A multi-cultural society produces multi-faceted problems. The stated ages of some young players, particularly those of African descent, are unreliable. Rios is acutely conscious of the danger of causing offence, but asks them, in a light-hearted manner, to smile, so he can check surreptitiously whether they have milk teeth. ‘I had one player, a Nigerian with a German passport, whom they told me was 11. He was bigger than me!’ he exclaimed.’ Rios splits age groups in half, separating boys born between March and August from those born between September and February, because winter babies tend to dominate.
The value system, encouraged by the elitist nature of scouting, also needs to be addressed. Rios learned, at Barcelona, that getting the right boys into a club is only ‘20 to 25 per cent of the job’. Parents must be educated because ‘the ones who chase the brand, the ones who talk and influence others, are a cancer’. Ose Aibangee, Brentford’s head of youth development, has introduced a series of workshops for parents with boys in their academy, to give them an insight into their responsibilities. He explained: ‘They basically explore how to work with their kids and how to work with us. The objective is to not make boys feel like they’re under pressure every time they go on a football pitch. They are babies. Even we forget sometimes, because they’re in their kit and you look at them like they’re little mini footballers. We’ve had parents openly admit that they’ve over-pressurised their sons. That’s good but I would imagine there is a bigger percentage that won’t tell us. They probably won’t even know that they’re pressurising their kids because, in their minds, they are just supporting them and giving them feedback. They can do the wrong things for the right reasons, because they’re all experts, aren’t they? Everyone involved in football is an expert.’
Some have a more intuitive grasp of its demands than others. Shaun O’Connor, the club’s head of youth recruitment, has been showered with stardust. He is one of the few scouts to have found ‘The One’. His moment of clarity came in April 2001, in his last match as a coach at Barnet, who were closing their Centre of Excellence as a result of losing Football League status. Having already arranged to run a satellite centre for Arsenal’s Academy, he had little motivation to fulfil an ill-timed fixture against Luton, but did so as a favour to their coaches, Dean Rastrick and Mark Ridgeway.
O’Connor was monitoring the Under 11s and Under 12s at the Furzefield Centre in Potters Bar, when he was informed the referee for the Under 9s hadn’t turned up. He took charge of the match out of a sense of duty, and quickly had his attention seized by an eight-year-old, playing on the wing for Luton. ‘Reffing was a complete pain, because it had been a really manic day, but this kid was quick. His close control, running with the ball, was the best I’d ever seen. He had fantastic balance, and didn’t mind leaving his foot in. He had that nasty streak you need, had such a will to win. He tore us apart. As soon as the game had ended I asked one of their parents who he was.’
Jack Wilshere, a graduate of Knebworth Youth and Letchworth Garden City Eagles, was O’Connor’s first recommendation to Arsenal. He went through proper channels, asking for permission to speak to his parents, and, helped by Steve Leonard, an Arsenal youth scout, lobbied Wilshere’s father, Andy. ‘I went over to a couple of tournaments during the summer just to make Jack feel that he was wanted by us,’ he recalled. ‘It was hard work to get him in because the old man was a bit sceptical about moving him out of Luton.’
Scouts are resilient sorts, who understand the value of the grand gesture. Arsenal staged a special Under 9s match for Wilshere against Leyton Orient, on the pitch at Highbury. Leonard recruited another Luton boy, Ryan Smales, who played a year up. Jack waited until the last day of the registration window before agreeing to join Arsenal’s Hale End Academy in Walthamstow. He thrived, but Smales regressed. The fresh-faced boy who sits alongside Leonard, in an Arsenal Under 12 team photograph for the 2002–03 season, faded, and returned to reality.
Just as the vagaries of life outside football are etched in the game’s all-consuming spotlight, football fails to look after its own. It is widely believed Wilshere will be captain of England one day. He is worth conservatively £50 million on the open market. Arsenal paid O’Connor £50 when Wilshere joined the academy. He received another £250 when he signed a scholarship. The scout worked diligently for the club for a decade, at one point having 35 boys in the system, but had signalled his intention to leave just before Wilshere signed professional forms. Under a policy implemented by Liam Brady, Arsenal’s head of youth development, this meant he did not receive the £750 usually due in such circumstances.
O’Connor is sanguine: ‘That’s Liam’s policy. At the end of the day, if it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t have got a full-time job at Arsenal. He helped me get where I am today, and I’m very grateful to him. I wouldn’t have had clubs asking about me. I could have joined Tottenham, and I sat down with Chelsea, although they weren’t for me. There’s a lot of politics in these clubs, and if I can’t do it to my full potential, which is how I felt at Arsenal, I won’t do the job.’
O’Connor had last seen Wilshere 18 months previously, when he visited his house to get a shirt signed. He follows his progress through Andy, his father, but feels no special affinity. ‘I was there then, I’m not, now,’ he said. Respect, of a more profound form, was paid by Aibangee, who pursued O’Connor relentlessly, because he had painful proof of his potential to play a pivotal role in the restructure of Brentford’s youth system. There is, indeed, honour amongst thieves.
Aibangee is a watchful man, but the memory of O’Connor’s larceny lightens his mood: ‘Yeah! I mean, I hated him. That’s why I brought him here, because he’s the best at his job. I thought I was good at my job when I was at Watford. We had some good kids and Shaun took my best one to Arsenal. We had that boy for a good year, trained him, coached him, did all we had to do. Then two or three months before he was meant to sign, Shaun, my enemy, took him. I couldn’t work out how he’d done it. It’s the worst thing in the world, the absolute worst. But that’s the job. Yeah, you take it personally, of course you do. I think if you don’t, then the job ain’t the right job for you.’
O’Connor agreed: ‘It’s emotional, exactly. I mean, when I was up at Arsenal I didn’t like to lose at all. If I lost a player it would probably take me a month to get over it. That was a club I supported and grew up following round the world. I felt I had let them down, somehow. So I didn’t like to lose anyone or anything, and it’s the same here. I go home and I can’t sleep. If I lose a player or I’ve lost out on a player, I can’t let it go. It affects me.’
The pair are different personalities. Listen carefully, and you can hear the neurons colliding in O’Connor’s skull like souped-up dodgem cars. He is a bundle of nervous energy. His eyes are bright, behind his glasses, and his greying, half-hearted goatee beard gives him the look of an ageing Labrador. Aibangee is an entirely different animal. Impeccably turned out, in tailored quilted coat, designer jeans and tan brogues, he has the stylishness and composure of a Golden Retriever. Together, they have prepared Brentford for the new Elite Player Performance Plan. They are a Category 2 Academy, which involves a £1.2 million investment. At a club whose record signing involved the outlay of £500,000, for Crystal Palace’s Hermann Hreidarsson in September 1998, that is a huge statement of faith.
O’Connor has built a database of youth football throughout London and five surrounding counties, from scratch. He has employed fixture co-ordinators, who source contact details for club managers in upwards of 40 leagues; 70 new scouts, of whom only 25 receive expenses, are operative. All collect a £150 bonus if one of their recommendations is signed: ‘We’ve put an academy in the shell of a centre of excellence. We’ve had two thousand triallists aged nine to sixteen in the past eighteen months. When we arrived we weren’t at ground zero. We were twenty miles into the earth’s core.’
His arms and knees are ‘shot’ from 20 years as a dry-line plasterer. He had a successful company, employin
g 30 men, but ran it down because he wanted to scout, full time. His only concession to conservatism was taking the Knowledge because ‘in football you don’t know what’s around the corner’. He drove a cab for ten months, and drove himself and, one would imagine, a certain type of fare, absolutely nuts. It was just like the old days when he took me to training one Thursday evening. A six-mile journey from Griffin Park, across West London to an athletics centre just off the A40, took nearly an hour.
Streaks of salmon pink presaged a watercolour sunset. Temperatures dropped rapidly, and, as darkness fell, strangers became silhouettes, absorbed by personal ritual. Rugby players practised scrummaging in the shadows cast by lights directed at the artificial surface on which Brentford’s boys were to train. Joggers eked out the last of the light on a circuit at the brow of the hill. Parents huddled in a doorway or retreated to their cars, where faces were framed by the eerie glow of instrument panels.
Everyone knew the rules. All the boys were obliged to shake coaches and visitors by the hand. This was no chore: eyes were bright, eye contact was made. ‘We do this to instil respect,’ said O’Connor, before his mobile phone took him hostage. He walked as he spoke. The blue light on his headset became strangely hypnotic. His first words, on every call, were: ‘What’s happening?’ A tremor of pride greeted my casual question about the England cap, which was the photograph on his iPhone: ‘That’s my lad’s. Brett plays Futsal for England.’
Futsal, derived from Portuguese futebol de salão, which can be translated as ‘hall football’, is played once a week by every boy on Brentford’s books. The game is played on a hard court surface with a smaller, heavier ball which, in consequence, has less bounce. There is an emphasis on improvisation, creativity and technique. The boys learn to flick and shape the ball with different parts of the foot, and develop an in-stinctive ability to see, and execute, sharp passes in a small space.
Its lingering influence was apparent in the Under 9 session, taken by Anthony Hayes, a young Irish coach. He had the boys on their toes caressing a ball – ‘sole, laces sole, laces: just touch that ball slightly’ – before introducing a series of passing drills. The air hummed with the percussive sound of footballs being struck against wooden side-boards. Coaches are rotated round the age groups each month. ‘We don’t want them getting favourites,’ explained O’Connor, in a brief respite from his mobile. ‘They are there to develop players individually, rather than create teams.’
Yet the Under 14s, coached by Danny Buck, another Arsenal refugee, had just beaten Celtic. The buzz was growing. Steve Watson was driving passes ‘Stevie G style’ at the Under 16s, to test their technique and composure. He typifies Brentford’s strategic decision to give scouts a central role. Watson compiles opposition reports for the first team, and organises a group of non-league scouts. The accent is on the accumulation of information. Boys are measured monthly, and growth spurts inform selection decisions.
O’Connor’s recipe for domestic harmony, turning his telephone to mute for an hour when he has his evening meal with his wife, is unorthodox, to say the least, but it appears to work: ‘Every night, I have to give her an hour because the phone doesn’t stop ringing. To give you an idea, I went out for dinner last night, and at the dinner table the phone rang about twenty-five times in an hour and a half. So that’s why when I’m in the house I have to give my wife her hour. When I started this, I used to walk in the door and be on the phone, and she’d create.
‘I mean, I’m a little bit cute, I have to say. Now I wait until she goes to bed, get back on the phone, and catch up with my emails. That’s the bit people don’t understand. This is a vocation. For the last two years there’s been nothing else. My life has been put on hold until we get to a certain level. It’s not healthy, I can tell you that now, because you’re going to bed with a phone in your hand and you’re waking up with a phone in your hand. But, to me, scouts are the most important people in the world. If I’m out anywhere and one of them rings, I have to answer the phone. It’s very important they see I care, about them and this club.’
The emotional investment is huge, and the corrosion of innocence is an ever-present danger. Brentford’s burgeoning reputation for previously unconsidered excellence in talent identification and development was double-edged. Praise was pernicious. Aibangee was used to scouts, literally lurking in the shadows: ‘They sneak in and they’ll just stand there, but when you’ve been in the game, you know the ones. They’re not talking to any other parent, but the parent of the boy they want. You smell them. You know who they are.’
Some clubs were cutting out the middle man, and using agents as scouts. O’Connor’s voice hardened, as his anger rose: ‘We’re trying to stop them, but they turn up everywhere. The bigger clubs think they’re being cute, and it’s worrying. We’re going to have to increase our security. I tell you, I wish the people who came up with EP3 could come and see this. They are killing us. They have no idea how hard we work. Send them here. We’re throwing the scouts out, but that won’t help us, because from next season they can do what they want.
‘We’re getting boys to sign pre-scholarship agreements at fourteen, to give some measure of protection to the club, but agents are already whispering to them that other clubs are interested. All I can do is sit the parents down and explain they are going to get a knock on the door very shortly. My message is “Be ready, but your son doesn’t need it yet.” He’s got to focus because he’s not a football player at fourteen or fifteen. Brand names do not make them football players. Good coaching staff, good mentors, good advisors do that. You can be stuck at a big club until you’re twenty years old but you won’t get an opportunity. Here at Brentford, we’re looking at putting them into a first team group at sixteen or seventeen.’
Aibangee maintained the argument, seamlessly: ‘We’ve got to let everyone know it’s not the category that makes the club, it’s the people that make the club. I believe we’ve got people here of a better calibre than they have at Chelsea. We’ve got people here who are better at their jobs than those at Tottenham and Arsenal. We need to communicate that to the parents and the players. Forget about the category, forget about what people are telling you. Chelsea’s first team will always be better than Brentford’s, but isn’t this the best academy for your child? We’ve got the people who can help him develop.’
Rios was on the radar. His group of Under 8s, assembled carefully over the previous two years, were already being stalked by scouts from Southampton, Aston Villa and Norwich. Mark Anderson was monitoring them on Liverpool’s behalf. Rios was counting down the days to the third Saturday in April, when the boys had to confirm their intention to sign for the following season, their first as an official academy group. He knew the wolves were waiting.
What he didn’t realise was that they had already been invited into his club, through the front door.
5
Hiding in Plain Sight
IT WAS A moment to melt a mother’s heart. Miguel’s little men were innocence personified, bright-eyed and dressed identically in miniature black tracksuits which bore the Brentford crest. They filed into the main stand at Griffin Park behind their mentor, with the blind faith of ducklings following a parent across a lily pond. They were there to observe, listen and learn. Appropriately enough, promotional banners for the semi-final of the inaugural NextGen Series invited the audience to ‘step into the future of football’.
The match, on March 21, 2012, captured the cosmopolitan nature of a rapidly evolving game. Brentford, formed in the autumn of 1889 as an offshoot from a local rowing club, played host to two of the most storied institutions in European football, Internazionale Milano and Olympique de Marseille. The competition, in essence a Champions League for Under 19 teams, met an incipient need to provide a platform for the young players who feed the star system.
The NextGen Series was modern football in microcosm: ambitious, entrepreneurial, opportunistic, international and commercially astute. It offered a better qualit
y of competitive experience to emerging academy players, whose precocity promised to counteract UEFA’s financial fair play rules. It provided an alternative recruitment opportunity, an insight into value disguised and distorted by a dysfunctional transfer market. It also allowed clubs subtly to position themselves for the ultimate fusion of money and meritocratic principle, a European Super League.
The setting was incompatible with the scope of the concept, and the identity of its creators was intriguing. The competition was the brain child of former currency dealer Mark Warburton, Brentford’s sporting director, and TV producer Justin Andrews, who had studied European academies with Ose Aibangee, Brentford’s head of youth development, for an online project. Their vision, driven by private funding and a belief in the latent benefits of elite competition, had taken four years to find its focus, but it was an idea whose time had come.
NextGen traded as football’s finishing school. The best young footballers were taken out of their comfort zone, introduced to the rhythms and challenges of regular Continental contests. Could they cope with different climatic conditions, contrasting cultures? Were they sufficiently mature to deal with alien opposition, diverse tactical systems and coaches with a different mindset? For the scouts, attracted in ever-increasing numbers, it was a free rummage through a smorgasbord of talent.
It was an important occasion for Warburton. He established his credentials by setting up David Beckham’s academy. He went on to develop Watford’s ground-breaking academy, where he designed a holistic programme, which matched academic and sporting excellence. His role at Brentford was multi-faceted: he oversaw the scouting network, sourced potential players for first team manager Uwe Rösler, and liaised with owner Matthew Benham. His responsibilities with NextGen were another area of influence. In a world in which everyone has a price, the figures were alluring. Even those who had graduated to Barcelona’s B team, the most coveted reserves in world football, were being paid a basic salary of only €1,200 a month. NextGen boys, outside the bloated economy of the Premier League, were earning even less.
The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters Page 6