Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Voronezh, Russia. Tuesday 3 July 2018.]

Two days on from Luzhniki, and the noise had not stopped. It had spread.

Not just the streets, though the streets were still going. Casablanca, Rabat, and past all that, the whole of it. Cairo. Amman. Tunis. Beirut. Lagos, Dakar, Abidjan, that café in Nairobi that had taken us in weeks ago and would not let go.

Africa and the Arab world both, deciding at the same moment that a team of ours was a team of theirs, and getting behind it like nothing else on earth mattered.

But it was the desks now too. Marcus had the lot of it up on his tablet when he found me at breakfast, whether I wanted it or not.

Every studio in England had run the same graphic that morning. My face, and a number under it. 29. The youngest manager in the history of the World Cup to take a country into the last 8.

They had dug that old CCTV still out again, shelf stacker to history maker, and set it beside a shot of me being thrown at the Luzhniki floodlights by men who were not even mine.

Carragher had called it the story of the tournament. Keane had said, flat as slate, that he had given up being surprised by anything I did about a year ago. Henry had gone back to the toughness, the thing he cannot leave alone.

And the French papers had put us on the front. L’Équipe had run a picture of the sujood right across half a page, the whole team face down on the Luzhniki grass, and a headline I did not need Marcus to translate. I take a French front page as a small personal win these days.

Raj had sent a voice note that was just laughing, no words in it at all. The Railway Arms group chat had not drawn breath since the whistle. And the Palace lads had strung a banner up outside Selhurst that Sarah photographed for me on her way in. DANNY WALSH, MAKING HISTORY ON LOAN.

The Chaika training ground had changed too.

6 weeks ago it was a quiet complex in a quiet corner of an enormous country. Now there were 200 people at the fence by nine in the morning, kids mostly, Voronezh kids who had taken us in the way you take in a stray.

Every one of them wanted a photo, a shirt, a wave, anything at all.

The bakery woman who had been sending bread up to the lodge since the group stage now sent enough to feed a small army, and would not take a rouble for a crust of it.

Inside, the mood was a hard thing to manage, and I had known it would be.

Because you cannot un-ring a bell like Luzhniki. The lads were floating.

Hakimi’s phone had gone off so many times in the night that he had turned it face down in a drawer and left it there. Ziyech had 3 million new followers and a look on him like he could not decide whether to laugh or be sick about it.

They were global now, some of these boys, in a way they had not been a week ago, and that is a hard thing to carry and play football at the same time.

Endorsement people were ringing agents. A shoe company had sent a crate of boots up to the lodge for En-Nesyri that he had not asked for and did not need.

So I let them have the morning. There is no sense fighting the tide the day after the biggest night of a man’s life.

I let them soak it up, the fence and the photos and the phones, and I watched Benatia move quietly through the middle of it doing what a captain does. A word here. A hand on a young shoulder there. Keeping the boys’ feet somewhere in the postcode of the ground.

At eleven I blew the whistle, pulled them in, and told them the truth of it.

”Enjoy today,” I said, in the French they had got used to hearing it in. ”Enjoy every last bit of it. You have earned every photo, every phone call, every headline they can print.”

I let that sit a second.

”Because in 4 days, none of it means a thing. Croatia do not care what we did to Russia. Modrić does not care. On Saturday there will be another stadium full of people who want us on a plane home, and the one thing that keeps us here is what we do between now and then.”

They were quiet, watching me.

”So have your morning. Have your fun. And tomorrow we go back to work, because we are not done. We are a long way from done.”

They knew. This group always knew. That is the thing 6 weeks had built, under all the rest of it. That was worth more to me than any headline in England or France.

And under all of it, with a country on my back and a continent behind me and a quarter-final coming down the tracks at me, I still had a football club to run.

Because the window does not stop for a fairytale. If anything, a fairytale is the exact moment you move.

Dougie and Sarah had flown straight off the plane out of Voronezh, no rest, no lie-in, into the teeth of the window. Sarah on the club, the pre-season, the medicals, the mad daily churn of a hundred small things a caretaker inherits. Dougie on the deals.

The pair of them living on coffee and mobile phones in a half-empty training ground in South London while I pulled the strings I could reach from a couple of time zones east.

Brrrp. Brrrp. Dougie picked up on the second ring, the way he does when there is money on the table.

”Morning, son. Hard man to get hold of, when you’re busy being adopted by two continents.”

”Talk to me, Dougie. What’s done?”

”What’s done.” I could hear him settle in, a man who lives for this stretch of the year. ”Gnabry’s done. 75.”

I let that one sit. Serge Gnabry, that we had taken off Arsenal for coppers when half of England had written him off, and turned into the best young winger in the division. 75 million pounds. And I felt no way about it at all, which is the part people never believe.

”Who?”

He told me. Bayern, of all the clubs in the world. The same Bayern that had let the boy go to us for next to nothing two years back, paying 75 million to buy him off us again off the back of everything we had built into him. Cash, no add-ons, no messing. Signed and sealed by lunchtime.

”Bojan, 60, to Barcelona, gone through this morning. The club that raised him and then let him drift, buying him back for a British record off the back of the best season of his life under Sarah. Full circle, and 60 million in our pocket for the privilege.”

”And Mili, 35, to West Ham. They wanted a leader for that midfield and they have got a good one. He wanted the move, we were never going to stand in a good pro’s road, and 35 million for a 27-year-old holding midfielder is daylight robbery in our favour.”

”Tell him,” I heard Sarah say, somewhere behind him.

Dougie sighed the sigh of a man being made to share. ”Sarah wants you to know Steve Parish had to leave the room when the Gnabry money cleared. Grown man. Chairman of a Premier League club. Went and stood out in the car park on his own for 10 minutes and came back in with his eyes red.”

I laughed at that, properly, the first proper laugh in days.

I did the sum on the pad on my knee, scratch. 170 million pounds in, off three men who had cost us, between the whole lot of them, less than one decent full-back.

This is the part nobody outside the walls ever gets about how we do it. We are not City and we never will be, so we make our money instead of spending somebody else’s.

We find them young, or cheap, or broken. We coach them, we play them, we make them worth 10 times what we paid for them.

And then when somebody waves stupid numbers at us, we take the numbers and go and buy three more, and every year the club is a bit bigger and the bank is a bit deeper, and nobody sees us coming until we are already past them.

”Right. What’s it bought us?”

”Kovačić permanent, 25, went through last week. James done, 10 up front with the wages loaded onto bonuses, and I’ll tell you now, that boy is going to look a daylight steal by Christmas.”

A pause. ”Which leaves you the guts of 130 million in the bank, and a gaffer who only ever wants to buy 10-million-pound players. Speaking of.”

Before he got to the two he meant, I told him what Marcus had shown me, because it had made me grin.

It was not only us who had noticed. The football writers had clocked it, under all the World Cup racket. Palace, the story ran, were about to post the biggest trading profit any English club had ever turned in one window, and not one of them could work out how a club our size kept doing it.

There was a bloke on the radio calling us the smartest-run club in the country. There were think-pieces with graphs in them.

And the fans had gone to war with themselves. The forums split down the middle, half of them certain I was flogging the crown jewels off the back of one good year and taking the lot of them for mugs, the other half watching the names coming the other way and starting, slowly, to trust it.

”They’ll trust it,” Dougie said, ”the day Grealish walks through the door.”

”Grealish,” I said. ”Where are we?”

”Now that one is a race.” His voice changed.

He laid it out, and it was a thing of beauty and a thing of danger in the same breath.

Aston Villa were on fire. The taxman had a winding-up order in against them, and they had come within an inch of going under after losing the play-off final.

Steve Bruce had stood in front of a camera and said out loud, to anybody with a microphone, that selling Jack Grealish was inevitable. That the club needed 40 million just to keep the lights on.

A 22-year-old English playmaker, the best young thing outside the top flight, and his club so short of cash they would let him go for a fraction of what he is worth on any other day of any other year.