The Nowhere Men (30 page)

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.

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.

‘Don’t get me wrong, good facilities are important. But they don’t make a player. Brazilian players play on the streets and kick a can around. There is a balance to be struck. An elitist world has been created, but ultimately a young footballer needs to be hungry. I came from non-league. Ian Wright came from non-league. Stuart Pearce came from non-league. Peter Beardsley as well. They’ve not come from brilliant situations but they’ve played games. Now when Man United under nineteens play Arsenal under nineteens it all looks great. They’ve got a perfect pitch, a lovely restaurant after the game, but that is not what the real world is like.

‘Get thrown out of some of the foreign teams, and you’ve literally got nothing. Survive, and you are brought up with the culture of your club. Take Barcelona. You’ve got players like Thiago, Montoya and Bartra moving up from the B team. They’ve played against men, in the equivalent of the Championship. They have to win. They must chase the game if they’re losing. It’s real. They identify with the club, and the demands of the game. It’s different here. Take Scott Sinclair. Ollie and me signed him at ten years old. Then he went to Chelsea, but was loaned out to a lot of different teams, all with a different culture. He didn’t know where he was for a while. It wasn’t until Swansea bought him, believed in him, and played him, that he did what he’s capable of.’

There were no short cuts. Carr was respected by his contemporaries because he had learned his trade. The new breed of numerate, dispassionate technical scouts lacked his earthiness and authority. Newcastle had been paying inordinate sums for substandard players on the strength of a promotional DVD, and needed some tough love. Carr was helping to reinvent a club once defined by the infamous Xisco, a seventh-choice striker who cost an initial £5.7 million and earned £12.5 million playing nine times in five years before returning to his natural level, the Spanish Second Division.

John Griffin, the sage of Wycombe Wanderers, remembered Carr fondly, ‘ducking and diving’ in non-league management with the likes of Dartford, Nuneaton Borough, Maidstone United, Kettering and Weymouth. David Pleat eased him into scouting at Tottenham because ‘he was such a hard worker and didn’t mind jumping on the Eurostar every weekend’. Carr contemplated retirement after a turbulent spell working for Sven-Göran Eriksson at Manchester City and Notts County, but is now contracted to Newcastle until he is 75. By the time the transfer window closed, at 11 p.m. on 31 January 2013, they had signed 11 players from Ligue 1.

Carr was stealing Arsène Wenger’s clothes, which would have endeared him to his former employers at White Hart Lane. One of Pleat’s observations – ‘never waste a flight’ – stuck with Carr, whose work ethic and affinity with his boyhood club gave him a head start with conscripts to the new model Le Toon army. ‘People know me,’ he admitted. ‘I’m from Newcastle, so if I bring in a bad player, I know I’ll get stick. We go for realistic targets, and we’re not able to pay big fees.’ The frisson of interest created by his son Alan, a camp comedian who, according to his father, ‘had no co-ordination and couldn’t trap a bag of wet cement’ was not sustained.

Carr looked for players with pace, youth and sell-on potential, but the process was often complicated. The career of Demba Ba, lost by Newcastle to Chelsea when the European champions exercised a buy-out clause, was an instructive case study. The sixth of seven children born to Senegalese immigrants who settled in Normandy, Ba played junior football for Montrouge FC 92 in the south western suburbs of Paris before undergoing unsuccessful trials at Watford and Barnsley in 2004.

Penrice detected him scoring 22 goals in 26 games for Rouen the following year, monitored his progress at Mouscron, and, like Carr, took a detailed interest in his development at Hoffenheim, whose chief scout was active in the French market. No one doubted Ba’s goalscoring talent. His knees, unfortunately, had the consistency of digestive biscuits. A €14 million move to Stuttgart was abandoned when he failed a medical; Stoke were similarly cautious when Penrice thought he had his man, for £7 million.

Carr kept his nerve when West Ham took the calculated gamble of offering a pay-as-you-play contract, and pounced when Ba exercised a clause allowing him to leave for free in the summer of 2012. Timing and good intelligence are the essence of modern scouting. Yohan Cabaye was, according to Penrice, ‘never an off-the-radar sort’. He was the star of a championship-winning team at Lille, and Newcastle merely moved fastest when it emerged he had a bargain buy-out clause of £4.5 million.

The nuances of the market are important. Newcastle’s cachet in France grew because of the standard of care lavished on Hatem Ben Arfa when his first season on Tyneside was decimated by a double break of his left leg. Flattery has its place; it was no coincidence Carr should choose to tell
L’Equipe
, the French sports daily: ‘I love France and the French players. Yohan Cabaye and Hatem Ben Arfa are real quality players, very professional and indispensable. Both of them are intelligent and understand quickly what you want, they also have a very good tactical brain. It is because the French youth academy system is so good.’

It can take years to create an overnight sensation. Carr and Penrice both began watching Papiss Cissé, Ba’s Senegalese striker partner, when he was at Metz, between 2005 and 2009. He was ineligible for a UK work permit when he joined newly promoted SC Freiburg in the Bundesliga for £1.4 million, but once he had acquired the necessary international experience, his price soared to £15 million. That dropped to £12 million. Once the asking price dipped below eight figures, a reflection of Freiburg’s sudden concern about the financial impact of relegation, Newcastle’s club secretary Lee Charnley did the deal, on Carr’s recommendation.