Michael Laudrup: The Maestro

The Dane who won five nil on both sides of the Clásico, and was loved by both.

In January 1994, Barcelona beat Real Madrid five nil at the Camp Nou. A tall Dane in the blue and claret shirt spent the evening putting the ball where nobody else could see a space. Romário scored three. The Dane made it look as though the goals had been arranged in advance.

A year later, almost to the week, Real Madrid beat Barcelona five nil at the Bernabéu.

The same Dane was on the pitch again. This time he wore white.

Michael Laudrup is the only man to have stood on the winning side of both of those nights. He did it without a single word of spite towards either club, and today both sets of supporters still claim him as their own. In a rivalry built on grievance, that is close to impossible. It tells you most of what you need to know about him.

A Football Family in Copenhagen

He was born in Frederiksberg, in Copenhagen, on the fifteenth of June 1964. His father, Finn Laudrup, had played for Denmark. The boy began at Vanløse, his father’s childhood club, and there was never much doubt about where he was heading. His younger brother Brian would follow the same road and become a great player in his own right.

Michael was quick, upright and unusually calm. By eighteen he was at Brøndby. By nineteen he had been signed by Juventus.

Turin, in 1983, belonged to Michel Platini. Serie A allowed only two foreign players per club, and Juventus already had theirs. So the young Dane was sent on loan to Lazio, in Rome, to wait. He waited two seasons, played well in a struggling side, and never once complained in public about being parked.

In 1985 he finally arrived in Turin. That December, in Tokyo, Juventus met Argentinos Juniors for the Intercontinental Cup. Laudrup scored the equaliser late in the match, rounding the goalkeeper from a narrow angle. In the shoot-out he missed his penalty. Juventus won anyway, and he became a champion of the world at twenty one.

The following spring they won the league. Platini, by then the finest player on earth, was asked about his young team-mate. His answer has followed Laudrup ever since. He called him the greatest player in the world, in training.

It was a joke, and a compliment, and a challenge. Laudrup understood all three.

The Eyes in the Back of His Head

To describe Laudrup you have to describe something that is hard to see.

He was not a sprinter. He was not a goalscorer in the way that Romário or Hugo Sánchez were goalscorers. He did not shout, and he rarely celebrated as though the moment belonged to him. What he had was the rarest gift in the game. He saw the whole pitch at once, and he saw it a second earlier than everybody else.

His most famous trick was a simple one. He looked one way and passed the other. Defenders read his eyes, as defenders are taught to do, and the ball went somewhere else entirely. It happened so often that whole back lines stopped trusting what they saw.

He had another move that Spanish football now calls the croqueta. The ball shifts from one foot to the other in a single movement, and an opponent who was blocking the way finds himself facing an empty space. Iniesta made it famous a generation later. Laudrup was doing it in the late eighties.

Jorge Valdano, who coached him in Madrid, put it in four words. He has eyes everywhere.

That is the number 10’s gift, whatever number is printed on the shirt. The maestro does not run the game with his legs. He runs it with his head, and the rest of the team plays at the speed he decides.

Cruyff’s Dream Team

In 1989 Johan Cruyff, newly in charge at Barcelona, wanted to build a team that played football the way he had played it. He needed a man who could see the pitch the way he had seen it. He went to Turin and signed Laudrup.

What followed changed Barcelona for ever. With Laudrup, Koeman, Guardiola, Stoichkov and later Romário, Cruyff’s side won four consecutive league titles between 1991 and 1994. They played short, fast, patient football, and Laudrup was the hinge on which all of it turned.

On the twentieth of May 1992, at Wembley, Barcelona beat Sampdoria after extra time to win the European Cup for the first time in their history. Laudrup played. The club that had spent decades in Real Madrid’s shadow finally had the trophy it wanted most, and the Dane had helped to bring it home.

There is a reason Barcelona supporters still speak of him with real tenderness. He was there at the beginning of everything they now take for granted.

A Summer Watched From Afar

That same summer, his country did something extraordinary without him.

In November 1990, Laudrup had stepped away from the Denmark side after a falling out with the national coach, Richard Møller Nielsen. He did not believe in the coach’s approach and he said so. Then he simply stopped coming.

In June 1992, Denmark were called into the European Championship at ten days’ notice, after Yugoslavia were excluded. They had not even qualified. They went to Sweden, beat the Netherlands in the semi-final, beat Germany in the final, and became champions of Europe. Brian Laudrup was in the side. His elder brother watched from home.

It would be easy to call that a mistake. Perhaps it was. But it is worth noticing how he carried it. He did not claim the triumph. He did not attack the coach or the players. He made no speeches about his principles. He let the team that won have its summer, entirely.

In August 1993 he came back. He went on to captain his country and to play for Denmark a hundred and four times, scoring thirty seven goals. At the World Cup of 1998, in France, the two brothers played side by side and took Denmark to the quarter-finals. Both were named in the tournament’s all-star team.

The older one was thirty four. He had waited six years for a summer like that. He played as though he had never been away.

Crossing the Line

In 1994, Barcelona reached the European Cup final again, in Athens, against Milan. Cruyff left Laudrup out. Milan won four nil.

That summer Laudrup did the thing that is almost never done. He left Barcelona and signed for Real Madrid.

In most careers that is a story about betrayal. In his it became a story about class. He did not insult the club he had left. He did not perform loyalty to the club he had joined. He trained, he played, and in his first season in Madrid he helped Real Madrid win the league for the first time since 1990. Barcelona’s run of four titles was over. Laudrup had won five Spanish championships in a row, with two different clubs, which no one had done before.

And in the middle of it came that January night at the Bernabéu. Real Madrid five, Barcelona nil. A year after he had helped Barcelona win by the same score.

Raúl, then a teenager breaking into the Real Madrid side, would later say that Laudrup was the best player he ever played with. Real Madrid’s own history calls him the king of the final ball.

What is remarkable is not that Madrid loved him. It is that Barcelona never stopped. Supporters on both sides of the most bitter rivalry in Spain still speak of him the same way. You do not earn that with talent alone. You earn it with how you conduct yourself when you leave, and how you conduct yourself when you arrive.

The Quiet Exit

He finished as he had played, without fuss. A season in Japan with Vissel Kobe, at a time when few European stars went that far east. Then a last year at Ajax, where he won the Dutch title and played alongside a new generation in Amsterdam, the city that had produced Cruyff.

In November 2006, the Danish football union named him the finest player in the country’s history. Two years earlier, Pelé had named him in the FIFA 100, his list of the greatest living players. Romário, who played beside him at the Camp Nou and was not a man given to generous rankings, put him among the best he had ever seen.

He went into coaching and won trophies there too, at Brøndby, at Swansea in Wales, in Qatar. He was never one of the loud men on the touchline. He wore a suit well, said little, and expected his teams to pass the ball.

What Laudrup Teaches

The number 10 is the maestro. He sees the play before it exists and sets the tempo for everyone else. Laudrup did that for Juventus, for Barcelona, for Real Madrid and for Denmark, for nearly twenty years.

But the deeper lesson is about something other than passing.

He teaches that you can compete without hatred. He played in the fiercest rivalry in club football, on both sides of it, and at the end neither side could find a reason to dislike him. We are gentlemen playing the game to win, always respecting our opponents. Laudrup is what that sentence looks like when it is tested on the hardest possible ground.

He teaches that a man can be wrong, or at least unlucky, without becoming bitter. He missed his country’s greatest summer. He never asked anyone to feel sorry for him. He came back, wore the armband, and gave them six more years.

He teaches that the best players are not always the loudest. There was no theatre in Laudrup. No tantrums, no feuds carried through the newspapers, no celebrations staged for the cameras. Style without humility is costume. His style was the opposite of costume. It was economy, and calm, and the ball arriving exactly where it needed to be.

And he teaches that respect is the only trophy that survives a transfer. Clubs keep the medals. The man keeps his name.

The game remains an essential part of our souls, even when we no longer play. Most of us will never wear the colours of two great rivals. Every one of us will change teams in some sense, a firm, a city, a role, a chapter of life. Leave the way Laudrup left. Arrive the way he arrived.

Craft your own legend.

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