s totem, Germany unveiled their most frightening weapon: telepathy.
The second goal arrived on 23 minutes and the way Germany scored it told Brazil that the game was up.
Fernandinho is a midfield monster for Manchester City, a relentless
destroyer who routinely dominates Premier League opponents with his
power and tenacity. Twice Fernandinho tried to tackle Toni Kroos, only
to bounce off the German midfielder like a bee off a windowpane. Kroos
serenely played a gentle pass through the Brazilian line into the path
of Müller, who was streaking in from the right. Brazil’s defense reacted
to the run of Müller, but not to that of Miroslav Klose in the opposite
direction. Müller’s lay-off to Klose wrong-footed the stumbling
defenders, affording Klose enough time for not one, but two unopposed
shots at the Brazilian goal. As the second shot rolled past the helpless
Júlio César, Klose became the top scorer in World Cup history.
At 2–0 Brazil knew they were probably going to lose, but the really
scary thing about that goal was the multidimensional coordination of
Germany’s movement. The understanding between Kroos, Müller, and Klose
had been as smooth and apparently effortless as though they were
executing a pre-planned move on a set piece. How could Brazil compete
with the sophistication of this team, who attacked from several
directions at once, who somehow seemed to know what was going to happen a
second and a half before Brazil did?
Brazil’s system was already beginning to short-circuit. Two minutes
later, Philipp Lahm aimed a cross toward Müller, and the ball broke to
Kroos, who smashed a glorious left-footer past César without breaking
stride. The Bayern player celebrated quietly, looking almost
embarrassed.
Germany’s next two goals proceeded with the inevitability of a
checkmate foreseen several moves in advance. First Kroos pounced on
Fernandinho and bulldozed him out of the way, played a one-two with Sami
Khedira that smoothly outmaneuvered the wreckage of Brazil’s defense,
and scored again.
In the next passage of play David Luiz threw himself forward with
desperation, but Mats Hummels beat him to the ball. Hummels’ pass found
Khedira, who coolly turned Dante before swapping passes with Mesut Özil
and burying the fifth. Germany was like a 10-year-old playing
PlayStation against his grandfather.
Barring the few thousand overjoyed Germans there was an atmosphere of
stunned, disbelieving horror in that stadium that has possibly never
before been experienced in sport. It was as though Germany had gathered
60,000 4-year-olds together and briskly announced that there is no such
thing as Santa Claus.
There is no mercy rule in football but at that moment you dearly
hoped that Germany would throttle back. The emotional deceleration was
too brutal for the host country to handle. It was as though the seven
years since Brazil won the right to host the World Cup had been an
elaborate joke leading up to this six-minute punchline.
At half time the German players congratulated each other as though the match was already over, which, of course, it was.
* * *
By that point, everyone present already knew that they were watching the most incredible result in the history of the World Cup. How can you explain such a collapse?
After the seventh goal.
Photo by Martin Rose/Getty Images
The only major match of recent years that could compare in any fashion was the 2005 Champions League final, when Liverpool scored three goals in six minutes to recover from 3–0 down against Milan, then won the game on penalties.
The coach of Milan that night, Carlo Ancelotti, wrote in his
autobiography that people often ask him what was going through his mind
during those minutes.
“The answer is simple: nothing. Zero. My brain was a perfect vacuum,
the vacuum of deep space.” It was only during extra time that “my brain
began functioning again, and I managed to put together a complete and
coherent thought: ‘This is starting to look bad.’ ”
After Tuesday’s match, a Brazilian journalist asked Brazil’s coach,
Luiz Felipe Scolari, why he had not made tactical changes during that
crazy six-minute spell when Germany ran in four goals. Scolari cut him
off mid-sentence.
“Let me explain something to you, then you can continue your
question. When were the goals scored? 23, 24, 25, 26, 28 minutes? In
such a space of time, nobody is going to change anything. It was one
after the other. I think everyone blanked out. We were trying to talk to
them, to get organized, to stop the goals going in, but it was a spell
of pressure when everything worked out for Germany. There was nothing we
could do to change it at that point.”
But there were things they could have done to change it. The most
obvious solution would have been for one of their players to throw
himself to the ground and feign injury for as long as it took for his
teammates to get their breath back.
That even an idea this obvious did not occur to Brazil tells you that all their fuses were blown.
It’s tempting to link those blown fuses with the spike of emotional
electricity with which Brazil had started the match. Outmatched by
coolly masterful opponents, suddenly aware of the appalling abyss that
separated the expectations of their people and their own ability to
deliver, Brazil gave in to blind panic.
Later, the Germans confirmed that they had sensed the initial Brazilian frenzy masked deep underlying doubts.
“From minute one we had the impression something big was possible,”
Kroos said. “We realized that the Brazilians were a bit upset, they were
not so clear in their actions. We took advantage of the possibilities
and scored one goal after another.”
“It was important to counter their passion and emotions with
calmness, patience, and persistence, also with courage and belief in our
own strength,” German manager Joachim Löw said. “You realized after the
2–0 that they were confused, that they never recovered their original
organization. We were extremely cool and took our chances. We realized
they were cracking up and took advantage of it.”
It was emotional judo. Germany reflected the energy of Brazil’s crowd
back against their players. They took the lead, then watched the
Brazilians melt down in the white heat of their own disgrace.
* * *
Afterward, Löw tried to empathize.
“I remember when we lost against Italy,” he said, referring to the 2006 World Cup semifinal,
when host nation Germany went down to two late goals from Fabio Grosso
and Alessandro del Piero. “A World Cup in your own country, everyone
wants you to go to the final. In the 119th minute we lost the
match. We know how Scolari feels, we know how the Brazilian team feels,
and we know how the people in Brazil feel now.”
Do they really?
Consider Philipp Lahm’s description of that Italy defeat.
“There is nothing worse than having to remain on the field after losing such an important game,” Lahm wrote in his autobiography.
“There is such sadness, such inner coldness, at the consciousness that
you will very seldom get an opportunity like this in your life, and now
you’ve messed it up. A few moments earlier you were part of a team, you
were a piece in a bigger puzzle, but now you’re all alone, and all you
want is to go into your shell, to get into the dressing room and stare
at the floor until the pain subsides. ... In that dressing room, there
was deathly silence.”
The Germans had to go to Stuttgart for a match none of them wanted to
play, the third-place playoff against Portugal. When they landed at the
airport it was pouring rain. The bus that picked them up got stuck in a
traffic jam. The players were irritated. What’s the holdup?
The main train station is closed, the bus driver said.
“For fuck’s sake,” the players grumbled. “What’s going on?”
Lahm writes:
“There are 10,000 people at the train station. They’re waiting for you.”
The bus inched through the crowd like Moses through the Red
Sea. Thousands of faces smiling, laughing, all because we have come here
to Stuttgart to play a completely pointless third-place match, and
suddenly I feel a shiver down my spine and I have goose pimples.
Madness. Ten thousand in the rain. Because they want to celebrate their team. Us.
In the bus, the temperature rises. Can this be true, what we’re seeing here?
“Madness,” said one.
“Madness,” said everybody.
As we get to the hotel and dump our bags in the lobby, we
hear the “Deutschland, Deutschland” choir. When we sit down to dinner an
hour later, I hear from outside such a roar, it’s like we’ve just
equalized against the Italians. But it’s just Lukas Podolski, who has
gone to stand before the big panoramic window of the dining hall to
assure himself that not a single person had left the place.
“They’re still there!” said Poldi.
The crowd was screaming because they had seen Poldi.
Ten thousand people were still there. Ten thousand people
standing in the pouring rain to thank us for playing an amazing World
Cup, for giving them joy and hope. None of these 10,000 is thinking
about the defeat against Italy. If we had beaten the Italians the mood
could not have been the slightest bit more joyful, more euphoric, more
friendly.
You wonder how the aftermath of what is already being called the Mineirazo—an echo of the Seleção’s 1950 disaster in the World Cup final against Uruguay—will play out in the Brazilian players’ cash-in autobiographies.
At 5–0 on the 30-minute mark, it briefly looked like we would soon be
watching the first World Cup semifinal to be played in an almost empty
stadium. Hundreds of Brazilian fans could be seen making their way up
the corridors to the exits.
But the initial rush subsided. Most of the Brazil fans would remain
until the end. They had a few things they wanted to get off their
chests.
For the first time since the opening match against Croatia in São
Paulo, the crowd began to chant against the president, Dilma Rousseff.
“Hey! Dilma! Vai tomar no cu!”
Then Fred, the center-forward who once played for this stadium’s home
team, Cruzeiro, took a shot from 20 yards that rolled weakly toward the
German goal.
The fans behind the goal exploded. The Dilma chant was quickly retooled. “Hey! Fred! Vai tomar no cu!”
From that point Fred was the target of ceaseless, savage abuse. Even
after he had been substituted in the aftermath of the team’s 6–0
deficit, the crowd jeered his face appearing on the big screen.
After the 6–0, the Brazilian fans began to cheer the German passes: Ole! Ole!
The tone had an unmistakable edge of malice. This had nothing to do
with any sportsmanlike desire to acclaim great German play. This was
about shaming the losers in the yellow shirts.
The 7–0 was celebrated by large sections of the home fans, for the same reason.
At full-time the Brazilian players gathered in the center circle, the
point on the pitch furthest away from the crowd. The players seemed to
confer, then turned to the fans behind one of the goals and raised their
hands in tentative applause.
The supporters erupted in furious derision, hurling the players’
olive branch back in their faces with pitiless rage. There would be no
mercy, no forgiveness. The message was simple: GET OUT OF OUR SIGHT.
* * *
If Löw really wanted to empathize with Brazil he should have chosen a different moment in Germany’s football history.
It didn’t involve humiliation in a home World Cup semifinal. It was
the more prosaic failure of Euro 2000, when Germany lost two out of
three matches and finished bottom of its group, that changed the future
of German football.
Maybe two defeats in three doesn’t sound that bad, but for Germany it
was truly shameful. Euro 2000 was perhaps the best ever edition of the
European Championships and Germany, the dominant country in the
continent’s football, had sent the worst team.
Rather than write it off under the heading of “these things happen,”
the Germans decided to act. Clubs in the first and second division were
told they had to set up standardized youth academies as part of a broad
reorganization of the national football structure. The idea was to make
sure that the next generation of German players would be better than the
last.
Year by year, the new generations of German footballers were equipped
with the technical and cognitive tools that we saw dismantling Brazil
at the Mineirão. The coordinated movement that looked like some uncanny
telepathy is really just coaching. Over the last five tournaments
Germany have reached a semifinal, a final, a semifinal, a semifinal, and
now another final, after what might be the World Cup’s greatest ever
victory. Germany’s plan is working.
Of course, Germany is the spiritual home of planning in a way that
Brazil will never be. But something in Brazil has to change, or the
future of the national team—still the proudest institution in a country
that doesn’t take pride in many of its institutions—looks bleak.
Historically, Brazil has produced outstanding footballers with the
same seeming effortlessness with which it produces mangoes. The
Brazilian football industry has been shaped by this plenty to resemble
the country’s other exploitative, extractive industries. Footballers are
another commodity to be exported. It’s a strictly materialistic system,
in which the only guiding principle is success.
This has been how Brazilian football has worked over the decades as
it has gradually ceded its vibrant former identity. It didn’t matter
that Brazilian football gradually ceased to be loved around the world.
Nobody cared that the beautiful game had been overtaken by a hollow cult
of victory. The enduring success of the national team covered the
flaws. At any given time, Brazil could count on several of the best
players in the world, and that was usually enough.
It’s not enough anymore. Brazil’s players are no longer technically
any better than the best Europeans. Now the top European countries, led
by Spain and followed by Germany, have introduced the super-organization
of top-level club football into the international game. In a future
where big international teams move with the same complex sophistication
as the best club sides, ad hoc collections of talent like the Brazilian
national team will struggle to compete.
In hindsight we can see that Brazil knew what they wanted from this
World Cup but neglected to figure out how they were going to get it.
Four years ago, they appointed Mano Menezes with a brief to build a
team for the World Cup. They lost confidence in Menezes halfway through
that process and turned back to Scolari, yesterday’s man.
Rather than make a real plan, they abandoned themselves to romantic
notions of passion, desire, and native cunning. They hoped that if they
screwed their eyes shut and wanted it enough they would prevail. Through
a collective effort of will they almost managed to transform forlorn
hope into real belief.
On Tuesday night, the land of magical thinking received a bracing
communiqué from the reality-based community in the form of seven German
goals. A fevered dream isn’t enough. You need a vision.
Brazil should forgive its players. The decay of the national team is
not their fault. They were just the men given the impossible job of
defending a reputation it wasn’t in their power to defend. The German
crowd’s generosity to its team in 2006 inspired those players to return
with renewed zeal for the cause.
Scolari was right when he said after the match that some of these
players can still carry the colors of Brazilian football into the next
World Cup.
But first Brazil needs to rediscover what those colors are supposed to stand for.
