The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters

by Michael Calvin

  ‘The stadium was just across the way. We’d play the game against this select Chinese eleven the following day, but no one would play for more than a half. It was like a hundred and twenty-five degrees on the pitch, silly humidity, no wind, nothing. Then we all piled on the minibus and got out of Dodge. It was unbelievable. I’d met my wife about six months before I went out there. When I was away, she went to Ayia Napa with her mates. I was away fifteen days and she was away fourteen days. I got on the scales and I’d lost sixteen pounds. She got on the scales and she’d put on fifteen!’

  His laughter was spontaneous, prolonged and infectious. ‘You miss stuff like that,’ he reflected, needlessly. Football’s fatal attraction might not have been enough to keep Rowley and Burton occupied for more than 70 minutes that night, but Austin gladly succumbed to it. It was a life choice, a life force. He used a coffee shop near his home as an office, nursing a phone, a laptop and a succession of skinny lattes. Leads were followed up, brains were picked, favours were granted and accepted.

  He covered 23 games in August and in September it seemed his background work had paid off. A chairman called, and confided he was mindful of sacking his manager. He promised Austin a place on the shortlist for his successor, and asked for his help in sourcing a striker on loan. The manager was duly discarded, Austin’s recruit scored on his debut, and the club appointed an internal candidate to save money. It was a casual betrayal, typical of its kind, excused by the cruel conformity of an apologetic phone call. Austin sought solace from peer recognition:

  ‘This guy comes up to me in Warwick, at the uni, and asks who had impressed me on the course. There wasn’t anyone in particular, but I wanted to be diplomatic so I just said sometimes you don’t see people for what they are in that environment. They might be holding a bit back, or they might not be as confident in a group as they are in familiar surroundings. Take Lee Bradbury. I played with him at Palace from 1998 to 2000 and coached him at Southend in 2006. If anyone had said to me that he’d be a manager, I wouldn’t have seen it. But he’s had a go, and he’s done allright at Bournemouth.

  ‘Anyway, this guy says to me, “I’ve watched you, and I’ve spoken to three people on this course. I’ve asked them who out of this group of sixteen, eighteen people would go on and become a top manager. They’ve all said you. You’re a bit different. You’ve got something about you, a drive, a determination. The way you conduct yourself stands out.” They were kind words. It was a really nice thing to say, and he didn’t need to say it.

  ‘I actually believe that I will get an opportunity, because I believe in myself. If I allow myself to be convinced that the situation is hopeless, because the system is seriously flawed, then I’ll never get an opportunity. It only takes me to meet one person, one chairman, one potential benefactor. I may sit down with him, and discover he thinks along the same lines. We may share ideas. He may be impressed by how I talk and by what I say. That’s all you need, a little opening to persuade people to give you a chance. It’s a brutal game, absolutely brutal, but I believe good things happen to good people. You’ve got to keep going, you’ve got to keep fighting, and scrapping through.’

  Austin’s hunger was insidious. He had worked at every level in football, from Watford’s Under 13s, through non-league management at Farnborough, and a range of senior coaching and recruitment roles at developmental and first team level, yet the game was being reshaped by fear, penury and expedience. His application to manage Coventry was ignored, and he was unsurprised to learn, through a friendly agent, that nearly half of 55 supposedly serious candidates seeking to return to the game had offered to work for nothing. He was back on the chain gang, and headed for Barnet.

  The NextGen series was going from strength to strength in the autumn of 2012, much to the horror of UEFA who, with characteristic cynicism, hastily unveiled plans to launch a rival competition, run on near identical lines, in the 2013–14 season. Arsenal, coached by Burton, were playing the previous season’s beaten semi-finalists, Marseille. It was sufficiently intriguing to attract Wenger and Ivan Gazidis, his ascetic American chief executive, to the front row of the stand. It had been a wet evening, but as kick-off approached the rain stopped, and back-lit clouds sped across the suburban skyline.

  The scouts’ seating section was delineated by yellow tape, as if it were a crime scene. The usual suspects had turned out: Austin, Allan Gemmell and I squeezed into a row containing Steve McCall, from Ipswich, Brian Talbot, from Fulham, Jason Halsey, from Brighton and Phil Chappell, from Charlton. Ted Buxton, the Duke, sat on the end, interpreting individual patterns of play in what appeared to be a schoolboy’s notebook. Mel Johnson had gone native, and sat amongst the fans, one of whom, a lady of indeterminate age, indulged in a solitary, monotone chant of ‘we love you Arsenal’.

  Ibrahima Sy, the Marseille goalkeeper, was rather more entertaining. He had the sangfroid of a man whose shorts were on fire, and the random movements of a mouse, attempting to evade the clutches of a tom cat. He treated his penalty area as if it were radioactive. Austin released the frustrations of a difficult journey from Warwick – the M1 roadworks in the Milton Keynes area were becoming the bane of his life – by yelling ‘Bomb scare!’ when Sy bounded out of the box on a particularly clueless rescue mission.

  Gemmell permitted himself a rather more restrained ‘oh, my God’. It was a phrase with which he had become familiar during a turbulent period at Nottingham Forest, after the Al-Hasawi family had purchased the club from the estate of the late Nigel Doughty, Forest’s former benefactor and chairman. Omar Al-Hasawi, regarded as a frontman for his cousin Fawaz, set the tone by sacking Steve Cotterill, and suggesting the Kuwaiti owners would oversee recruitment policy, with a special emphasis on the Gulf.

  Three Kuwaiti players were parachuted in for a month-long trial which ended when they were refused work permits. Khalid Al-Rashidi was a tolerable third string goalkeeper in the extended squad of a Championship club. Defender Hussain Fadhel and Bader Al-Mutawa, a second striker who was supposedly the best Kuwaiti player of his generation, would have struggled to make it in the Conference North. The owners’ ostentatious announcement of a ‘three-to-five-year’ strategy missed the point. Forest’s needs were immediate and acute.

  ‘Two weeks before the season started we had no manager and no players,’ Gemmell recalled with unconvincing insouciance. ‘The owner was persuaded to interview Sean O’Driscoll, because he knew the setup inside out. The owner asked the players about him, and away we went. We had a few deals lined up, but it was a case of having two eyeballs, two earholes, and getting out there. Everyone knows everyone’s business in football, and some of the calls have been interesting.

  ‘Paul Sturrock phoned from Southend, asking if we were going to take Kane Ferdinand. We were strong on him, liked him a lot, but decided to pass. They had a tax bill to pay, and needed to sell him to pay the wages. That’s what it is like in football, financially at the moment. I guarantee at least fifty per cent of Championship clubs are up for sale. Everyone’s overspent. I’m not sure where all this is going.’

  Nevertheless, 14 players arrived on ‘a conveyor belt’. O’Driscoll had been employed for his acumen as a coach, and played a marginal role in the recruitment process. As Gemmell, whose protégé Jamaal Lascelles signed a new four-year contract after attracting interest from Manchester City, explained: ‘All Sean has to do is shake hands with the players, and get them out on to the training field.’

  Gemmell, like many around us, was impressed by Serge Gnabry, a German clone of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. Arsenal won with ease, 3–0, but could easily have doubled the score, given the paucity of the French resistance. Chuba Akpom, an England Under 19 striker who would sign his first professional contract on his 17th birthday in October, scored twice. He led the line intelligently, held the ball up well, and linked play thoughtfully. Wenger praised his ‘personality and quality’. Akpom was diligent and responsive, a model student in football terms, but the noises off were worry
ing. The cultural problems, to which Brady referred, resurfaced when Pat Holland lasted only six weeks as coach of Arsenal’s Under 18 squad. He was popular, admired by his peers, and was quickly reintegrated into Rowley’s scouting team, but the brevity of his tenure as a coach was ominous. Holland had been disrespected by a strong-willed group of young players, who resented his disciplinarian approach. The honest pro took on the hoodie generation, and lost. Austin was not particularly close to Holland, but, like many, was appalled:

  ‘When you are a professional sportsman, especially at a higher level, people think money is a substitute for everything, and it’s not. The money I was on as a player wasn’t bad, but it is not like these boys now. One year and they’ll never need to work again. I’ve realised in the last eighteen months that I’m fortunate I’ve got a real good family around me. I’ve got four kids, three young ones with my current wife and my eldest boy, who is eighteen. I lost a bit of perspective on life. Because you throw yourself into this game so readily, you forget the things that are really important to you.’

  Gemmell, too, had long-term plans. Scouting had changed, irreversibly, in the 37 years since his career had begun by watching Windsor and Eton play Aylesbury as a favour to his brother-in-law Peter Taylor, Dartford manager at the time. Gemmell intended to base himself in Vilamoura on the Algarve, to search for undervalued talent in Spain and Portugal. ‘It’s only a hundred and fifty kilometres from Lisbon, and a lot of Portuguese clubs don’t pay their players,’ he reasoned. ‘When they go three months without being paid, they become free agents. That’s when we can dive in.’

  There was only one blemish on what appeared to be the perfect scenario: football’s ex-pat community already had the ‘No Vacancies’ sign out.

  16

  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

  THE CLASS WARRIOR selling the Socialist Worker newspaper outside the New Lawn Stadium in the Cotswold village of Nailsworth never stood a chance. Doughty matrons, collecting for the RSPCA, protected their patch, and ushered him to the end of the driveway. Stewards stationed there were studiously indifferent to the Range Rover driver who slid his window down and said ‘Wigan Athletic’ as if the words were the key to a magic kingdom. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he was told. ‘No concessions. Three quid.’

  Gary Penrice shrugged, paid up and parked on a patch of grass sodden by mid-winter rain. Forest Green Rovers, his nearest professional club, was certainly different. Dale Vince, an eco-friendly owner, refused to have red meat on the premises, and aimed to produce football’s first organic pitch within two years. The grass was cut by a robotic mower controlled by a GPS positioning device and fuelled by 180 solar panels on the roof of the main stand.

  Sheep grazed on a hillside overlooking the ground, and three Union flags, tattered and faded, flopped wearily in a gentle breeze. It was a snapshot of a contrasting culture. Penrice had taken a break from a sequence of three-day weekends, watching up to six games in the Low Countries or Southern Europe. He lived just down the Stroud valley, and it was a rare chance to catch up with a friend, Jamie Johnson.

  Millwall’s chief scout needed a left back, and was watching Chris Stokes, Forest Green’s player of the year. A former England youth international, who once captained Bolton’s youth team, he was a decent size, assured on the ball, but had a disconcerting habit of drifting inside under pressure. Johnson, whose three year pursuit of West Bromwich Albion striker Chris Wood had been rewarded with a mutually beneficial loan deal, concluded: ‘Maybe more of a central defender. He keeps you interested, but he’s not ready for us yet. We’ll keep an eye on him over the next few months.’

  Penrice looked at a broader picture. He was a prolific striker, who made more than 400 League appearances for Bristol Rovers, Watford, Aston Villa and QPR before becoming assistant manager, under school friend Ian Holloway, at Bristol Rovers and QPR. He acted as chief scout at Plymouth and Leicester, but moved into European scouting with Stoke. He was combining a similar role at Wigan with a portfolio approach, suited to stringent times.

  An increasing number of clubs were rationalising their scouting programmes, effectively cutting out the middle man by dealing directly with agents. Penrice had anticipated the trend, setting himself up as a freelance scout, and establishing a strategic association with the Wasserman Media Group, which represented more than 400 players in La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Bundesliga and the Premier League. He had created a European talent-spotting network for them and a unique niche for himself.

  It didn’t make for a quiet life. His mobile ringtone, Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was the soundtrack to his working day. His Bristolian burr was accentuated by the speed of its delivery, which occasionally made him sound like Hagrid on helium, but his instincts were sharp. When he was in the car with his children, his Bluetooth headset protected them from the ‘effing and jeffing’ which constitutes normal football conversation.

  Europe was a goldfield, inundated with prospectors. Each sought to emulate Graham Carr, given the unprecedented security of an eight-year contract as Newcastle United’s chief scout because of his ability to exploit the French market. The fever was spreading across the continent, fostering the illusion of riches for all. For every Paulo Gazzaniga, the goalkeeper Penrice had found on the fringes of Valencia’s third team and propelled into the Premier League with Southampton, via Gillingham, there were a thousand hard luck stories. The pathos of players without hope or, in extreme cases, even a passport highlighted recruitment as a cold, methodical business. Penrice knew the game, in all its forms:

  ‘I took Paulo to Gillingham, where I knew Andy Hessenthaler, the manager. I said, “He’s a good lad, good attitude, very cheap wages, free transfer, no money, have a look at him.” Well, Paulo is six foot five, and he always wanted to play in England. I knew that, see? We’ve got an Argentinian under 18 international, at a top club in Spain, who’s getting a maximum of thirty thousand euros a year. You wouldn’t find that goalie in England, in my opinion. Not at that wage, at that age, and that size. Hessy can’t afford a scout in England, never mind a scout in Spain. How is he ever going to hear about that player?

  ‘They had no way of knowing him. So you’ve got a situation in England where a club like Gillingham, good club, good stadium, all the fundamentals, have a manager who has got to run the team and also find players. How does he do that? He can’t, because scouting is an expensive thing. They’ve done well out of the goalie, and he’s in the Premier League with Southampton. We’ve all benefited from the “look after your mates” culture. English players are massively overpriced. Do they care any more? I’m not sure they have the character. The reason I went the agency route is that the game’s gone global now.

  ‘We’re a small island, with a million teams, and there’s only a limited amount of talent. The pressure of people trying to nick each other’s players is ridiculous. You have to go to the agent, especially at Premier League level, and maybe at Championship level. I know people knock agents but they can come to you with good deals. Say, as a scout, you go to Spain. It’s a lot of effort to watch one game. You might catch your player on the best day ever. You come home, you say to your manager “fantastic”, but where do you go from there? You watch him again, but you still need a point of contact.

  ‘You don’t know him. Does he speak English? Does he want to come to England? You invariably learn that the agent is the one who knows the player really well. You establish a bit of trust with him. Even if you agree a fee with the club, you still have to deal with the agent because the club will contact him. There’s no way round that. A scout only sees the player from the stand. Sometimes, the first handshake is when he blinking signs him. I knew Paulo. I knew his dad. There’s more of a relationship.

  ‘If you’re at a specific club it can be very frustrating. It’s exciting because it is result-driven, but if the manager says “I need a right winger” you can spend a whole year looking for one. It doesn’t matter that you see a hundred good left
wingers while you are out there. Even if you find your player, he has got to meet certain criteria to fit the way the manager wants his team to play. People have this thing about the mystique of scouting, but I think that only really works in youth departments or development situations. Then you are buying players to work with, to shape. At first team level it is not actually scouting, but realising what a manager wants in a player for a specific position.

  ‘The ideal situation for a Premier League club is if you believe you’ve got a team that’s good enough to stay in it. Then you can look for your nuggets. Stoke are probably in that situation now. Tony Pulis has done brilliantly to establish them, and he might be able to take the odd chance. It is still difficult, because it can be hard for a foreign player to adapt to a specific coaching style. Communication is a massive thing within a team, so it helps if they’re not fighting for their lives.’

  Football men are patchwork quilts of experience, often bitterly acquired. Penrice was ahead of the curve in terms of recruitment trends, but at heart remained a traditionalist. He underwent apprenticeship as a plumber before working his way up, as a player, from Mangotsfield United. He drove the bus for the reserve team at Bristol Rovers despite periodically injuring his shoulder because it lacked power steering. Little wonder he considered academy products, sheltered from reality in a self-perpetuating system, increasingly unfit for purpose.

  ‘Without the Mangotsfield experience, non-league, regular football against men where you get kicked and there’s a result and a crowd, I don’t think I’d have mentally adjusted to the professional game. They’re giving lads five year contracts straight from school. That’s great in theory, but the problem is, when you get released, you actually are no use to society. You’re twenty, and there ain’t too many jobs at the Job Centre for a footballer.