Authors: Michael Calvin
The pair are different personalities. Listen carefully, and you can hear the neurons colliding in O’Connor’s skull like souped-up dodgem cars. He is a bundle of nervous energy. His eyes are bright, behind his glasses, and his greying, half-hearted goatee beard gives him the look of an ageing Labrador. Aibangee is an entirely different animal. Impeccably turned out, in tailored quilted coat, designer jeans and tan brogues, he has the stylishness and composure of a Golden Retriever. Together, they have prepared Brentford for the new Elite Player Performance Plan. They are a Category 2 Academy, which involves a £1.2 million investment. At a club whose record signing involved the outlay of £500,000, for Crystal Palace’s Hermann Hreidarsson in September 1998, that is a huge statement of faith.
O’Connor has built a database of youth football throughout London and five surrounding counties, from scratch. He has employed fixture co-ordinators, who source contact details for club managers in upwards of 40 leagues; 70 new scouts, of whom only 25 receive expenses, are operative. All collect a £150 bonus if one of their recommendations is signed: ‘We’ve put an academy in the shell of a centre of excellence. We’ve had two thousand triallists aged nine to sixteen in the past eighteen months. When we arrived we weren’t at ground zero. We were twenty miles into the earth’s core.’
His arms and knees are ‘shot’ from 20 years as a dry-line plasterer. He had a successful company, employing 30 men, but ran it down because he wanted to scout, full time. His only concession to conservatism was taking the Knowledge because ‘in football you don’t know what’s around the corner’. He drove a cab for ten months, and drove himself and, one would imagine, a certain type of fare, absolutely nuts. It was just like the old days when he took me to training one Thursday evening. A six-mile journey from Griffin Park, across West London to an athletics centre just off the A40, took nearly an hour.
Streaks of salmon pink presaged a watercolour sunset. Temperatures dropped rapidly, and, as darkness fell, strangers became silhouettes, absorbed by personal ritual. Rugby players practised scrummaging in the shadows cast by lights directed at the artificial surface on which Brentford’s boys were to train. Joggers eked out the last of the light on a circuit at the brow of the hill. Parents huddled in a doorway or retreated to their cars, where faces were framed by the eerie glow of instrument panels.
Everyone knew the rules. All the boys were obliged to shake coaches and visitors by the hand. This was no chore: eyes were bright, eye contact was made. ‘We do this to instil respect,’ said O’Connor, before his mobile phone took him hostage. He walked as he spoke. The blue light on his headset became strangely hypnotic. His first words, on every call, were: ‘What’s happening?’ A tremor of pride greeted my casual question about the England cap, which was the photograph on his iPhone: ‘That’s my lad’s. Brett plays Futsal for England.’
Futsal, derived from Portuguese
futebol de salão
, which can be translated as ‘hall football’, is played once a week by every boy on Brentford’s books. The game is played on a hard court surface with a smaller, heavier ball which, in consequence, has less bounce. There is an emphasis on improvisation, creativity and technique. The boys learn to flick and shape the ball with different parts of the foot, and develop an in-stinctive ability to see, and execute, sharp passes in a small space.
Its lingering influence was apparent in the Under 9 session, taken by Anthony Hayes, a young Irish coach. He had the boys on their toes caressing a ball – ‘sole, laces sole, laces: just touch that ball slightly’ – before introducing a series of passing drills. The air hummed with the percussive sound of footballs being struck against wooden side-boards. Coaches are rotated round the age groups each month. ‘We don’t want them getting favourites,’ explained O’Connor, in a brief respite from his mobile. ‘They are there to develop players individually, rather than create teams.’
Yet the Under 14s, coached by Danny Buck, another Arsenal refugee, had just beaten Celtic. The buzz was growing. Steve Watson was driving passes ‘Stevie G style’ at the Under 16s, to test their technique and composure. He typifies Brentford’s strategic decision to give scouts a central role. Watson compiles opposition reports for the first team, and organises a group of non-league scouts. The accent is on the accumulation of information. Boys are measured monthly, and growth spurts inform selection decisions.
O’Connor’s recipe for domestic harmony, turning his telephone to mute for an hour when he has his evening meal with his wife, is unorthodox, to say the least, but it appears to work: ‘Every night, I have to give her an hour because the phone doesn’t stop ringing. To give you an idea, I went out for dinner last night, and at the dinner table the phone rang about twenty-five times in an hour and a half. So that’s why when I’m in the house I have to give my wife her hour. When I started this, I used to walk in the door and be on the phone, and she’d create.
‘I mean, I’m a little bit cute, I have to say. Now I wait until she goes to bed, get back on the phone, and catch up with my emails. That’s the bit people don’t understand. This is a vocation. For the last two years there’s been nothing else. My life has been put on hold until we get to a certain level. It’s not healthy, I can tell you that now, because you’re going to bed with a phone in your hand and you’re waking up with a phone in your hand. But, to me, scouts are the most important people in the world. If I’m out anywhere and one of them rings, I have to answer the phone. It’s very important they see I care, about them and this club.’
The emotional investment is huge, and the corrosion of innocence is an ever-present danger. Brentford’s burgeoning reputation for previously unconsidered excellence in talent identification and development was double-edged. Praise was pernicious. Aibangee was used to scouts, literally lurking in the shadows: ‘They sneak in and they’ll just stand there, but when you’ve been in the game, you know the ones. They’re not talking to any other parent, but the parent of the boy they want. You smell them. You know who they are.’
Some clubs were cutting out the middle man, and using agents as scouts. O’Connor’s voice hardened, as his anger rose: ‘We’re trying to stop them, but they turn up everywhere. The bigger clubs think they’re being cute, and it’s worrying. We’re going to have to increase our security. I tell you, I wish the people who came up with EP3 could come and see this. They are killing us. They have no idea how hard we work. Send them here. We’re throwing the scouts out, but that won’t help us, because from next season they can do what they want.
‘We’re getting boys to sign pre-scholarship agreements at fourteen, to give some measure of protection to the club, but agents are already whispering to them that other clubs are interested. All I can do is sit the parents down and explain they are going to get a knock on the door very shortly. My message is “Be ready, but your son doesn’t need it yet.” He’s got to focus because he’s not a football player at fourteen or fifteen. Brand names do not make them football players. Good coaching staff, good mentors, good advisors do that. You can be stuck at a big club until you’re twenty years old but you won’t get an opportunity. Here at Brentford, we’re looking at putting them into a first team group at sixteen or seventeen.’
Aibangee maintained the argument, seamlessly: ‘We’ve got to let everyone know it’s not the category that makes the club, it’s the people that make the club. I believe we’ve got people here of a better calibre than they have at Chelsea. We’ve got people here who are better at their jobs than those at Tottenham and Arsenal. We need to communicate that to the parents and the players. Forget about the category, forget about what people are telling you. Chelsea’s first team will always be better than Brentford’s, but isn’t this the best academy for your child? We’ve got the people who can help him develop.’
Rios was on the radar. His group of Under 8s, assembled carefully over the previous two years, were already being stalked by scouts from Southampton, Aston Villa and Norwich. Mark Anderson was monitoring them on Liverpool’s behalf. Rios was counting down the days to the third Saturday in April, when the boys had to confirm their intention to sign for the following season, their first as an official academy group. He knew the wolves were waiting.
What he didn’t realise was that they had already been invited into his club, through the front door.
IT WAS A
moment to melt a mother’s heart. Miguel’s little men were innocence personified, bright-eyed and dressed identically in miniature black tracksuits which bore the Brentford crest. They filed into the main stand at Griffin Park behind their mentor, with the blind faith of ducklings following a parent across a lily pond. They were there to observe, listen and learn. Appropriately enough, promotional banners for the semi-final of the inaugural NextGen Series invited the audience to ‘step into the future of football’.
The match, on March 21, 2012, captured the cosmopolitan nature of a rapidly evolving game. Brentford, formed in the autumn of 1889 as an offshoot from a local rowing club, played host to two of the most storied institutions in European football, Internazionale Milano and Olympique de Marseille. The competition, in essence a Champions League for Under 19 teams, met an incipient need to provide a platform for the young players who feed the star system.
The NextGen Series was modern football in microcosm: ambitious, entrepreneurial, opportunistic, international and commercially astute. It offered a better quality of competitive experience to emerging academy players, whose precocity promised to counteract UEFA’s financial fair play rules. It provided an alternative recruitment opportunity, an insight into value disguised and distorted by a dysfunctional transfer market. It also allowed clubs subtly to position themselves for the ultimate fusion of money and meritocratic principle, a European Super League.
The setting was incompatible with the scope of the concept, and the identity of its creators was intriguing. The competition was the brain child of former currency dealer Mark Warburton, Brentford’s sporting director, and TV producer Justin Andrews, who had studied European academies with Ose Aibangee, Brentford’s head of youth development, for an online project. Their vision, driven by private funding and a belief in the latent benefits of elite competition, had taken four years to find its focus, but it was an idea whose time had come.
NextGen traded as football’s finishing school. The best young footballers were taken out of their comfort zone, introduced to the rhythms and challenges of regular Continental contests. Could they cope with different climatic conditions, contrasting cultures? Were they sufficiently mature to deal with alien opposition, diverse tactical systems and coaches with a different mindset? For the scouts, attracted in ever-increasing numbers, it was a free rummage through a smorgasbord of talent.
It was an important occasion for Warburton. He established his credentials by setting up David Beckham’s academy. He went on to develop Watford’s ground-breaking academy, where he designed a holistic programme, which matched academic and sporting excellence. His role at Brentford was multi-faceted: he oversaw the scouting network, sourced potential players for first team manager Uwe Rösler, and liaised with owner Matthew Benham. His responsibilities with NextGen were another area of influence. In a world in which everyone has a price, the figures were alluring. Even those who had graduated to Barcelona’s B team, the most coveted reserves in world football, were being paid a basic salary of only €1,200 a month. NextGen boys, outside the bloated economy of the Premier League, were earning even less.
Miguel Rios’ Under 8 squad, like Warburton and the League One club itself, was hiding in plain sight. The boys sat just in front of Steve Gritt and a gaggle of lower division, or unemployed, managers, who were networking for their lives. They were five rows below the main body of scouts, who laughed self-consciously when Bobby Langford, who was representing Tottenham, joked ‘we’d better keep our heads down.’ Several scouts had been thrown out of Brentford’s training ground the previous week, for being too overt in their interest in some of Shaun O’Connor’s prize recruits.
‘Trying to nick kids is the horrible side of the game,’ acknowledged Mel Johnson, who led a four-man contingent from Liverpool. ‘There is some fantastic work being done by some of the smaller clubs, and Brentford is a proper club. Blitz this area, and you will find talent. But as a scout, you have to do your job. If the kids are out there, and someone else gets them, you are asked why you haven’t signed them.’
Liverpool had been beaten 6–0 by Ajax in the other semi-final at Langtree Park, St Helens’ new rugby league ground. Raheem Sterling had excelled in previous rounds, but was as grateful as anyone that the Dutch effectively declared, with 20 minutes to go. Until they did so, I was convinced they were destined to reach double figures. Ajax stuck to their traditions, patterns of play established in the 1970s by Cruyff and co. They were fluid, inventive. Their movement was sinuous, intelligent. Liverpool’s youngsters simply couldn’t cope with their pace and athleticism, the accuracy of their finishing. Viktor Fischer swept inside, from an exaggerated position wide on the left, and scored a hat-trick of rare quality. He was being watched by a posse of scouts and coaches from Manchester United. Captain Davy Klaassen and central defender Stefano Denswil were also earmarked as ones to watch.
Slowly, a new teenaged aristocracy was emerging. Liverpool found compensation in the progress of Suso, a Spanish midfield player signed from Cadiz in 2010. They were so impressed by João Carlos Teixeira, when he played against them in the NextGen Series for Sporting Lisbon, they bought him for £850,000. Rosenberg also cashed in quickly, and sold Norwegian youth international striker Mushaga Bakenga to Club Brugge for €2.3 million. Tottenham were entranced by the potential of Alex Pritchard, a small, two-footed attacking midfield player who operated as a second striker as well. Barcelona, also beaten by Ajax, had two players of eye-watering potential. Sergi Samper was, according to Warburton, ‘a superstar in the making’. Alex Grimaldo, a left back, was capable of turning hardened football men into fumbling, awestruck schoolboys.