Making the grade

I'll be frank. The main reason you're reading this column is that it's due. And yes, I did think about taking this week off and not sending anything.

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Konstantin "Mr 4.5" Golovskoy

Obviously, nearly everybody who makes a living covering German football has talked or written about Robert Enke's death these past days. I intend to remain an exception, and you'll know why.

Last Wednesday, Phil Ball sent an e-mail saying how "very spooky" it was that my last column had the subject it had. Well, yes. As you can see from some of the comments to "Chased by the Black Dog", there were even readers who at first didn't realise it was published seven days before Enke died.

But it's getting even spookier. Those of you who've followed the first comments to that column will know that a reader known as "zulquar" suggested I write about the strange life and mysterious suicide of the man who took what was later voted the "Sports Photo of the Century" in Germany.

I was working on that piece last Tuesday, fully intending to publish it today, when a sudden impulse made me turn on the TV and check teletext, when I discovered Enke had died. I don't know why I did that, considering there were no games scheduled. Moreover, I had left the office and thus the news feed only two hours earlier, so it was rather unlikely something of importance had happened in the meantime.

So, "zulquar", I'm sure you won't mind not reading another column about an early death or a related topic. However, that raises a question. Can one, in the face of such a tragedy, write about a mundane or perhaps even light-hearted subject without sounding laughingly trivial?

I don't know. Maybe you can't. But I'll try. And perhaps, just perhaps, what follows is not entirely out of place after all.

Like most writers with a bad memory, I keep a notebook into which I scribble ideas for pieces. So that's what I turned to for help when I decided I would need a new subject for my column. On one of the pages, I found this note: "Aktobe - 4.5 - WTF".

As soon as I read this, I knew when and why I had made that note and what it refers to (my memory can't be that bad, then). But of course you don't, so I'll let you in on it.

On August 20, a Thursday, Werder Bremen played the Kazakh club FK Aktobe in the first leg of the Europa League play-offs. Four days later, I bought the Monday edition of kicker magazine and there, on page 49, were the statistics for the Bremen game, along with the customary player grades.

Today, kicker uses the German school grades - from 1 (best) to 6 (worst) - to rate the players' performances. Thus the "1" Mesut Özil was awarded with for his showing against Aktobe meant he'd been outstanding, while Marko Marin and Clemens Fritz - both of whom received a "5" - had played pretty badly.

But what caught my eye was the "4.5" the writer from kicker had given Aktobe's midfielder Golovskoy. Some research will tell you that this is a 34-year-old Russian who also has a Kazakhstani passport and whose first name is Konstantin.

I'd never heard of Golovskoy before and the same went for the other thirteen Aktobe players who saw action on that day. And I'm fairly sure the man from kicker was equally unfamiliar with those visitors from 2,300 miles away. Yet he decided that one of Aktobe's holding midfielders had turned in a "4.5" performance, meaning he'd been a bit worse than "sufficient" but a tad better than "poor".

It never fails to amaze me how people can observe a game and register enough details to not just report on the match as such but also precisely evaluate every single performance. I remember standing in the bowels of Dortmund's football ground in 2002 with a bunch of colleagues and feeling very alienated indeed because they were discussing the grades they would be dishing out to players they by and large didn't know at all for their respective newspapers. In this case, these were Arsenal players. In the following day's edition of kicker, Lauren was given a "3", Pascal Cygan a "3.5". (And Gilberto a "4", probably because he scored an own goal.)

Those grades are taken very seriously in Germany, particularly by kicker, as the mag will regularly print corrections telling you for instance that due to a typo in the last issue, a player was given a "4.5" when in fact that should have been a "3.5".

Well, when I say kicker, which is what everyone calls the magazine, I should really be saying kicker-sportmagazin, as that's the correct title of the publication following a merger in 1968. This plays a role in the history of player grades, so let me take you on a brief detour.

kicker was founded by the German football pioneer Walther Bensemann in the summer of 1920. The name of the paper was spelled with a capital "K" until the 1964-65 season. Then the publication replaced the subtitle "The German Football Magazine" with "The Sports Review" and also introduced the lower-case spelling. (Both the old spelling and the old logo, incidentally, remained in use for the traditional yearbook, known as the "kicker Almanach", until 1990.)

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Pascal Cygan: Rated 3.5

As you can see, kicker is steeped in tradition, as 1920 is a pretty early birthdate for a football paper and even the "Almanach" goes back a long way, having been introduced in 1937. (La Gazzetta dello Sport was first published in 1896, yet it was - and is - a general sports magazine, not a specialist publication. Argentina's El Gráfico began life in 1919 but didn't become sports-only until 1925. France Football, like kicker a twice-weekly magazine, dates from 1946. World Soccer, the oldest British football magazine still running, has been around since 1960.)

Yet there's a hitch. The magazine hasn't been published continuously. The original kicker was taken off the market in 1944 and then revived in 1946 as Sportmagazin. It was this latter paper, which became twice-weekly seven years later, that introduced player grades to Germany. After the first matchday of the newly-formed Bundesliga, in August 1963, Sportmagazin rated the performances on a scale from 1 to 4.

But the true Annus Mirabilis for grades was 1968. In June, the Sunday edition of Bild - Germany's biggest tabloid - introduced its own grading system that would soon be hotly debated, because the paper was notoriously ruthless. And in October, Sportmagazin joined ranks with a publication called - kicker! It had been introduced in 1951, when Friedebert Becker, the last editor of the original kicker, launched a football magazine using the old name.

The first issue of kicker-sportmagazin hit the stands on October 7, 1968. "The two biggest German sports publications at last march together", said the editorial. The first grades were on page 25. Of the more than two dozen players who were involved in the game between Gladbach and Hamburg, only the substitute Klaus Winkler received a "4". Everyone else was granted a "2" or a "3".

From 1968 on, grading players became commonplace and a science in itself. In 1971, kicker switched to the 1-to-6 scale to have more options. And in 1993, the magazine introduced the half-steps, so that, nine years later, somebody would judge that Lauren had been a half-grade better than Pascal Cygan.

"I know as a fact that, in the days when the scouting departments weren't what they are now, clubs bought players partly because of their kicker grades," says Rainer Holzschuh, currently the editor of kicker. "I often get calls on Monday from agents who complain about the grades we've given their clients."

Actually, I can understand why he's getting those calls. Us Europeans tend to make fun of what we consider an American obsession with breaking games down into rows upon rows of stats and numbers and figures and data. But that's surely less silly than a German writer deciding that Konstantin Golovskoy has just turned in a performance worthy of a 4.5 - meaning he was exactly as good or as bad as Werder's left-back Sebastian Boenisch on the night but slightly better than his own team's left-back, a young Kyrgyz international by the name of Emil Kenzhesariev.

Rainer Kalb, a veteran writer who's spent six years at kicker, once said: "The yearning for grades is a reflex to the debates about school grades in childhood. Now you can once again get upset about what you consider an injustice." If that's supposed to mean that the players secretly, subconsciously wish to be graded, it's rather been my experience that it's the writers who secretly, subconsciously react to a childhood experience. Now they wield the power to rate and grade and classify, now they are the teachers. WTF.