January Window (23 page)

I couldn’t disagree with that assessment. It wasn’t the fact that McIlvanney was a Scot that made me like him, it was his sheer ability as a writer. He never disappointed you. When George Best had died, in November 2005, it had been McIlvanney who’d written the most eloquent appreciation of George in his ‘Voice of Sport’ column. I still remembered a particularly favourite phrase of mine that he’d written then: ‘Trying to explain how or why the sight of men playing about with a ball can hold countless millions in thrall from childhood to dotage is a task beyond rational argument. But we never needed anything as prosaic as logic when George was around.’ Amen. Mac hadn’t always written kind things about João Zarco – once he’d described his approach to football as ‘forensic’ and the man himself as ‘the reigning master of sporting realpolitik’ – but he was always scrupulously fair.

‘Yes,’ I told Sarah. ‘I’ll speak to him. But only because it’s a piece about Zarco.’

Sarah put out the press release on Twitter and almost immediately I started getting texts from other managers that were an understandable mixture of commiserations and congratulations. From Porto – Zarco’s home town – I received an Instagram of the Estádio do Dragão where, underneath a mural of the club’s famous dragon, there was now an enormous brooding photograph of Zarco flanked by two members of the Portuguese National Republican Guard. While from Glasgow, where Zarco had ended his career as a very popular player with Celtic, every inch of the green railings that surrounded Jock Stein’s statue was now covered with lengths of black ribbon. In the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where for a while Zarco had managed Atlético Mineiro, the Estádio Raimundo Sampaio – a ground that always reminded me a little of Arsenal’s old stadium at Highbury – the pitch was now covered with flowers. It seemed that the man’s death had touched people all over the world.

One or two of these texts I answered, but I was rather more interested in reading the hundreds of texts that were on João Zarco’s ‘something else’ mobile phone. Mostly these were to and from Paolo Gentile who, as well as having been Zarco’s agent, had been the club’s agent, too – at least he had been in the recent transfer of Kenny Traynor. The texts between Gentile and Zarco were undated and often deliberately obfuscating, but it was quickly obvious that Zarco had taken a bung on the Traynor transfer. For a nine-million-pound transfer an agent would have made close to a million quid in commission. That was just normal pay for a top-ten football agent like Paolo Gentile, and indeed he’d made much bigger fees on higher-priced players. When Henning Bauer went to Monaco from Bayern Munich for fifty million euros, Gentile had walked away with a cool five million euros.

Put simply, a bung is an illicit payment made to ensure that a player-transfer deal is completed satisfactorily; a club sanctions a payment to an agent, some of which then gets secretly handed back to a manager in cash. Famously, during the scandal that followed on from the transfer of Teddy Sheringham to Nottingham Forest, Terry Venables alleged that Brian Clough ‘liked a bung’. And not very much has changed. Managers and agents are perhaps more careful of the FA and the Inland Revenue these days but, as anyone in football will tell you, illicit payments are more or less impossible to police. I wouldn’t ever take a bung myself, but if an agent and a manager decide between them that cash should change hands, then I don’t see how it can be prevented.

Zarco and Gentile were wise to be cryptic. The penalties for taking a bung were severe, as the former manager of Arsenal, George Graham, would testify: he was the first and only casualty of the bungs scandal that hit football in 1995. He lost his job and was punished by the FA with a year-long ban from football.

What was less obvious was exactly how and when and in what form the bung on Kenny Traynor was to be paid to Zarco. I had to read the texts several times before I could get any kind of a handle on what had happened between the two men.

I
assumed VS was Viktor Sokolnikov, DK was Denis Kampfner, KT was Kenny Traynor and SD was Silvertown Dock.