Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Crans-Montana, Switzerland. Monday, 4 June 2018.]

The bus came up the mountain in low gear, grinding, the engine working hard.

Out the right-hand window the world just dropped away. A valley going blue with distance. A very long way down.

I’d flown in Sunday night with Marcus asleep on my shoulder and a flask of bad coffee, and we’d bused up in the dark to a hotel I’d only seen in photos.

Woke Monday to this.

I’ll tell you what the place looks like, because the place is half the plan.

Crans-Montana is a ski resort with the snow taken off it. Fifteen hundred metres up, where the air has a third less in it than your lungs are used to. Which is exactly why I picked it, and exactly why the federation’s fitness lad whistled through his teeth when I said it.

Chalets with big sloping roofs, dark wood gone silver. Geraniums in the window boxes, because the Swiss cannot help themselves.

Donk.

A cowbell, down the slope. A real one. On a real cow, because there’s a herd in the field below the training pitch and they do not care that a World Cup squad has moved in upstairs.

Snow still on the peaks across the valley. In June.

The air smelled of pine and cut grass and cold, and it was so clean it felt like a trick.

The hotel was ours. All of it.

Spa turned into a medical room. Ballroom turned into a gym. Conference room turned into a war room, Marcus’s screens already up the walls by breakfast. No guests. No press. No phones at a fence, because there was no fence and nobody to put a phone to it.

Eight hundred miles from the nearest man who wanted to call me a fraud.

That was the whole point. You cannot build a team in a goldfish bowl. So I brought them up a mountain with cows and no wifi and nothing to do but become a side.

Forty-odd of us, once you counted everyone. Twenty-three players. My lot. Theirs.

Mine had flown in over three days, and I’d watched them arrive like a man watching his own furniture carried into a new house.

Bray first. Set pieces and defence, sixty-one, built like a recycling bin. Took one look at the gradient on the training pitch, which I’d picked partly for the gradient, and said, ”You’re a cruel man, Daniel.” Meant it as a compliment.

Marcus and his two analysts and what looked like a server farm. He does not travel light when there are three of the best sides on earth to take apart.

Michael Steele, goalkeeping coach. Quiet as a church until you put two keepers and a bag of balls in front of him. He was here because I had a goalkeeper question the iPad could not answer, and Steele could.

And Rebecca, my head physio, who had the spa turned into a treatment room and a recovery protocol on the wall before her case was unpacked. I’d back her in a corner against any federation doctor in the building.

The four I don’t work without. Then their people behind them.

I’d fought Jessica’s war to bring every one of them, and walking that corridor with my own staff in it, in a Swiss hotel, getting the job done, I will not pretend it didn’t feel like something.

But my four were not the twenty-three I’d come for.

Those I met all at once. In the room. Monday morning. On purpose.

Because you learn more about a group of men in the ninety seconds it takes them to walk in and choose a seat than in anything any of them says once he’s sat down.

I stood at the front and let them come.

They came in jet-lagged and wary, the way any squad comes to a new manager three weeks out. Half of them off weekend flights from Spain and Italy and the Gulf and England. All of them having spent four days reading that the federation had lost the plot and hired an Englishman who’d need a translator to say good morning.

Scrape, clack of chairs. Deep heat and clean kit. Forty-six studs on a hard floor.

And I read them as they came, the thing behind my eyes doing its quiet work, a shape settling over each man as he found a seat.

But I’ve learned not to trust the shapes too far in a room like this. The shapes are a week old off an iPad. They can’t tell you the thing I came up a mountain to learn, which is how these men are with each other.

Who walks in beside who. Who saves a seat. Who comes alone.

Benatia came in last.

On purpose, the way captains do, so the room’s full to be walked through. Thirty-one. Built like a door.

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MEHDI BENATIA · Centre-back, captain · Age 31 Current Ability 152 / Potential 152 Positioning 16 · Marking 16 · Heading 16 · Strength 15 Bravery 17 · Leadership 17 · Composure 15 · Determination 16

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I didn’t need the reading. I watched the room do the thing rooms do around a real captain, a small turn of heads toward him that nobody decided to do. He had a word and a hand for half of them on the way past, easy, unhurried.

He clocked me at the front. Held it a beat. No hostility, just a professional taking the measure of another.

Sat down front and centre. Folded his arms. Waited, politely, to be unimpressed.

That was the man. Win him, the room came with him. Lose him, I had a fortnight and twenty-three strangers and Spain at the end of it.

Then Ziyech came in, and here’s where I have to be straight, because the easy version of this man is a lie.

He did not slink. He did not glower.

He came in laughing. At something Amrabat said behind him, a quick bright laugh. Fist-bump for the kid En-Nesyri. A long handshake with the keeper Bounou that turned into the pair of them grinning about something from a camp two years gone.

He wasn’t the outsider the number had me braced for. He was liked. If anything, he was the funny one.

It was only when he sat that you saw it.

He took the end of a row. By the wall. Where he could see the whole room and the whole room couldn’t quite see him.

And when the laughing stopped and the manager was about to speak, a stillness came over him that didn’t come over the others. A held-back watchfulness.

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HAKIM ZIYECH · Attacking midfield · Age 25 Current Ability 154 / Potential 162 Technique 18 · Passing 17 · Vision 17 · Flair 17 · Set Pieces 18 Decisions 14 · Teamwork 11

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The gift and the cost, sat there in two numbers next to each other. Technique 18. Teamwork 11.

Not a sulk. A self-possession so complete it had nowhere to put itself but slightly apart. The look of a man who’s been the most gifted person in every room he’s walked into, and has learned to wait and see what a new voice is going to want from that.

That’s harder to coach than a bad attitude. A bad attitude you can break. You cannot break a man out of being right about himself.

I’d get to him. Not today. Not by being the Englishman who walks in and tells the best player in the country to track back.

That order, from a stranger, on day one, bounces. And hardens him. His turn would come from inside the room, off a voice he already trusted, and the fortnight was for finding whose voice that was.

And then there was the one I got wrong.

I’d had the squad a week. I’d read every man on it twice. And on the iPad, one name had gone past me almost without stopping, because the system had filed him neat and small and I’d let it.

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SOFYAN AMRABAT · Defensive midfield · Age 21 Current Ability 128 / Potential 160 Stamina 16 · Work Rate 16 · Tackling 14 · Aggression 15

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