Exposed at the Back

by Arild Stavrum

  The development coaches possessed enormous knowledge. They were the ones who knew the most about what was going on in Oslo’s football world, and if there was anybody who could fill in the gaps in Benedikte’s knowledge of football agents it was Vålerenga’s development coach.

  Sennikov led Benedikte up the wide metal steps and into the long, narrow corridor where the Vålerenga offices were.

  ‘These offices are reserved for the marketing department. Those of us who work on actual football, we have to fight over these meeting rooms.’

  Andrei spoke without so much as a trace of accent. Although he was of Russian ancestry, Benedikte knew that he’d lived his whole life in the East End of Oslo, but she still found herself listening out for a foreign twang.

  ‘Sorry, but with everybody complaining to me the whole time, I have to speak my mind now and then.’

  ‘What do they complain about?’

  ‘Either it’s the smaller clubs saying we’re stealing their best talent, or it’s people on the board or even you lot from the media saying we’re not bringing enough good players up through the system. It’s all wrong anyway.’

  ‘How do the transfers from smaller clubs take place? Via an agent?’ Benedikte didn’t have the patience to listen to his complaints.

  ‘There are normally agents involved. It’s not unusual for 13-year-olds and their parents to have advisers.’

  ‘Isn’t there a lower age limit of 15?’

  ‘To get a written contract you have to be 15. Many of them come along to meetings for “support”, or they come up with some other excuse. But you’re right, the players have to be 15 to have a legally binding contract. Anyway, these agents are just getting worse and worse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘We’ve seen some agents going through matches on video with the players.’

  ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘We’re the ones who are supposed to go through matches with them. We’re supposed to say what they’ve done well or what they can improve on, based on Vålerenga’s playing style. What do you think is at the forefront of an agent’s mind?’ asked Sennikov. For the sake of his forefinger and of the meeting room table, Benedikte hoped that he wouldn’t use the word ‘we’ much more today.

  ‘That the players should make themselves marketable,’ she answered.

  ‘Exactly, so the agents, who often lack any technical background in football whatsoever, tell the players that they shouldn’t pass, but that they should shoot from every possible range; that it’s their own performance that counts, not that of the team.’

  ‘Who are the most active agents?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘Arild Golden practically had a monopoly on the biggest talent. Things are a lot less clear now that he’s dead. But don’t despair, if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that other vultures will turn up. Would you like some coffee, by the way?’

  Benedikte shook her head. Sennikov pushed down a few times on the top of a large pump-action coffee pot, which squirted out smaller and smaller doses. A gurgling sound filled the meeting room, and eventually Sennikov sat back down. He looked into his cup, which was far from full, and groaned.

  ‘Back to Golden. Have you thought how insane it was that he had his own soccer school? A travelling soccer school. With the pretext of bringing money to smaller clubs, his Golden Boys system allowed him to appraise and make contact with the best 14-year-olds in the country.’

  ‘Pretext? What do you mean?’ asked Benedikte. She’d heard about Golden’s soccer schools, but had thought of them as a charity gesture on his part, as if he’d sucked so much money out of football that he’d decided to organise them on a not-for-profit basis almost to redeem himself.

  ‘Golden let the smaller clubs arrange a camp every year, and the clubs made a couple of hundred thousand kroner out of it, but that wasn’t the main idea behind the camps. The best 14-year-olds took part in the camps with the football association’s blessing. Camps that were off-limits to other agents. Think how ludicrous that is. The Association sent talented players to a camp closed to other agents that they themselves had licensed. They gave Golden a monopoly. Golden filtered out the best talent in Norway and got to know the boys and their families. That’s how he got control of Stanley.’

  Benedikte nodded as she thought about it. It seemed incredible that the NFF, Norway’s largest single-sport association, could allow itself to be so manipulated by a single agent, and that they let one agent take control of the country’s best 14-year-olds. 14-year-olds who would soon be 16 and would go on to international academies with Golden Boys owning their rights.

  ‘You just said now that the state of the market has become a lot less clear since Golden’s death. Why? Did Golden have partners?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘He might have done, but the contracts are tied to each agent individually, not to companies, so many of Norway’s most attractive players are unrepresented now. There’s a power vacuum, and the transfer market opened yesterday.’

  Benedikte thought about Stanley. He was a potential international star. Norway’s Zlatan. Almost 15, which was a golden age, foreign clubs couldn’t sign players then, but agents could. And surely Golden Boys wouldn’t just want to let him go? They had a verbal agreement with his family, after all. Or did they? It struck Benedikte that Golden had been such a visible front man for his agency that she didn’t know whether he had any other employees. Benedikte’s thoughts were interrupted by Sennikov.

  ‘Football’s not like it used to be,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got superstars at lower secondary school and first-team players who are reality stars. I don’t know how they manage to keep focused.’ He shook his head slowly while dipping his fingers into a box of snus tobacco, digging out an improbably large pinch and manoeuvring it into position under his lip in a masterly fashion.

  ‘Has the club got involved in this?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘It’s hard to have an overall policy. It’s so new for us to see our players broadcasting from their own flats. We have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis, but it’s no secret that we had meetings with Golden to make sure that Per stayed focused on his football.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘Golden made some good arguments, Per was performing better than ever, after all. Vålerenga wanted to maintain good relations with Golden too, so perhaps we weren’t as critical as we should’ve been.’

  ‘Didn’t Golden have a point, though? Diesen is at the top of the fantasy football stats in most newspapers, and not just in VG, which is probably giving him high marks to promote their PDTV series anyway.’

  ‘That’s just it. The club let it lie, as long as he kept on playing well, but where should we draw the line? Reality TV’s fine, but what about porn? Is that okay as long as they score on the pitch too?’

  Benedikte started fidgeting with something in her pocket in the somewhat uncomfortable pause that followed. It was the business card she’d been given by that portly football agent she’d met at Nordre Åsen. She fired a shot in the dark.

  ‘What about Ola Bugge? Do you know him?’ she asked.

  ‘Bugge, yes. He’s different,’ said Sennikov.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Golden had the ones with the very best talent, while the fairish ones were swept up by other agents. Bugge started something completely different, he signed Oslo’s worst footballers.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like much of a business plan,’ said Benedikte.

  ‘Players were queuing up. He had the ones who’d played on the second-best youth team at Kjelsås, the ones who’d turned 28 and still thought that Real Madrid had their eyes on them, the ones who were in their third year playing for Bjølsen and thought that they deserved a contract they could live on, or even that they could live well on. These were players who weren’t paid by their clubs, in some cases players who didn’t even have a club, who couldn’t even get a Fifth Division side to go to the trouble of submitting a
transfer form to the local association. Players who were perfect for Bugge’s plan.’

  ‘Perfect?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘These people were so bad that nobody wanted them, while they themselves thought they were good enough for any top-flight Norwegian team. Then Bugge played on the fact that Golden and the other agents could easily demand 20–30 per cent of players’ salary, which of course can be enormous in cases when players earn 20–30 million kroner. So, instead, Bugge asked for what he called a symbolic payment, in other words a flat payment of 1,000 kroner a month.’

  ‘So Bugge’s profits are based on his number of players?’ asked Benedikte.

  ‘That’s right. If he could get enough players to pay 1,000 kroner a month, he could just lean back without doing anything at all and make a good wage for himself.’

  ‘Genius,’ said Benedikte.

  ‘Just one problem. Judging talent is an art. Anybody can see that Stanley from Skeid is going to become a professional footballer, but often the next best players carve out careers for themselves too, not least out of real need or hunger, and it’s a lot harder to gauge those ones. Two of Bugge’s players turned out well: Kalid Jambo and Otto Cana.’

  ‘I didn’t know Bugge was their agent. I thought they were with Golden Boys too,’ said Benedikte.

  ‘They were with Bugge until they were selected for the national under-17 side. Golden became their agent immediately after that.’

  ‘How did he get them away from Bugge?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who knows how Golden really operated? In any case, Bugge’s now more involved with the better players. Actually I think he’s dreaming of signing Stanley,’ said Sennikov.

  ‘Why haven’t you taken him on? I thought Vålerenga could practically have any players they wanted in Oslo.’

  ‘He’s too good.’

  ‘Too good?’

  ‘He’d leave Norway before playing a single first-team match with us. The big international clubs are counting down to his sixteenth birthday next year, when he’ll be able to go abroad. The only unknown about Stanley is who’ll be his agent, and who’ll end up hauling in the big catch.’

  ‘What would you advise Stanley to do?’

  ‘The same thing I advise all players. Listen to your coach and stay away from agents.’

  Soul of Fire

  ‘It doesn’t look good,’ said Dr Ramstad, putting his hand on Steinar’s shoulder. Bjørnar Ramstad and Steinar were childhood friends, having grown up together in Lofthusveien, in the East End of Oslo. Practically every time they’d met as adults, they’d argued about which neighbourhood Lofthusveien was in, whether it was Grefsen or Årvoll, but not today. Steinar nodded ever so slightly before drawing his breath and opening the door to room 3206, on the second floor of the Cancer Centre at Ullevål Hospital.

  Steinar’s old coach, Ståle Jakobsen, was sleeping in bed. Jakobsen was a football coach of the most politically incorrect school. He wouldn’t have given a damn about giving a seven-year-old a dressing down for a poorly executed tackle, and ideas such as squad rotation or prizes for everybody weren’t part of Jakobsen’s ideology. Nevertheless, warmth was the quality that Steinar associated with him most.

  He turned back to Bjørnar and whispered: ‘Bloody hell, he’s fat!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he get so fat?’

  ‘How long has it been since you last saw him?’

  ‘A few years.’

  ‘Same here. So I made some enquiries. He’s barely left the sports centre over the past few years. He stopped eating his dinners and was living almost exclusively on energy bars and XL-1 energy drinks.’

  ‘He loved that indoor pitch. He was the one who got it built, after all. He even threatened to beat up people from the council’s planning department, and they coughed up the money in the end. What he did was a political miracle here in Oslo, where it’s only skiing that gets the real money.’

  Steinar thought about the old sports centre just beyond Årvoll School, towards Trondheimsveien, with its indoor synthetic grass pitch. The centre that had meant so much to him when he was growing up.

  ‘Lung cancer,’ said Bjørnar.

  ‘You can’t get lung cancer from being fat, can you?’

  ‘No, but that’s what he’s got anyway, and it’s at an advanced stage too. I’ve spoken with the doctor dealing with his treatment. It’s not operable, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But I can’t remember ever seeing Jakobsen with a cigarette.’

  ‘Smokers make up 80 per cent of cases. 20 per cent are down to other causes.’

  ‘How did Jakobsen get it, then?’

  ‘I’ve got a theory, but I need to investigate a bit more first. Can we meet up tonight? Seven o’ clock at Magneten?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you what’s killing him.’

  Fair Play

  Benedikte’s white iPhone 4S rang. She looked at the display. It was Per Kristian Boltedal from the financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv finally returning her call.

  Boltedal was known as one of Norway’s best investigative journalists. Corruption among business leaders was his speciality, but his greatest passion was football. Every other Sunday on the stands at Ullevaal Stadion he did the customary jenka party dance with the rest of Klanen, the Vålerenga supporters’ club.

  ‘Benny Bly! Long time no speak! How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine thanks, but I need some help.’

  ‘And here was me thinking you just wanted a wee chat.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Arild Golden?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m only pulling your leg, but Benedikte, you know you’re a rival too, I…’

  Benedikte interrupted him: ‘I just need it for background information.’

  ‘Alright. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m especially interested in Golden Boys.’

  ‘Golden Boys is Arild Golden’s agency, easily the biggest in the Nordic market and one of the biggest in Europe. I’ve tried, but have barely been able to find out anything else at all about the company.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Golden Boys is registered in Guernsey and the board’s made up of two English lawyers who refuse to comment.’

  ‘What kind of structure do you think the company’s got, then?’

  ‘Its accounts and the details of its ownership aren’t public. There are many ways to hide these, for example through an agreement with the lawyers, or with the shares being owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein or somewhere. And, if you’re really paranoid, you can use bearer bonds.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Whoever physically holds the bonds owns the company.’

  ‘Could these have been kept in Golden’s office?’

  ‘Anywhere. It’s probably most common to keep them in a safe-deposit box. The point is that if you want to keep details about ownership a secret, then they’re impossible to find. Just imagine if Golden kept those bonds deposited in a Swiss bank and memorised the account number and the code needed to access them. Then we’ll never find out anything about the company’s structure or what happened to the money.’

  ‘What about his address and phone number?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Golden on the phone several times, but I can’t manage to trace any record of his number. As for his home, he spent so much time travelling outside Norway that he didn’t have to be registered as a resident. I can’t even find any documentation on his transfers. Just rumours.’

  ‘I like rumours.’

  ‘Per Diesen and Everton.’

  ‘Is he going there?’

  ‘Was going there. Everton were about to buy him this month, but now that Golden’s dead it seems as if the planned transfer will suffer the same fate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Golden sold players in turn. The last two had gone to West Ham and Aston Villa, and next on the list was Ever
ton and Diesen. What’s more, the Everton manager Brian Fulton suffers from a gambling addiction, and Golden knew how to exploit that.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Golden bribed Fulton, not to mention other football executives, both in England and in Norway. That’s why there was never any correlation between which players the clubs needed and the ones they got.’

  ‘But that’s illegal, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s how football works. It’s not how good you are that decides where you end up playing. It’s how creative your agent is, how selective his morality, and how many contacts he’s got. With Golden gone, so went the tasty morsel of a few extra tax-free million, and so there was no more space left at the end of Everton’s subs’ bench.’

  ‘Why does nobody report these things?’

  ‘Who’d want to do that? The agent sits on every side of the table, and it’s not so hard to agree with yourself. We’re talking about a business that’s rotten to the core.’

  ‘Do you know about anything else that might have led to his death?’

  ‘I said that everybody was fine with it, but Africa is usually the exception. It’s impossible to work down there as much as Golden did without making enemies.’

  ‘Have you got any rumours about that, then?’

  ‘Nothing about Golden himself, but I have heard of other agents taking young girls as payment.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They promise young lads a professional career in Europe in exchange for sex with their sisters. I’ve heard of a Belgian agent who set up a small harem in Africa while the girls’ brothers were in transit, unable to get through the visa checks. We haven’t managed to link anything like that to Golden but, as I mentioned, you can’t operate in Africa for that long and stay legal. By the way, I think one of your colleagues from TV2 was working on an African angle to the story.’

  ‘Do you know what it was about?’

  ‘Something about a footballer from the Cameroonian under-17 national side who was kidnapped and forced to play for a team in Egypt. A totally normal transfer for African football.’