Sometimes he looks at the game around him, glances up at the stands, and wonders what it’s all about. In a recent match for Japan he experienced such a moment and “felt confused as to why we were out there playing football. I started asking myself what the other players must be looking for, what their goals must be in playing.”
Albert Camus, a renowned goalkeeper, was the world’s first existentialist footballer; Hidetoshi Nakata may well be the second. He is undoubtedly different. For years he has been an icon of Asia, for the West one of the faces of modern Japan, certainly in sport. Yet he resembles nothing as much as an English gentleman-amateur from the old days who plays the game for kicks rather than out of necessity or ambition. “I like football,” he maintains, but admits that “love” would be too strong a word. He never watched football as a youngster.
“I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t watch on television or have videos or anything,” he says. “I don’t watch football now and when I retire that will not change. I don’t really understand why people are football fans. I don’t like to watch any sport so I don’t understand what makes people do that. I want to play rather than spectate. I’m like that in life. I want to take part.”
Nakata’s unusual viewpoint defines him not just as a person but as a player. “I am not very skilful,” he says, “and I’m not very physical, but while I’m playing I can look at the game almost like a third person and that’s very important because it makes you able to judge where to find space to receive the ball, shoot or play a pass.”
When he emerged in Europe, the first Japanese player to succeed overseas, his elusiveness was key: he stole 10 league goals in his first season for Perugia — extraordinary for a Serie A midfielder — and his ability as a playmaker to flit into space and open games up with an almost scientifically calibrated pass won him a £12m move to Roma, where he won a scudetto, and an £18m transfer to Parma.
In his last three seasons in Italy, however, he became an intermittent starter, first at Roma and then at Bologna and Fiorentina, and it was his form that seemed to do the disappearing act. Bolton (he joined last summer from Fiorentina on a 12-month loan) is proving awkward terrain in which to relocate a career. He started off strongly, establishing a place in the team and influencing, with a goal and an assist, back-to-back Premiership wins against West Brom and Charlton, but since the November international break he has played just 53 minutes of League football, although he has featured in the Carling Cup and Uefa Cup.
Boss Sam Allardyce says the player hasn’t been producing “as much quality as we know he’s got”, but puts it down to him still requiring time to recover his sharpness. “I understand, and the manager’s right,” says Nakata. “At first I fitted into the team well but then I got tired and now I have to do better. In England, it is much more physical and faster than in Italy. You don’t have time to rest in a game, sometimes you don’t even have time to breathe.”
He does weights in order to power up “but only sometimes. We are not playing rugby. We are always playing with a ball at our feet. Football’s not sumo or karate; against a bigger guy you have a chance to beat him and that’s one of the reasons so many people like football.”
It would be a mistake to think he is too delicate for biff-bang Bolton. There is a seam of subtlety, particularly in their counter-attacking, that often goes unnoticed in Allardyce’s side and two of the manager’s best signings, Stelios Giannakopoulos and Jay-Jay Okocha, are small, creative players.
Bolton play more long passes than Nakata is accustomed to “but I am trying to get used to it and that’s why I need to learn how to get to the second balls. If I have to go for the first ball, it’s difficult for me; I can head, but I am not that big. I don’t agree with criticism of Bolton’s style. The style here is successful. As long as you get good results, why do you need to change things?” Allardyce retains sufficient confidence in Nakata still to be pursuing a deal to make his transfer permanent next summer while still chasing his compatriot Shinji Ono. “I’d like to stay at Bolton, but it’s something I can’t control,” says Nakata. “I like him (Allardyce). He is very open and jokes a lot. Sometimes you don’t know if he’s joking or being serious but he’s very good. A coach who doesn’t talk to his players makes them tense. When I came here I said I wanted to rediscover my enjoyment of football and I’ve done that. At Bolton, even in training, the idea is to enjoy it. In Italy it’s serious, always. Here it’s noisy, informal. In our dressing room there’s always music, jokes.”
Perhaps Nakata’s biggest pleasure in England has been reclaiming some day-to-day normality. He was stopping traffic in Tokyo long before they had even heard of David Beckham and, since 1997, when he won the first of several Asian footballer of the year awards at the age of 20, the Japanese have given him superstar treatment — in the way he is celebrated but also scrutinised. Relations with his national media have been troubled for some years and a particular sore point is their intrusion into his private life, particularly when it comes to girlfriends. When he went out with Milla Jovovich, the supermodel-turned-actress, they found themselves plagued by paparazzi.
Long before signing for Bolton, Nakata was a regular visitor to London because he enjoyed the anonymity he found in Britain. “Off the pitch, people give you space here,” he says. “Sometimes you feel good when someone asks for your autograph but sometimes you need your own life. I know it’s not easy for people to separate what’s on the pitch and what’s off the pitch but from that point of view England’s good, people respect your privacy a lot. In Japan, people are more on top of you and they confuse players with celebrities, and in Italy everyone likes football so much that when they see footballers around they think maybe you are their friend. That’s why they keep talking to you and it’s nice in a way but, like all people, we need room.”
He did not become a footballer, he says, to become famous, though he is shrewdly aware of his own appeal. His website, in four languages, gets up to five million hits every week and he has starred in 40 major television advertisements, mostly for blue-chip brands such as Canon, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Nike, in many playing on his enigmatic image.
At Perugia, the Far East shirt sales and sponsorship he drew transformed the fortunes of a small club and he often finds himself talked about, not as a footballer, but a marketing phenomenon. “I don’t appreciate it. When I hear it, I’m not that happy,” he says. “But it’s true.”
His worst experience in England came as a result of his fame. After Bolton played West Brom at the Reebok stadium in a match which set Nakata against another national hero, Junichi Inamoto, he found a large mob of Japanese supporters waiting as he tried to walk from the stadium to his car and some local children got caught up in the crush.
“That was a big disappointment because in England you can leave the stadium and people don’t bother you or if they do it’s in a polite way to ask for your autograph or a photograph,” he says. “But after that match I couldn’t control anything and people didn’t look around to see there were small kids there. I felt responsible. Always in life, you have to look around and understand the situation. When you go to another country and the normal people there behave in a certain way, you should behave that way too. You have to respect their culture and I felt very sorry for local people in Bolton about what happened.”
He speaks English, Italian, Japanese and some Spanish and wants to learn more languages, and “psychology as well”. He chuckles at our clichés regarding the Japanese. “People think it’s all geishas and samurai and I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? That was hundreds of years ago!’ People say to me, ‘Do you drink snake blood?’ I say, ‘Never’ . They say, ‘But I saw it on TV. . .’”
He feels he is just beginning to understand English life and there is much he wants to experience. He wants to go to a pub “and the thing I really need to try is fish and chips.” Nakata’s life, in many ways, has come to mirror his football hero. This was not a real player but, befitting his abstract tendencies, an invented one — Captain Tsubasa, the hero of a Japanese comic strip that resembles our own Roy of the Rovers.
Tsubasa is an ordinary Japanese kid who finds he has a gift for football and goes on to turn professional and travel the world, operating as a creative midfielder. Tsubasa was the reason why, with nothing better to do one afternoon at elementary school, Nakata decided to take up a friend’s invitation to join his first kickabout. He is no ordinary footballer but Bolton need him to be a little more extraordinary.
