Authors: Michael Calvin
‘Scouts have no money, work all hours, and are always the first ones to be sacked. My only security is a three-month pay-off. I earned more outside the game, and that weighs heavily, when you’ve got two kids. We’d love to pay for their education, but we can’t. To be honest, Mitch and I had a pact. Whoever got the big job would take the other with him. He’s been on to me to join him at Southampton. The package would be better, but can I bring myself to let other people down? I just can’t. We all have our ups and downs with managers, but Kenny Jackett has been very good to me. He gets out there, sees games, and understands what we do.’
Others would not have been so measured, because lack of professional respect encouraged a mercenary approach, and insecurity corroded the closest relationships. Yet there was a glimpse of humanity, as the match meandered to a close. Scouts are competitive, occasionally economical with the truth, but they have a strong sense of allegiance to their own. Mel Johnson suggested I shuffle along the back row of the stand, to meet one of the many men struggling in football’s shadows. ‘You’re seeing a lot of people in the game, Mike,’ said Johnson. ‘I’ll introduce you to Georges Santos. Do me a favour and see if you can get his name out there.’
At the age of 42, Santos, a former defender who picked up pin money playing Masters football for Tranmere Rovers, retained the muscular definition of a recently retired athlete. He was prone to the cold, however, and was swathed in a Puffa jacket and an elongated scarf. He proffered one of those revealingly thin, disconcertingly glossy, business cards, which can be produced for free on the internet. He explained, quietly, that he had been ‘let go for financial reasons’ by Blackburn Rovers. A former international for the Cape Verde Islands, he understood the demands of the English game, having played for nine League clubs in nine seasons, and was seeking to establish a niche for himself in the French market.
‘These are hard days,’ he admitted. ‘I stayed in England for a long time because of the way you play the game, the passion of the football. I love it that the stadiums are full, and the fans have long memories. They like defenders who tackle. They are their warriors. In France it’s difficult to be appreciated unless you’re a goalscorer or Zinedine Zidane, but it is a place I know well. Many French players want to play here, and many French agents are looking to sell. They are cheap. I try to work in the middle.’
Football was a pan-European business. Frank McParland, the other member of Liverpool’s contingent, was taking in the game before an early morning flight to Portugal from Heathrow. The director of the Anfield Academy, a small, open-faced man in a blue suit, was sufficiently at ease with his surroundings to have a man bag slung across his shoulder. He playfully pilloried Anderson for taking two miniature steak pies from the boardroom spread, and homed in on the Inter scouts, who had annexed the cheeseboard. McParland was attempting to get to the bottom of a rumour that Pablo Armero, Udinese’s Colombian wing back, had been approached by Liverpool ‘officials’.
‘It’s that time of year,’ he acknowledged, with a world-weary smile. As a former chief scout, he was accustomed to the creative sales techniques of Udinese owner Giampaolo Pozzo and his son Gino, whose business plan was built on extensive scouting in underdeveloped markets and strategic husbandry of undervalued players: ‘Old man Pozzo is obviously deciding who he wants to move on. The agents get busy, and no one knows or particularly cares, if the stories are true. It gets the name out there, doesn’t it?’
McParland was friendly, without losing any of his political adroitness. As a former Kopite, he was known as a Dalglish loyalist, yet insisted he spent each Thursday with Comolli, ‘talking through everything’. He was looking for younger players, aged between 15 and 19, who were capable of adapting quickly and efficiently to the high-tempo, high-pressing style Liverpool were attempting to develop. Financial considerations – ‘at fifteen the boy will cost you five hundred grand, but by the time he is seventeen the price will have gone up to two million’ – were unavoidable. McParland used Dalglish’s stellar reputation as bait to attract Dan Smith, a schoolboy who was on the verge of a £300,000 transfer from Crewe to Manchester City until Liverpool’s Academy director materialised with the offer of a meeting with the manager. Smith, duly anointed, posted a photograph of him, with his hero, on his Twitter feed. McParland was also preoccupied by the progress of Sterling. A series of unattributed stories suggested someone was briefing that the boy’s mother was unhappy on Merseyside, and seeking to return to London. McParland was adamant he was content, loved and on the verge of a breakthrough: ‘We really like him. He’s nearly there. The first team next season? Maybe this.’
He was close friends with Warburton, who mindful of his wider responsibilities as Brentford’s Sporting Director, was building a case for importing some of the NextGen players to the Football League. The thought of these youths being volleyed over the nearest stand by some of the Neanderthals who can be found in League One was disconcerting, to say the least. But Warburton was a true believer. He might have been speaking through his wallet, but his argument had genuine conviction:
‘I’ve got massive respect for the guys who can go to a game like this and go “yeah, he’ll do. He could adapt.” They have fantastic eyes to be able to do it. I was watching the Sporting Lisbon kids recently, thinking, they’re physically strong, they’re quick, technically outstanding, tactically aware, and they’ve got real hunger. I turned round to someone and I said, “I’ll tell you what, they would absolutely piss League One” and they laughed at me. “Don’t be ridiculous,” they said. But I’m thinking, hang on a sec. They’re eighteen, nineteen. They’ve obviously got natural talent and they’re well coached. I think you could take ten, fifteen, twenty players, who could slot comfortably into any Division One team, and probably most Championship clubs. They’d have the technical excellence to deal with the situation.
‘I look at a player and ask: is he being challenged? You might see a full back up against a lousy winger. The scout would say he’s rock solid, but if he’s playing some crap winger, how can we be sure he is an outstanding defender? He obviously doesn’t have to be on that particular day. That’s where NextGen comes in. This is the best against the best. Times are changing. What seemed inconceivable yesterday is attainable, even normal, today. I always go back to the banking industry. When I joined it, there were teams of dealers, with branches in every major European city. Now, thirty years later, there’s one European centre. Everything and everyone else has gone. But the old school guy is still making money, if he’s good enough, and smart enough.
‘So don’t tell me that the scout who found Duncan Edwards wouldn’t find a player today. Some scouts don’t adapt with the times. I know so many football people who are uncomfortable with technology. I once worked with a manager, and promised to send him an email. He turned round and said, “none of that bollocks. You phone me. You write me a letter or you phone me.” There are scouts out there, who have thirty years’ experience of simply making a phone call to the manager: “You need to keep your eyes on this boy quick.” Now they’ve got to log into a database, do a match report, and animate three key session plays. You know, and I know, there’s a number of good people lost to the game because of that. But it doesn’t mean they’ve lost their ability to see a player – I just think you’ve got to be savvy enough about it to combine both. You’ve got to adapt to the modern game but at the same time retain some of the old attributes.’
Warburton was offended by the institutionalised insecurity he saw around him that night. He was a proud host, and proof that preconceptions in football are perilous. Brentford were out there swinging, punching above their weight.
‘People talk about the big clubs, with their fantastic databases, and almost belittle the smaller ones. The fact of the matter is, there are some outstanding people at smaller clubs. They just don’t have the financial muscle or the budgets to implement what they’d like to do. These guys have to work with budgetary restraints, but if you buy a player for ten grand, or for fifty million, it’s a financial investment for your company, relative to the size. If Man United buy a player for a hundred and fifty grand, that’s irrelevant. If Brentford buy a player for a hundred and fifty grand, it’s very relevant.
‘I’m looking for the very best people to make sure the foundations are strong and I can take the club forward because I’ve no doubt the laws governing home-grown players will get more stringent. Competition for players will get ever tougher. We’ve got an outstanding recruitment team in our academy. We’ve invested a lot of money in it. I want a player to be impressed with those around him. I want his parents to look at the consistency of discipline, the appearance of our boys, the respect they have for their coaches. I want Brentford to have the highest standards. It drives me nuts when we have got a twelve-year-old player on a three- or four-year contract, and the staff member who is the most important person in his football life is on a three-month or one-month notice period. How does that work? What other business would do that?’
It was a rhetorical question. He knew few industries devalue their workforce with such craven disregard for their welfare as football. The servitude of coaches and scouts confronted by short-notice terminations was taken for granted, because of one awful truth: they were the lucky ones.
THE SILVER C
class Mercedes saloon, a deceptive symbol of affluence, had covered 232,000 miles in the four years since it had been purchased, in a discount deal offered to members of the Professional Footballers’ Association. On this cold, clear spring night, it was required for the shortest journey of Steve Jones’ working life, a ten-mile round trip to the Valley from his home in the South-east London suburb of Welling.
In the glory days, the PC World car park, three minutes’ walk from the ground, would have been officially off limits. But the security guards who once supposedly protected spaces for shoppers were gone, their scams collateral damage in Charlton Athletic’s plunge from the Premier League to League One. They used to accept a cheeky fiver for looking the other way, and Jones wasn’t complaining at their absence. Had he been unable to park for free, he would have been operating at a loss.
This was subsistence scouting at its most stark; Jones was a specialist whose professionalism and experience were belittled by systemic lack of respect. His oppos-ition report on Colchester United would be thorough, concise, and an important managerial aid for his latest boss, Danny Wilson at Sheffield United. It would cover 13 pages, and be informed by more than two decades spent in the backwaters of the Football League. Jones was working so far below minimum wage levels it would have made a sweatshop owner blush, yet in football no one batted an eyelid. It was how it was, how it will be until the laws of supply and demand cease to exist.
‘I’m on mileage only at Sheffield United, and I can’t get back in full time until something changes,’ Jones reasoned. ‘This keeps me ticking over. I promised my wife I wouldn’t come back, but I am waiting until the summer, to see who is in and who is out. Until then I’ll take it as it comes. So tonight it’s ten miles at forty pence. I’ll be out, at and around the match, for about three, three and a half hours. Once I get home, I’ll do my match report. That’ll take another two and a half hours or so. Now you tell me, in what other business would you go and do six hours work, for four quid? I’m not ashamed to say that because you know what the game is. What gets me, though, is you see people who don’t do the hours, who don’t do the mileage, who don’t do the stats, who have not played, coached and managed at every level, suddenly come in and get eighty-grand-a-year jobs.’
There is something supremely ironic in football’s feudalism and its unthinking misogyny; without the support of his wife Julie, who ran Ultimate Beauty, a hairdressers’ and beauty salon in Sidcup, Jones would have been denied access to the game which had absorbed him since adolescence. His had been a constant, tellingly typical struggle to survive, in which self-pity was pointless. The blow of being released by Southampton as a teenaged trainee had been eased by Harry Redknapp’s decision to sign him for Bournemouth, but within a fortnight he had ruptured his cruciate ligaments. The mundane nature of the incident – he landed awkwardly after competing for a header in pre-season training – belied its significance. His playing career at the highest level was effectively over.
Jones persisted in non-league football, worked on a succession of building sites, and ‘ducked and dived’ to eke out a living in the professional game. He coached Gillingham’s Under 10s, and created a niche for himself running the club’s Centre of Excellence, a role which involved cleaning the dressing room, polishing first team players’ boots and driving the minibus. He scouted in his spare time, even coached and managed the reserves. Gary Penrice recognised his hunger, and offered him the chance to become Plymouth’s European scout. He subsequently recommended him to Millwall. Jones was responsible for opposition reports before he accepted an approach to join Sven-Goran Eriksson’s staff at Leicester. The Swede was as natural a fit in the Championship as a camel in Antarctica. He needed Jones’ street wisdom and working knowledge of the division. It was a quixotic episode, expensive, and destined to end messily.
Eriksson lasted 13 games of the 2011–12 season, and ambled away from the wreckage with the insouciance of a serial opportunist. Leicester’s Thai owners, conscious of the marketing strategy for their duty free shopping empire, paid him off with as much grace as they could muster. They were not the first to be seduced by the civility of a coach who was now a caricature, a Cuban-heeled lothario. Others, like Jones and Bill Green, the chief scout to whom he answered, could not afford to be so sanguine. They were vulnerable, understandably fearful. Green advised Jones to work normally, and not to overreact.