No Hunger In Paradise Page 12

  Managers and players have their own peer support organisations, the LMA and PFA respectively. Simon Bywater’s proposal that the Players’ Trust should be given a viable long-term role in independently representing young players and their families is a challenge to a range of special-interest groups, accustomed to influence without true accountability.

  The Trust is the brainchild of Simon Andrews, who forged a secondary career in the financial services industry following his release by Manchester United at the age of 19, and Peter Lowe, former Head of Education at Manchester City. It was shaped, in its inception, by the concerns and curiosity of Sir Alex Ferguson, who saw the need for transitional support for young players going out of the game, and a structured antidote to the chaotic, entourage-driven lifestyle adopted by many prematurely rewarded Premier League starlets.

  Andrews formulated ideas about education and mentorship programmes with Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs and former United chief executive David Gill, an important advocate at the highest level of the game’s administration in the UK and Europe. The most easily overlooked requirement, for an instantly available confidential counselling service, is the most pressing.

  ‘What everybody sees is about ten per cent of what is there. As soon as something happens to a player there is a headline test, but no one concentrates on the hidden aspects of a particular problem. There is, for example, a lot of parental bullying going on. I know this will sound very harsh, but the socio-demographics are such that you’ve got parents living their failed existence through a son who is now a lifeline.

  ‘The meal ticket syndrome puts more pressure on the boy than sometimes the club does. There’s peer pressure at school, bullying within clubs or between players. These are real issues for a young player who is simply trying his best to make it. They don’t feel able to come out and say, “Well, actually, my dad, or my mum, is making my life a misery because I had a bad game. They haven’t talked to me for a week.”

  ‘It’s not exactly the Samaritans, but a boy needs someone to pick the phone up, so they can tell them, “Look, I’m feeling really shit. I’m having a bad time, things aren’t good.” We can use former players who have experienced similar issues as mentors. Lifestyle is another obvious area, because footballers are naturally addictive personalities; I still am.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean to say that you’re having ten pints of lager every night or on drugs or gambling recklessly. There is good addiction, to training, winning, and competing, and bad addiction, where you find yourself in areas that you shouldn’t really be. There has got to be a better model than the one that exists, because at the moment it is every man for himself.’

  The system is swamped by what Andrews terms ‘a tsunami of money’. Agents are wielding greater influence, opening fissures within clubs struggling to cope with the pace of financial change and the residue of a feudal philosophy. Chief executives are preoccupied by protecting their multi-million-pound investments in first-team players while lesser-paid employees are prey to temptation.

  Andrews captures the contradiction: ‘There are clubs that feed agents. There are individuals within clubs who are introducers to agents, and what they get back differs from the odd thing here or there, to potentially a commercial arrangement. You’ve got to remember that in football clubs, not everybody earns huge amounts of money, but, equally, they are part of an aspirational environment.

  ‘Environments trigger behaviour, don’t they? So what you’ve got is a relatively low-paid individual compared to some of the players, who is in close contact with the players, who can feed the player into someone he knows, and there’s a deal done, for whatever reason. The feedback we’re getting from people who care about the game tells us this has to change.

  ‘Agents are controlling players, being responsible for moves. There’s no education process for parents. What does a good or bad agent look like? If they’re saying to us, “I’ve been approached by three agents and I don’t know how to choose,” we can provide somebody to talk to. At the minute they can’t pick the phone up to the club, because of what I described earlier.’

  United funded a pilot programme, which involved seminars by financial, legal, media and security specialists. These ranged from basic advice on investment strategies and crisis management to pre-nuptial arrangements, tax issues and addressing fears about the vulnerability of highly paid footballers and their families to burglary or even kidnap.

  It was augmented by the development of an app, which Andrews refers to as a ‘player passport’. This, in essence, is an emotionally intelligent CV, in which a player records the minutiae of his progress through the system. If necessary he undergoes psychometric testing, so he can understand the complexities of character and culture.

  ‘Speaking to young players, they trust technology more than they trust people. The passport is really a catch-all for whatever a footballer has experienced in his life, so that if he’s moving to another club, or if he’s moving to another career, he can say, “This is me. I’ve built this, this is mine. I own it.” He understands himself. He can sit down with a prospective employer and say, “This is what I’ve experienced. These are the highs, these are the lows.” Currently there isn’t a way of capturing that.

  ‘Clubs do really well on statistical information around playing, but this, in my opinion, is more important, because this is about him as a person. Whether he makes it as a footballer isn’t irrelevant, it’s really important to him, but, in the long run, given the stats around the game, what’s more important is that he has a platform, literally a technology platform, for his future life.’

  Kieran Bywater had reached that crossroads. He had been worn down psychologically by the accumulated stress of post-rejection trialling. In the words of his father, ‘He was just living in hotels and traipsing around really, and it wasn’t doing his mental health any good.’ Lowe provided advice about further education, in a football setting, and a family conference provided the perspective.

  Anger lingered over the lack of meaningful feedback. Scars were scoured by such hidden indignities as the sudden loss of a sponsored boot deal with Adidas. The Bywaters’ solution was to summon the simplicity of childhood, the innocence of ‘going to the park and playing, and scoring goals, and enjoying it, having fun’.

  Enforced detachment from the professional game encouraged broader thoughts, a focus on wider horizons. Kieran accepted a full soccer scholarship from the University of Charleston in West Virginia to do a four-year degree course. He realigned his ambition to one of academic excellence and, in the medium term, a potential career in Major League Soccer.

  He was one of seven British players recruited in January 2016 by Chris Grassie, head coach of the University of Charleston’s Golden Eagles, a nationally ranked NCAA Division II team competing in the Mountain East Conference. The twenty-eight-man roster features ten different nationalities and trains in a new £6 million Innovation Center and Sports Arena.

  As a freshman, to aid integration and come to terms with the polyglot nature of the squad, Kieran was obliged to have a roommate from a different culture, in his case a midfield player and native of São Paulo, Bruno dos Santos from SC Corinthians Paulista, the legendary Rivellino’s club. Kieran had to sit out the 2016 College season, because fifteen appearances for Bishop’s Stortford following his release by West Ham made him initially ineligible under NCAA rules.

  Grassie, whose Geordie accent has softened during his time on the other side of the Atlantic, has built his own life in North America in two phases. He attended the school of excellence that preceded Newcastle United’s academy before his family moved to Canada when he was 15. He graduated from Alderson Broaddus, a liberal arts university in Philippi, West Virginia, in 2002 and spent three years as an assistant coach before returning to the UK.

  He played semi-professionally for Northwich Victoria in what was then the Conference, but when Martin Allen had to suspend his offer of a contract at Brentford in 2006 because of financial pro
blems he faced a choice: indulge himself as a penurious lower-league journeyman, or supplement his studies for a master’s degree by developing a coaching career in the US.

  In truth, it wasn’t much of a choice. He still visits England annually, on recruitment tours of Category One academies, organised for college coaches by the Premier League. He looks for players who are problem solvers, unafraid to look at things in a different way. They are not immediately obvious, since the young men in the audience tend to be in denial:

  ‘You look around the room and they are all sure they are going to make it. You talk to them about this great opportunity, the cheerleaders, our analytics and our A licence coaches, but they don’t hear you. They know your name and have your number, but they don’t realise it is probably not going to happen for them.

  ‘It takes time to hit home when they are released. The grieving process usually lasts for a year. Then you are meeting them at their lowest point. They’re thinking, what am I going to do with my life? Hopefully you can build them back up, reignite the spark. This is their lifeline. It gives them something to believe in.

  ‘We know about most of these kids, and I have to admit I never thought someone like Kieran would be available to us. The way they were speaking about him, the way I saw him performing, he didn’t seem to be someone who would fall out of the professional game. He has had a great football education. He is a special player, a special lad, a happy, positive guy who works very hard at his craft and seeks to challenge himself. He will probably be my best player; if not, top three. He is captaincy material, without a doubt.’

  On the day we speak, unseasonably warm for late October, Grassie is formalising his recruitment for the following season. He conducts back-to-back interviews with first-year pros who know they are likely to be released from clubs like Manchester City, Sheffield Wednesday, Huddersfield Town and Queens Park Rangers. He suspects the exodus from England will gather momentum in the years to come.

  Kieran is on campus, enrolling for two new classes, since he wishes to stretch himself intellectually. He is cryptically quoting Socrates on social media (‘Be slow to fall into friendship but when thou art in, continue firm and constant’) and promoting World Mental Health Day. Few will grasp the haunting eloquence of his Twitter bio, which reads: ‘You see my mask, not the story behind it.’

  If the scars are covered by the foundation powder of easy friendship and impending achievement, Kieran has dealt well with the immediate frustrations of the hiatus in his football life. He relished a summer season away from NCAA restrictions in Tennessee, playing for Chattanooga FC in the National Premier Soccer League, the amateur fourth tier of the US game.

  He was accompanied by two of his Charleston teammates, Jake Young, younger brother of former England defender Luke, and right winger Will Roberts, a former Wales under-19 international who had a single substitute’s appearance in the Championship for Coventry City in 2012. The experience was certainly different.

  Supporters, self-styled ‘Chattahooligans’, marched into matches in unison, and ritually observed an a cappella version of the US national anthem before kick-off. Bywater was hailed as a ‘two-way midfielder’, scoring twice in seven games as they qualified for the national play-offs, where they lost to a ninety-first-minute goal in the semi-finals before a home crowd of 12,251.

  Disappointment has become a relative experience. Bywater was being judged on his own merits as a potentially pivotal player in the Golden Eagles’ attempt to claim national honours in the 2017 season, which stretches from April to November. Though, inevitably, he is occasionally ambushed by memory, he is bullish because he has learned to compartmentalise failure:

  ‘I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me, and trying to motivate myself was incredibly hard. There had been no warning signs that I was about to be flushed down the toilet. I wasn’t ready mentally to start trudging round new clubs when I had naïvely thought I was going to be OK, but I’ve not looked back since moving out here.

  ‘It is a fantastic university and the setup is akin to any pro team back home. I’m training like a pro with players who have a similar story to mine. England is not the be all and end all. My advice to anyone released from a British academy is to think long term, rather than flogging it out in the lower leagues on poor pitches for short, bitty contracts.

  ‘I’m working for a degree that will give me a plan B when I can’t kick a ball. I’m not chasing money and I’m not motivated by it. What’s motivating me is the happiness of playing in a completely different environment. This has made me fall in love with my football again.’

  8

  Shiny Gobshites

  THERE IS, SADLY, no star on Hollywood Boulevard, no place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for La Rocca, an indie piano-rock band named after a damp downstairs bar in Bristol. Their anthems of twenty-something angst drew comparisons with U2, Keane and Supergrass, but they had only a solitary hit single in Australia, a 129-second thrash entitled ‘Sing Song Sung’, to show for a five-year, two-album exile in Los Angeles.

  The lead singer and principal songwriter, journalism student Bjorn Baille, insisted on being known as Bjørn in what can only have been a loosely parodic attempt to channel the creative genius of Prince. Tony Hoffer, a producer borrowed from Beck, and Belle and Sebastian, impressed Alan Redmond, the drummer, with his sagacity when he decided he liked the aural warmth of guitars recorded in a toilet.

  Redmond, whose beard, braces and coarse waistcoats preceded the pheasant-shoot chic of Mumford & Sons, had a self-confessed ‘band manager head’. He saw the business logic of constant gigging across the United States, even when the stricken tour bus was ambushed in 8 Mile, Detroit, and their equipment was stolen in Philadelphia. The less said about a five-day gambling binge ‘in a big B&B’ on the Nevada border the better.

  A decade on from the release of La Rocca’s first album, The Truth, the self-styled ‘Alan Whicker of Shitsville, Arizona’ is a singular football figure. Now 41, and owner of the R10 agency, he works primarily in England, Italy and Spain, with a small stable of twenty first-team players, nine academy players, and renowned development coaches such as Rodolfo Borrell at Manchester City, and Pep Segura, who has returned from Liverpool to Barcelona as technical secretary to oversee the latest evolution of their academy.

  Redmond has a Dubliner’s natural eloquence and brings an interesting mixture of vivacity and intelligence to professional football, where he is in little danger of being confused with senior members of his relatively new trade. They have affectations of dignity and authority, despite the cigar-sucking, proverb-quoting, deal-cutting clichés, and are unlikely to be impressed by his acute portrait of a particular breed of modern agent:

  ‘There is one class of agent that is, for me, almost a joke. It is like they have come off a conveyor belt. We refer to them as shiny gobshites. They are immaculately turned out. Even beyond the age at which they should start dressing respectably they still squeeze themselves into skinny jeans and very expensive shoes, trousers rolled up and no socks.

  ‘They have the manicured beard and the Southampton players’ haircut, shaved on the side with the little sweepy fringe. There are a lot of these guys and there is no substance there at all. I don’t know where their personalised BMWs come from; they must be on lease or bought with some family money.

  ‘I tend to see a lot of the same faces on the sidelines. There are a few of them where I think, he’s a good guy, he’s not on the take. If his player has a career further down the line, then of course he’s going to take his five per cent, but he’ll contribute to that player’s progress. But quite a high proportion I look at and think, God help the players that are with them.

  ‘I might have an alien background, but on a serious note there are a lot of parallels between music and football. I spent a large part of my youth practising and trying to get a deal. Once we got the deal we realised that only got us to the foot of the mountain. Talent, luck or a combination of the two takes you the rest
of the way.

  ‘We sold so few records I think we shocked our label. When we first started playing we turned down a couple of adverts because we were ethically against them. By the time we released our first record it was needs must. Every song on that album bar one has been used in an advert, video game, TV show or a film.

  ‘It qualified me a little for football because at a relatively young age I was given a big chunk of money, simply because I was good at doing something unusual. I watched some people handle that quite well, and I watched other people handle it quite badly. The only difference for me is that some of the best musicians I ever met never made any money and some of the worst footballers make great money. There’s guaranteed money in football, whereas in music there is never that guarantee.’

  His eclectic approach was forged during degree studies in English and Italian at Cardiff University, where the band was formed by three Irish students and a garrulous Lancastrian, keyboard player Nick Haworth. The course entailed a gap year in Parma where, in the late nineties, Carlo Ancelotti was shaping a young team around such stellar prospects as Gianluigi Buffon and Fabio Cannavaro, in a 4–4–2 system pioneered by the great AC Milan and Italy coach Arrigo Sacchi. Redmond ‘wanted to speak football’ and collated a glossary of simple terms, which gained in relevance when he started a language school in the UK following the end of his musical career. Liverpool FC were among his first clients; he translated legal documents and recruitment DVDs in five languages for the club’s global scouting network and acted as an English teacher for players and support staff.

  The gap in the market was immediately obvious. One senior coach, struggling to transfer his knowledge and experience, confessed that his previous English tuition had essentially consisted of learning the children’s song ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ by rote. The problems of international transition for highly priced foreign players were also tinged by farce: