Florentino Pérez and Zinedine Zidane might be playing nice at the moment but the pair have not always seen eye to eye. There are not many players that can publicly criticise the Real Madrid president and get away with it but that is exactly what Zidane did after Pérez took the decision to sell Claude Makélélé to Chelsea in 2003.
“Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?” Zidane asked after his compatriot’s exit from the Bernabéu. Pérez replied with the coldest of parting shots: “We will not miss Makélélé. His technique is average, he lacks the speed and skill to take the ball past opponents, and 90% of his distribution either goes backwards or sideways. He wasn’t a header of the ball and he rarely passed the ball more than three metres. Younger players will arrive who will cause Makélélé to be forgotten.”
How wrong Pérez proved to be. Younger players arrived, as did more established names. Instead it was them who were forgotten. For the remainder of Pérez’s first reign until 2006, his Galácticos – numbering Zidane, Raúl, Ronaldo, Luís Figo, Roberto Carlos and David Beckham, among others – failed to win a single trophy. In this time, Makélélé would win back-to-back Premier League titles, a League Cup and was a penalty shootout away from winning the 2006 World Cup, in which he played every minute. Operating in front of the back four, he created his own position – ‘The Makélélé Role’ – becoming one of the few players (Cruyff turn, Panenka penalty, Papinade volley) to have his name sewn into the fabric of the game.
Zidane had understood what Pérez hadn’t. It was not Makélélé’s quality on the ball – his dribbling, range of passing, heading ability – that was his strength but his importance when Real didn’t have possession. He was not the quickest, as Pérez had gleefully pointed out, but his nose for danger, reading of the game, and tactical awareness meant that he was plastering over cracks that had not had time to fully form, a firefighter disguised in shin pads and shorts.
This was not lost on Claudio Ranieri, who echoed Zidane’s ‘engine’ sentiments upon signing the Zaire-born midfielder for Chelsea: “I have a fantastic watch. It is run by battery. Claude is my new battery. The best.” Shelling out £16m in 2003 for an unglamourous player the wrong side of 30 would normally be seen as a risk. Here it was a no-brainer.
The one facet of Makélélé’s ability that Pérez refused to criticise – and yet the one attribute that is so obviously lacking from his game – was his prowess in front of goal. In three years he scored one goal for Real. Makélélé failed to register an international goal in any of his 71 appearances for France. In over 600 club matches during his career, he scored just 17 times.
Ironically it had been two goals that first peaked Real’s interest in signing Makélélé. Pérez was in attendance to watch the Frenchman head Celta Vigo into a 2-0 lead at Real Madrid in 1998 (a goal ably assisted by another future Galáctico, Míchel Salgado – Celta would also beat Real 5-1 in the return fixture that season). The next season, Makélélé opened the scoring in Celta’s 4-0 destruction of Zidane’s Juventus in the Uefa Cup.
Only two of Makélélé’s 17 career goals came for Chelsea – and the second, on Bonfire Night 2006 at Tottenham, was a ripper which gave him a 100% shot-conversion rate in 2006-07: one shot, one goal.
‘Three-Point Lane’ had become a happy hunting ground for Chelsea – going into the game, Spurs had not beaten their London rivals in 32 league encounters home and away, a record stretching back to 1990. Indeed in one of these matches, Makélélé had made his Chelsea debut against Tottenham in 2003, a 4-2 win for the west London side. And so, buoyed by a 2-2 draw away at the Camp Nou in the Champions League the previous week, José Mourinho’s side travelled to north London in high spirits, on the back of a 13-game unbeaten streak in all competitions, and knowing that another win would send them joint-top of the Premier League with Manchester United. Chelsea promptly lost 2-1.
Records show that goals from Michael Dawson and Aaron Lennon were enough to give Spurs the victory. The result may have had far reaching consequences for Chelsea, they never closed that three-point gap with United, remaining in second until the season’s end to relinquish their Premier League crown for the first time in two seasons. Other things did happen in the game – John Terry was sent off, the substitute Khalid Boulahrouz lasted 22 minutes before he was himself substituted – but the game should be remembered for a 30-second period a quarter of an hour in: Ledley King’s outrageous slide tackle on Arjen Robben (which probably deserves a blog all in itself – stand by for the Guardian’s new football series: Golden Tackle) leading to a Chelsea corner, from which Makélélé scored.
King would play one more part, impressively beating Terry in the air to the subsequent set piece, but could only half clear, with Benoît Assou-Ekotto and Arjen Robben both unable to reach the ball. And then, it happened. Unexpectedly, where you might imagine Frank Lampard or Michael Ballack to appear on the edge of the area, Makélélé enters the shot, before delivering one of his own: cutting across the thigh-high bouncing ball with his right foot – not unlike Eric Cantona in the FA Cup final 10 years previously – and walloping a swerving effort that started outside Paul Robinson’s right-hand post but swerved just inside, nestling in the bottom corner.
Cue pandemonium. Chelsea’s fans can be seen falling about in the away end, figuratively and literally, at the sight of Makélélé’s feat. The beaming Frenchman, utterly bereft of ideas of how to celebrate, sets off towards the bench, visibly laughing. Every single one of his team-mates mob him, all of them towering over the 5ft 6in goalscorer, and there is not one face that is not delighted for him. José Mourinho initially walks calmly out of his technical area to greet his players, wearing a smug expression and opening his arms as though himself claiming responsibility for the goal, but in the end, even he breaks – a smile spreading widely across his face – caving into the unadulterated happiness going on around him. “Claude Makélélé’s lack of goals have been something of a joke around the Chelsea dressing room,” says the BBC’s commentator Steve Wilson. “The joke’s over now.” Meanwhile, neighbouring Spurs fans wear a look of disgust, King throws up both arms in despair, equally bemused at what has just happened.
After all, scoring was simply not his job. Makélélé’s running and tactical intelligence without the ball, and distribution with it, was geared towards one thing: winning the ball back. “My role is to keep the balance of the team right,” he later admitted. So when Didier [Drogba] goes here, I do this. When Frank [Lampard] goes there, I go there. Same with Michael [Ballack]. When one person moves out of position, then someone else comes in and covers for them. When you play in my position you have to enjoy it. You can’t be thinking ‘I don’t get any goals’. You just enjoy it, you enjoy playing football, tackling, giving the ball. Just enjoy it. It’s the ultimate honour to have [The Makélélé Role] named after me.”
He rarely spoke to the media like this but could be magnificently combative in the interviews he was forced into: before France’s World Cup quarter-final against Brazil in 2006, as his team-mates were waxing lyrical about the Seleção – “You can’t ignore them, they have five stars on their shirt,” flatters Thierry Henry; “the great Brazil … wonderful,” lauds Zidane – Makélélé says, almost with a bored expression: “Brazil or not, I don’t give a fuck … Ronaldinho, whats-his-name, thingy … don’t give a shit.” France won 1-0, Ronaldinho and Kaká were kept quiet but Makélélé’s name barely got a mention in the match reports.
Yet the common assertion that Makélélé was under-appreciated is a folly. From the reaction of his team-mates, to Zidane, to Mourinho, to Ranieri, it is easy to see he was appreciated, he was feared, he was eventually missed. Rather, he was the master of understatement – Chelsea’s Moneypenny, cleaning up the mess made by more ostentatious colleagues, doing the boring but necessary admin behind the scenes; a master French maître d’ silently going about his business in a decadent Russian restaurant.
Makélélé’s goal against Tottenham is remarkable because for a brief moment, this cloak of understatement is thrown off in glorious fashion. The value of it wasn’t important to winning a title, or because it was the greatest ever scored. It is a gem worth celebrating because of its rarity: file it next to Tony Adams’s title-clinching piledriver in 1998, or Tony Hibbert’s first career goal in 2012, a free-kick in his own testimonial. Typically, Makélélé’s aptly-named autobiography, Tout Simplement (‘Quite simply’), makes little mention of the best strike of his career. Instead, Makélélé made just one small remark to a Chelsea fanzine the week after that match in 2006 – delivered with the same broad, joyous smile he showed on the White Hart Lane pitch: “I think it was a good goal, no?”
