WORLD CUP ‘94: 23 DAYS and COUNTING : Romania’s Untapped Treasure : Soccer: Hagi, a temperamental star, has one final chance to prove his ability to the world.
It is a rainy-misty morning in late spring and at the Stadio Comunale a mongrel puppy is racing around the soccer field where Brescia’s second division team is practicing. The players are halfheartedly stretching on the grass, and--grateful for the diversion--allow the puppy to clamber over them with his muddy paws.
The brown and black dog, Rocky, belongs to someone who works at the stadium and the players accept him as a mascot, boxing his ears and playfully tugging his wagging tail.
One player does not join in. He is small and dark and wiry, and wears a wool headband that covers the tips of his ears. He is off to the side, kicking a soccer ball very hard toward a goal from extreme angles. And he is hitting the net.
He is Gheorghe Hagi, the best player ever produced by Romania. He has been nicknamed “the Maradona of the Carpathians” for his superb dribbling skills. At 29, he has been a part of the Romanian national team for a decade. Romania will play in Group A with the United States in the World Cup and it is Hagi whom defenders on the U.S. national team will chase on June 26 when the teams meet in the first round.
On this day, Hagi is being chased by Brescia’s Romanian coach, Mircea Lucescu. Hagi is in Lucescu’s doghouse and the new accommodations don’t suit him. Lucescu benched him in a league game a few days ago and Hagi is pouting. In two years with the Italian club, he had never sat out a game.
The long-suffering Lucescu has about lost patience with his star, whose talent is undeniable but whose temperament gives coaches fits. A week before, Brescia had generously released Hagi to attend a Romanian World Cup warm-up game in Bucharest. The club’s gesture was all the more indulgent, given the fact that Hagi--who is the Romanian captain--was not eligible to play because he had been expelled from a previous match for spitting at an opponent.
Even given his spectator status, Hagi managed to return to Brescia a day late and skipped a practice. Lucescu decided to teach him a lesson, but Hagi chose not to learn it. So they are squabbling. And today there is a new source of tension. Even though Hagi had previously agreed to sit for an interview, now he doesn’t feel like it. Nothing personal--it’s been four months since he’s spoken to local reporters.
Lucescu has talked during the brief practice and now it’s Hagi’s turn. The coach calls to Hagi and the player ignores him. Lucescu yells at Hagi in Romanian and Hagi fires back. Hagi starts down a flight of stairs and Lucescu gives chase.
Hagi has been told that if he does not give the interview he will be fined. That threat, and another angry confrontation, brings Hagi to a small room under the stadium to discuss his brilliant but enigmatic career.
He is a compact man whose black jeans and leather jacket complement his closely cropped black hair and dark glowering eyes. The interview begins uncomfortably, but Hagi relaxes and--once--even smiles and laughs. Under 30 but a professional since he was 13, Hagi understands that this World Cup will be his last chance on such an international stage.
Lucescu, who was captain of Romania’s 1970 World Cup team and a national coach, has been using every coaching trick he knows to motivate the stubborn and, he says, lazy Hagi to raise his game to the level most of the soccer world believes he can achieve. Lucescu is candid.
“He is a great player without much of a work ethic,” Lucescu said. “He could be the best player in the world, after (Diego) Maradona. If he changes his mind set, he could be one of the best players in the World Cup. I’ve tried to motivate him. I’ve tried to anger him. I want him to react. It is his last chance to be seen as a great player. We are trying to get him to understand that.”
Hagi is familiar with the criticism. Romania’s loss in the second round in the 1990 World Cup was considered a failure and, in the public mind, much of the responsibility was Hagi’s. The midfielder never appears to give on the field as he seems to be able.
Given Romania’s soccer history, Hagi’s generation of players has been given little guidance and precious little sense of continuity. Ultimately, Hagi’s development might have been retarded by the lavish attention paid to soccer by Romania’s former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Ceausescu and his son, Valentin, adopted certain teams and saw to it that they were successful. Valentin’s club was the powerful army team, Steaua Bucharest. Together, the Ceausescus acted as informal heads of soccer in Romania.
“Hagi was a star player who didn’t work hard,” Lucescu said. “He was a favorite of the Ceausescus. The team did well without having to try hard. They always won. (Because of this) he didn’t improve. Here, he has difficulties.”
In a corrupt system where results were a foregone conclusion, Hagi never explored his potential. Why put out the effort when it isn’t necessary? One commonly heard story about that era of Romanian soccer concerns a team in Ceausescu’s hometown vying for promotion from the third to second division. The team needed an improbable 17 goals in its final game to earn the promotion. It scored 18.
Valentin knew how to cultivate players. Steaua’s players were well trained and well cared for, afforded privileges that few in Romania’s crumbling economy could afford. The club enjoyed three undefeated seasons and had nine players on the 1990 World Cup team.
Hagi was snatched up by Steaua when Valentin Ceausescu determined he needed the rising star for a European Cup match in 1986. According to Lucescu, Steaua got Hagi on loan from Sportul Studentesc, and never gave him back or paid the club for him.
The legacy of soccer from that era is still being felt in Romania.
Under the Ceausescu regime, soccer players were viewed as national treasures and were not allowed to be exported. No one in the government wanted young players exposed to other systems, lest their “new ideas” infect the rest of Romania.
After Ceausescu’s overthrow and execution in 1989, a new attitude developed. Soccer players were still seen as natural resources, but as such, they were valuable commodities to be sold on the now-open market. After the country’s return to the World Cup finals in 1990 for the first time in 20 years, many of the most promising young players in Romania were sold in a frenzy of profit taking.
Hagi was sold to Real Madrid for $3.5 million in 1990. Hard currency was a higher priority than sports development. But money wasn’t the only objective. Some players were transferred for food or commodities that could be resold. One club swapped a player for a bus.
The short-sighted policy may have yielded immediate profit to club owners, but the talent drain bankrupted Romania’s development programs.
“The change came when they sold all of those players,” Lucescu said. “There were no players left behind. It’s difficult to build a national youth team if all the players are abroad. So our young players have little experience because all the old players come back (to play on the national team) and there is no place for the young ones.”
Lucescu estimated that 200 Romanian players from all levels were sold in the chaos after Ceausescu’s assassination. With the best players playing abroad, the standard of the game in Romania began to drop. So did the sport’s popularity. Lucescu said that Romanian league games used to draw 40,000 fans. Now, the figure has dwindled to about 3,000.
“This team has to do something important in the World Cup, otherwise the future of the sport is not good,” Lucescu said. “If the national team does well in the United States, it can get young people interested in the game.”
The Romanian World Cup team gets mixed reviews with this being the standard critique: talented individual players who don’t work well together and who, although capable of brilliance, don’t always give their best effort.
“We do have good days and bad days,” Hagi acknowledges. “We must try to develop a mentality where we play on a consistent level. We know we are a good team, but we are not the kind of team the other teams are frightened of. We have to show this in the World Cup.
“We don’t want to play this rough-tough football. We want to play in a pleasing style. We don’t want this problem where you don’t score goals, especially in the United States. Americans love a show, don’t they?”
