Glory Of The Football Manager System

”We offered 10,” I said.

”We offered 10, and they have not laughed us off the phone, which tells you everything about how bad it has got over there. The lad wants it. Premier League, Europe, a manager who is the story of the World Cup. His people know us, they trust Sarah. On paper it is the easiest deal of the summer.”

”But.”

”But there is a takeover circling them. Egyptian money, an American alongside it. And the second that money lands, son, they pull Jack Grealish off the market, bolt the door, and build a team around him, because he is the one asset in that whole club worth the keeping.”

A beat. ”So it is a straight race. We get it done inside a fortnight, before the money arrives, or we do not get it done at all.”

There it was. The steal of the whole window, sat out in the open for anybody with the nerve to take it, and a clock ticking on it whose face I could not see.

”Push it,” I said. ”As hard as it will go. I want Jack Grealish in a Palace shirt before some billionaire with a chequebook goes and saves Aston Villa and locks him in for ten years.”

”Leaning on it every hour, son.”

”And the other?”

”Højbjerg. Southampton will take 10, we are fairly sure. Danish boy, 22, sits in front of the back four and runs until his legs come off. A straight like-for-like for what Mili gave us, at under a third of what Mili just sold for.”

Dougie near sounded happy. ”That is the whole trick, son, in one line. Sell the 27-year-old for 35, buy the 22-year-old for 10, and come out of it richer and better at the same time. If people ever worked out it was that simple, they’d all be at it.”

”They can’t be at it,” I said, ”because they won’t sell their best players and back their own coaching. Get Højbjerg done.”

Then the line went quiet, the way it does when Dougie has been saving the bad news for last.

”And Hakimi?”

”Hakimi,” he said, ”is doing my head in.”

The boy wanted to come.

We knew that much for certain. After Luzhniki, after everything he had done at this World Cup, half of Europe was camped at Real Madrid’s door for him, and through the right quiet channels he had made it plain enough that his head was at Selhurst and nowhere else on earth.

The player was willing. The player was never the problem.

”It’s the agent. Salas. Every time we get within touching distance the man moves the posts. A fatter cut for himself, a new clause, a bidding war he is trying to light off the back of the tournament.”

”He reckons the World Cup has tripled the boy’s price, and he wants to squeeze every last pound out of it before the music stops.”

”And Madrid?”

”Madrid are worse than he is. One morning they have decided to sell, and my phone goes and it is on. Next morning the president has read a newspaper and decided the boy is the future of the club and they are keeping him, and it is off again.”

”A willing player, a frustrating agent, and a selling club that cannot make its own mind up between breakfast and lunch. It is a mess. And it is the one I want most in the world.”

And the maddening thing, the thing that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, was that the one man alive who could cut clean through all of it was the one man forbidden to go anywhere near it.

The boy trusted me. He would sign a napkin if I slid it across a table and told him it was the right thing. I could close that deal in one conversation, over a cup of tea, in an afternoon.

And I could not have it. Not one word of it. Because I was his international manager, and I was picking him for Morocco on Saturday.

If one line leaked that Danny Walsh had gone near Achraf Hakimi for Crystal Palace while he was still choosing him for a country, it finished the pair of us, and the deal along with us.

”Keep it warm,” I said. ”Do not lose him. But keep me a mile off it. All of it.”

”I know the drill, son. We are holding it together with tape and prayer. But we are holding it.”

I put the phone down and sat a minute in the quiet, the Chaika kids still hammering their ball off the fence outside. Thwack, thwack, thwack.

I had not been off the phone 5 minutes when there was a knock at the door. And of all the people in Russia it could have been, it was him.

Achraf Hakimi. 19 years old, in his training kit, stood in my doorway with the look I have seen a hundred times on young players carrying a thing they do not know how to put down.

”Gaffer. You got a minute?”

I knew what was coming before he sat down, and I knew, to the letter, what I could not let him say.

He perched on the edge of the bed and turned his phone over in his hands a few times. Then he went at it, careful, feeling for the words in his third language.

”After the World Cup. My future. Everybody is talking to me now. My agent, he tells me things, this club, that club, this money. I do not know what is true.”

He looked up.

”I trust you. More than my agent, more than any of them. So I want to ask you what I should do.”

And there it was. The one question in the world I was forbidden to answer, sat in the middle of a hotel room in Voronezh, put to me by the one lad I most wanted to give a straight answer to.

I could have ended it in a breath. Told him he belonged at Selhurst. That we would build the whole thing around him. That his agent was playing a game, and Madrid did not know their own minds from one morning to the next, and the club that wanted him more than any of them was mine.

One sentence, and it was as good as done.

And I could not spend a word of it.

”Achraf.” I picked each word up and looked at it before I used it. ”Right now, in this room, you are my player. Morocco’s, and mine. That is the only hat I am allowed to wear in front of you, and it is the only one I am going to wear.”

”Your club, your next move, where you sign, who pays what. I cannot talk to you about any of it. Not because I do not care where you end up. Because I care too much, and there are rules for this exact thing, and if I break one it lands on you harder than on me.”

He held my eye a long moment. Then, because he is a good deal sharper than his 19 years, the corner of his mouth went up.

”You cannot say it,” he said. ”But I think I know what you would say. If the rules let you.”

”You don’t know a thing,” I said. ”And neither do I. Go and get your lunch.”

He stood. At the door he stopped and turned. ”Saturday,” he said. ”I run through a wall for you. Whatever comes after it.” And he was gone before I could find an answer.

I sat there a while after the door had shut. Some walls you build to keep a person safe, and you hate every brick of them.

And then, because that is the actual job under all the rest of it, I opened the laptop, and I stopped being a chairman and a trader and the story of the tournament, and went back to being a football coach with a quarter-final to win.

Marcus had already built the first file. Croatia. And it did not make for comfortable reading.

This was not Russia. Russia had the crowd, and the fear, and Dzyuba’s head, and we had found the cracks in them and prised them open. Croatia did not have the same cracks. They had almost none of the weaknesses and most of the strengths.

They had Luka Modrić in the middle of the pitch, the best midfielder on the planet on his day, and Rakitić next to him, and between the two of them they could keep the ball off you for an hour and make you chase shadows until your legs turned to sand.

They had beaten Denmark on penalties to get here, which told me their nerve held under a load that breaks other teams. They had a spine that had never once learned how to fold.

We would not out-football Croatia. Nobody at this tournament was going to out-football Croatia. We would have to do to them what we had done to every side that had fancied itself against us. Find the one thing they could not stand, and make them stand it for 90 minutes and then some.

There was one thread, maybe. Modrić was 32. Rakitić 30. They had gone 120 minutes and penalties to see off Denmark, and this Croatia had a habit of it, winning ugly and late, leaving every drop of themselves on the grass to get there. Beautiful footballers, a lot of miles on old legs.

If we could not out-pass them, we could try to out-run them. Make Modrić defend. Make him turn and cover 60 yards he did not want to cover, again, and again, and again, until the class drained out of those legs.

It was a thin edge. But every edge we had ever had was a thin one. Thin is the whole of what we do.

I did not know yet if it would hold. But I had 4 days to find out, and I have solved worse in a good deal less.

I shut the laptop and stood at the window a while, watching the kids and the fence and a Russian town that had somehow, against all sense, become ours.

170 million banked. Two of the best young footballers in Europe on their way in for 20 between them. The steal of the window in a race I still fancied us for. A club being called the best-run in the country by men who could not tell you the first thing about how we did it.

A right-back I had been quietly turning into a star for 6 weeks, tangled up in a knot only I could untie and only I was banned from touching. And Luka Modrić, in 4 days, on the biggest stage there has ever been.

Out there a whole continent was singing a country’s name into the night. Back home a whole city was daring, quietly, to dream about where its little club was going. And I stood at a window in Voronezh holding both of those worlds in the same two hands.

Some life, this. Some daft, impossible, once-in-a-thousand-years life.

And I would not have swapped one minute of it for anything on God’s green earth.

***

Thank you for 100 Power Stones.