Sober

by Tony Adams

  English managers seem to fall into two categories, neither of which is about winning the biggest prizes of a title or European trophy. There is the manager who can keep you in the Premier League, like Tony Pulis. Then there is the manager, like Eddie Howe, who will get you up. I can see Eddie being offered a bigger job than Bournemouth but a top-six club? It was going to be intriguing to see if Arsenal really did have an interest in him as Arsène’s successor or whether that was just paper talk. To add to the pigeonholing, the former type of manager tends to be seen as older, the latter younger.

  It was interesting to me that Chris Coleman, the Wales manager, turned down the Swansea City job even though it was a Premier League opportunity. He said he would prefer to go abroad to a club where he might have a chance to reach the Champions League.

  All those factors offer reasons why I spent so long out of the country and why English football is not attractive to many who would want to work with elite players. So many times you are on a hiding to nothing. It is also much to do with a facet of football that has changed beyond recognition and is one of the subjects least taken into account in the modern game. Agents may these days get a lot of coverage but their unhealthy influence is not spoken of enough.

  It has always been a badge of honour with me that I have never really tied myself to agents, though I have had informal agreements with some at certain times, and have been open if they want to contact me and I believe they are credible. I prided myself on doing my own contracts with Arsenal when I was a player, at first with my dad in the room then on my own when I felt enough of a man. After that, I would just get a solicitor to check the contract was legal.

  Trusting the club probably cost me, though I was fortunate to have the luxury of long-term contracts for most of my career. While acknowledging that I did very well for the mid to late part of my career, for much of my early career I would sign a new three-year deal every year with an improved wage but with the signing-on fees I was due under the terms of the old contract being waived.

  For example, I would be due a signing-on fee of £265,000, broken down into £75,000 in the first year, £90,000 in the second and £100,000 in the third. But all I would get would be the £75,000. The next contract would have a bigger wage, and a bigger first-year signing-on fee, of course, but I would never get the second-and third-year sums. I signed them anyway. It was the Arsenal.

  Sometimes I would use the Jerome Anderson agency for outside deals and, in the early days, they got me a boot deal and a contract for 10 columns with the Daily Express. It was the usual story. The paper was nice to me when I was their columnist, but didn’t spare the criticism when I wasn’t. I remember one article deriding suggestions I was the new Bobby Moore by saying I was more like Dudley Moore, but taller.

  I also worked on occasions with Steve Kutner, mostly for certain deals such as personal appearances, though he did help me get the Wycombe job. And I was approached by Lorenzo Paolo about the Gabala job. Otherwise, I always preferred to be my own man.

  Back in the old days, there were probably about 20 agents who had a name in England. Most managers would deal with them. Sir Alex Ferguson would have had one, or ones, he trusted, as would Harry Redknapp. Gradually, the landscape changed with all the overseas players coming into the game over the last 20 years, to the point where the number of agents has exploded and managers have to deal with swarms of them. Now the game is full of greedy and unscrupulous characters.

  I first saw it close up during my spell at Portsmouth with a player I was interested in signing. I would get five phone calls from different agents who would all claim he was their player. You would often be used as a bargaining tool.

  For example, an agent would ask you – sometimes by text message – if you were interested in Yaya Toure. If you said yes, they would go back to Toure and say that Tony Adams at Portsmouth was interested in him. Was Yaya interested in them? If he said yes, then the agent would claim they were acting for him, even though when it actually came to doing a deal, you would be dealing with someone else altogether, maybe even a brother or a friend. Then the agent who had sent you the original text would want paying for his part in the process if you ever did sign that player, reckoning he had done the deal.

  I have never, by the way, been offered a ‘bung’; that is to say, an inducement to buy a player. I am sure agents would have known they were wasting their time with me as I am straight and would never take a player who couldn’t do a job for me. I look at talent and age and statistics, never a pound note.

  With regulations now meaning that anyone can register themselves as a ‘representative’ for a £500 fee, it makes for a crazy system – that is only going to get worse with the TV billions growing all the time – where money is leaking out of the game. Mind you, it can be worse in other countries, as I witnessed first-hand on a visit I made to Rwanda for an under-18 tournament.

  There, I saw hundreds of agents swarming all over players. I remarked on it when I spoke with the president, Paul Kagame, and the head of the country’s FA. They had some excellent players but poor facilities. Could they not own the players and deal for them abroad, rather than the agents, so that the country’s football earned the revenue? Great idea, I was told, but they did not have the expertise to administer a scheme like that. And anyway, the country had other priorities.

  Sometimes it is less about how good you are, as a player or manager, and more about how good an agent is. I am sure I have been down the pecking order for jobs just because I don’t play the system and use somebody to get into owners, chairmen and chief executives on my behalf. I have tried on occasions to forge relationships with good and respectable CEOs myself but there are not a lot of those about, in my experience.

  It got to the point where Poppy suggested to me that I should just go and see the ‘super-agent’ Pini Zahavi and align myself with people who knew people. But I felt uncomfortable about doing that. I thought that if I did get a job through an agent, I would then feel obligated to take some of his players. You see it now in the game, though hardly mentioned: some managers are clients of an agent whose players they then take. To me it’s wrong, a conflict of interest, though it might not technically be breaking any rules.

  The increasing amount of money in the game due to ever-increasing TV deals is directly responsible for the powerful force in football that agents have become, and made them a symptom of the dysfunction in the game. The system – if it can be called that – is flawed, wrong in fact. Just by the rotation of managers – and expectancy of tenure for a manager in the Championship is now apparently down to 10 months – you can see it’s not working.

  The other reason agents have become so powerful is because people running clubs who don’t know the football business – or even their own jobs very well – have allowed them to be. Too often when a manager is sacked, owners, chief executives and boards do not have a plan in place for the next appointment and are thus too influenced by agents all putting forward their clients. Often agents will be in their ear even before managers have gone, during that period when results are bad and they are under pressure.

  When Gabala played Borussia Dortmund in the Europa League, during that lunch on the day of the match with the German clubs’ officials, the president, Reinhard Rauball, told me that they knew they would at some point be losing Jurgen Klopp and they were well aware of all the promising young coaches in Germany, having kept tabs and done their research on them all. He knew the game and where to look and was not going to rely on an agent with an agenda phoning him up. In the end, they chose Thomas Tuchel, then 42, who had led unfashionable Mainz to seventh in the Bundesliga the previous season.

  What I concluded at Gabala, having learned so much overseas and stepped back from the madness of the Premier League in which it is sometimes difficult to gain some perspective, is that partnerships and teams within clubs are what work best.

  At Manchester United you had Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill as manager and CEO. At Arsenal it w
as Arsène Wenger and David Dein, the vice-chairman. You can see what happened when one or both departed: United struggled to regain their pre-eminence in the English game, while Arsenal went six years without a trophy after David Dein left.

  It is why I was interested in 2015 in joining that consortium of people looking to buy Aston Villa from Randy Lerner. I had hoped to become the board member with responsibility for the football side of the business and working with a head coach whom I could appoint, along a more Dutch model. That way I would have had some say in events, rather than being a victim of them.

  I also think that a team of people would work so much better. The job of running the playing side of a club is now so big that it is too much for one man, even if that person’s ego can be so big these days that they think they can still manage, identify signings, negotiate contracts and transfer fees, as well as coach and pick the team, all by themselves.

  It is about getting the structure right and putting the right people in place, all working together rather than having dictators, though naturally the coach has to have the final say in all playing-related matters, free from executive interference. That way, you might not see so many managerial changes all the time.

  Because the English game is so rich and so revered in the world, there seems little appetite to change things, however. It is as if the dysfunction is part of the game, and what makes it what it is, and nobody wants to interfere while it is bringing in so much money. All the intrigue and the sackings, all the financial chaos, give it spice that audiences, both in stadiums and on TV, and the media, with their short attention spans and need for the new, love so much. That at least seems to be the underlying ethos of those with the money and the power who deliver this huge circus.

  But too many careers are cut short and too many costly mistakes made, with coaches and managers the victims of the chaos. In other industries, the CEOs would be the ones to carry the can when a business is failing. In football, they seem to escape, sacking the manager before crowds turn on them. And so the cycle repeats itself, with the people at the top not implementing the vision, as they are supposed to, because they don’t have a vision beyond the short term.

  We have to come up with a new model of running clubs but no one seems to be grasping that nettle. The League Managers Association seem to see their role as simply to ensure that their members get paid up properly when they are sacked. Then they take their percentage, so are doing well for themselves and maybe don’t want to see change.

  The Premier League is a hugely successful entity with its own identity, but that identity is not English and it is bringing down the English game and the England team. It also has to be said that the FA’s house has also not exactly been in order for some time.

  We now have just one English player in three in the starting line-ups on average in the Premier League. That is probably less at the bigger clubs as well. That 33 per cent figure compares with 50 per cent German players in the Bundesliga, 58 per cent Spanish in La Liga, 56 per cent French in Le Championnat and 43 per cent Italian in Serie A.

  When it comes to football, we are foreigners in our own country and it is getting worse, with the number of English players in the Premier League falling by 2 per cent a year. Sooner or later we are going to have to put a cap on it, perhaps when it gets to 25 per cent, though I saw that Greg Dyke’s replacement as FA chairman, Greg Clarke, immediately ruled that out.

  While the TV money keeps multiplying, we are clearly still going to get overseas players keen to come to the Premier League, as we did with Paul Pogba coming for a ridiculous £89 million, plenty of which would leak out of the game in agents’ fees. Decent player though Pogba is, my problem with it is that we are not getting the real elite at the peak of their powers, like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Quite simply, that is because it is not the best league in the world, although it may be the most competitive and most exciting for TV audiences.

  The fact that the best of the best are still in Spain is because Barcelona and Real Madrid can negotiate their own TV deals, and thus get more than any other club, while in England the agreement is collective and the money spread around more. There have been moves in Spain to make it fairer but still the rich at the top – Barcelona and Real Madrid – get richer by earning €150 million a season in TV money, around €90 million a season more than the bottom clubs.

  The English model of less of a differential between top and bottom is to me a much fairer system and also cements the policy of clubs sticking together, with 14 of the clubs needing to vote collectively for any change to be made.

  Still the Spanish, and Italian, leagues look enviously at the revenues of the English game and are thus considering the possibility of a European Super League as an extension of the Champions League. That may be attractive to the big – overseas – owners in the Premier League because it means they are guaranteed to play in Europe every year, with all the money that brings. They need to be careful, though. I sense people are getting a bit fed up with seeing the same teams in the Champions League every year.

  People ask me why English teams have not been faring so well in the Champions League in recent years. I am sure it is cyclical and we will see Manchester United and Chelsea back winning it, probably even Manchester City, over the next decade. Currently, you have exceptional sides in Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, but they will sooner or later go through the same sort of transition that befell United and Chelsea.

  Add it all up and you have the contrasts of the English game: national team often a laughing stock in the world – and even engendering a growing indifference at home – but Premier League and club sides that have the admiration and envy of the world. It is brilliant in many ways but forgets the basics in others.

  I still love football, love coaching it, even if, like Gareth Southgate, I don’t love a lot of the nonsense that goes with the money and all the hangers-on attracted by the smell of it around the game. England has more of that than most nations given its financial status, though there is somewhere with an even greater growth potential. And it would be my next port of call.

  19

  China Crisis

  Living one day at a time,

  Enjoying one moment at a time,

  Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace . . .

  Verse Two, The Serenity Prayer

  Euro 2016 had just started and I had not long been working with the Arsenal under-18s when my phone rang and the name of a French agent called Ivan Blum showed on the screen. Three years earlier, Ivan had been working for the new Mumbai team in the Indian Premier League and had asked me if I wanted to go out there, but it was not for me and I think in the end Peter Reid, latterly of Sunderland, got the job. Ivan and I stayed in touch, though, and now he was asking if I fancied working in China.

  Maybe, I told him, but thought little more of it. These kinds of phone calls come now and then and often aren’t followed up. The agent relays any interest to a club owner or chief executive and you may get on a long-list of candidates but after that it can go quiet.

  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was at Birmingham New Street station on my way to a course at St George’s Park to renew my UEFA Pro Licence when Ivan called again. The adviser to a team called Wuhan in China League One wanted to speak to me, Ivan said. He was Spanish, by the name of David Belenguer, and in his playing days he had turned out for Getafe in La Liga.

  I spoke with Ivan for half an hour, at the end of which he asked me to send him my CV. I also did some research and sent him a report on Wuhan and how I might improve them through my style of play. In there too was a film about me in Azerbaijan that my old friend Tom Watt, Arsenal fan, former EastEnders actor and now a writer and filmmaker, had come out to Baku and Gabala to make.

  When I then spoke to David, we talked detail – terms and conditions, salary, accommodation, flights for the family – and he sorted out a visa for me to fly out and meet the owner. Before that could happen, though, Ivan called me again, on a F
riday when I had just finished with the Arsenal under-18s. Another club, this one a step up in the Chinese Super League, were interested in me.

  They were Chongqing Lifan, lower to mid-table. A quick search revealed that it was a city in the middle of the country with 8.5 million inhabitants, double that figure with its suburbs taken into account, and around 30 million living in the district. That sounded astonishing in itself – a place I had not even heard of that had three times the population of London.

  The owner was a guy called Lizhang ‘John’ Jiang, who had made his fortune through his sports marketing business called Desports and had sold it to a company called DDMC Culture for a reported 820 million yuan (around $120 million). He still ran the company, which also owned Granada in La Liga, and he was a basketball fan who had bought into the Minnesota Timberwolves in America’s NBA.

  Ivan said that John, as he liked to be called, was in Europe for Euro 2016 and was going to be in Bordeaux for the Italy v Germany game on the Sunday. Would I meet him there? I agreed and a first-class plane ticket, there and back in a day, was emailed to me.

  John, who was just 35, had only patchy English but we had a good translator. He was bright and humble and reminded me of Tale Heydarov. He wanted my help and my knowledge, he said. It was refreshing to hear, and flattering. After seven years of not being wanted in England, except for an under-18 job – even if it was with the Arsenal – it was, quite simply, nice to be wanted, as I had been by Gabala. I knew I was a good coach. I just needed other people, in positions of authority and power, to believe it. After the meeting, we had lunch with his wife and seven-year-old son. John shared a photo on his phone of his son wearing an Arsenal shirt. Nice touch.