The human element will always be paramount. Peer recognition is pivotal. Moyes’ brains trust uses individual contacts, including players, coaches and managers. Agents are regarded as most useful in South America where the web of third-party ownership can ensnare the unwise or the unwary. Work permits are a recurring issue in the UK, though unlike Chelsea, who use Vitesse Arnhem in Holland, and Manchester City, who have a Scandinavian network, Everton do not have a strategic association with a foreign club. The case of James Rodriguez highlights the dangers, frustrations and potential rewards. A young winger, regarded as the most naturally gifted Colombian player to emerge since Carlos Valderrama, he was on their radar, but dismissed because of the impossibility of securing a work permit due to his lack of international experience.
Porto, who operate in a more relaxed administrative environment, paid €5.1 million for a 70 per cent ownership package in July 2010. Rodriguez signed a four year contract with a €30 million release clause, and Porto quickly sold on 10 per cent of his economic rights. In November of that year Porto sold another 35 per cent to a Luxembourg-registered company, Gol Football Luxembourg SARL, for €2.5 million. They did something similar with the much-coveted Portuguese international João Moutinho. When Rodríguez scored a hat-trick in the 2012 Portuguese Cup final, Porto bought the original 30 per cent of the player they did not own from Convergence Capital Partners B.V. for €2,250,000. That meant they now controlled more than half his economic rights. He signed a new five year contract, with a €45 million release clause. Nice work, if you can get it. The scorpion dance was completed in January 2013, when Gol Football Luxembourg SARL sold their 35 per cent stake back to Porto for €8.5 million, a profit of €6 million. With such sums at stake it is unsurprising that Porto, like Udinese in Serie A and Villareal in La Liga, are pioneering video scouting.
Smith reflected: ‘We’re running into another era where the ability to stream games is incredible. You could come in here on any given Monday and have every game from, say, the French league ready to watch – bang, bang, bang. Maybe for a Premier League club, video scouting might be the next step. So instead of sending somebody out there, certainly in the initial phase, you just compile all the reports back here. Then, further down the line, someone goes out and follows up. You would never want to get away from first-hand insight but I would argue that you can get enough from video to make it worthwhile. Think of football in terms of being a normal business. You deal in footballers as a commodity, just like you would buy and sell anything else. You’d be more conscious of how you spent your money. You wouldn’t have people travelling all over Europe, all over the world, speculatively looking at things, would you?’
He sees Borussia Dortmund as a more realistic role model: ‘They nearly went bust about five or six years ago because they overstretched. They’ve rebuilt with a team full of young players, all with good resale values. They recruited really cleverly, from Poland, Japan, South America, and won the Bundesliga. The next step involved the Champions League, which gave them the money to invest in slightly more expensive players. It’s like a virtuous circle as long as you can keep it going. It’s a great example of how to run a football club. They also produce top, top players from their academy. That leads to self-sufficiency. You have to accept that every year you might have to sell one, and that will fund a process of evolution. So you sell a player for fifteen and you buy three for five million each. The hope is one of those will be sold for fifteen in a year or two, and so it goes on. Everton can operate a bit like that in the Premier League because it is acknowledged and accepted that we haven’t got much money.
‘The world is changing. In the old days, it seemed as if they did everything off the back of a fag packet. The old school scout would go to a game, and just have a general look, unless there was a specific player. He’d then speak to the chief scout on the phone and tell him what he thought, so basically everything was stored in people’s heads. Well, they thought it was. It wasn’t really, because you can’t store it all in your head, can you? That’s why reports have become so fundamental. It’s about intellectual property rights. That information belongs to Everton, because it was gained by people being paid by Everton, working for Everton. The old school way, with the chief scout having it all in his head, gave no continuity. If he gets run over by a bus, he takes all the knowledge with him. I know I’m laughing at that thought, but we had a similar problem in the academy, several years ago. The head of recruitment left and there was nothing . We didn’t even have the telephone numbers of the scouts! It was as if he’d never been here. An owner, or a CEO these days wouldn’t tolerate that, if he’s got anything about him.’
Some things never change. Great clubs are shaped in the image of their great managers. It is too simplistic to view Moyes as merely an autocrat, with the inflexibility that implies. Like his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson, he wields power decisively, but sensitively. He is comfortable with ultimate responsibility – indeed he demands it – but the democratic nature of Everton’s recruitment policy informs us of the man, and the club he has created. They would not make Liverpool’s mistake, of attempting to impose a sporting director in the mould of Damien Comolli. Kenwright is a fan; he understands the mentality of his club in the way an opportunistic owner from the United States never could.
When he arrived at Goodison, Moyes made a statement of intent. He hailed Everton as ‘The People’s Club’. The defiance of the gesture, and the horror with which it was greeted at Anfield, across Stanley Park, registered with his natural constituency. In wider terms, it begged a critical question: is football still a people’s game? A League One club would assist in the search for the truth about England, and its national obsession, in the formative years of the twenty-first century.
4
Parklife
WEMBLEY STADIUM’S SIGNATURE arch, glistening in a weak sun, dominated the horizon. Viewed from the dereliction of the Warren Farm Sports Centre, across a valley mottled by the clutter of suburban housing, it had the splendour of a cathedral on a hill. Yet, like many things involving English football, its majesty was an illusion.
Miguel Rios understands the gulf between the presumptions of the apparatchiks, working in the Football Association’s ruinously expensive headquarters, and the realities of the grassroots game. It cannot be measured by the three miles which separate the stadium and a symbol of sporting decay, where park footballers play beside abandoned cricket nets, in which saplings grow through ancient, shredded green matting.
He knows, one day, soon, the boys he watches, in an attempt to detect and develop unrealised talent, will be evicted. Clubs are likely to fold. The travellers’ ponies which graze, untended, on adjoining straw-coloured scrubland will, in all probability, be humanely destroyed. The bulldozers will move in, and, sometime in the 2014–15 season, Queens Park Rangers will have a new training ground. It is expected to win more awards for the men who designed and built the Olympic Stadium.
For the moment, Warren Farm is a regular port of call for Rios, a scout who is changing perceptions of Brentford, a homely football club with expansionist ambitions of its own. The men who write the FA coaching syllabus, and the politicians who encourage a conspiracy of silence about the sale of playing fields, and the betrayal of a generation, should meet him. It may be too much to expect them to be enlightened, but they would certainly be challenged.
His is a world where parents brawl, and referees cower in car parks, as the ignorant seek retribution. Lofty edicts about the technical development of young players are simply irrelevant. Coaches regurgitate second-rate TV punditry and tactical half-truths. This is England, our England. Children, as young as seven, have the first stoop-shouldered signs of physical illiteracy. They are active, by definition, but many are overweight, or burdened by social and cultural circumstance.
Rios is a football man with a conscience, who sees the good in people, despite the dispiriting nature of his experiences. He is a refugee from the City of London, where he wa
s a successful business analyst for banks such as UBS, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital, until he could no longer accept the dehumanising effects of a lifestyle based on accumulation and consumption. He got out before he became someone he did not like.
‘You kinda sell your soul to the money, but eventually you ask yourself why am I doing this?’ he reflected. ‘It is a pressurised lifestyle, but to be honest, I relished that. It was the other side which got to me. You see people who are financially secure, who decide they don’t have to be nice to be anyone. They shed their humanity. There are everyday irritations – I don’t miss the tube, that’s for sure – but eventually I had enough of the egos. I just decided I didn’t need to work there.’
He had played, semi-professionally, and was asked to coach, part time, at a sports school in Portobello in West London. There he met a teacher, who gave him an introduction to Barcelona’s soccer school system. He spent three months there annually for four years, working as a translator and a coach, and refined his football philosophy. He was recruited by Arsenal’s Academy, where he worked with Ose Aibangee, a coach with a similar perspective, and Shaun O’Connor, the scout who discovered Jack Wilshere. The three are now the pillars of Brentford’s youth system.
Rios, a tall, mild, quietly spoken man, has responsibility for talent identification, and is head of recruitment for the Under 6–12 age groups. He has 15 scouts reporting to him and, on this particular Sunday, watched eight games, in Hounslow and Ealing. Against expectations, in an age in which the young are conditioned to believe you are the badge you wear, he was wearing a fawn hoodie, and a silver-grey gilet, rather than a club tracksuit.
‘No uniform,’ he said. ‘The parents like you to have one, but most scouts wear it for their egos. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. No one should know who you are. I prefer to be in the group. I listen for names, and try to fit players to parents. Essentially it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. At this level you need spotters, seeing as many games as they can. It is a cut-throat environment, where people try to undermine you. Why be a scout, then? I prefer it to coaching, because coaching is very binary. Its yes no yes no.
‘The FA coaching courses seem driven by an economic imperative. They are not age specific. The system, at youth level, is too unstructured. A lot of coaches don’t understand critical things like development cycles. The analogy I use is that most people see the car dashboard. They see the dials, indicators of what is going on under the bonnet. Scouts are the sat nav system, to see where we are going, and how to get there.’
We parked at Warren Farm, on what was once a series of shale tennis courts. Up to 20 games are staged here each weekend, on a 63-acre site, and the shortcomings were immediately obvious. An Under 11 game was being played on a full-size pitch: it was an absurd Lilliputian spectacle, closer to a cross-country race than a suitable contest in what coaches regard as the final meaningful year of a young footballer’s technical development. The parents, mainly young mothers with double buggies, and fathers in a fog of cigarette smoke, loved it.
Rios was a familiar figure. He shook hands with several coaches, asked after the occasional boy. He was respectful, engaged and observant. As we wandered along the touchline of an Under 9s match on a mercifully truncated pitch, he pointed out a sullen youth, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his baggy jeans: ‘He tells me he’s an academy coach. What do you reckon?’ No answer was required. Had one been delivered, it would probably not have registered, because he had found what he was looking for.
An Under 15 game was in its final quarter. It was a frantic match, fuelled by unstructured effort and unintelligible instructions from the sidelines. ‘Look at the ethnicity of the teams,’ murmured Rios. ‘Certain coaches can only handle certain types of boys from certain types of backgrounds. Their teams are a reflection of who they are.’
One of the coaches, in a white half-sleeved tee-shirt, looked like a middleweight boxer gone to seed. His harsh negativity – ‘go on Smiffy, fuckin’ have him’ – matched his taut body language. His team was exclusively white and working class. The opposition was much more ethnically diverse. Their coach was white, but straight from central casting. He carried a clipboard, and wore a tracksuit top emblazoned with his initials. His three-quarter length cargo trousers and ankle socks did not give him the gravitas for which he so evidently yearned.
By the time I resumed following play – apologies to Mel Johnson, incidentally, for that schoolboy scouting error – Rios’ demeanour had changed. He had his eyes locked on to Clipboard Man’s number 9, in the way a gun dog follows the descent of a fatally wounded pheasant. The boy was tall, thin, and finely featured. At a guess, he was of Somali descent. His orange boots were out of keeping with the dowdiness of the day. ‘Watch the speed of his feet,’ said Rios. ‘It’s late in the game, but he’s still chasing the ball. He’s got desire, but he’s not running willy-nilly. There’s something there, allright.’
Once the match had ended, Rios approached one of the number nine’s teammates, Michael, whom he had taken to train at Brentford after seeing him excel in a schools’ match, several weeks before. The boy beamed at being recognised by the scout, and was eager to please. It transpired the newcomer’s name was Daniel. He came from an Angolan immigrant family. He had scored in the final minutes, converting a loose ball spilled by the goalkeeper, but had changed on the opposite touchline, and was already wandering away. Rios approached Clipboard Man, introduced himself courteously, and offered his business card. The response could not have been more guarded had it been a court summons.
‘What do you want?’
‘Can you tell me anything about Daniel?’
‘Don’t know anything about him. He just turns up on my doorstep every Sunday morning.’
‘Do you know his family? I gather he goes to school with Michael.’
‘See the Mum, once in a blue moon.’
‘I wonder if you see her, you’d tell her that I’d like to speak to her. I’d be grateful if you’d give her my card.’
‘Well, I’m not happy. He’s with me this season . . .’
‘Appreciate that. Thanks for your time.’
The resentment ran deeper than we realised. Bizarrely, the coach subsequently complained to the county FA about the nature of the approach. The innocence with which the day began, at Lampton School in Hounslow, was evidently an illusion. That was a different scene. Grandparents with ancient camcorders brought picnic seats and flasks. The boys, joined by a smattering of girls, were younger and more carefree.
The school, a product of 1960s functionality, was being updated. A patchwork quilt of starkly contoured pitches was folded around a site which combined Portakabin classrooms with new Alpine-style wooden chalets. The shrill sounds of childhood were intermittently drowned out by planes coming in low to land at Heathrow. United, BA, Singapore, Virgin. The world was evidently in unison.
This was QPR territory. The most interesting match, at Under 8 level, involved one of their feeder clubs, Old Isleworthians. Judged by his accent, the coach was South African. He had a prop forward’s shape and character. A grey t-shirt was stretched across large, tense shoulders. He emitted a well-meaning stream of consciousness, barely pausing for breath as he told the boys where to run, and what to do.
‘It’s all so vocal,’ said Rios, barely audible because he had positioned himself amongst parents, close to the halfway line. ‘There are no technical details. He should be positive, let the game develop.’ You didn’t need to be a geneticist to realise that Isleworthians’ number 6, Paolo, was the coach’s son. He was like his dad, squat, earnest and shaven-headed. When he committed the cardinal sin of passing sideways, he was rewarded with a yelp of ‘We are not playing for a draw we are playing for a win.’
Rios has worked for two years, identifying the most talented boys in the area, aged from six to eight. He has developed his own database, in which boys are classified by body shape and ethnicity. ‘The game develops co
ntinually,’ he explained. ‘At a match like this we’re trying to look fifteen years into the future. If you are a good footballer at this level, the kid who can score from the halfway line, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be an elite footballer.’
The Barcelona influence endures: ‘I wanted to see inside their system. They judge by ability rather than age. They have A & B squads that can play up and down the age groups. Their physical literacy is much better than ours. Between the ages of six and eight, Barcelona do things that, if we tried them, we’d get laughed at. It is all about co-ordination. It involves balance, agility, a simple thing like hopping. They dribble the ball and rub their stomach at the same time. Then they change their hands. Can the boys cope with that? The coaches are usually teachers. They are looking for intelligence, the speed of execution of technique.’
He had spotted a boy, playing in an empty goalmouth on an adjoining pitch. ‘Hi Derek’ he shouted. The boy smiled, and waved, soundlessly. Rios had asked his coach, a Brentford fan, to try him in goal because of his agility and outstanding hand–eye co-ordination. ‘Derek doesn’t like it,’ reported the coach, who had been half-volleying shots at him. ‘He doesn’t like to get dirty.’
Rios grinned. He believed in the rotation of goalkeepers at such a young age, ‘otherwise the biggest lad, or worst outfield player, goes in all the time’. His ideas met with resistance, because the coaches were wedded to winning, even when, officially, the result was not recorded. ‘We’ve got one coach around here who calculates how his team gets on in non-competitive tournaments,’ Rios revealed. ‘He actually produces imaginary League tables on the club’s website. The problem is the parents buy into that type of thing.’
The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters Page 5