The Nowhere Men (31 page)

It was strictly business. Penrice didn’t take it personally. As he pointed out: ‘I know Graham well. He’s a good lad, you know. We’ve been on loads of trips together. We both knew those players for a while. He is very good at scouting for a position. He knows what the team needs, and the manager wants.’

All scouts have tales of the ones which wriggled off the hook. Penrice watched Cheick Tiote seven times before recommending him to Stoke City in 2009, more than a year before the Ivorian midfield player signed for Newcastle. Pulis was dissuaded by a telephone call to Steve McClaren, Tiote’s manager at FC Twente at the time. Steven N’Zonzi, signed by Stoke for £3 million in the summer of 2012, had been identified by Penrice in a poor Amiens side, three years earlier, when he was available for £500,000.

When Stoke sought to stabilise after their first season in the Premier League, in 2009, Fernando Llorente and Javier Martinez, who were emerging at Athletic Bilbao, were on Penrice’s wish list. The scout was also impressed by the discipline and defensive versatility of Laurent Koscielny, who was available on a free transfer following the expiry of his contract at Tours, in the French Second Division. Koscielny opted to join L’Orient, who sold him to Arsenal for £8.5 million the following year.

‘I don’t blame any of the managers for saying no. We all talk about the good ones we’ve put up, but don’t kid yourself. We’ve all come up with crap ones as well, the ones we forget about. If you’re a Premier League manager earning a million pounds a year why do you want to take a chance on a bloke from Chateauroux Reserves? It’s easy for us scouts. He’s the one that’s got to sit on the touchline, get beat three-nil and go in front of the press. They’ll ask him why he didn’t sign so and so instead.’

Some people chart their lives through holiday photographs, birthday cards or glowing annual assessments which lead to promotion at work. A series of ring folder files, stored haphazardly in an office at his home in the Gloucestershire countryside, are central to Penrice’s existence. These contain thousands of team sheets, accumulated across three continents in the previous decade. Each player is given a mark between A and E. Those with an S against their names were recommended as signings. Those with an M were monitored further.

Pick a file at random, and the names spill off the pages. Mesut Ozil, a callow substitute for Werder Bremen, 18 months before he starred for Germany in the 2010 World Cup. An A and an S. An 18-year-old Eden Hazard, who would eventually cost Chelsea £32 million, playing for Lille. An A and an S. A 17-year-old Raphael Varane, playing for Lens, two years before a £10 million move to Real Madrid. An A and an S. David Luiz, playing for Benfica in a Portuguese Cup tie two years before Chelsea signed him for £21 million. An A and an S.

‘You can’t hide from it, can you?’ said Penrice, with the reverence of a true believer, going through the scriptures, line by line. ‘The letters are there, aren’t they?’ He was on a spiritual journey; my questions were incidental, ignored not through disrespect but because he was consumed by a latent sense of wonder. The players lived a double life in his imagination; he envisaged them as they were, savoured the memory, and placed them, lovingly, in the context of what they had become.

‘You can’t buy this knowledge . . . no scout would have this knowledge . . . I’ve got book after book, hundreds of them . . . can you see what I mean? . . . this stuff don’t lie . . . it’s true, ain’t it?’ In those ethereal moments, that sacred stream of consciousness, Penrice had unwittingly answered one of my central questions. Why do scouts embrace the privations of a fractured lifestyle, and the frustrations of a disposable football culture? I suspect they dare not admit this, even in solitary moments of self-doubt, but they do so because they exist in a parallel universe where schoolboy sticker books come to life. They bear witness to the game’s central struggle, between talent and ambition. They exist on the cusp of cynicism and idealism. They don’t need to be indulged; it is sufficient to be intimately involved.

Penrice is a garrulous man, not given to quiet contemplation, but struggled to articulate what he felt, as he flicked through team after team: ‘It’s a funny, stupid thing. I don’t get any satisfaction, me, out of the business side, to be honest. I get my satisfaction out of seeing the players do well. It’s very rewarding. This job has a fair amount of longevity. When you find somebody you can watch their career progress. It’s quite nice. I get more joy out of that than anything else, you know?’

Emotions are inevitably suppressed, because economics are more important. The Spanish market, though inflated at the top end, can still produce bargains like Michu, a £2 million revelation at Swansea, following Michael Laudrup’s arrival as manager. The relative impoverishment of Portuguese football offers opportunities, as do underdeveloped systems in South and Central America, but the complications are onerous.

Eligibility for UK work permits is a recurring problem, because of the stipulation that a player must have appeared in 75 per cent of competitive games for a nation ranked in FIFA’s top 70 over the previous two years. This leads to some players being parked at feeder clubs in Europe and Scandinavia. Third-party ownership is rife, but prohibited in England following West Ham’s signing of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, who were owned by anonymous investors represented by Iranian-born businessman Kia Joorabchian. It is also outlawed in France.

Luiz is a case in point. A quarter of his so-called economic rights were owned by the Benfica Stars Fund, run by Banco Espirito Santo, Portugal’s biggest bank. The fund received £5.25 million from the £21 million Chelsea paid to Benfica for the Brazil defender, a profit of £1.38 million over 14 months. It still has a stake in 18 Benfica players. Transparency is assured because, like Porto and Sporting Lisbon, Benfica are listed on Portugal’s Stock Exchange. The sale of footballers’ economic rights must be publicly declared.

Third-party ownership is seen as beneficial by some, because it allows clubs to share the risks of producing young players, and to manage their debts. It is endemic in South America, where clubs effectively use investment funds in the way overstretched householders use pay-day loan firms. However, UEFA announced in December 2012 they opposed the practice on principle, and would seek to pressurise FIFA to ban it, globally. If FIFA did not do so, they would take unilateral action.

Michel Platini, the UEFA president, chose a conference in Dubai to renew the attack: ‘I sincerely believe that such a system poses unnecessary risks to football by creating improper links between agents, financial speculators and clubs that could ultimately affect the fairness of competition while promoting abuses such as money laundering which can only harm the integrity of football.’ He was answered by Portuguese agent Jorge Mendes who, like Joorabchian, is also involved in the partial ownership of players’ economic rights. He insisted: ‘If we do this, we put an end to football for small clubs.’ Former Manchester City defender Ray Ranson, whose fund had invested £50 million in a pan-European portfolio of 20 players, argued clubs needed the third-party system because ‘the banks are shut’. Fund profits averaged 50 per cent over two years, and though Ranson insisted he had no influence on transfer policy, risks were managed through contractual inducements for clubs to sell.

Pressure, applied also by Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s chief executive, flushed out others from a secretive world. Traffic Sports, an arm of a Brazilian sports marketing company, was raising $100 million for its third football investment fund, in conjunction with a Dubai-based buyout firm, Cedar Bridge Partners. Jochen Loesch, Traffic’s head of international business, suggested, in a filmed interview with Bloomberg TV, that third-party ownership ‘doesn’t exist’.

Such semantics were strange, because he then outlined ‘a billion dollar market’ in football, in which a single investment of $6,780,362 in Brazilian striker Kerrison, who was sold to Barcelona for $19,310,067, produced a 114 per cent profit for Traffic in eight months. He also warned that any legislative strictures from UEFA or FIFA would be ‘widely ignored by the market’. It was an unmistakable signal that the facts of football life remained unchanged.

When the agent has more power, the scout, by definition, has less influence. Clubs planning their transfer strategy for the summer window in 2013 had started to circulate South American agents with their requirements the previous autumn. West Bromwich Albion were especially thorough, and were looking to repeat the success of the previous summer, when they signed defensive midfield player Claudio Yacob on a Bosman free transfer.

Albion were a progressive, stable club. Their strategy was sufficiently robust to sustain the loss of Dan Ashworth, their highly regarded sporting and technical director, who was replaced by Richard Garlick in January 2013. Ashworth stayed at the Hawthorns during a two month transitional period, before he joined the Football Association as director of elite development.

Albion’s shopping list for the 2013–14 season, in the initial form of a request for suitable CVs and recommendations, was extensive: they sought a young goalkeeper with development potential, a right sided centre back, with pace, and a right full back, with extensive experience. Another holding midfield player, in the mould of Yacob, two wingers and two central strikers were also required.

It was a measured, businesslike and professional process. Such adjectives cannot always be applied to the mayhem of the Primera División of the Argentine League, which Yacob had left in bad odour in the summer of 2012. He was marginalised after refusing to sign a new contract at Racing Club, who stripped him of the captaincy. This ensured Ashworth was unable to see him play when he visited Buenos Aires in late February and early March in 2012. He made his choice on the strength of a DVD, peer testimonials and an instinctive assessment of his character. He passed on his other principal target, Mariano Pavone, a British-style centre forward, who subsequently moved from Lanus to Cruz Azul, the Mexican club.

The attractions of the Black Country were brought into sharper focus for Yacob during the April derby against Independiente, who also represent the port city of Avellaneda. Racing led 1–0, but lost 4–1 after having midfield player Bruno Zuculini and goalscorer Teo Gutierrez sent off. Yacob sparked a media firestorm by being pictured wearing a pair of Independiente shorts, and the Racing Club dressing room resembled something out of the Wild West. Gutierrez pulled what he later claimed to be a paintball gun on goalkeeper Sebastian Saja, with whom he had swapped punches in a brawl which also included defender Lucas Aveldaño and Gutierrez’s fellow Colombian Gio Moreno.

Boing Boing, indeed.

It was so much simpler in Penrice’s world. He had immersed himself in the memories of an Under 16 match between Den Haag and PSV Eindhoven, one morning in 2009. He had never forgotten the PSV winger, a waif blessed with searing pace, quick feet, adhesive control and an eye for goal. His name was Zakaria Labyad. He was subsequently spirited to Sporting Lisbon, and great things were expected from this 18-year-old.

‘One last thing,’ said Penrice, as he steeled himself to close a blue loose-leaf file. ‘See this one here? Labyad. I put him down as an S. Just you wait and see what happens. They’re already talking about him going to Barcelona or Real Madrid. That’s scouting!’

The dream was still alive.

SHANE BATTIER IS
football’s missing link. That is an odd accolade for a multi-millionaire basketball player whose employer admits ‘he can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control’, yet it offers a tantalising glimpse into a future shaped by human chemistry and applied mathematics. Battier, the Miami Heat forward, is the No Stats All Star of the NBA. They call him ‘Lego’, because when he is on the court the pieces start to fit together.

His job is to harass, block, steal, dive and draw fouls. He needs acute peripheral vision, anticipation and intestinal fortitude, to take a charge from the best offensive players in an aggressive, relentless sport. So far, so obvious; but every team in which he has played, even supposed basket cases like the Memphis Grizzlies, acquired an uncanny ability to win. The Heat, NBA Champions in Battier’s first year, 2012, secured one of the great bargains when he signed a three-year contract worth a minimum $9.41 million.

Superstars such as Kobe Bryant lose their edge when Battier guards them, and ushers them into areas of statistically proven inefficiency. The contagion of uncertainty, when a marquee player is diminished, triggers collective ineffectiveness. Statistics provide an instant insight into what is happening, without allowing coaches immediately to understand why. Bright young things in basketball’s back offices regurgitate such phrases as Battier being blessed with ‘the IQ of where to be’ but are constantly in catch-up mode.

The mystique of the process is enhanced by the impact Battier has on his teammates, who suddenly become more productive. It can be condensed into a single statistic, the plus–minus. In short this quantifies fluctuations in the score when any given player is on the court. Anyone who crystallises such magic in football, and finds the equivalent of what basketball identifies as a ‘glue guy’, would make a
Moneyball
-style impression.

Emile Heskey seems the footballer closest in spirit to Battier, because his credibility amongst coaches and teammates defies popular disdain and perceptions of weakness, but his career is petering out in Australia. The search is inherently difficult, because football is a low-scoring game and, according to Blake Wooster of Prozone, ‘the most important things are the hardest to measure’.

New data is invaluable, and influential. Football’s progression is reliant upon a quantum leap in thinking. It needs a man like Matthew Benham to be appreciated, instead of being feared and mistrusted, like a medieval witch. Brentford’s owner is an Oxford graduate, a former financial trader who has become one of the world’s leading professional gamblers. Smartodds, his consultancy, provides statistical and quantitative research to football punters, and executes bets on behalf of clients. A team of 17 graduates, all holding PhDs, initiate and develop sophisticated probability models, which incorporate theories, trends and anomalies.