The Nowhere Men (6 page)

The next whiteboard contains live targets, who are monitored constantly. Their ages are written in red, on a yellow square. Those names in blue are potential free transfers, coming to the end of their contracts. Those in green are potential loanees. Those in red carry a price. There is an additional section, in the bottom left-hand corner, featuring three goalkeepers, who are seen as emergency loanees, if required. I had given my word not to be specific on names, but this list was deemed relatively insignificant. It included Brad Guzan of Aston Villa, Vito Mannone of Arsenal and Chris Kirkland, whose injury-plagued career had stalled at Wigan.

Some managers preach loyalty; Moyes practises it. The next whiteboard is a statement of faith in those closest to him. It features favoured Premier League players, personal choices who are not on any other list. They must be 26 or under, playing for a club outside the top six, and be regarded as realistic potential recruits. They have been voted for by Moyes, and his senior staff. Four players, out of the 20 or so featured, are unanimous selections. That gives everyone food for thought.

Time moves with terrifying speed in football: the next wall condenses the next three seasons into the five seconds or so it takes to scan a succession of teams, in Everton’s favoured formation. This is why the secret room is off limits to players. It is, in essence, a Moyes mind map. The whiteboard contains a list of all first team squad players, with their ages, contract details, and appearance records. It starts with Moyes’ idea of his best current starting 11, and what it will be, up until 2014. This offers an insight into which regulars he suspects will fade away, and who he hopes will emerge from the supporting cast. It is an imprecise science, because of the unpredictability of fate, but the gaps, when they appear, are ominous. This is a visual tool for the black art of management, moving a player on when his use has been exhausted, but his resale potential is still significant.

Moyes does not share the elitist view that the quality of players from the Football League has declined so markedly that it is negligible. His personality was shaped in the lower leagues, and he retains faith in their ability to nurture raw talent. The next whiteboard is smaller, and contains no player over the age of 23. The most promising Championship, League One and Two players are highlighted in blue, red and green respectively. One name stands out, and can be used because of its ubiquity. Everton, like the vast majority of Premier League teams, were casting covetous glances at Jack Butland, Birmingham’s City’s goalkeeping prodigy.

The last major whiteboard, the transfer window list, is, in many ways, the most important. This contains the names of players Everton are actively seeking to sign. On this day, it is in transition, from the January window, which has just closed, to the summer window, which awaits. This is the scruffiest section, because so many names have been scrubbed off, or re-entered, during the courtship rituals involving players, clubs, agents and assorted hangers-on. It is a movable feast – numbers range from 15 to 20. The process is so attritional only one of the names on the January 2012 list, striker Nikita Jelavic, was signed.

Smith has a smaller whiteboard, an
aide-mémoire
, to the right of his desk. It contains players from Japan and Korea, and features ‘first contact’ names, who require a file to be established. ‘When I first got into this I had this idea that for each position you would have three players,’ he said. ‘You know: that’s the one we really want, that’s the next one, and that’s the next one. Once one of those either signs for you or moves to another club you’d replace him with another one. In reality it’s not that simple. If you’re looking to fill a particular position, three isn’t really enough. You almost need eight or nine. If you’re Man City, or Man United maybe, you just need the one name, because you’ve got the money to go and get whoever you want. But if you’re Everton you come up with a list of quite a few who you think could come in and do the job. You actually end up signing the one you can get.’

The human element will always be paramount. Peer recognition is pivotal. Moyes’ brains trust uses individual contacts, including players, coaches and managers. Agents are regarded as most useful in South America where the web of third-party ownership can ensnare the unwise or the unwary. Work permits are a recurring issue in the UK, though unlike Chelsea, who use Vitesse Arnhem in Holland, and Manchester City, who have a Scandinavian network, Everton do not have a strategic association with a foreign club. The case of James Rodriguez highlights the dangers, frustrations and potential rewards. A young winger, regarded as the most naturally gifted Colombian player to emerge since Carlos Valderrama, he was on their radar, but dismissed because of the impossibility of securing a work permit due to his lack of international experience.

Porto, who operate in a more relaxed administrative environment, paid €5.1 million for a 70 per cent ownership package in July 2010. Rodriguez signed a four year contract with a €30 million release clause, and Porto quickly sold on 10 per cent of his economic rights. In November of that year Porto sold another 35 per cent to a Luxembourg-registered company, Gol Football Luxembourg SARL, for €2.5 million. They did something similar with the much-coveted Portuguese international João Moutinho. When Rodríguez scored a hat-trick in the 2012 Portuguese Cup final, Porto bought the original 30 per cent of the player they did not own from Convergence Capital Partners B.V. for €2,250,000. That meant they now controlled more than half his economic rights. He signed a new five year contract, with a €45 million release clause. Nice work, if you can get it. The scorpion dance was completed in January 2013, when Gol Football Luxembourg SARL sold their 35 per cent stake back to Porto for €8.5 million, a profit of €6 million. With such sums at stake it is unsurprising that Porto, like Udinese in Serie A and Villareal in La Liga, are pioneering video scouting.

Smith reflected: ‘We’re running into another era where the ability to stream games is incredible. You could come in here on any given Monday and have every game from, say, the French league ready to watch – bang, bang, bang. Maybe for a Premier League club, video scouting might be the next step. So instead of sending somebody out there, certainly in the initial phase, you just compile all the reports back here. Then, further down the line, someone goes out and follows up. You would never want to get away from first-hand insight but I would argue that you can get enough from video to make it worthwhile. Think of football in terms of being a normal business. You deal in footballers as a commodity, just like you would buy and sell anything else. You’d be more conscious of how you spent your money. You wouldn’t have people travelling all over Europe, all over the world, speculatively looking at things, would you?’

He sees Borussia Dortmund as a more realistic role model: ‘They nearly went bust about five or six years ago because they overstretched. They’ve rebuilt with a team full of young players, all with good resale values. They recruited really cleverly, from Poland, Japan, South America, and won the Bundesliga. The next step involved the Champions League, which gave them the money to invest in slightly more expensive players. It’s like a virtuous circle as long as you can keep it going. It’s a great example of how to run a football club. They also produce top, top players from their academy. That leads to self-sufficiency. You have to accept that every year you might have to sell one, and that will fund a process of evolution. So you sell a player for fifteen and you buy three for five million each. The hope is one of those will be sold for fifteen in a year or two, and so it goes on. Everton can operate a bit like that in the Premier League because it is acknowledged and accepted that we haven’t got much money.

‘The world is changing. In the old days, it seemed as if they did everything off the back of a fag packet. The old school scout would go to a game, and just have a general look, unless there was a specific player. He’d then speak to the chief scout on the phone and tell him what he thought, so basically everything was stored in people’s heads. Well, they thought it was. It wasn’t really, because you can’t store it all in your head, can you? That’s why reports have become so fundamental. It’s about intellectual property rights. That information belongs to Everton, because it was gained by people being paid by Everton, working for Everton. The old school way, with the chief scout having it all in his head, gave no continuity. If he gets run over by a bus, he takes all the knowledge with him. I know I’m laughing at that thought, but we had a similar problem in the academy, several years ago. The head of recruitment left and there was nothing . We didn’t even have the telephone numbers of the scouts! It was as if he’d never been here. An owner, or a CEO these days wouldn’t tolerate that, if he’s got anything about him.’

Some things never change. Great clubs are shaped in the image of their great managers. It is too simplistic to view Moyes as merely an autocrat, with the inflexibility that implies. Like his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson, he wields power decisively, but sensitively. He is comfortable with ultimate responsibility – indeed he demands it – but the democratic nature of Everton’s recruitment policy informs us of the man, and the club he has created. They would not make Liverpool’s mistake, of attempting to impose a sporting director in the mould of Damien Comolli. Kenwright is a fan; he understands the mentality of his club in the way an opportunistic owner from the United States never could.

When he arrived at Goodison, Moyes made a statement of intent. He hailed Everton as ‘The People’s Club’. The defiance of the gesture, and the horror with which it was greeted at Anfield, across Stanley Park, registered with his natural constituency. In wider terms, it begged a critical question: is football still a people’s game? A League One club would assist in the search for the truth about England, and its national obsession, in the formative years of the twenty-first century.

WEMBLEY STADIUM’S SIGNATURE
arch, glistening in a weak sun, dominated the horizon. Viewed from the dereliction of the Warren Farm Sports Centre, across a valley mottled by the clutter of suburban housing, it had the splendour of a cathedral on a hill. Yet, like many things involving English football, its majesty was an illusion.

Miguel Rios understands the gulf between the presumptions of the apparatchiks, working in the Football Association’s ruinously expensive headquarters, and the realities of the grassroots game. It cannot be measured by the three miles which separate the stadium and a symbol of sporting decay, where park footballers play beside abandoned cricket nets, in which saplings grow through ancient, shredded green matting.

He knows, one day, soon, the boys he watches, in an attempt to detect and develop unrealised talent, will be evicted. Clubs are likely to fold. The travellers’ ponies which graze, untended, on adjoining straw-coloured scrubland will, in all probability, be humanely destroyed. The bulldozers will move in, and, sometime in the 2014–15 season, Queens Park Rangers will have a new training ground. It is expected to win more awards for the men who designed and built the Olympic Stadium.

For the moment, Warren Farm is a regular port of call for Rios, a scout who is changing perceptions of Brentford, a homely football club with expansionist ambitions of its own. The men who write the FA coaching syllabus, and the politicians who encourage a conspiracy of silence about the sale of playing fields, and the betrayal of a generation, should meet him. It may be too much to expect them to be enlightened, but they would certainly be challenged.

His is a world where parents brawl, and referees cower in car parks, as the ignorant seek retribution. Lofty edicts about the technical development of young players are simply irrelevant. Coaches regurgitate second-rate TV punditry and tactical half-truths. This is England, our England. Children, as young as seven, have the first stoop-shouldered signs of physical illiteracy. They are active, by definition, but many are overweight, or burdened by social and cultural circumstance.

Rios is a football man with a conscience, who sees the good in people, despite the dispiriting nature of his experiences. He is a refugee from the City of London, where he was a successful business analyst for banks such as UBS, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital, until he could no longer accept the dehumanising effects of a lifestyle based on accumulation and consumption. He got out before he became someone he did not like.

‘You kinda sell your soul to the money, but eventually you ask yourself why am I doing this?’ he reflected. ‘It is a pressurised lifestyle, but to be honest, I relished that. It was the other side which got to me. You see people who are financially secure, who decide they don’t have to be nice to be anyone. They shed their humanity. There are everyday irritations – I don’t miss the tube, that’s for sure – but eventually I had enough of the egos. I just decided I didn’t need to work there.’

He had played, semi-professionally, and was asked to coach, part time, at a sports school in Portobello in West London. There he met a teacher, who gave him an introduction to Barcelona’s soccer school system. He spent three months there annually for four years, working as a translator and a coach, and refined his football philosophy. He was recruited by Arsenal’s Academy, where he worked with Ose Aibangee, a coach with a similar perspective, and Shaun O’Connor, the scout who discovered Jack Wilshere. The three are now the pillars of Brentford’s youth system.

Rios, a tall, mild, quietly spoken man, has responsibility for talent identification, and is head of recruitment for the Under 6–12 age groups. He has 15 scouts reporting to him and, on this particular Sunday, watched eight games, in Hounslow and Ealing. Against expectations, in an age in which the young are conditioned to believe you are the badge you wear, he was wearing a fawn hoodie, and a silver-grey gilet, rather than a club tracksuit.

‘No uniform,’ he said. ‘The parents like you to have one, but most scouts wear it for their egos. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. No one should know who you are. I prefer to be in the group. I listen for names, and try to fit players to parents. Essentially it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. At this level you need spotters, seeing as many games as they can. It is a cut-throat environment, where people try to undermine you. Why be a scout, then? I prefer it to coaching, because coaching is very binary. Its yes no yes no.