Sober

by Tony Adams

  I asked for a meeting with Tale. The VP and CEO, Fariz and Alastair, were still marking their territories, and I was still unsure of who was in charge and had no clear guidelines. Things had slipped back to how it was after that meeting to clear the air. It didn’t help that Alastair was out of the country so regularly on various commercial missions to do with the club.

  Having the family there was a blessing but there were also issues around that. The schooling wasn’t as good in Baku as back home and I was making a seven- or eight-hour round trip between the capital and Gabala twice a week. Coaching the team, the thing I really wanted to do, was taking second place to building the club and being on the road.

  I said all this in my meeting with Tale, who in my 18 months in the job had probably been to one game. I said that I wasn’t aware I had been hired to win the league but to build a club, and that I’d not been overly concerned with results. I couldn’t be. It still seemed to be a lot about balls, bibs and cones.

  The club, I said, needed a new coach who I would help find. Perhaps, then, I could become a director of football, who could oversee recruitment and infrastructure. Let me do that, I said to Tale, and I will finish the job I came here to do, which was to establish a proper professional football club, not just a competitive team for a season or two.

  In Azerbaijan, the coach is king. They didn’t understand the concept of director of football and they didn’t want another man in the mix. But Tale didn’t want me to quit Gabala entirely. We shared a vision of creating a club that would be a flagship for him and the region, be competitive in the country’s Premier League in the medium term and perhaps even Europe in the longer term. I think he was also keen to retain my profile, certainly in England. In addition, the Azerbaijanis do not like people resigning on them. It is a matter of pride.

  And so I suggested another role: I would help him put in the next coach, and become Tale and the club’s adviser on all matters on and off the field as the next phase of making FK Gabala a footballing force. He agreed. I had been a player, a manager, a coach and now I was to be an adviser. It would be another interesting role and challenge for a kid from Essex.

  14

  Farewell to Peter

  The idea that somehow, someday

  he will control and enjoy his drinking is the

  great obsession of every abnormal drinker.

  The persistence of this illusion is astonishing.

  Many pursue it into the gates

  of insanity or death.

  ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, here

  Another Cotswolds Christmas – and the unpacking of the boxes that had also been packed in Gloucestershire but never opened. For no sooner had Poppy and the kids settled into the apartment in Baku than I had stepped down as coach of Gabala and the crates were sent back to England. They had enjoyed their little adventure but it was over almost before it had begun. The holidays done, spent enjoyably, and the New Year here, it was then time to adapt to my new role, based at home but with an eye always on Azerbaijan.

  The club – that is the president and vice president – chose as my replacement Fatih Kavlak, the coach I had brought in to oversee the academy. He was a good guy and quite capable of taking over the team. It upset Gary Stevens, who wanted a crack at the job himself and they eventually paid him up.

  It had still been a good move for him as it furthered his coaching career. A good man and a good manager, Gary would go to Thailand to coach then do some media work on the Premier League in the Far East. It was, though, a difficult situation for me because I had brought in both Gary and Fatih. Two other staff I recruited – Daryl Willard and Faraz Sethi, development coach and physio – also left over the next six months as Fatih brought in his own people.

  My first task was to establish a more regular relationship with Tale and we met more often now, with him often in London on other business for Gilan Industries. He was active in The European Azerbaijan Society, the organisation based in those offices in Queen Anne’s Gate and established to promote the image and interests of the country. TEAS also lobbied MPs about the plight of IDPs – internally displaced persons – moved out of Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory disputed, and subject of a war in the 1990s, between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

  I would go up to London every month or two, and Tale and I were in regular contact by email. The more we spoke, the more he understood just what was involved in setting up a club to compete at a high level. It wasn’t that he hadn’t taken an interest before; he was just busy with all his other commercial and political concerns. And, of course, I had been busy in another part of Azerbaijan trying to get things done.

  It is why face to face works best in football, why owners or presidents and chairmen need to be close to managers, rather than too far removed, for things to work well. Often you see that they don’t when an owner is based abroad, and it is especially apparent in the Premier League these days. In my case, I had a vice president who didn’t particularly understand football, and the president was getting information from him rather than from my man, Alastair Saverimutto.

  Meeting Tale regularly made me realise that I had more power and control as an adviser than as a head coach. I let go of playing matters, knowing that nobody was really going to succeed unless the structure and infrastructure of the club were properly established. Fatih Kavlak did well enough, the team finishing sixth when the cut-off for top and bottom six came in February, then fifth in the final standings.

  At season’s end, Alastair slipped away, his contract not renewed. He went to work for the Sri Lanka Rugby Association then the International Amateur Boxing Association in Lausanne, next to the International Olympic Committee’s headquarters. He always was good at selling himself, even if it was a struggle for him, as an outsider, to secure sponsorship deals for the club.

  Come the start of the following season, Fatih did not start well and by September he was gone, to be replaced by Ramiz Mammadov, the vice president’s brother-in-law and the man I had replaced, who had apparently been attending every game of Fatih’s tenure. Ramiz didn’t fare much better, finishing fifth before the cut-off then sixth at season’s end.

  It meant that they wanted another change of manager for the start of the 2013/14 season and I advised the club on potential candidates, not wishing to interfere but wanting to earn my money. In from Dynamo Kiev came Yuri Semin, something of a legend in the Russian game having been manager and president of Lokomotiv Moscow.

  Things were moving behind the scenes, with Phil Sharples sorting out the pitches and the indoor centre now in place. FK Gabala was finally looking like a football club with a stadium springing up – though it would also have its crises during the construction – and the academy was developing all the time. I kept the VP in the loop with what I was doing as well and I think he could see, and began to appreciate, that things were taking shape.

  In the background, I was doing some extracurricular work for Tale in the form of helping to organise, along with TEAS, a charity football match at Barnet’s old Underhill ground between an Arsenal Legends XI and an international team. The idea was to draw attention, on International Refugee Day at the end of June, to all those IDPs who had been forced from their homeland by that Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Many of them were now housed in new settlements that had sprung up on the outskirts of Baku. There was also a block of flats for some of the refugees in Gabala.

  More than 3,000 people turned up at Underhill to see the distinctly lean Mo Farah, double Olympic champion at London the previous summer, turn out in his beloved Arsenal’s colours, and the distinctly portly Tony Adams, who was prompted to lose some weight by the event. I didn’t mind showing myself up too much this time, unlike with that Soccer Aid game at Old Trafford, as I was now 10 years on from retirement and people weren’t going to expect me to be the figure of my pomp that they would have assumed back then.

  After that I became friends with Mo – who everyone was desperately worried would get injured in a tackle – and he was a l
ovely guy. After he won his 10,000 metres gold in Rio in 2016, I texted him to say he still had to win the 5,000 metres if he wanted to be a double double winner, like me. When he did, he rang me on FaceTime the following morning. ‘Yay,’ he said. ‘I’m a Tony Adams now.’

  A year after the Barnet match, we would also stage a charity boxing event for the Mo Farah Foundation and TEAS at York Hall in Bethnal Green, where stars such as Frank Bruno turned out. Gabala had a strong boxing club too and I was manager for the night as they took on Repton of east London, managed by one of their former alumni, Darren Barker, a world middleweight champion.

  That summer of 2013, though, I was busy recruiting a new academy director for Gabala, sifting CVs, talking to contacts. In the end, I narrowed it down to three people and they were invited to meet me, the president and a young Azerbaijani, Zaur Azizov, who had stepped up from club secretary to general manager now that Alastair had gone, for interviews in Brussels. To be fair, though he didn’t know how good Zaur was, Alastair had looked after the club staff, getting them all pay rises.

  Zaur was an interesting young man. Alastair had sent him to Everton and Sheffield United to see how they ran their clubs and Zaur, who spoke good English, had learned quickly. I began to see how smart he was, a great guy, and he quickly adapted to being the main administrator of the club.

  I wanted him in Brussels so that he could develop his role and confidence, and so that he could have some time with the president, which was at a premium. It was really the first time he had spoken in any depth with Tale. Zaur was very grateful to me and he became an ally.

  What we were looking for in an academy director was someone to set the style of play throughout the club and give us a long-term playing vision. I showed Tale videos of various teams and asked him what he would like to see, then gave him my recommendations. Naturally, he wanted Barcelona. Which club president doesn’t?

  I had a man in mind, one of the three, and who would interview well. I had got to know Stanley Brard through my old journalist friend Marcel van der Kraan. He told me that his fellow Dutchman was doing a fine job in the Feyenoord academy and that stacked up when I checked him out with some old contacts at the club. Stan had been a player for the club in the 1980s, playing in the same side as Johan Cruyff, the founder of the modern Barcelona. He had been a youth coach and also a head coach at Den Haag.

  An old contact I respected, Albert Capellas, a Spaniard who had been a coach at Barcelona and was now assistant manager at Vitesse Arnhem, told me that the Feyenoord academy in which Stan was now working was the best in Holland. They played 4-3-3 possession football out from the back through the age groups and had 60 per cent of their players in all the national youth teams.

  Thus was Stan ideal for the job, particularly as he had the sort of even temperament that would serve him well in a country that was always fascinating but could be frustrating at times. Tale accepted my recommendation. Being an excellent linguist, like many Dutch, Stan would become pretty fluent in Azeri in six months. I only ever really learned enough words and phrases to get me by.

  I also went out to Azerbaijan to meet with contractors and architects as the new stadium at the centre of the complex gradually became a reality. The initial plans for a 25,000-seater stadium were ambitious and would gradually be scaled down to a 10,000-seater, good enough for European football and more manageable in terms of maintenance. There were, naturally, a lot of logistical problems to be overcome and the project would take three times longer and cost three times more than expected.

  It all kept me busy enough, but being based in England also meant that I had time to be hands-on again with Sporting Chance and it was just as well. Things were not right. Poor Peter Kay, the chief executive of our charity, was not right. Indeed, issues that had emerged gradually over the previous 12 months would tragically come to a head that summer and early autumn of 2013.

  As I had stepped back from the running of the charity over the years, and because I had become more consumed with work and been abroad, Peter had become the face of Sporting Chance, through such high-profile cases as Adrian Mutu and Joey Barton, very public figures who had come to us for help. Peter was often the point of contact for those seeking help as well as for the media.

  In many ways, he enjoyed that. He was energetic, charismatic and charming, brilliant at leading educational seminars. He was very popular at the PFA – without whose support we would have folded – and his relationship with them was one reason why the charity had survived so long, beyond the natural course of many small charities.

  Peter’s lead role, however, often meant that boundaries became blurred, that he became almost a therapist when he didn’t have the same high level of training as James, our head of treatment. Sometimes, Peter would take on cases when they should have been passed on.

  In addition, it would turn out that the finances were not in the sort of shape we would have hoped. I was as guilty as anyone of not monitoring them as closely as I should have. But then Peter would come to the board of trustees to say we were pretty much breaking even, and looking at the annual accounts it did look that way. We would, for example, bring in £300,000 and maybe spend £310,000.

  What’s more, because we were helping people and the situation was far from the worrying times of the early days, as the PFA and FA were now contributing good amounts, we were not overly concerned. We let Peter get on with it. He was such a lovely man, so willing to help everyone. He had such a good heart.

  But what did worry me, and the board, was Peter’s health. I think he was trying to keep any financial and cash-flow issues of the charity away from me, knowing I had other things to preoccupy me. He also wanted to keep costs down by being a one-man band. I think, however, his ego got the better of him. He loved the attention and the control and just would not delegate. The football world and its spotlight can be seductive.

  That, though, is dangerous for an addict, as Peter was. As is the stress of keeping it all together and not asking for help.

  One of our trustees, Charlie Lesser, who was also a close friend of Peter, sensed something was wrong after having some conversations with him and went down to our facility at Liphook to see Peter one day. Peter was not there, however, and had not been for a while, according to James, who thought he had been on the road at a lot of meetings.

  Charlie reported back to me and also confided that he thought Peter might have relapsed, into gambling. That was not Peter’s preferred mood-changer – he was an alcoholic and drug addict, having been a cocaine user – but that can be the nature of the illness. People swap one flavour or behaviour pattern for another just to try to feel differently, to feel better, hoping against hope that this might work for them. An addict is an addict, however, and always will be. Once someone starts using again, any control soon goes.

  We had certainly discovered that at the charity over the years and the nature of players’ addictions was changing. Once, you could say that seven out of 10 referrals were for drink and/or drugs with maybe a couple for gambling and the other for another addiction, such as sex or food. Now, that had turned round, with these days around seven out of 10 presenting with gambling addiction. They knew the papers would turn them over if they were out boozing and they would lose their place in the team, or would fail a drugs test if they used. Gambling was the silent, private addiction that could be indulged on the internet, and thus more easily kept a secret, as well as being not so immediately obvious. Plus it was everywhere – adverts on television, clubs having betting partners and being sponsored by them.

  It meant when players came into treatment, we would have to take their phones off them and just give them back for personal calls at specific times. Then, they would find messages on them offering free bets or an extension of credit if their accounts had not been used of late. They might owe fortunes but they would be offered another £10,000 worth. We had one player who left treatment to find that because his account hadn’t been used for a few weeks, and he had been such a
‘good’ customer, £1,000 had been deposited in it.

  There was also the issue of free bets, which I think will become one of the scandals of the age when all the social effects of the growing gambling culture really kick in. I have met with Andy Burnham MP and Lord Howard of Rising, who are both as worried about this as I am, in an effort to put in place some legislation to prevent free bets being offered as inducements. Andy had other pressing business with the Hillsborough inquiry, but Sporting Chance would continue its attempt to get a law against free bets introduced.

  Peter, it emerged, was living beyond his means. We called him in to talk it over. He just said he had been working too hard and it certainly seemed that way. He looked 100 years old. We resolved to get him some help – at first in the office.

  A few years earlier, I had been invited to be one of the guest editors of Radio 4’s Today programme in that period between Christmas and New Year they give over to people in the public eye who they believe have stories to tell. I really put my heart and soul into it and worked with Robert Peston, then economics editor, on a piece about the finances of football, and Alan Davies, the actor, comedian and Arsenal fan, who talked about the game from a supporter’s viewpoint. I also recruited the former sports minister Kate Hoey to do a slot on academies and sports politics.

  I wanted to feature, too, something on addiction in prison, given that many people around the excesses of Christmas get into trouble and/or want to stop drinking or drugging, and I met a guy called Colin Bland, who was then working for the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners trust, of which I was a patron, up in Yorkshire. Now I contacted him again. Colin was a good man, an organised man, who was doing three days a week for RAPt and could do two for us.

  And so we put him in the office alongside Peter. The idea was that Colin would do the admin and the books, leaving Peter to do what he did best – all the educational seminars and public appearances, which he was born for. We should have known we were merely putting off the problem, and I know both James and I would for a long while feel some guilt that we didn’t see all this sooner.