Sooner or later this season, you’re going to watch a Manchester United game and, during it, someone is going to compare Raphael Varane to a car.
Football doesn’t really “get” defenders, at least not in the same way we understand and revere its attackers. Goalkeepers can earn a Golden Glove for keeping clean sheets, but there isn’t quite an award for the centre-backs who play ahead of them and help them compile those clean sheets.
Advertisement
A centre-back hasn’t won the Ballon d’Or since Fabio Cannavaro did it in 2006. Nearly 15 years on, for all of our statistical and analytical advancements in the game, we still struggle to quantify a good centre-back as an individual, without first applying a collection of caveats. Defending is a noisy, sometimes boring art, and while we respect the players who are good at preventing goals, in a sport as low-scoring as football, it is its goalscorers who tend to be most celebrated.
Football can lack a true physical award to consistently gift to centre-backs, but English football does enjoy bestowing a certain creative accolade.
If you’re a particularly good defender in the Premier League, who plays in a very particular manner then, sooner or later, someone will compare you to a Rolls-Royce.
It’s a strange, very British, compliment.
The Rolls-Royce has been idiomatic for exceptional performance in many fields for more than 100 years in England. You may never drive or ride in one, but part of you knows a Rolls-Royce is supposed to represent luxury, calmness, and high quality. Which is why it probably works as a useful description for defenders; we may never quite understand everything that makes for a good centre-back, but we can recognise and appreciate someone who looks unflustered while stopping goals.
The perception of defending carries a weight unlike that of other positions. Goalscorers are applauded for their ability to finish “scruffy goals”, but Manchester United centre-back Phil Jones was memed again and again for his scruffy, header while stumbling to the turf, clearance at the feet of Arsenal’s Olivier Giroud in 2015 – despite it actually being a rather inventive way to deny someone a goalscoring opportunity given the circumstances.
Phil Jones took extreme measures while defending vs Arsenal yesterday. Highlights on #SSNHQ pic.twitter.com/oZTw17Sy7W
— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) May 18, 2015A great forward player has a “certain gravity” to them, spreading fear all over the pitch whenever they come onto the ball. When one looks at the compliments given to great centre-backs, they are lauded for their ability to quell that fear.
Advertisement
Great defenders are compared to a Rolls-Royce because both are supposed to be able to manoeuvre in style and comfort. A Rolls-Royce is supposed to be a big or heavy vehicle but they are described as “gliding” across the tarmac, like our favourite six-foot-plus centre-backs who can dispossess attacking players with little fuss.
Which brings us back to Varane, who in 2019 was a subject of a documentary all about the making of Rolls-Royce defenders.
Titled Raphael Varane, Destin De Champion and available on Amazon Prime for UK football fans (in French and Spanish audio, with English subtitles), the film largely covers the 2018-19 La Liga season. It’s an entertaining watch, three 30-minute episodes connecting the past, present and possible future of the France international centre-back.
We get the 28-year-old’s origin story, handily shaped to the Hero’s Journey template by director Theo Schuster and co-writer Emmanuel Le Ber. The familiar sporting stories are there: We see Varane’s childhood in the Hellemmes district of Lille. We get conversations with his mother Annie and father Gaston. There’s Varane starting out playing football in their garden, going against his older brother, Anthony. There’s his football-coach dad impressing upon him the need for good technique and his academic mum driving him back and forth from training three times a week as he progressed for his local team AS Hellemmes, before being picked up by the Centre de Preformation de Football – a boarding school for promising players from that Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in the very north of France, bordered by Belgium and the English Channel.
This is all impressive stuff you can find on Wikipedia: Varane plays an age group up in nearly every youth team, he actually misses eight of the 24 months he’s supposed to play at the above centre because he suffers from Osgood-Schlatter disease, the same growth-related knee condition that affected now United team-mate Marcus Rashford’s early career.
There’s even a nice “rise, fall and rise again” piece of storytelling; episode two ending on Varane losing a header against Mats Hummels for title-bound Germany’s winner in a 2014 World Cup quarter-final before the concluding part shows him heading the opening goal in the eventual champions’ 2-0 World Cup quarter-final triumph over Uruguay four years later.
Advertisement
“Varane is smart!” everyone says over the course of the documentary. “Varane is a good person”, everyone reminds you. “Varane is a quiet leader who works hard!”, is the message we get repeatedly as he takes you through his well-furnished trophy cabinet, while he remarking he wants a second international trophy (eyeing up the European Championship, not yet knowing what would transpire in early 2020 and then this summer).
And then Karim Benzema rocks up and breaks the fourth wall, telling us he has stories he can’t possibly tell because the aim of this documentary is to make Varane look like a gentleman defender.
There is always a meta-story to a film whenever the subject is granting access and footage of their life, always a “make me look like this for these reasons” undercurrent that reveals itself through sleight of hand. (Whenever a footballer is doing a slow walk around a city centre in these documentaries, always remember that said walk would have included multiple takes.)
There are choices made in even the smallest of decisions in these shows: Varane scored 17 times in over 350 appearances for Real Madrid across his 10 years there — an average of one every 21 games — but you’d think he was a constant goal threat on corners and free kicks based on this.
The choices Varane has made are pretty clear.
He would like to be described as a Rolls-Royce.
Varane wants you to know defending is hard, sprinkling in words like “difficult”, “pressure”, and “not easy” when he describes the challenges throughout his career.
That World Cup quarter-final against Uruguay is called “a war of attrition”, and the thigh injury that forced him to miss Euro 2016 on home turf is experienced “as a death”.
He also wants you to bring calmness and grace to everything you do in life (that he collected only 24 bookings and one straight red card in his decade in Spain suggest he’s a rather calm fellow). Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappe, Pepe, Sergio Ramos, Jose Mourinho, Zinedine Zidane and Didier Deschamps go out of their way to talk about Varane’s good nature, before we end with a look at his charity work.
Varane is settling well at his new club in England. He is already saying calm things (“It’s the same with every defender in the team. It’s important to feel connected. We have to move together and motivate each other. Every day, we are learning and improving.”) and reconnecting with old team-mates in Cristiano Ronaldo and Pogba (the latter had been his room-mate at France youth-team level).
Advertisement
We may never totally “get” defenders. If history is written by the victors, then the history of football tends to be written by the goalscorers.
But Destin De Champion is a fun look at what happens when you allow one of the most decorated defenders of his generation to tell you their own story: they come out of it resembling a car.
(Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kXFobWpoaHxzfJFqZmlxX2eBcMDHnmSrmaCdrqa4jK%2BYq5memnqlu8KupJ6mpJa%2FunnAp5tmr5iueqWxxZ6lnZ2iqHqttcqeZK2nXZeybq%2FOpqeaqpWZerW7jJycq6yRnrtur8Crqmg%3D