Cliques, Singsongs and Super-Fast Wi-Fi: How to Survive a World Cup Camp
If every England managerial appointment is a reaction against the previous one, so it is with their World Cup camps.
In 2006, while England's players were tucked away at a hotel in Germany's Black Forest mountains, their partners were ostentatiously living it up in the chic spa town of Baden-Baden. With Britain's tabloid press slavishly reporting the details of their every shopping trip and nightclub visit, it became an unwelcome distraction. In his autobiography, Red, Gary Neville described it as "farcical."
Four years later in South Africa, in the middle of Fabio Capello's austere regime, the England players found themselves at the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus in Rustenburg, a remote retreat surrounded by high fences that made them feel isolated from the buzz of the tournament. Jermain Defoe revealed to ESPN FC that he and Wayne Rooney spent one evening watching the entire DVD of Rooney's wedding day.
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In 2014, England opted for an urban location in Rio de Janeiro's exclusive Sao Conrado suburb, only to fall foul of the Rio traffic. The daily trip to their training base, a distance of just 10 miles, took over an hour each way. On the plus side, it was not a trip they had to make for long, as the Three Lions didn't make it out of the group stage.
Fast-forward four years, and England have gone back down the secluded route, basing themselves at the seaside resort of Repino, about 20 miles north of Saint Petersburg. The camp has been hailed for being more relaxed than it was in Chantilly, France, for Euro 2016—when players such as Joe Hart refused to divulge details of the squad's darts tournament. But if manager Gareth Southgate's men fail to maintain their early momentum in Russia, that approach inevitably will come under scrutiny.
So is there a right way to organise a World Cup camp? Can a team find balance between professional focus and the need for entertainment? And might it be possible to go to the biggest, most prestigious tournament in the sport and actually have fun?
For some nations—witness Ghana's players singing as they arrived for a game against Germany in Brazil 2014—playing at a World Cup seems like a joyful experience.
There have been plenty of smiles on show at the current tournament, from the Panama squad's successful completion of the bin challenge to Senegal's warm-up drill. They join a long list of teams who have shown that the unique pressures of the World Cup need not be barriers to enjoyment.
At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, a television crew from German channel ARD visited the Bulgaria team hotel prior to the quarter-final between Germany and Bulgaria and was surprised to find Dimitar Penev's players lounging beside the pool and playing water polo.
Asked for a score prediction, a grinning, half-naked Hristo Stoichkov replied: "Eins, zwei, drei, drun!" (basically, "One, two, three, boom!" in a mixture of German and Bulgarian). The following day, Stoichkov scored the equaliser as Bulgaria came from behind to win 2-1.
To a large extent, the players with the strongest personalities will determine the atmosphere within a World Cup camp. If those players enjoy a night out, as was the case with Brazil's 2006 squad, the allure of the bright lights will naturally be more difficult to resist.
Seven members of that Brazil squad—Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Emerson, Dida, Adriano, Emerson and Julio Cesar—were photographed at a nightclub by Swiss tabloid Blick during a pre-tournament training camp in Lucerne. Brazilian Football Confederation president Ricardo Teixeira said that unnamed players had returned to the team hotel drunk in the early hours of the morning during the tournament, in which Brazil lost to France in the quarter-finals.
Holland's 1974 World Cup squad were also renowned for letting their hair down.
"We were very easy-living, and we had parties," midfielder Arie Haan said, per Chris Hunt of Sabotage Times. "Because we did not know anything about a world tournament, how you have to behave, we were just normal. We played our game, and after the game, you were free."
That sense of freedom came back to bite Holland when German tabloid Bild published a front-page story about unnamed Dutch players carousing with naked women in their hotel pool on the eve of their semi-final victory over Brazil. The incident may have been a setup by Bild, and the role it played in Holland's loss to the hosts in the final is probably overstated. But Haan told 90min (via Sports Illustrated), "We changed a little bit that night."
Technology means that today's footballers are spoilt for choice when it comes to whiling away the long hours between games and training sessions. Once their options might have been limited to card games, table tennis or a few lengths of the hotel pool, but now they can get lost in video game competitions with friends back home, spend time on social media or throw themselves into Netflix marathons.
"The players bring PlayStations, so they want super-fast Wi-Fi," says Christian Machowski, managing director of Euro Sport and Event Management, which organises training camps for leading European clubs. "The first thing players ask when they get to a hotel is, 'What's the Wi-Fi like?'"
For countries with cultures that are more straight-laced, the concept of players being allowed to enjoy themselves at a World Cup remains problematic.
In his autobiography, #2Sides, former England international Rio Ferdinand recounted his surprise when, while covering the 2014 World Cup as a television pundit, he came across the Dutch squad in a hotel bar on the Copacabana.
"All of a sudden almost the entire Dutch team turn up and start chilling in this bar," Ferdinand wrote.
"I sat down next to [Wesley] Sneijder and said: 'What's going on? Are you allowed in here?' He was like: 'Yeah, the manager said to go. As long as we're back in the hotel by 11, it's fine.' Me and Jamie [Ferdinand's friend] just looked at each other and started laughing. Our players are treated like complete babies."
There will always be an onus on players to think creatively about how to spend their free time, but as Ferdinand's anecdote illustrates, bonhomie at a World Cup camp is also contingent on a certain degree of permissiveness from the team staff.
"It's up to the team management to have a relaxed approach, and if you trust the players, treat them as adults," Machowski says.
"So not everything is regimented. You say, 'Right, we're having the afternoon off.' And if you're not too far from a little town or your families aren't staying too far away, you can meet up with them, just to see a different face and get out of the hotel. I think those kinds of things can help deal with issues of boredom."
The problems that Germany had with their base prior to their elimination at the current World Cup proved to be the least of their worries, but four years ago, they nailed it on and off the pitch
For the 2014 tournament in Brazil, the Germany squad became the first guests to stay at a brand-new resort built by German developers near the village of Santo Andre in the northeast state of Bahia.
Known as Campo Bahia, the site measured 15,000 square metres and comprised of 14 two-story villas, a gym, an outdoor swimming pool, a lounge and dining area and a room for team meetings. A separate media facility and a floodlit training pitch—its grass kept at the same 22 millimetre length as the pitches used in the tournament—stood within walking distance.
The complex had to be accessed via car ferry across the Joao de Tiba River, and the isolation suited Germany well, with their preparations for the tournament having been plagued by problems.
But rather than the seclusion, the social repercussions of the resort's lodging arrangements helped Germany to forge a winning spirit. The squad's 23 players were split across four of the resort's villas, each of which was headed up by a senior player (Per Mertesacker, Philipp Lahm, Miroslav Klose and Bastian Schweinsteiger).
The four house leaders deliberately assigned their team-mates to villas where they would have to live alongside players from rival clubs. The result was that everyone in the squad got to know each other, something that Mertesacker credited with playing a vital role in Germany's success at the tournament.
"Everybody struck up a small relationship with everybody else," he told Raphael Honigstein in Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World.
"The forces that were unleashed there brought us the trophy."
It is clearly possible to have fun at a World Cup, provided there is a certain degree of harmony in the squad, the management don't keep the players on too short a leash and the setup in the camp facilitates easy intermingling between team-mates.
And if all else fails, you can always ask if anyone's brought a DVD of their wedding.
