by Tony Adams
He seemed to appreciate the talk, quit drinking and worked his way back into the team. When it was right for player and club, we found him another club where he might play more regularly.
I know I can manage, and manage well, but ideally I will be looking in the future for a job with an element of coaching involved.
Being a sporting director feels easy to me – working with a coach, getting rid of bad players and recruiting good ones, creating the right environment. Managing a club can be frustrating, with the way so many things can be beyond your control and your fate is in the hands of others.
It is, I believe, in coaching where I excel. There, you can teach and develop, talk and suggest. Encourage and empower. The rewards come when, years later, players acknowledge that you made a difference to their careers and lives.
There have been leaders I have admired down the years outside football, chief among them Winston Churchill for the way he united the nation during World War Two and for his inspiring oratory. Football is not war, but it is a battle. The British used to be good at strategy and organisation. We need to rediscover that.
Indeed, I have often observed politicians and how they speak and conduct themselves. To learn more, I tend to read their autobiographies, and those of business leaders, rather than fiction these days.
I did meet Margaret Thatcher, and was struck by the powerful – and scary – aura she gave off. Whether you agreed with her or not, she had conviction. ‘You came through YT S [Youth Training Scheme]?’ she asked. I said yes. ‘My idea,’ she said, turning to the gathering. I liked John Major for his understanding of sport, shown in his setting up of the National Lottery, funding from which has helped Great Britain to be so successful at the Olympic Games. I also admired Tony Blair for securing the Olympics for London in 2012.
Mind you, I don’t think people should be getting knighthoods and being made dames for running round an athletics track, as I joked to Mo Farah. They should be for people who transcend their sport and contribute more widely to our society.
I like to read books that aid the process of leadership such as Moneyball, about how finances impact sport, by Michael Lewis, along with Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s book Soccernomics. I also enjoyed their book, Why England Lose, and Michael Calvin’s Living on the Volcano, about football management. It gave great insight into the pressures and difficulties managers face.
In leading a football club, you need to create leaders around you as well, particularly among players. I agree with Brian Clough, who once said that if you’ve got fewer than four leaders in your team going to an away game, then you might as well not bother getting on the coach.
It was another reason why I admired Terry Venables’ way of doing things. He made a big call in taking the England captaincy away from David Platt and giving it to me. As well as not being certain he would be starting David, Terry wanted a lot of leaders in his side – Paul Ince, Stuart Pearce, Alan Shearer – and thought that I could best mediate and control them. You need to be a secure enough figure, as Terry was, to have so many strong characters in a group.
The people you are looking for are those who get into training first, who will set standards, morals and morale. They will spot situations, such as unhappy players, and lift them. Like Terry, Sir Alex Ferguson was superb at developing such figures.
And inside the club I have had a lifelong love affair with, I was fortunate to have role models, right from the understated but brilliant Terry Burton in the youth team, through the inspirational George Graham to one of the most intelligent men in the game, the man himself, Arsène Wenger.
17
Good Old Arsenal
As a club, we have an educational purpose:
to give back to those people who love
Arsenal so that they learn moral values
from our game and how we behave.
ARSÈNE WENGER, 1998
Another big reason for leaving Gabala was that I had the urge to get the grass beneath my feet again. I wanted to coach, wanted my own team to shape and improve, and at a reasonably good level. It was unlikely to be in England, however. I confess that after my Wycombe Wanderers and Portsmouth experiences in English football, I was probably still seen by many club owners, chairmen and chief executives as damaged goods. Not that it seemed to stop some other damaged-goods managers from getting jobs time after time.
I was sad about that but guess I understood a little, given my record and the fact that many chose to take it at face value rather than look into the circumstances behind it. Fortunately, I had more respect abroad. My coaching in Holland still counted for something and my role in the development of Gabala would be noted more on the wider European stage, where more attention was paid to these things than in the sometimes insular English game.
I received a call from Benny Nielsen, who had been a player for Anderlecht and was now a scout for Chelsea in his native Denmark. He had sent me Danish players to look at when I was at Wycombe. He told me that Brondby, the well-respected Copenhagen club, were interested in me as a head coach, as they were in the market for a new one after a bizarre row.
It seemed that the club president, Jan Bech Andersen, had been exposed for having gone anonymously on to a supporters’ message board to criticise the coach, Thomas Frank, who had quit amid the row. Mr Andersen also resigned as president but would remain pulling the strings as he was a co-owner and major investor.
I had talks with Mr Andersen, which seemed to go well, and he sent me a contract with terms and conditions in it. The money was going to be less than at Gabala but I was willing to take it. Things then went quiet, until I heard that they had appointed a German coach and that was that. I just emailed Mr Andersen to wish him and Brondby well.
There was also a possibility of going to Grampus 8 of Nagoya in Japan, who were thought to be making a change, and with Stanley Brard, my old academy director at Gabala, already there, it had potential. It was interesting that Grampus had been Arsène Wenger’s club before he came to Arsenal. As it was, nothing came from the Japan interest – though I did get some from Arsenal.
In the May of 2016, the European Under-17 Championships were held in Azerbaijan and I took them in to further my education. The quality of football was very high and I used the tournament as the basis for a future research paper.
While watching, I noticed that Arsenal did not seem to have any representatives there and so I contacted Steve Rowley, the chief scout, to ask if he would like analyses of the performances of the four young Gunners who were taking part, two English, one French and one Dutch. Steve liked the idea and so I emailed him reports.
He emailed me back to thank me, adding: ‘By the way, Tony, there’s a vacancy for an under-18 coach in the Arsenal academy.’ I thought about it. Having watched elite players at the tournament, I thought it would be nice. I hadn’t coached for three and a half years and it appealed to me. I suddenly felt stirred. This is what I had been missing.
I contacted Andries Jonker, the Dutchman who had taken over from Liam Brady as the head of the academy in 2014, as Steve suggested I do. Andries said he would get back to me and soon he did. It seemed he had had the thumbs-up from Arsène and he asked me to a meeting at Hale End, the Walthamstow home of the academy.
My relationship with Arsène had been warm over the previous six months following my heart scare. He had texted me saying: ‘I admire your strength. Respect and love.’ It prompted a bit of a text love-in, and I think he appreciated me doing an article in the press defending him when he came under pressure from supporters again over the winter as Arsenal slipped out of the title race.
I also texted him about the under-18 job and he just replied: ‘Good luck Tony.’ The papers were reporting that he wanted Thierry Henry for the post, but I don’t think Arsène ever really considered it as Thierry had lucrative punditry work for Sky and Arsène did not believe the two could or should be combined. I got word back that Ivan Gazidis, the Arsenal chief executive, also approved of me ta
king the job.
And so I drove the two hours from my home to Walthamstow on a Saturday morning to meet with Andries at Hale End. He outlined the job: I would be working alongside the existing coach Kwame Ampadu initially, with a view to being the lead coach, but that this was the extent of the job – there was to be no pathway to the reserves or the first team. The salary would be £45,000 gross.
‘What, a week?’ I asked, and Andries laughed.
I said I needed to go home and talk it over with Poppy to see if I could make it work logistically and financially. The commitment was going to be considerable, after all – five days a week, to include one evening, plus a Saturday morning match.
But it was appealing. And it was the Arsenal. After speaking to Poppy, who simply wanted me to do what would fulfil me, I agreed an arrangement with Andries. I would give it a month, starting at the end of June, to see how it worked for both parties and then Arsenal would make the decision about whether I was to be the lead coach for the under-18s.
It was, finally, a chance to get back into my spiritual home and, goodness knows, I had made some attempts down the years . . .
The first time it looked as if there might be a route back to the club came during the time I was working for Tale Heydarov at Gabala and there was a power struggle going on for Arsenal between two potential owners – the American Stan Kroenke and the Russian Alisher Usmanov. Several of the major shareholders were considering selling their stakes, as David Dein had done in 2007 when he sold his 14.5 per cent to Usmanov for a reported £75 million.
I went to see Blackstone, an American organisation with offices in Berkeley Square, who were then selling the 15 per cent shareholding of another Arsenal board member, Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith. She wanted £100 million for them. I also had lunch with the great Danny Fiszman, Arsenal through and through, who owned 16 per cent. Danny was worried about who might take over the club and I thought that possibly we could all link up if perhaps Tale was interested in buying Lady Nina’s stake. That would give the two of us more than 30 per cent, compared to Kroenke and Usmanov who then had around 25 per cent between them.
Danny was receptive but said that I should come through the front door and talk to the chairman, Peter Hill-Wood, who had a smaller shareholding. The board had fallen out with David Dein because they felt he’d sold his shares behind their backs and did not want any more of that kind of thing. I was interested, I told him, in being the board’s adviser on footballing matters.
In the event, as with that initial interest in Aston Villa some time later, Tale’s involvement waned as he needed to concentrate on events in Azerbaijan. Lady Nina also sold her stake to Kroenke for £120 million, Stan having his hand forced when he thought there was another player in the equation. Lady Nina had also fallen out with the board and sent me an email complaining about the state of the club.
Then Danny grew ill and would die of cancer, which saddened all who loved the club. He had been such a central figure, a force for good, for so long. Just before he died, Danny made arrangements to ensure that Usmanov, whom he did not warm to, would not get his shares and they ended up being sold to Stan for £110 million. Danny’s wife Sally still goes to the Emirates, and the Diamond Lounge created in honour of Danny’s business is still there. Stan now had full control of Arsenal, but he retained Peter Hill-Wood as chairman to maintain the link with the old club and its culture and principles.
Peter did an article with a newspaper in which he questioned – in light of all the new executive directors in the game receiving considerable payment at Premier League clubs – where all the people, like him, who gave their time and expertise and ran football clubs for free, out of love, had gone. He was in his seventies, he added; where are the younger people?
I wrote to him. I am in my forties, I said, and I don’t need paying. I will come and advise about playing matters and the future, perhaps Arsène’s long-term successor. The board needed someone like me, I reckoned, on footballing matters. In the end, Peter became unwell and I never got a reply. A year later Peter would step down, with Sir Chips Keswick taking over as chairman.
Before that episode, and after the initial sounding-out about buying a stake in the club on behalf of Tale, I heard in early 2012 that Pat Rice was retiring as Arsène’s assistant. I hadn’t wanted to be an assistant again; I had wanted to be a number one. But this was Arsenal.
As it had been rumoured the year before that he would be going and it didn’t happen, I went to see Pat to get it from the horse’s mouth. He confirmed to me that he would definitely be going in the May and that he had bought a house in Spain. I said that I wouldn’t want to do anything behind anyone’s back, so would he be OK with it if I went to see Arsène? Pat was fine with that.
Arsène was happy to see me and so I went to London Colney. We talked for an hour, a lovely conversation about the good old days and now . . .
You always could talk to him. Sometimes as a player, I would go into his office angry about something and then leave, disarmed, in a better frame of mind. I remember once having a discussion with him about God or a Higher Power, and he said he liked to believe in something, that it would be miserable to think we would go to the grave and that would be the end of it.
On this day, I told him he wouldn’t win the Premier League with full-backs playing like wingers. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. I asked him if he was going to do anything about it and he simply smiled.
Then he asked me why I was there.
‘Well, Pat is retiring . . .’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ said Arsène. ‘He won’t retire. He said that last year.’
I told him I had spoken to Pat and that he’d said he was going. Arsène then said he would be convincing Pat to stay, as he had done 12 months ago. ‘Fair enough,’ I said and shook his hand.
Then came Pat’s leaving-do at the Arsenal, which Arsène did not attend. I texted him again and asked if I could come and see him.
I went back to London Colney and we had a lovely conversation about the good old days and now . . .
I recall asking him about the differences between then and now.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘From Monday to Friday it was difficult. You players did what you wanted to do. But on Saturday, you were brilliant and I could relax. Now, it is great from Monday to Friday but on Saturday I tear my hair out.’
I thought back to that time when Manu Petit was late on to the training pitch and I went ballistic and threw the plastic cup. I wondered again who in the current set-up would be pulling people up now.
Then he asked me why I was there.
‘I went to Pat’s leaving-do and I understand there is a job going,’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ said Arsène. ‘I am moving Steve Bould and Neil Banfield up from the academy.’
‘Oh, OK,’ I said. ‘Good luck to them and you.’ I thanked him for his time and left.
I then texted Steve to congratulate him. He texted back to say he knew nothing about it. He had been offered it last year, he added, when Arsène thought Pat might be going then, but had heard nothing this time. He wasn’t sure he would take it anyway, he said.
Two days later Arsenal made the announcement about Steve and Neil stepping up. The next day I texted Arsène to ask if I could come and see him. This was three times in just over a month.
Back to London Colney. And we had a lovely conversation about the good old days and now. We also discussed how unlucky Arsenal had been this year.
Then he asked me why I was there.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘With Steve and Neil moving up, you have two jobs vacant now in the academy.’
‘Would you be interested?’ Arsène asked, surprised that I would work lower down in the club.
‘Maybe not at another club but it is the Arsenal,’ I said. ‘I do have the connection and even if it’s the youth team, the development squad or the EPPP [Elite Player Performance Plan] squad, I’d like to give something back.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I am going to t
he European Championships soon but leave it with me and I will call you.’
Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine began and I had heard nothing. I texted Arsène to ask if anything was happening. He replied that I should talk to Ivan Gazidis and Liam Brady, then head of the academy, as they were choosing the candidates. I rang Liam, who was in Ireland working for the media on the Euros. He would talk to me when he got back, he said. He had influence with Arsène, he added, but it would be the manager’s decision.
I emailed Ivan, who was in China working on a commercial project. He replied to say that it was Arsène and Liam who were deciding this. I texted Arsène. He texted back that it was ridiculous, that he would talk to Ivan straight away.
Then Liam rang me, to ask me to come and see him.
At our meeting, he told me that I was overqualified and they wanted somebody younger who they could train up, as they had with Steve Bould. I was just pleased that someone had given me an answer.
That still left the reserves and the development squad for which Arsène could appoint, and so I texted him again to relay what Liam had said, that the youth was not available. He said to leave it with him and he would sort it when he was back. This was the Friday towards the end of the European Championships, and the players not involved were due back in training on the Monday.
Then I got a phone call from Terry Burton, my old youthteam coach and a great man revered in the profession, whom I had tried to recruit for Portsmouth. He said he had just had lunch with Arsène and been offered a job but he wasn’t quite sure yet what it was. He had been told just to turn up for work on the Monday and they would sort a contract and his role. He said he didn’t think he could combine reserves and development and that he would recommend me for the reserves. I said I would be up for that. Two days later, the club announced that Terry was to be reserve-team and development-squad coach.
I was not going to let this go by now, having been messed about so much. I texted Arsène to congratulate him on Terry’s appointment, saying what a great guy he had taken on. A while later I noticed a missed call from Arsène and rang him back. He asked me if I had received a voicemail and I said no, then asked him what it was about.