Teaching To Win : East Asia turns to European coaches to rescue their lackluster teams from football's cellar. Can humor and 'happy soccer' really turn them around?(Guus Hiddink, Philippe Troussier and Bora Milutinovic)(Illustration)(Interview)

Scouting reports told Dutchman Guus Hiddink that his new squad lacked skills and stamina, but only after he had agreed to coach South Korea's national team did he discover their Confucian eating habits. At his welcome dinner last year, veteran players, most pushing 30, occupied the head table like officers in an army mess. When the food arrived, they headed to the buffet and loaded up their plates, then nodded the go-ahead to the slightly younger men at the next table. The ritual repeated twice more until rookies at the last table got some grub. The meal inspired Hiddink's first directive: players must take different seats at every meal. "I didn't mean to change their culture," he says. "My aim was to make the team competitive. Seniority must not mean that a younger player doesn't dare speak to, or even look at, an older player."

Seoul's campaign for respectability in this year's World Cup finals goes far beyond the chow line. Eager to improve on five winless appearances in football's ultimate challenge, cohost South Korea recruited the coach who, as head of the Dutch national team in 1998, thrashed its squad 5-0 during its first-round elimination. Similar thinking inspired Japan to hire Frenchman Philippe Troussier in 1998 and China to sign on the jocular Serb Bora Milutinovic, creating the sporting equivalent of a regional arms race to become Asia's dominant soccer nation. Though none of the East Asian teams harbors a realistic hope of winning this year's World Cup, each aims to be among the 16 teams that advance to the second round--and the last Asian team standing in the single-elimination contest that follows.

Indeed, with one notable exception--North Korea's miraculous march to the quarterfinals of the 1966 World Cup in England--East Asian teams have proved to be football's shrinking violets. No wonder they have been so eager to sign on coaches from Europe, the center of world football. Their chosen leaders advocate a modern strategy that emphasizes speed and athleticism, and rejects the traditional distinction between offensive and defensive players. Hiddink calls this "total soccer," and introducing it in Korea required improving stamina among players accustomed to resting when away from the ball. In Japan, Troussier has struggled to cultivate European play in a society that values group harmony. The culture "rejects the individuality of players, and modern football requires some individual expression," he says.

Teaching the game in translation has proved fraught with linguistic and cultural pitfalls. The coaches have struggled to inspire and unite green teams packed with no-name players. They've subverted traditions and endured sports paparazzi interested not only in their coaching but also in their salaries, vacations and sex lives. Above all, they've had to answer to results-oriented sporting authorities. "There's a huge expectancy among the people who hired me," says Troussier. "I feel, in a way, like a missionary."

China's would-be savior, Milutinovic, is a globe-trotting freelancer who has led four teams to the World Cup, including an upstart American squad in 1994. He speaks six languages--none of them Mandarin. "I only understand that when the Chinese smile it is good, when they don't... danger!" he jokes. Humor is central to his strategy, but most Chinese don't realize that about the man they call "Milu." "We ...