The clock is ticking, even for world’s soccer stars
They are all in the twilight of their careers, now — still playing but recognizing only too well that the days are fast dwindling.
Ronaldo admitted as much this past week. Brazil’s two-time World Cup winner and three-time FIFA world player of the year acknowledged in Rio de Janeiro that this could be his final season.
The World Cup’s all-time leading goal scorer, sidelined by injury for more than three months and fighting weight problems, told O Globo television that he wants to end the current campaign with Corinthians on a positive note.
The 33-year-old former Cruzeiro, PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and AC Milan star said he would make one “last sacrifice to end the year well,” and then decide whether to hang up his boots.
For France’s Nicolas Anelka, that decision already has been made, and there is no doubt about that.
After the French soccer federation last week handed him a ludicrous 18-match ban from the national team for his tirade against then-coach Raymond Domenech during France’s pitiful World Cup in South Africa, Anelka thumbed his nose at the officials and walked away laughing.
Anelka, 31, will continue playing for Chelsea, but his days with the other Bleus are done.
“They are real clowns, these people…. I am doubled up with laughter,” Anelka, who played 69 times for France before being sent home in disgrace from the World Cup, told the France Soir newspaper in his first interview since the South Africa fiasco.
“For me, ever since the South Africa World Cup, the French team is part of the past,” he said. “For me, this whole thing with the [disciplinary] commission is an aberration, a masquerade to make sure they don’t lose face. They have punished a void.… The page with Les Bleus was turned on June 19 when I was evicted” from the French team at the World Cup.
Another player who is getting long in the tooth but still talking a good game is Germany’s Michael Ballack, who missed out on South Africa because of an ankle injury and subsequently lost the captaincy of the Mannschaft to Philipp Lahm.
Now Ballack, 33, who joined Bayer Leverkusen from Chelsea on a free transfer in late June, says he wants the armband back and is challenging Lahm to return what he feels is rightfully his.
Even though Lahm, 26, led Germany to third place at the World Cup and is the better choice as captain in the long term, Ballack argues that he is in the right.
“For me, the matter is clear,” he said. “I am the captain of Germany and intend to take on the role again when I am fit. I can’t wait to lead Germany into the Euro 2012 qualifiers” starting next month.
“I believe in myself as the captain and I have the personality to do it. Missing this year’s World Cup was a real blow and there is no way I am about to settle for a final curtain like that.
“Not for one instant do I feel like a player in decline.”
Nor, apparently, does Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs, who last weekend extended his goal scoring streak to an astonishing 21 consecutive years when he found the back of the net in United’s English Premier League season-opening win. The Welsh standout turns 37 in November but in his case age is just a number.
Another old-timer, meanwhile, is making an improbable comeback. Even though he is 37 and has not played in two years, former Dutch star Edgar Davids, once the pride of Ajax Amsterdam and Juventus, among several high-profile clubs, on Friday joined Crystal Palace, a second-tier English team.
“It is an exciting time for me,” Davids said after signing his contract. “I just want to enjoy football and show what I can do.”
While such veterans are making news in several odd ways, the next generation of players — the ones who will be retiring two decades from now — are beginning to be heard.
Perennial Ukrainian power Dynamo Kyiv, for instance, last week had a crucial European Champions League match at home against Ajax Amsterdam. Amazingly — but successfully — the team opted for Maxym Koval as its starting goalkeeper. Koval is 17.
“He looked very mature,” said teammate and all-time Ukraine great Andriy Shevchenko. “He saved our team several times and fully deserves lots of compliments.”
The years have slipped by almost impossibly fast. It seems only yesterday that Ronaldo was a 17-year-old protégé sitting on Brazil’s bench while the Selecao of Romario and Bebeto set about winning the World Cup in the U.S. in 1994.
Koval was not yet 2 that summer, and there are a host of other teenagers now forcing their way onto the international stage and into the soccer public’s consciousness.
On Friday, for example, while Davids was signing for Crystal Palace on a pay-as-you-play deal, 18-year-old forward Neymar of Brazil’s Santos was rejecting a $39-million move to Chelsea that would have earned him $85,000 a week.
When PSV Eindhoven lured Ronaldo from Brazil to Holland in 1994, he cost the Dutch club only $6 million.
But that was yesterday and tomorrow already beckons.
grahame.jones@latimes.com
