Glory Of The Football Manager System

Keane: ”It’ll be En-Nesyri.”

Everything in me stopped.

”He goes down as he strikes it,” Keane said, flat, bored, the way a man reads out a shopping list. ”Watch it back. He isn’t falling over because he’s emotional. He is on the floor before the ball is in the net. That’s a muscle. I’ve done that one.”

Nobody on that panel argued with him.

And in a breakfast room in Moscow, 20-odd men turned round at the same time and looked at the armchair by the window.

At a 20-year-old with his leg up on a stool and an ice wrap round the top of his thigh, who had not said a word since I walked in.

Youssef did not look at one of them.

He looked at me.

And I looked back at him.

And neither of us said anything at all, and on a television in the corner of the room Roy Keane carried on talking, and 8 seconds later he moved on to England’s full-backs.

”And here is the bit nobody has said out loud all morning,” Jones said, ”so I’ll say it. Danny Walsh is English.”

Neville shifted in his seat. ”David.”

”He’s from Manchester. Moss Side. He learned the game on a pitch with no nets on it. And on Wednesday night he is going to stand in the other dugout at a World Cup semi-final and try, with everything he has got, to knock England out of it.”

Neville: ”That’s his job.”

”I know it’s his job, Gary. I’m asking how he sleeps.”

Keane put his cup down.

”He’ll sleep fine. He’s a manager. You think I’d have gone easy on Ireland?”

Carragher: ”You’d have gone harder.”

Keane shrugged. ”Probably.”

And then Henry, last word, and he did not smile when he said it.

”He will not sleep at all. But not for the reason you think.”

Jones: ”Meaning?”

”He is not thinking about England tonight.” Henry looked down the lens the way he looks at a defender. ”He is thinking about the one who cannot walk.”

I put the coffee down and I walked out of that room, and I did not look at anybody on the way.

The numbers came in at 9.

FIFA do not publish for months. You stand in that bowl and you have not the faintest idea whether 4 men or 400 million are watching you.

But the broadcasters have their own, and Marcus turned the laptop round on the breakfast table.

Bootprint still on the lid. He has forbidden anybody in that building from cleaning it, and I expect it will be on a shelf in his house when he dies.

The average match at that World Cup pulled 191 million pairs of eyes.

Ours pulled a shade under 600 million.

More than double. The biggest audience of the tournament to that point, bigger than any group game, bigger than any last 16 tie, and Marcus put his finger on the line and said, quietly, ”Danny. This is the number that is wrong.”

”Why?”

”Because it is metered.”

And he is right, and it took me a minute to see it.

That figure counts a man on a sofa with a box on his telly. It counts England and it counts Germany and it counts a flat in Zurich.

It does not count a café in Casablanca with 60 blokes in it and 1 screen.

It does not count a street in Brussels where somebody has dragged a television out of a shop window. It does not count Abidjan. It does not count Rabat, or Dakar, or Tunis, or a wedding in Kenitra that stopped for 120 minutes and did not start again.

Out-of-home at that tournament ran to hundreds of millions of people on its own, and it is the softest number FIFA publish, and it is a guess.

And that is where every one of ours was.

The real number is not knowable. Marcus says that, and he is the most careful man I have ever employed, and he says it with a straight face.

The real number is bigger than anything on that screen.

Mustapha found me in the corridor and he could not speak.

He held his phone out at arm’s length like it was hot, and his hand was going, and he stood there, 54 years old, tie gone, still in yesterday’s tracksuit, and could not get a word out.

So I took it off him and read it.

The Confederation of African Football had put out 2 words. CONTINENTAL HISTORY.

Drogba had posted. Eto’o had posted. Half the continent’s football federations had posted, and 3 of them do not speak to each other.

Governments across North Africa and the Gulf had sent word to Rabat before the sun was properly up, and they are not countries that agree on much, and they agreed on this.

There were Moroccan flags on the Champs-Élysées at 2 in the morning.

There were Moroccan flags in Abidjan, and in Dakar, and in Cairo, and a photograph from a bar in Ivory Coast at 3am with 200 Ivorians in it and not one Moroccan, all of them screaming.

Mustapha took the phone back, looked at the floor, and said one word I did not catch.

I did not ask him to say it again.

@rachidcasa my father is 71 and has not been to bed. he is sat in the ROAD. in a plastic chair. IN THE ROAD

@AbidjanArsenal bar was full at 3am. Ivorians. every one of us screaming for Morocco. never seen that in my life 🇲🇦

@KenitraKid my mum has NEVER watched football. never. she watched all 120 minutes. she is now asking me what a ”penalty shoot out” is. I LOVE HER

@BeirutTouria Baghdad. Cairo. Dakar. Tunis. Amman. everyone. EVERYONE.

@notsteveparish north african flags on the CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES lads. in Paris. what is happening

And then the fame arrived, and it came through the front door like weather.

By 10 there were 200 people outside the glass. Sunday morning. Moscow. Flags on the fence and a drum going, boom boom boom, and the woman on reception was crying, and she is Russian and speaks no English and no Arabic and she put both hands on my forearm and said something to me anyway.

Yassine Bounou’s face was on the front of every newspaper from Rabat to Riyadh. Not the back. The front.

A man who 2 weeks ago could have walked through any airport on earth. There is a photograph of him on his knees in the mud holding an 11-year-old’s hands, and it was on 11 million phones before I had got out of bed.

Achraf Hakimi’s phone rang at 7am and it was a Madrid number.

He is 19. He showed it to me with the face of a lad who has found something in the garden and does not know if it is alive.

There were agents in the lobby. Actual agents, with lanyards on, sat in the armchairs at half past 10 on a Sunday morning like they were waiting for a bus.

I had 2 of them removed.

Jessica did the removing, and I have never seen a woman enjoy a Sunday morning more. She has 60-odd approaches sat in that phone and she has told me about not one of them, and when I asked her she said ”Wednesday” and went back to her coffee.

The second one told me I was making a mistake.

And Mustapha was a meme.

Somebody had cut the footage of him sprinting 60 yards down that touchline with his tie over his shoulder and his arms out, howling, and set it to music, and by lunchtime on Sunday my assistant coach was more famous than 4 of my starting 11.

He was mortified.

I have never in my life enjoyed anything more.

Dougie Freedman rang at 11 and did not say congratulations either.

That is why I love him.

”Villa,” he said. ”It’s moving.”

”How fast?”

”Fast. The takeover’s days away, Danny. Days. The Egyptian and the American. The minute that money lands, Villa do not have to sell anybody, and Grealish is not a 10 million pound footballer any more, he is a 40 million pound footballer and he is not ours.”

”Then we go now.”

”With what? We bid 10. They will probably want 40. And Steve Bruce has stood in front of a camera and said a sale is inevitable, which is the only reason we are still in the room.”

”And?”

He went quiet.

”And there is a London club in for him as of Friday. Proper money. And Danny.” A breath. ”They were in for him at 25 before you beat Croatia. They will be in for him at 30 by Wednesday, because everything you touch has gone up in the last 12 hours.”

That is the joke of it. That is the actual joke.

I have spent 6 weeks making these men famous, and every one of them is now too expensive for the club that pays my wages. I keep suffering from success.

”Højbjerg?”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for Massage Chair.