Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  As we sat in the club reception area I told the players that if we all stuck together we’d be fine. Our captain did his usual trick and left us to it but I stood firm, much to the annoyance of our director of football, who was in quite a panic at this point. First he threatened to fine all of us but we refused to budge. I sent all the young players and first-year pros out on to the pitch where the photos were being taken, so that their reputations would remain intact. You should never involve the young lads in these sorts of negotiations – it isn’t fair on them, and in any case it is the job of the older pros to watch out for them. With the bulk of the first-team squad standing firm, the director of football returned with an offer.

  “OK,” he said, “here’s your deal. Sign it, and if you’re not out on the pitch in the next five minutes I’m sacking all of you.” Now, that would have been a good story, but in the interests of harmony I made everyone sign the agreement; the outcome was that at the end of the season we were all at least £50,000 better off and some players who had played in all the games doubled that. I didn’t get any thanks for negotiating that deal but I did get a cheque, and that was always the name of the game.

  Dinner was winding down and I paid the bill with my usual dry humour. “No, please,” I said. “After I make a club hundreds of millions of pounds I like to buy them dinner too.”

  “You’re still a bloody idiot,” said the director of football. “Can you remember what you said to me when we were negotiating that bonus deal?”

  “Not really,” I said,

  “You said to me, ‘We’re not gonna bend over and take it up the arse any more.’ I had to look serious but when I left the room I absolutely pissed myself. If you do take up the role, I’m looking forward to dealing with you.”

  “As if I’d want any of your players,” I said.

  “Stay in touch, mate,” he said. “And good luck with it.”

  As I’ve said before, if you’re going to do something you really need to immerse yourself in it. That approach stems from the most successful period of my playing career, in which I really did sacrifice everything to become a winner. So as I was thinking about this latest offer I called a good friend of mine who sits on the board of a huge club and is in charge of appointing managers. I know a lot about football, but this is a process whose finer points are still a mystery to me. It was a bit of a coup to get him to talk, because there are very few people who will tell you how they hire and fire managers.

  We met at a restaurant in Manchester; a place that he told me had been very popular with the last manager. He’d bought an impressive amount of literature with him and presented it to me at the table after looking around to make sure there was nobody looking over at us. “Before we start,” he said, “my name is nowhere near this, OK? Seriously, if one person finds out, that’s it for us.” Some people have no faith.

  He’d been working on bringing in the right manager for some time and the whole thing had become a bit of a saga as far as the media were concerned.

  “At this level there is a huge amount of negotiation that you need to account for,” he told me. “Negotiation with the club, the manager, the agent, your board, the media. Sometimes I think all I do is negotiate. What irritates me is that we all know what the outcome is going to be – we’re going to get the man we want because of who we are – but we always have to go through this mating dance first. When I first took the job I didn’t want to upset anybody, so I was perhaps too nice and I’d let the situation play out. But now that I’m more experienced, or possibly just because of who we are and the fact that I’m old and grumpy, I am a lot more comfortable in saying, ‘Right, this is your last chance – you either want the job or you don’t.’ And the great by-product of that approach is that the manager begins to panic and starts lobbying his existing club to let him go and waiving all sorts of bonuses and monies that he’s owed as a result. He thinks he’s helping you out but you’ve really worked him from behind. It’s all about knowing when to play your best cards.

  “It’s much easier now: the pool of people that we would interview is much smaller than it used to be because the remit is very simple – success. But things haven’t always been as easy and colleagues of mine at League One and Two clubs are really struggling in the same job. The financial fair play rules are affecting their choices every day, including which manager they bring in.”

  He took out a binder with “Job Description” written on the front, apparently borrowed from a friend at another club. “This is what a club would typically send to any manager who applied for the job. They might not even get the courtesy of an interview but they would still get a copy of this.” The job description set out what was required of any new manager, and it wasn’t simply a case of listing the basics, such as, “in charge of first-team affairs and arrives for work in a punctual fashion” (although that was on there, believe it or not). According to this document, the manager was expected to attend all technical board meetings, manage the team budget (far more common the lower down you go), and to have Uefa A, B and Pro licences and a proven and profitable track record in player trading.

  Then he showed me a five-year business plan that he’d borrowed from the same colleague. “This is what I mean regarding the financial fair play rules,” he said. “Let me take you through this. This business plan is designed to get their club into the top half of the Premier League from where they are now within five years, while having to adhere to the fair play rules. This document is shown to prospective managers at the interview stage and presented by the director of football or chief executive. Clubs at that level really have to marry their ambitions to those of any new manager, especially now; they have to share the ideal more than at our level. At our level we supply the manager with everything he needs; at that level the manager is much more hands on and needs to be fully acquainted with budgets, for example.”

  The start of the business plan lists various facets of the club – football, business, community etc – then talks about each one. The first is obviously football: they want to get to the Premier League in five years and the way they have decided to do it is dictated by budget. The board have decided that the most effective way to achieve their goal is to introduce a “club culture” that boils down to exploiting the products of their youth team by playing them in the first team for one year and then selling them and putting the money back into the academy. Because of the financial fair play model, they see this as their best chance.

  Further into the booklet – which is pretty hefty, I have to say – they talk about creating an environment to succeed. Unusually, the chain of command has the manager and the director of football together at the top, with the technical board below them (head of sports science, academy manager etc), and then the club board below them. There are two plans for success based on promotions and financial gains; if the first fails, plan B kicks in immediately. These plans are accompanied by details of how the transition of the squad fits in, and provide for slashing budgets should the team fail to win promotion. They also allow for more money to be made available if they do go up. Wherever money is tight, the youth team have a much larger slice of the pie. The budget for the squad is split between starters, cover players and youth team players and the idea is to have a mixture of all three in the starting 11 positions on the pitch.

  Next to each of those positions is the budget. The starting players are expected to earn between £1,500 and £2,500 a week, with the cover players earning £1,000 to £1,499 and the youth team players between £100 and £250. A chart shows how their value to the club diminishes and when the club should look to cash in on any given player based on age and standing. This model goes on right up to the Premier League.

  Halfway through the presentation is a very simple five-point plan explaining that players who come into the club need to be identified, scouted and analysed, targeted and then purchased before being integrated with the first team and their new surroundings. Believe me, although that sounds simple, I
have played for big clubs where foreign players with no English have been bought in and then left to fend for themselves on day one.

  Then it moves on to the make-up of the squad, and unfortunately this part of the plan has a very clear message for players like me. At the top of the page under the heading “Young Players”, it simply says three things: “young, hungry, talented”. At the bottom of the page it says: “Do not sign or retain cover players over the age of 26.” The importance of the academy players is emphasised everywhere: in League Two they expect at least 20 per cent of the first team to be made up of youth team graduates; in League One the figure falls to 15 per cent; in the Championship the figure is 10 per cent; and in the Premier League it falls to 3 per cent. This may sound like a huge tail-off but there are market forces at work here. The academy isn’t just a way of supplementing the first team; it is a way of supplementing the business model up to the Premier League, but in the top division the income is so vast that the model changes. A Premier League club can sell its youth team players to a huge amount of clubs even if they are not good enough for their own first team because it has probably canvassed them from around the world. In the lower leagues the youth team players are likely to be local players, with perhaps only one or two capable of playing professionally.

  “Now take a look at some of the CVs they received,” my friend said. “The manager that my friend’s club really wanted was already working elsewhere, which wasn’t really a problem because the possibility of an acquisition was in the budget. They asked him to send a CV through as a matter of course, and this is what turned up.” With that he brought out a single sheet of A4 paper that appeared to have been faxed and that stated only the more memorable achievements of the man’s playing career. “Now compare that CV to this guy’s” – and he pulled out what looked like a very comprehensive holiday brochure. “This is 50 pages long,” said my friend, “and the detail is ridiculous. He talks about his approach to strength and conditioning, the medical side, tactics, pre-season, nutrition, psychology, motivation, even the welfare of the players’ families. Jesus Christ, it’s no wonder he didn’t get an interview. Who has the time to read all that when you have 200 CVs to get through?

  “At my friend’s club – and this is happening more and more – the interview was split into two parts: a football side that focused on tactics and a financial side that dealt with the budget. The tactical side was incredibly simple, and although each manager had the chance to put across his philosophy, it really boiled down to one question that was posed to everyone: ‘How important are set pieces?’ Now, that sounds really amateur but it is in fact incredibly clever. When Albert Roux interviews graduate chefs, he doesn’t ask for a three-Michelin-starred dinner – he asks them to cook him an egg. If they think it’s beneath them they don’t get past the interview, but if they treat it with respect they get the job. Genius.

  “The answers that came back could tell you everything about a manager. One of them said, ‘Yes, they are important. I would send my centre-halves up for corners and I would bring a striker back to defend them.’ The guy who got the job said something like, ‘Incredibly important – over half the goals in Leagues One and Two came from set pieces last year but you scored only 23 per cent of your goals from set pieces, which puts you 14th in the league. You need to be at least sixth for automatic promotion, and this is how I am going to change those stats. You also conceded 35 per cent of your goals from corners and crosses that had been cleared. Twenty-five per cent of those crosses landed between your right-back and your right-sided centre-half, and these are the players that I have identified to replace them, plus a left-back who is not stopping crosses well enough. If we can reduce this figure to 10 per cent, that puts us fifth in that particular table of statistics, which is where we need to be to guarantee automatic promotion.’

  “Now, that’s a proper answer. In one question he had demonstrated that he knew the league and that he knew the players that he could get for the budget that he was going to be given. He had also targeted promotion from day one.

  “Incidentally,” he said, “most managers are becoming incredibly big on recovery the lower down you go, in a bid to improve professionalism. They are giving players fewer days off because a lot of them sit on the sofa in a bad position and drink fizzy drinks and eat shit. At least if they are in on Sundays then they can recover for a few hours.

  “Anyway, the financial interview was much more detailed: it had to be because finances in the lower leagues are becoming so much more important. He asked them about social media, such as Twitter and Facebook; given recent experiences, he wanted to know how they’d deal with disciplining a player who abused that privilege. Most of the managers said they would have no hesitation in fining or even sacking a player, and that is what my friend wanted to hear.

  “I’ve met the guy that my friend appointed and he seems to be on the level – young, ambitious and very knowledgeable. We sat around over dinner and there seemed to be a good natural fit between his approach and the club.”

  “So what about you guys?” I said. “How did you go about identifying the right manager?”

  “Well we’re different. We can pretty much have our pick, so the pool is reduced to perhaps five or six names. At the level that you’ll start from you’d be much better off thinking about the situation that your club is in. It really depends where the club finds itself. I have been in situations where the club has been third bottom of the Premier League and we needed somebody who could come in and manage for 10 games in two or three weeks. That is completely different – that is what happened at Sunderland. They paid him a fortune to keep them up and guaranteed him all three years’ money if they sacked him thereafter. People said it was reckless but those people don’t understand football as a business – it was £5m against £100m. They chose Di Canio because they needed maximum uplift at the club for the last few games. There was no point in bringing in a manager with a five-year plan: they needed a short-term solution.

  “At the end of the season you’ve got two months and you can assess the club’s situation because you know what league you’re in. Our biggest regret was keeping the manager that we got promoted with, because we should have replaced him and restructured the whole squad. We should have lost some of the senior players who got us promoted – remember, you don’t owe them anything – and bought in talented and hungry players. When you get promoted through the leagues, unless you have a young, forward-thinking, intellectual manager, you pretty much need to transition the squad as you go, particularly from the Championship to the Premier League.

  “And don’t be afraid to change manager. Changing manager is not a big deal any more because winning something is not the name of the game for many clubs now. Winning is staying in the Premier League and trying not to lose too much money.

  “Balancing the books is still important, especially when the financial fair play model comes into full force in the Premier League. The problem with the cavalier approach is that you can get caught with two or three players whom you don’t want and who are earning big money. Astute management can get those players out – it’s simply a combination of the chief executive and chief of recruitment working with the manager. We’ve got one player earning a fortune at the moment that we don’t want and who still has one year left on his deal. The manager needs to speak to him properly in order to get the most out of him and make sure that he doesn’t become a troublemaker, but always with the end game in mind that we need to get him out. Where you’re starting from, it will be easier if you get promoted, because players are so much easier to move on with ‘promoted’ on their CVs, especially strikers. You’ll always find a manager at another club who thinks he can get more out of the player than you can. Managers need to be more ruthless when they are promoted to the Premier League – the cull needs to be much bigger than it currently is.

  “The reason we were hammered by the media in the summer was simply that we were going to be the biggest off-fie
ld story in the press and the press wanted the story as soon as possible because they had nothing to write about. They began to make things up about managers rejecting us and fall-outs within the club – that’s what they do. In the summer when a club is looking for a manager you’ve got more time to consider what you need, but the media play on the fans’ anxiousness. The truth is that people only see what happens on the field, but off the field there is a huge amount of activity that goes on. The commercial activity of marketing and selling season tickets, for example – that is an opportunity to ensure your income for the whole year. As soon as the transfer window opens the fans want to see player trading, so we prepare for that.

  “On the subject of season tickets, let me give you a friendly piece of advice. Never, ever factor in your season ticket money. My old club once did it in the summer before they got relegated and it was a huge mistake. We needed instant cash for the manager to buy the players that he needed in January because we waited so long before appointing a manager and missed most of the summer window. All of that could have been avoided by appointing a manager in a timely fashion.”

  The evening was winding down and I was very grateful to my friend and indeed his friend for allowing me to see exactly how things are done. But I couldn’t help thinking that he still hadn’t told me much about how his own club were getting on with replacing their manager. So I made a last appeal.

  “Look,” he said. “The reason I’m not telling you anything about our own situation is that it’s completely different from where you’ll be starting from. At this level our biggest problem is media intrusion. It’s very aggressive and could scupper my ability to get the right guy. If too much is said in the media before we make the appointment, then any manager could be put off by that. Loose lips sink ships.

  “I knew maybe 18 months ago that we were going to change manager this summer and I have been preparing for it ever since by culling the squad, refusing transfer targets, restricting budgets and all the time putting out feelers to the right people to gauge initial interest. We have to be careful from an ownership point of view, too: we don’t want to upset anybody who has a lot of money at risk with the club. At this level it is all about negotiating: every decision I make affects every other facet of the club in a way that is almost too much to comprehend at times. If I cut the budget, the manager immediately knows something is up. He loses motivation, the players lose motivation, the team begins to underperform and the fans lose heart, and all the time you just want to scream, ‘This is what’s happening, there is a reason,’ but you can’t. Do yourself a favour, mate – keep playing for as long as you can.”