Glory Of The Football Manager System

I took it into the office and put it on the desk and got the lid off a coffee and sat down in my own chair for the first time since the 31st of May.

The chair was wrong. Somebody had been in it and put the height down and I sat there for a full minute working out what was wrong with the room before I found it.

I did it the way I have done it every Friday for 14 months.

3 piles. Sign. Read. Bin.

Bin was the biggest. It always is. 9 catalogues from a company that sells cones. A brochure for a gym in Bromley. 4 invitations to dinners I would rather be shot than attend.

Read was 20 pages of medical from Rebecca that she had already told me on an aeroplane, and a Premier League circular about the new deadline, and a note from the academy about a boy in the 16s who has grown 4 inches in a year and cannot run properly any more.

And sign was contracts, and a fixture confirmation from Wembley for the 5th of August, and a letter from a firm of solicitors in Croydon about a property purchase on Wooderson Close that meant nothing to me at all until Steve Parish walked in at 10.

And at the bottom of the tray, under the whole lot, in a padded envelope with a Manchester postmark, was a photograph in a frame of me and my mother at a rail in the Luzhniki.

She has never sent me anything in her life.

There was no note. There is never a note.

I put it on the shelf behind the desk, and then I moved it, and then I put it back where it had been the first time, and then I got on with the post.

Steve Parish came in at 10 without knocking. It is his building. He stood in that doorway and did not say anything for a while.

”You look like a bloke who has been in the sun.”

”Steve.”

”No, do not.” He came in and shut the door with his heel. ”I have got 40 minutes and I have got 3 things and if you start being nice to me I will not get through any of them.”

Then he came round that desk and shook my hand with both of his and held on.

”Well done, son,” he said. ”The whole of it. Well done.”

”We lost.”

”I watched a man take 23 lads nobody wanted to a World Cup final and then stand up on live television and take the blame for losing it, on his own, in front of the world.” He let go. ”Do not say we lost to me. Say it to somebody else.”

He sat down in the low chair across the desk. He chose that chair himself and complains about it weekly.

”Right. 3 things. And Danny, none of them are football, so put your face right.”

”Selhurst,” he said.

”Go on.”

”It is happening. This season. Not next season, not the season after, not when we have got the money and the planning and the moon in the right place.

”This one. The one that starts in 16 days.”

I put the pen down.

The Main Stand at Selhurst Park has been there since 1924. It seats about 5,200 people and it has a Portakabin next to it that has been the away changing room for as long as anybody can remember, and every single person who has ever worked in that building has a story about the plumbing.

We have been talking about knocking it down since before I was hired.

”Croydon signed it off in the spring,” Steve said. ”While you were up a mountain in Switzerland.”

”Signed off what?”

He did not answer that. He got a folded sheet out of his inside pocket, opened it on my desk, turned it round with 2 fingers, and sat back and let me look at it.

It was an elevation. 5 storeys of glass on an iron frame, with an eagle on the front of it the size of a house.

”That is nice,” I said. ”What is it.”

”It is the Main Stand.”

”Steve, the Main Stand is a shed from 1924 with a Portakabin bolted to it.”

”Yes.”

I looked at the drawing again and then at the little scale bar at the bottom of it. Nobody looks at the scale bar. I looked at it twice.

”What is the capacity.”

He did not say anything.

”Steve. What is the capacity.”

”60,000.”

I sat there with a coffee going cold in my hand.

Outside that window somebody was putting cones out on pitch 2. You can hear the trolley on the path from my office. It has one wheel that has needed doing since March.

”Say it again.”

”60,000 seats. 6th biggest ground in England.” He was not enjoying it. That is how I knew. ”Above Everton. Above Newcastle. Above everything in this city except the 2 you are already thinking of.”

”How much?”

”Danny.”

”How much, Steve?”

”250 million pounds.”

Clatter. The cone trolley going over the kerb by the goalkeeper pitch. It does that every morning. For some reason it is the thing I remember about being told.

”You have not got 250 million pounds.”

”No,” he said. ”I have got 130 in the bank off your window and a stadium in a part of London where land does not exist, and the rest of it is borrowed against 25 years of a football club that has finished 11th, 14th, 10th and 2nd.”

”And 3 of those 4 were before me.”

”Yes.”

”So you have borrowed 120 million against 1 season.”

”I have borrowed it against a football club that won 3 trophies and finished 2nd, has a record kit deal on the table, 31,000 people who cannot get a ticket, and 15 million euros coming off UEFA before a ball is kicked.” He did not blink. ”The bank did the sums in a fortnight. They did not even argue.

”And I have borrowed it against you.”

Everything else in that 40 minutes was decoration.

”No.”

”Danny.”

”No, Steve. You do not get to put that on me at 10 o’clock on a Friday morning.”

”I am not putting anything on you. I am telling you what I have signed, because you are going to read it in the Croydon Advertiser in September and I am not having you find out that way.” He had not moved. ”Sit down.”

”I am sat down.”

”You are stood at a window.”

I was, as well. I had got up at some point and had not noticed doing it.

Out on pitch 2 the trolley had stopped and there were 2 lads in bibs stood next to it, and one of them was Aaron Wan-Bissaka, who is 20, and who was 4 divisions and 3 years away from all of this when I was still coaching an under 18s.

”Talk to me about the 7 per cent,” I said.

”You have read the accounts.”

”I have read them. Say it out loud, because I want to hear you say it.”

Steve rubbed his face with both hands. I have not seen him do that.

”Last season, 77 pence in every pound this club earned came off television,” he said. ”And 7 pence came off matchday.

”7. We have got a Championship gate in a ground built in 1924, and we finished 2nd in England with it, and won 3 trophies with it, and turned the biggest trading profit any club in this country has ever turned with it.

”We sold out every game last year. All 19, to the last seat. Only club in the division that did.

”And I am sat here with 130 million in the bank and I still cannot sell you a ticket, because there is not enough of it.”

He put a finger on the drawing.

”We are not doing this because we are poor. We did poor for 90 years and I am done with it. We are doing it because we are rich for the first time since 1905 and I am not spending it all on 4 footballers who will be 31 in a minute.”

”So you are going to build 35,000 more.”

”I am going to build 35,000 more. And in 3 years it pays for itself and it is still standing when you and me are both dead.”

He got the second sheet out then. A fixture list with a Wembley crest on the top of it.

”You cannot build that stand and play in front of it. The corner comes down, the tunnel goes, the offices go. So we are not at Selhurst Park this season.”

”Where are we... ?”

”Wembley.”

I put the coffee down on the windowsill and did not pick it up again for the rest of the conversation.

”Tottenham are at Wembley.”

”Tottenham’s ground opens on time. They are in it in August.” He tapped the crest. ”Which leaves the biggest stadium in this country with a hole in its calendar, and a chief executive who rang me on the 14th of May.

”I have had 9 weeks of not being able to tell you, because you were managing a country and I was not putting it in a text.”

”Every game?”

”Every game. League, cup, and 3 group stage nights.”

I stood at that window for a while.

”25,486,” I said.

”I know.”

”That is the number, Steve. It has been the number in my head for 14 months. Every team talk. Every walk down that tunnel. The Holmesdale 40 feet behind the goal and the away bench close enough that I can hear what their number 2 is saying to his gaffer.

”We do not beat good teams because we are better than them. We beat them because of that ground.”

”I know.”

”And you have just moved us into a bowl in north London with a running track’s worth of air round it, in the season we play Manchester City, Real Madrid and 3 clubs who have all won the European Cup.”

”Yes,” he said.

”Right.”

”And I would do it again this morning.”

Prrp. Prrp. His phone went face down on my desk and he turned it over, looked at it, and turned it back.

”41,000,” he said.

”What?”

”General sale went live at 9 on a Tuesday in June. We had 41,000 people in a queue for 7,000 tickets and the website fell over twice. The last seat went at 11 minutes past 10.

”The waiting list was 4,000 names in April. It is 31,000 this morning.”

He picked the phone up and put it in his pocket.

”31,000 people who cannot get in, Danny. Who pay this club nothing, watch it in a pub in Thornton Heath, and buy a shirt off the internet from a company in Guangzhou.

”There are grandsons in Croydon who have never once been through that turnstile because their grandad has the seat and he is not giving it up, and I would not either.

”And on a Tuesday night in October, 90,000 of them are getting in.”

That is the only time in 8 years I have heard Steve Parish’s voice do that.

”One year,” he said. ”One year in somebody else’s ground, and then we come home to 60,000 and a stand your grandchildren will sit in.”

”And the arithmetic.”

”You do it. I have done it 400 times and it has not stopped being funny.”