The Nowhere Men (5 page)

It was bad enough that a stranger should saunter through the heavy door, marked ‘with permission only’, which led to a sequence of four offices which symbolised the continuity of Everton’s decade under the Scot’s control. To allow someone of my calling into the nerve centre of a club which consistently overachieves in the face of financial restraint was positively heretical. My guide, James Smith, revealed the compelling simplicity of a system which many seek to emulate.

Appropriately, given the nature of my visit, Moyes was on a scouting mission in Europe. Thankfully, given my vulnerability, Duncan Ferguson, who has previous in dealing with unwanted intruders, was unaware of my presence. He was flicking yellow-flighted darts into a royal blue board in the players’ dining room around the corner. Smith, Everton’s head of technical scouting, was free to reveal the science behind the School of Science.

Smith has worked for Moyes since 2003. A sports science graduate from South Bank University in London who coached in the United States and worked his way up from Coventry City’s Community Scheme, he was among the first wave of performance analysts who seeped into professional football in the early years of the last decade. He was promoted after five years, when Moyes had the foresight to recognise the value of an integrated approach to recruitment, which embraced technology and made a virtue out of necessity.

‘I think he was the only manager outside the Premier League to use performance analysis software when he was at Preston,’ Smith recalled. ‘It’s not unlike him to want to have the best things and to be ahead of the game. Managers don’t let people in very easily – so much of the job is about relationships and confidentiality, because you are working very closely with them. He was not looking to overhaul recruitment exactly, but drag it forward a bit. He wanted someone with more of an academic background, as we stepped things up.’

Smith operates from the recruitment room. Its contents are cherished and highly classified. They represent Everton’s most valuable intellectual property. Moyes’ entire transfer strategy is mapped out on a succession of whiteboards which cover all four walls. This is the visualisation of a principle, the distillation of a phi-losophy. It underlines the collegiate nature of his approach and the clinical brilliance of his management skills. Everything is self-contained, yet inter-reliant.

Smith has 5,000 reports stored online, on around 1,000 potential targets. They conform to a blueprint, which matches the club’s culture, aspirations and financial status. ‘Maybe we’re quite an extreme example because we really don’t spend much money,’ he reflected. ‘Everything is motivated and directed by the way the manager’s mind works and the way he transmits the core message – we can’t afford to get it wrong. If Manchester City waste twenty million, which they’ve actually done at times, it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things. So twenty on Jo, twenty on Roque Santa Cruz. No problem. But if Everton waste twenty million, we’ll wait a long time to get anything like that again. David Moyes spends the money like it’s his own.

‘It is absolutely crucial that we’ve got a clear idea what, or who, we are looking for. The pool of players that could potentially play for Everton is huge – it’s in the thousands, so we need some way of tapering it down. There are a series of filters that extract the ones you don’t want. The first thing, of course, is that they’ve got to be good enough to play for a team that wants to be in the top half of the Premier League. So straight away you’ve ruled out most of the world’s footballers. But at the same time they haven’t got to be so good that they don’t want to play for Everton.

‘We know if they are potentially going to Manchester United, City, Arsenal or Chelsea, then they’re not for us. We won’t worry about a David Silva, and we dropped out of Gary Cahill quite early on because he was obviously going on to somewhere bigger. The next factor is age; that is massive because we’re very conscious of resale value. We wouldn’t typically buy someone over the age of twenty-six, because if you spend ten million pounds on a twenty-eight-year-old you’re probably not getting that money back, and you certainly won’t make any money out of them.

‘Of course the academy is of fundamental importance to a club like ours. We sold Wayne Rooney for megabucks, which funded a lot of things. But the essential advantage has been in getting resale value. So you buy Joleon Lescott for about five million and you sell him for about twenty-five. Character is also extremely important, but the problem is that if you aren’t paying much money for a player, there’s sort of a trade-off. You can have the character or you can have the ability. You can’t have both, because otherwise they’re not available cheaply. They’re big money’.

Smith paused, and laughed at the private mental image he had created: ‘I can think of specific examples of players we’ve got here who have one or the other. We’ve got the guy who is a fantastic character, who wants to train every day and loves being here. He’s desperate to prove himself in the Premier League but hasn’t got the real top-level ability. We’ve also got the other end of the spectrum, the guy who has masses of natural ability, who for whatever reason can’t quite sort his life out enough to get the best out of himself. But the bottom line is if his attitude isn’t so good, he won’t be here for long.

‘The other variable is injury. You don’t want people who are constantly missing games with funny little injuries. That’s worse actually, than someone who’s had a serious injury. That can happen to anyone. One of the things we do is keep a close record of stories in the media. Every player we’re interested in has a file, so you can piece things together, but there isn’t really any official way of knowing precise details. Theoretically, when they come to you for a medical, they’ve got all their medical notes with them. But very often they haven’t, especially when there are things in there that they don’t particularly want you to know about, and also by then it’s too late. By the time you’re doing the medical, you’re signing them.’

To the right of that heavy door, beside an incongruous blown-up photograph of Johan Cruyff, the only non-Evertonian depicted in the building, is the office designated for chief scout Robbie Cooke and his principal ally, Tony Henry, the former Manchester City player. It is a place of clutter and transience; a half-eaten jumbo Kit Kat nestles among DVDs of Mexican and South American football. An underscored train timetable lies in an in-tray.

Cooke, who played with Moyes at Cambridge United and worked part time for him at Preston before following him to Everton in 2002, heads a two-strand scouting network. Henry helps supervise six part timers, who operate in the UK. Thomas Hengen, the former Borussia Dortmund player, operates, full time, from Germany. The structure is supported by 13 additional part-time scouts, based largely in Europe. Bryan King, the former Millwall goalkeeper, is responsible for a three-man team in Scandinavia. A series of internal scouting conferences analyse trends and standardise reporting mechanisms. Each scout must assess every player under the age of 24 at his match, and grade them on specific aspects of performance. Moyes has produced what he calls ‘an MOT Test’, where players are judged against a checklist of up to 12 criteria for each position. The optimal aim is to have up to 50 reports on a primary transfer target, written by between ten and twelve scouts.

Smith argued: ‘What it’s about is having the best system and the right people in the right places. It’s about the flow of information getting to the right people, who make the right decisions. The whole business about someone’s eye is so subjective it’s untrue. It never ceases to amaze me. We’ve had well respected people go to the same game, to watch the same player, and come back with a different view of him. One guy will say “No, he didn’t really contribute much – he had one good little bit of play where he beat a couple of players on the edge of the box but then shot wide, that’s about all he did.” And the other guy will say “Yeah, he was quite quiet, but you know what? He had this one moment on the edge of the box where he beat a couple and he nearly scored, and I saw enough there.”

‘We do a lot with video now. That’s a big part of the job, because it gets around this business of the manager not being able to see as many games as you’d like him to see. So although he’d never sign a player without seeing him, and he goes to more matches than almost anyone, he can have a really good feel for the player before he’s ever actually been and seen him. I’m almost talking about our own flaws here – but if you show the footage to a room full of people, they all go away with the same view of the player because they influence each other. So and so says “cor, that was good” and the others will go “oh yeah, it was”; or “I don’t like that. . . . no, it was crap”. But if you get them to watch it individually, they’ll each go away with different views.’

Moyes occupies the corner office next door to Cooke. It features a wooden desk with the dimensions of a full-sized snooker table, and a digital monitor that wouldn’t be out of place in the local Multiplex. Visitors occupy three leather chairs, facing him. A picture window enables the manager to look out, across a balcony of wooden decking, on to the training pitches, which flow into one another on the 55-acre site, in the Liverpool suburb of Halewood. ‘The master of all he surveys,’ said Smith, reading my thoughts.

One of the definitive elements of the Moyes mythology is the nature of his job interview with Bill Kenwright, the chairman whose emotional commitment to Everton borders on the obsessive. Even he was surprised by the response when he contacted Moyes, and invited him to his home in London to discuss the position. The Scot refused to do so until he had done that night’s work, scouting striker Nathan Ellington at Bristol Rovers for Preston. After the game, Moyes drove to the capital, leaving Kenwright at around 1.30 a.m. He completed his 550-mile round trip to Lancashire at 4.30 a.m., and took training five hours later.

His commitment inspires loyalty and, it must be said, a little awe. Steve Brown, who took Smith’s role as principal performance analyst, hails Moyes’ ‘brilliance’ in devising specific tactical strategies. The same qualities which make him a leading coach – according to Brown ‘he’s so detailed, thorough and methodical in his work’ – make him a good judge of a player. The complementary disciplines coalesce in the preparation of a gameplan, which draws on detail contained in Everton’s opposition scouting reports. Brown told
Sports Illustrated
: ‘Now we tend to examine at least five games of the team we’re facing, break them down, link them up with the scouting reports we have and the stats we get from Prozone. From that we build a detailed picture of how we think the opposition play and what we think their style, strengths and weaknesses are, what their intricacies are in terms of what they’re doing positionally, and if their individual players have trends and tendencies in their play.’

In such a collegiate atmosphere, the pressure to develop professionally is subtle, but decisive. Smith admitted: ‘I go to probably two games a week. That’s quite important because of the credibility issue. How can you sit in a discussion and contribute to it by having an opinion if you don’t know the players? So in that respect I’m just like any other scout, really. What I’m not doing necessarily, is disappearing off into Europe midweek because I need to be here. I go abroad at weekends to see games, to understand the realities of the job, the match tickets, airport and hotels and what’s best for the guy on the road. If you never do it yourself, you can’t understand it, and it also leaves you vulnerable to the guy to whom you’re saying do this, this and this. He’s saying, “Fuck off. Why don’t you do it?” Well I do!’

Steve Round, Everton’s assistant manager, works out of the office opposite Moyes. He was another early disciple of performance technology. Elements from a PowerPoint coaching presentation, entitled ‘The Disciplines of Transition’ are on a whiteboard, alongside the psychedelic graffiti of a child’s self-portrait. The desk is dotted with reference books, fixture schedules and tomes on sports psychology. Round, too, is away, watching a player in Southern Europe. He has an integral role in the creation of a two-tiered gameplan with Moyes. The main strategy, which takes several hours to create, is distilled into a shorter, more accessible version for the players, featuring team shape, set piece analysis and opposition goals. Round enters the transfer process after first team coach Jimmy Lumsden has followed up leads sourced by the scouts, and sanctioned by Cooke. Again, the principle of collective responsibility applies.

Smith admitted: ‘When I started at the club, I didn’t know much about it all, so I’ve learned from the manager, from Steve, and the other staff. In the first job, I was doing all the pre- and post-match video work, so I spent a lot of time listening and showing them stuff, talking about stuff. Doing all the team meetings, travelling abroad, was a massive chance to learn from David. So I’ve got an idea of players from him. I kind of know what he’s looking for, what he’s thinking. I’m thinking out loud now, but my role is knitting it together, being a kind of a link between the manager and the scouts. He is the main man and the scouts aren’t really here, for much of the time.

‘Football is wracked with insecurity. Chief scouts are probably as good an example of that as any. For various reasons, their jobs haven’t been secure over the years. The view is that they’re the manager’s man so if the manager goes then he goes with him. Robbie, our chief scout, wants to discuss things and be kept updated with what’s going on. My role is to help him, make his life easier. Everything is fed back into the recruitment room. Anyone can just pop his head in at any time. It enables the manager to keep absolutely on top of what’s going on. That’s a lot of what I think David Moyes’ success is probably about – keeping on top of everything and checking, making sure you’re on it and it’s not just drifting.’

The secret room is unprepossessing, long and thin. It has the feel of a teacher’s study at a busy comprehensive. It is a mine of information, a tantalising glimpse of what might be, expressed in marker pens of different hues. The whiteboards on the walls have a logical sequence. To understand where Everton are in the recruitment process, they must be read from left to right. The first board features the most promising new foreign players, highlighted by the system. They are the pick of the 1,000 or so players under review, and are deemed realistic recruits. Annotated beneath individual positions, they span Europe and South America. Trends are highlighted: right backs, for instance, are in extremely short supply.