False Nine (3 page)
‘Have you thought about joining UKIP?’ she said.
Olympique Gymnaste Club Nice Côte d’Azur was eleventh out of twenty in Ligue 1, and Paris Saint-Germain was second. Nice, founded in 1904, was the older club by seven decades and doing rather better than the fire sale of players in the summer might have led us to expect. Paris had not lost a football match since the beginning of the season and while I’d come to France looking forward to seeing Thiago Silva, David Luiz and Zlatan Ibrahimovic in action for PSG, it was the Parisian number nine, Jérôme Dumas, who impressed me the most. He was as quick as greased lightning and just as unpredictable, with a left foot that was as sweet as any I’d seen; the player he reminded me of most was Lionel Messi. It seemed strange that there was a rumour he was for sale. He was full of running and might have scored had there been more of an understanding between him and Edinson Cavani, nicknamed ‘the matador’ on account of his flamboyant style on the pitch. Zlatan might have scored the only goal – from a penalty – but the Parisians did not convince and, after the goal in the seventeenth minute, unaccountably PSG took their foot off the gas which left the initiative with the Niçois, who looked unlucky not to come away with a point.
We went back to the Plaza and had a quick shower before going out for dinner.
*
The following morning I left Louise in bed and went down to breakfast with Gerard Danton, who was one of the directors at OSG Nice. He was a handsome, well-dressed man in his forties and I was glad I’d decided to take Louise’s advice and wear a blue blazer, a shirt and a new tie from Charvet that she had bought me the day before. We spoke in French. It’s a language I love to speak although my Spanish and German are better.
‘This is a nice hotel,’ said Danton. ‘I’ve not stayed here myself. I usually stay at the Meurice. But I think I prefer this.’
‘My girlfriend would probably agree with you. And of course it’s very handy for the Metro.’
He frowned, as if he didn’t quite understand why someone staying at the Plaza could think the Metro to be at all important.
‘I took the Metro to the match,’ I added.
‘You took the Metro to Parc des Princes?’ He sounded surprised as if he’d never considered doing this himself.
‘Quicker than the car. It took me no time at all. Besides, I like going to a match on the Metro. In London I can’t do it. Not for the present, anyway. I’d get too much stick.’
He glanced out of the window into the hotel courtyard. ‘What’s that they’re building out there?’
‘It appears to be an ice rink.’
Danton shivered. ‘Paris is too cold for me,’ he said. ‘I prefer the south. I take it you’ve been to Nice.’
‘Many times. I love the Riviera. Especially Nice. It’s the only part of the Côte d’Azur that feels like a proper city.’
‘With all the problems that brings.’
‘Not all. You’ve got the nicest climate in Europe. Spain and Italy are too hot. Nice is Goldilocks. Just right.’
‘Tell me. Why on earth did you leave City? You were doing so well there.’
‘I loved the club, it’s true and I miss it more and more. I suppose I was an idealist. You might say I believed in a certain style of football. And perhaps I was not pragmatic enough.’
‘That’s a very diplomatic answer.’
‘I’m afraid it’s the only one you’re going to get. Really, it’s best I don’t say any more. Since Tony Blair and George Bush diplomacy has a habit of sounding like a lie.’
‘Very well. What did you think of our football?’
‘The first half an hour was difficult for you. They wouldn’t have got that penalty anywhere but the Parc des Princes. But Grégoire Puel organised his players very well and you endured the storm, which was mercifully brief. Frankly, they allowed you back into the game when they should have closed it down. If you play with the same intensity you showed in the second half you’ve a good season ahead of you, Mr Danton. Given that you were missing some key players I thought you made a very good game of it. They were lucky to get three points.’
‘And yet, we’ve had just one point in our last four matches. How can we put things right? What is the best way forward for Nice? What’s going wrong?’
‘In my opinion, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just that you don’t have Qatari money to throw around like confetti on the likes of Cavani, Ibrahimovic, Luiz, Silva, or Dumas. PSG have bought their second place, just like Manchester City have bought theirs. If you had any one of those players things might be very different for you. Do you have a spare thirty-five million to buy Jérôme Dumas? Because I hear PSG might be looking to offload him in January.‘
Danton shook his head. ‘We’ve had a difficult summer. We had to reduce our wage bill quite substantially. We couldn’t afford that price.’ He shrugged. ‘Nobody can, unless they have an Arab or Russian daddy to buy them all the cakes they want.’
‘Oil money distorts everything. Not just football. Take a look around this hotel. There are people staying here who spend money like it has no real meaning.’
‘True. But it’s the same at the Meurice.’
I shrugged. ‘You’re punching above your weight, Mr Danton. Puel is doing a good job. I’m sure I couldn’t do any better than him. Not with your resources. Your goalkeeper, Mouez Hassen, made an excellent save. He kept you in the game. And if Eysseric had scored we might be having a very different conversation. In the first half the ball burned your feet. In the second you started to enjoy yourselves. I don’t see much that needs to change. Except maybe that you should tell your players to free themselves a little more, and to enjoy the game. All of which makes me wonder why you wanted this meeting.’
‘Window shopping. Like everyone else in Paris. Who can afford to do anything else in this city? Apart from the Russians and the Arabs.’
‘Don’t forget the Chinese. They may have slightly less money than the Russians and the Arabs but there seem to be more of them spending it in Paris.’
‘It’s not everyone who would be straight enough to say what you’ve said, Mr Manson. Especially when he’s unemployed. That kind of honesty speaks volumes about a man’s character. For the same reason I admire a man who’s not too proud to take the Metro. So, I hope you’ll allow me to pay for your weekend. The fact is, you’ve probably saved me quite a bit of money this morning. And I appreciate that most of all. Especially in Paris.’
The best way to see Shanghai is at night when the huge, neon-lit city looks like a fabulous, black velvet-lined jewel box full of shiny red rubies, glittering diamonds and bright blue sapphires. Tempest was right. It was just like
Skyfall
, except that I wasn’t planning to kill anyone. Not that anyone would have noticed, probably. I’d never seen so many people. Shanghai has a population of twenty million and it’s hard to imagine that the individual has any real significance. Equally, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on. Everything looks like a major metropolis but when you can’t read anything very much it’s easy to feel lost and out of your depth. There’s that and the fact that I had a hard time telling Chinese people apart, which isn’t racist so long as you recognise that they probably have the same problem with people in the West.
My host was the Chinese billionaire, Jack Kong Jia, who had contacted Tempest with an invitation for me to come and manage his football club, Shanghai Xuhui Nine Dragons, on a rolling six month contract. JKJ, as he was popularly known, owned the Nine Dragons Mining Company and was reportedly worth six billion dollars, which explained why I’d been installed in an eight thousand pound a night Chairman’s Suite on the eighty-eighth floor of the Park Hyatt, one of the highest hotels in the world.
‘Jack Kong Jia is supposedly in the market to buy an English football club,’ Tempest had explained back in London. ‘He’s not just looking for a manager in Shanghai but someone who knows English football and can help advise him about that, so it would be a good thing if you and he got along.’
‘Which one? Any idea?’
‘Reading. Leeds. Fulham. Take your pick. Owning a football club is not for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure. You might need nine dragons to give yourself the courage to do it.’
‘I don’t know if I want to work with another foreign billionaire,’ I said. ‘I worked for one before, remember? And I didn’t like it.’
‘Which is exactly why a six month contract in Shanghai would be a good idea. That way you can decide if you take to each other or not. Look, Scott, this guy might be the next Roman Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour and let’s be realistic, it’s not as if there are any other offers right now.’
‘True. But it’s not like I need the money. I can afford to wait for the right offer to come along. And I’m not sure this is right for me. It’s not as if I can even speak Chinese.’
‘I’ve only spoken to him on the telephone but Mr Jia speaks perfect English, so that’s not a problem. And half the team are from Europe.’
I grunted. ‘I keep thinking there’s a club in Germany I could manage. I speak fluent German, after all. I like it there.’
‘You’ve not been to Shanghai, have you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘It’s my opinion that to walk away from this would be like turning your back on the future.’
‘Are you speaking from experience?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re guessing.’
‘Call it intuition. Look, Scott, one of the reasons I was hired by you was so that I might have an opportunity in an almost exclusively male world. That means you have to accept that I’m going to think outside the box. I also have to tell you that I need to make a living and if I’m going to represent you I have to remind you that right now I’m earning ten per cent of nothing. So, please. Give this a chance.’ She picked up my hand and kissed it fondly. “And do try to cheer up, Scott. Smile. Things will get better, I’m sure of it.”
‘All right. And you’re pobably right. I’ll go.’
‘And when you get there don’t talk yourself out of a job, the way you did in Paris. Try not to be so very honest. The current team manager, Nicola Salieri, has already resigned. Mr Jia seems to have a high opinion of you.All you have to do is go to the match and listen to what he has to say.’
Mr Jia met me in a luxurious private box at the thirty thousand capacity Yu Garden stadium where Shanghai Xuhui – wearing a blue and red home strip that looked suspiciously like Barcelona’s – were hosting Guangzhou Evergrande. He was a handsome man in his early thirties with Michael Caine glasses, an American accent, a diamond-encrusted watch as big as the Queen’s coronation crown and, in the lapel of his suit, a little Chinese flag. We were carefully attended by eight beautiful Chinese girls wearing smiles that were bigger than their little black minidresses. They poured our drinks, fetched us food, lit Mr Jia’s endless cigarettes and took care of his large and almost continual in-play bets. He drank Krug champagne – all the time, it seemed, and not I thought because he liked it but because it was the most expensive. I restricted myself to Chinese beer – Tsingtao – because I liked it and because I wanted to keep a clearish head for business and the game in hand. But in truth we were so high above the pitch it was difficult to follow the match. The player names on the shirts were yellow and in Chinese and while they also had numbers, the programme was in Chinese too, so I had little or no idea of who was who.
‘You like Shanghai?’ he asked. ‘Your hotel room? Everything is to your liking?’
‘Yes, everything is great, Mr Jia.’
‘I want you to like it here. This is the future, Mr Manson. It’s impossible to be here and not to think so, don’t you agree?’
‘Wasn’t it Confucius who said that prophecy is always difficult – especially when it’s a prophecy about the future?’
Mr Jia laughed. ‘You know Confucius? That is good. Not many managers can quote Confucius. Even in China.’
I shrugged, modestly. I had an idea that there were many famous names who were alleged to have coined this saying, among them Confucius, but I had no wish to insult Mr Jia by suggesting that this was now the kind of quotation that could be found inside any Christmas cracker.
‘I was very much an admirer of London City,’ he continued.
‘Me, too. Still am.’
‘Of João Zarco and yourself. I tell you honestly that if Mr Zarco had still been alive it might have been him who was sitting here now.’
‘Zarco was the best manager in Europe,’ I said. ‘If not the world.’
‘This is my opinion also,’ said Jia. ‘But I also think that you are the next best thing. That if you had stayed at London City you would have achieved greatness. Of course it might turn out that their loss could be my gain.’
Mr Jia allowed one of the hostess girls to refill his glass. While she did so his hand drifted up her skirt and stayed there for a moment but she did not flinch and the smile remained fixed on her face. Evidently she was used to this Game of Thrones style behaviour. And I got the feeling that she would not have blinked an eye if I had copied his behaviour and done the same. But my hands stayed wrapped around my beer glass.
‘I heard a strong rumour that your departure from City had something to do with a foreign betting syndicate,’ he said. ‘That you discovered that the death of Bekim Develi in Athens was connected with an in-play bet made in Russia. Oh, it’s all right, I’m not asking you to confirm this rumour. This is common knowledge here in China. I like to bet myself – all Chinese people like to gamble – but I make it a rule never to bet on my own team. The bets you’ve seen me making are all on other matches taking place this afternoon. Principally the match between our principal rival, Shanghai Shenhua and Beijing Guoan. I tell you this so that you will know that I am not a crook. I am, however, very rich and what else can you do with money but spend it? I have a million yuan riding on the result of that match; this is about a hundred thousand pounds. But there’s nothing to stop you betting on Nine Dragons, Mr Manson. Or for that matter on these dogs from Guangzhou Evergrande. Although I wouldn’t recommend it. They are without their best player – Arturo. The Brazilian? Shanghai Xuhui Nine Dragons will almost certainly beat the Greens this afternoon.’