No Hunger In Paradise Page 13

  ‘I went to see one Argentine player, who was really down in the dumps. He tried to explain to me that he felt that he was being bullied because of the size of his head. He said that the players were calling him “melon” because he had a big head, like melon head. I was looking at him and I thought, if anything, his head is quite small. I couldn’t understand it.

  ‘When I investigated it, his teammates were shouting “man on”, but he just heard “melon”. So, every time he had the ball, he felt that they were on at him. I thought, what the fuck? But then I realised there were so many stupid things to sort out. There are so many critical football phrases used every second of the game, which are so easily misunderstood.

  ‘They are not going to hear those terms in a general English class. Coaches will never stop and take the time to explain. So, for example, if a midfielder plays the ball to a striker with his back to the goal, and there is a player running on who wants to shoot he might shout “set”. But the guy doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s got no idea, so the moment is lost in his confusion.’

  Redmond was used in an advisory capacity by the Premier League, and together with Sean Warren, compiled an Oxford University Press book, English for Football, with a foreword by Sir Alex Ferguson. Distilled into eight chapters, covering different positions on the field and roles within a modern club, it formed the basis of an intense thirty-hour introduction to a sanitised version of industrial language.

  Goalkeepers were taught the vernacular of eternal verities, such as ‘narrow the angle’ or ‘stay on your line’. They were informed that a clean sheet had nothing to do with their laundry. Midfield players were given a list of personally relevant terms, including instructions to track back, play a through ball, cut inside or play on. Basics, such as how to ask for advice or even how to apologise for an error, were paramount.

  He gained an insight into the mentality of the top professional by teaching Luis Suárez and Fernando Torres. Martin Škrtel, the Slovak defender, was so committed to fitting in as smoothly as possible he had Redmond visit his hotel for English lessons each day during his first month at the club. They had families to help them assimilate; academy players, allotted to house parents, were more vulnerable.

  They were usually aged 16, although some younger boys were at the club on extended trials. Redmond would take them on a tour of their host city, and later test them on place names and street signs. As his experience extended to include work with Everton, Stoke City, Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic, an obvious opportunity beckoned.

  Players began bringing their contracts to him for translation. This developed organically into broader advice, since he had won their trust as a tutor. Pep Segura, summoned to Liverpool by Rafa Benítez as technical director of the academy following a spell as Olympiakos manager, sought to put their relationship on a more formal footing.

  A seed, carefully planted, germinated when Segura suggested he should take the agents’ examination, which underpinned FIFA’s global licensing system until it was scrapped with chaotic consequences, appropriately enough on April Fools’ Day in 2015. Redmond’s diverse career had reached another crossroads:

  ‘Pep was a bit of a mentor to me. It’s not like I was Mother Teresa, trying to set the world to rights. I could see the way things were moving, and was one hundred per cent aware that there was a lot of money to be made. I won’t lie to you. That was definitely a motivating factor. I would see players arrive at a big club, requiring some form of mainstream education, and the agent, who had made a lot of money from the transfer, just disappearing.

  ‘On a basic level, being unable to communicate because of the language barrier, the frustration is huge. Clubs do a lot for their players, but I never understood how a care package was never considered to be part of the agent’s responsibility. At some of the really big agencies it wasn’t part of the job. It was just like, there you go. Get on with it.’

  The examination consisted of twenty multiple-choice questions, mainly on contract law and football regulations. He studied for it for a minimum of five hours a night, seven days a week, over a two-month revision period in which his only release was to put his children to bed. It was an instructive process, since he detected the slackness in the wording of the Football Association’s rulebook, compared to that of the global governing body.

  At that stage there were approximately 400 licensed agents in the UK. Now, in a deregulated age, there are 2,000, who pay £500 to pass ‘go’ in what they envisage, optimistically in most cases, as a lucrative form of Monopoly. Being charitable – admittedly difficult in the circumstances – the catch-all qualification that the newly branded intermediary is of ‘immaculate character’ is too imprecise to inspire complete confidence.

  ‘I’m glad I did the exam because I don’t know how anyone can do the job without having learned the stuff within it. You can always check things, but it’s good to know them first. It gives you a reference point, where you can confirm that you’re right, rather than wondering what the hell you should do in any given situation.

  ‘It is a mess. FIFA haven’t helped at all. The money in the game means that people will do desperate things to get in on deals. I’ve had a Portuguese agent contact me saying, “Look, I represent this player at Benfica. Manchester United have offered fifty-five million euros for him. We know you’ve got UK contacts, could you speak to these clubs for me?” When I’ve done due diligence, he’s got nothing to do with the player. I get an email a week from some fairly high-level bullshitter, trying to connect A with B and somehow jump in the middle.

  ‘I was waved through the new intermediary process because I passed the exam. I haven’t seen any positive effect of doing away with it. I can’t understand any business coming to the conclusion that removing knowledge as a barrier of entry is logical. If you do so, what are you saying? We welcome people with no knowledge, is what you’re saying, and it’s not rational.’

  The Spanish system, in which Redmond works for around 10 per cent of his time, is no less fraught, but his dealings with Barcelona have reinforced his respect for their talent identification process. He believes such familiar stories as Manchester City coveting three of their best academy prospects, Pablo Moreno, Ansumane Fati and Nico González, miss the point.

  ‘Barça look at English teams in youth tournaments, and are envious of their athletic level and cultural diversity, because their teams are very Catalan, but they regard any young player lured away by money as having a flaw. I suppose in the nicest possible way they feel they are smarter than everybody else. I’d probably go along with that. They really believe in the old rule about it being a narrow stride from the academy to the first team.

  ‘In terms of expertise, I’ve never met scouts like theirs. It’s no accident they spot players because occasionally I’ve had a chat with a Barça scout about an English player, and they know him better than their English counterparts. They’ve no interest in signing the player, because they trust their traditions and philosophy, but their knowledge is unmatched.’

  Such lucidity and reason are hardly calling cards of a game in which material wealth is matched by intellectual poverty. Redmond, who works alongside Bertie Foster, son of former England defender Steve, may be arguing against himself to an extent, but as someone who is not afraid to think counter-intuitively he detects danger in the shift of the balance of power from the player to the agent. One particular incident was telling:

  ‘A lot of agents are now attracted to younger players. To be honest, when I first started working with the academies, maybe I drank a little at that pool as well. I thought, this kid is going to be huge, and then he wasn’t. Then there’s another kid. He goes on loan to Cheltenham and it doesn’t work out for him either.

  ‘I saw the good and the bad, and it was predominantly bad. I wouldn’t say that I saw certain players being mistreated, but I certainly thought I could make a good living, and could contribute to their career, if they’d have me. On this particular night, I wa
s in the apartment of a very promising academy player at a Champions League club when the teenage son of his agent arrived.

  ‘As the player opened the door, the agent’s son said, “I thought you were supposed to drop off fucking tickets at my house after training.” That’s incredible, awful behaviour, in any business. I’d been having conversations about this sort of thing with my wife and other friends within the game, and this confirmed to me that things have gone too far the other way.

  ‘Players now feel like they are working for the agents. This is totally wrong. Some agents take ten per cent when for me it should always be five. I’ve seen Premier League players, discovering a couple of years down the line that the agent has taken more from them than they realised, being afraid to phone them to discuss the issue. They are in awe because he’s this major broker, as they see it.

  ‘One first-team player whose contract with his agent had expired told me he was afraid to leave him because he had all the connections. When I looked into it, the player had been trying, unsuccessfully, to move for three transfer windows. From doing a little snooping around, I found out that this agent had been looking for an agency fee of two million quid.

  ‘When I spoke off the record to a couple of clubs they said to me, “Oh, we like the player, but the agent is a fucking lunatic. He’s a megalomaniac. We’re not giving that sort of money to anybody.” So the agent, the person the player thought had all the connections, was actually working against him getting the move he wanted.

  ‘If anything, the pastoral side is even more important when you are dealing with young players. I’m confident on the legal side, the contractual side, but I have learned most from seeing things done badly rather than by looking at someone and saying, “That’s how to do it.” Does that tell you anything?’

  It is an indication of a strange combination of complacency and desperation, greed and financial recklessness. In such circumstances it is not a huge shock that Redmond, a member of the Association of Football Agents, which is trying to become more transparent under the chairmanship of Mike Miller, spends a lot of the time either on the phone, or pretending to be on it, during breaks in their meetings:

  ‘There are a handful of agents I know and trust. I have the odd coffee with them, and talk generally about football. We don’t really talk about each other’s clients. I don’t really like many agents. Sometimes I’m judging a book by its cover. I might be wrong, but it’s in my interests to keep a professional distance because I don’t want to be accused of trying to get their players, and I don’t want them anywhere near my players.

  ‘There’s a lot of desperation. The oldest trick in the book is the bullshitter who goes around with a car boot full of football boots. He hands them out to players with a line about him knowing the top guys in the company, when he has actually paid for them out of his own pocket. It is fantasy when the reality is any agent worth their salt can get free boots for a reasonably well-regarded player.

  ‘I don’t initiate conversations about that with parents, but if they raise it I am happy to assist them. The mum of a young player I’m helping at Everton came to me, saying that he was costing them a fortune, going through six or seven pairs of boots a season. At two hundred pounds a pair that was a burden because they are not a rich family. That was something we could fix straight away by having boots sent to him.

  ‘But I never use that as a basis for a relationship, because if you do you’re just offering what everybody else has. You’ve got to be careful. It’s very easy to say, “Oh, listen, happy birthday, here’s an iPhone and this and that,” but if you start doing that someone else will start getting him an iPad, and you look shit. You’ve always got to be judged on the quality of your work and the support you give.

  ‘I got a call the other day from the company which supplies boots to a young player I have just signed. Their rep was laughing his head off. He told me that when the lad was called up by England, he had ten people call him to say they represented the player. Of course, he knew differently. Five of them were from the same major agency, and didn’t realise the others had been on.

  ‘It is ambulance chasing, really. I don’t know the structure of some of the agencies, but I guess a lot of them are on commission only. They desperately want to work in football, and consequently will do whatever it takes. Most of them are pretty transparent, and parents have become a lot more savvy.

  ‘They talk amongst each other. If you are a parent of a promising under-16 player, you will get to know about the agent who is unscrupulous, or a liar. Word gets around. I don’t make people promises; the only thing I promise is that I’ll work my backside off for them. I’d never say to a parent, “You know what, your son is going to play for Barcelona one day.” I’d never do that.

  ‘I’m pretty consistent. I tell the boy his first fight is to have a career as a player, at any level. Once he has got out of the academy system and is playing football with grown men, he will find his level. That may be going straight through to the first team, at an Arsenal or a Tottenham, or it might involve being released, and going to a Swindon Town.

  ‘Every player needs a starting point at first-team level and that is what a lot of them don’t get. My starting point is that nobody makes it. The trick is how to navigate the system to give yourself the best chance to do so. You never know what the future holds, so I stress to them that good work is never wasted.’

  At times, this involves bordering on being a professional nuisance. Redmond calls opposition academy managers, or heads of recruitment, before matches, to brief them on his client’s status. No selection secrets are disclosed; it is merely an insurance policy, designed to keep the player’s name at the forefront of an influential individual’s mind.

  ‘If I’ve got a player who is sixteen or seventeen years old, and he’s playing, I’m not shopping the guy out. I don’t want him to agitate for a move. But what I am doing is speaking to clubs he is playing against, and saying, “Just keep an eye on him, because you never know.” The player could hit eighteen and go through a period when he is not playing very often, so he can’t be scouted. That means he has to go trialling, if he is released. At least this way when they are in the spotlight I make sure people know they exist. That’s all you can do.’

  Redmond speaks quickly, occasionally forcing his words into a traffic jam around his vocal chords. He works in a world of deceptive courtesies, flagrant phonies and poor character actors. Though some in football will doubtlessly be distracted by his ardour, and appalled by his candour, there is something refreshing about an individual prepared to puncture the game’s pretty balloons:

  ‘Maybe I’m unusual, but I choose not to work with even potential arseholes. Maybe when I first started I took a gamble on a couple of situations, and regretted it. Maybe it was a parent that was a nightmare to try and work alongside. To give you an example, I was phoned by the dad of the captain of a national under-18 team, who was a defender at a big club in the UK.

  ‘I know the player. I’ve got no interest in taking the player. I could make some money out of the player but I don’t want to. I don’t like him. When I say I don’t like him, I’ve seen enough of him to see that he thinks he’s arrived. And in my opinion, although he’s at a big club now, his level is League Two. I’ve no interest in being the guy that delivers that player down the slope.

  ‘A player hasn’t got have Champions League potential for me to work with him. If I think that Swindon Town is the top end of a guy’s potential, I’ll take him if he’s going to work his arse off to get there. In the last year I’d say I’ve probably done maybe a dozen contracts that I haven’t taken money for.

  ‘Some of the players have been relatively young, others a little bit older, but if he is on a low salary, why would I take five per cent if I don’t need to? It might sound a little naïve and that’s probably why I’m better outside of the large agency structure. You hear stories of certain agencies talking about each player having six individual revenue strea
ms.

  ‘I just laugh when they talk about a brand, because that looks after itself if you’ve got a player who plays for a really big team. It’s simple: people will pay that person to do shit if he’s very good at football. If he is an ugly bastard, fewer people will pay him to do certain things. If he’s a handsome guy – and there’s no way to manipulate that – he does what he wants. You can’t build a brand around nothing. You can’t build a brand around a sixteen-year-old who has never kicked a ball with men.’

  His experience of working with young players in an educational capacity crystallised his conviction that clubs could do more to assist academic development. He believes concentration on BTEC courses lowers the bar, and that players between the ages of 16 and 18 would benefit from the additional responsibility of studying for at least two A levels, or further GCSEs if that is more educationally appropriate for the individual.

  Temptation is omnipresent in such a materialistic, status-conscious culture. Redmond was aghast to hear one of his 16-year-old players was selling his complimentary boots to less celebrated teammates, ‘and absolutely ripped into him’. His lecture on the importance of mutual respect and the warped morality of ‘treating people like dirt’ was part of a thematic approach:

  ‘To be honest, it is easy to come up with these little things that sound like bumper stickers. I challenge my players by saying, “I know you’ve got your career plan and your dreams, but did anyone train better than you today?” And if they go, “I don’t know, I didn’t really think about it,” I tell them to start thinking about it. Don’t let it happen again. If you trained really well on Monday, don’t celebrate it on Tuesday. Do it again, because that’s what top players do. You can’t do the impossible but you can do your best every day if you focus on it.’

  He works on personal recommendation and on average takes on one new player each month, ‘because with not so many mouths to feed I don’t have to go chasing’. He learned from early mistakes, dealing with the neuroses of mid-career cast-offs from other agents, and has followed the market trend, which dictates that the best players are recruited earlier.