Always Managing: My Autobiography (25 page)

Football was changing in the 1990s. The influx of foreign players made our game richer and more professional, but it created a new challenge for clubs and managers, and we did not always deal with it adequately. Too often, we bought players in and dumped them in a house somewhere, gave them a car and expected them to get on with life. The lovely homes and other perks were all very nice, but if the wife does not speak a word of English and she is suddenly dropped in the middle of nowhere with no family or friends, and her husband disappearing on a
pre-season tour for two weeks, no wonder things go awry. Some of the foreign players who failed to settle attracted a lot of criticism, but I think we simply expected too much of them, not just as footballers, but as human beings.

Probably the best example of this was Javier Margas, the captain of Chile. I first saw him in a friendly against England at Wembley, in the build-up to the 1998 World Cup. Michael Owen would go on to be one of the stars of that tournament, but Margas didn’t give him a kick that night. Chile won 2–0. I was impressed. I checked him out again in the tournament that summer and he did nothing to undermine that good first impression. It wasn’t hard to get him out of his Chilean club, Universidad Católica, for around £1 million, and he arrived that summer. Fantastic. We gave him a house, we gave him a car; someone drove him home the first day to show him where everything was, and that was it. We left him and his wife to get on with it. The following day, he got in his car, got lost, and ended up at Stansted Airport. Eventually he found his way to Chadwell Heath but, on the way back, going down some little country lane, the car got a puncture. He didn’t know who to call, he didn’t know what to do. And it just got worse from there.

Javier’s wife came from a very wealthy family in Chile who owned a chain of hotels. She was very close to her sisters, and enjoyed a lovely life. Money, success, husband a famous footballer. Suddenly, she was in a foreign country, didn’t know anyone, didn’t even know where she was, really. She didn’t know how to get here, or there, to do the most basic activity, like go to the shops. She couldn’t even watch the television for company because she didn’t know what anybody was saying. Javier would come in and tell me, through his interpreter, that his wife was unhappy, wanted to go
home, and was crying all the time. So in the end she left. And then the problem transferred to us because, with his wife back in Chile, Javier’s head had gone. His wife wasn’t with him, his kids were on a different continent, he was in the house on his own: didn’t know what to do, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t focus. All he wanted to do from that moment was to go back to Chile to be with her. He ended up staying in a hotel off the M25 at Waltham Abbey, and that was where things came to a head.

I had arranged a meeting – Javier, me and our managing director, Peter Storrie. We arrived at the hotel. ‘Could you put us through to Mr Margas’s room, please?’ No answer. He’s definitely in his room, we were told, but still no reply. We kept ringing and ringing – in the end we asked to be shown to his room. He’d jumped out of the window – from one floor up – left all his clothes behind, his boots and all his kit; took his passport, his money, one small overnight bag and legged it. Never came back. While we were on our way to the meeting, he was on his way to the airport. He was a wealthy boy and could afford to put his family first. I picture him now, looking out of his hotel room at that nice patch of soft grass, and weighing up his chances. Peter went out to Chile after him, but he wouldn’t return without his wife, and there was no way she was coming back, so we had no choice but to try to sell him back to his old club. Knowing the situation, they had us by the cobblers. I can’t remember what they paid but it wasn’t £1 million.

It’s a different world now. Every club has player-liaison officers for all nationalities, who look after the new players and make sure that they are OK and that their families are settling in. I think that’s why you get some foreign players, like Carlos Tevez, who have been here six years now but still seem to struggle with the
language. They are so protected they can live as if they are still in their own country. Fans might think they are mollycoddled but I feel that is how it should be done. The players still get the house and the car, but their wives are cared for, their kids are set up in the best schools and everything is done properly. Back then, they were lucky if someone bothered to tell them we drive on the left side of the road. ‘Here’s your car, son, now get on with it.’ And we expected these guys to hit top form straight away and walk into the team on Saturday. Can you imagine how different Universidad Católica is to West Ham and the Premier League? It is no surprise it takes players so long to fit in.

The problem for West Ham during my seven years there was that we were gambling. Prices in the domestic market had spiralled and there really wasn’t the value at home. We would call about a striker who was scoring a few in the third division and get asked for £2 million. Then an agent would come on offering a foreign player who had made fifty international appearances and cost half that. Yet there was invariably a reason these players were being offered to West Ham, not Manchester United. There was often an element of risk. Their last move had been a disaster, or they were pushing 30 or had been picking up a few injuries. A boy might be the top goalscorer at the club, but had been sent off three times in one season. So you had to weigh it all up. The other problem with British players involved the transfer conditions: full VAT, 50 per cent up front, and the rest within twelve months. It wasn’t the same for foreign players. So we gambled.

Some came off, some didn’t, but we were all learning. One of the players that everybody remembers is Florin Răducioiu, who had a brilliant World Cup for Romania in 1994, scoring four goals. We
took him two years later, after the 1996 European Championships when he had scored Romania’s only goal in the tournament. He was second only to Gheorghe Hagi for his country. I thought he would be brilliant in the Premier League.

I was very harsh on Florin at the time but, looking back, perhaps I was as much to blame for his failure. He came from a very different culture, a very different style of football, and maybe I didn’t have as much patience with him as I should have. Everything he did irritated me, right from the start when we met to discuss the transfer and he kept asking about the quarantine arrangements for his dog. I wondered why he wasn’t as interested in our ambitions for West Ham. Yet if his wife loved the dog, as he said, why shouldn’t he be concerned? I think a lot of managers were feeling their way through this new era at the time. It wasn’t like dealing with Stuart Pearce or Ian Wright. The players were coming to a new country and they were unsure, too. If I had a player like Răducioiu now, I would handle him differently.

I think I had lost interest in him almost before the season started. We were playing Torquay United in a friendly and they had a centre-half called Jon Gittens who had been around a lot of the south coast and West Country clubs. He was known as a hard man and at half-time Răducioiu came in, practically crying. ‘They are kicking me, hurting me, they are kicking me from behind,’ he wailed. ‘Florin,’ I said, ‘wait until you come up against Tony Adams. This guy’s nothing.’ But he looked as if he didn’t want to go back out. He obviously decided to take Gittens on at his own game, but it was a pitiful effort. He aimed a kick at him, but it was half-hearted and ineffectual, and the next challenge Gittens got his own back, properly. He hit Florin with an elbow to the face – bam.
Poor Florin was on the floor, yelling and rolling around. I knew from there we would have a problem. He was the same at a friendly against Luton Town the following week, and our relationship went downhill from there. Perhaps I had such high expectations that I could only be disappointed. I stopped believing in him, and didn’t get the best out of him for that reason. When I see film of him playing now, I am sure my original instinct was right, and he could have been a great player in the Premier League. Maybe I was on his case too much and didn’t give him enough time to adapt. I know I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Even Paulo Futre poked him in the chest and called him a big girl one day, and when he didn’t turn up for our Coca-Cola Cup game at Stockport County, that was the final straw. He went back to Espanyol soon after.

Some of the risks were extreme. After being asked what I thought was a ridiculous amount by Bristol Rovers for a striker called Marcus Stewart in 1995, we went with Marco Boogers of Sparta Rotterdam, having only watched him on video. Other managers had bought on taped evidence but that had never been my way. Yet we were running out of time, the season was about to start, Boogers looked good, and would cost half of what Rovers wanted for Stewart. What the tapes never show, however, is what a player is like as a trainer, or a person. Boogers was hard work. The players didn’t like him, and he was a lazy worker. He got one kick in our second game of the season at Old Trafford, but it was on Gary Neville, and he was shown a red card. This caused him to become depressed, he claimed, and he returned to Holland. Very soon, we made that arrangement permanent.

Some of the foreign players just had different priorities. For Paulo Futre – Sporting Lisbon, Porto, Atlético Madrid, Benfica,
Marseille, AC Milan – it was the number 10 shirt. Futre was another great player that came as damaged goods. He had been an international footballer since the age of 17 and a superstar of the European game, but he had suffered a succession of knee injuries and was available on a free transfer. He came to us in the summer of 1996 and his ability was simply remarkable. Training would stop just to watch him take free-kicks – I’d put him in the top-ten players I have seen. Our first game was at Arsenal and the team-sheets had already gone in when Eddie Gillam, our trainer, told me there was a problem with Paulo. Eddie had handed him his shirt, number 16, and got it thrown back in his face. Next thing, Paulo was in my face, too. ‘Futre 10, not 16,’ he said. ‘Eusebio 10, Maradona 10, Pelé 10; Futre 10, not fucking 16.’

By this point, there were forty-five minutes to kick-off. ‘It’s changed now, Paulo,’ I explained, as gently as I could. ‘We’ve got squad numbers and your number is 16. We didn’t choose that number. When you came, all the numbers were gone, so Eddie gave you number 16.’

‘Number 10,’ he insisted. ‘Futre 10. Number 10. Milan, Atlético Madrid, Porto, Benfica, Sporting – Futre 10.’

‘OK, OK, Paulo,’ I said. ‘Look, just get on with it today, we can’t do anything now, play today and on Monday we try to change. But it’s difficult, we need permission from the league.’

Still, no compromise. ‘No fucking 16,’ he insisted.

Now it was getting desperate. I tried to be firm. ‘Paulo, put your shirt on, get changed, please, we have a big game.’ That was it. The shirt was thrown to the ground, his boots aimed at the wall. ‘No fucking 16.’

‘Right, if you don’t want to wear it, Paulo, off you go,’ I said. And he did. Put his gear on and left. But the team-sheet was already in, so I had to knock on the referee’s door with a good excuse. ‘You won’t believe this, ref,’ I said, ‘but Frank Lampard’s done the team-sheet and he’s filled it in wrong. He put Paulo Futre down and he’s not even here, he’s getting treatment in Portugal.’ The ref said that if Arsène Wenger gave us permission to change it it would not be a problem, and, being a nice man, he did. We still got beat 2–0, though.

The following Monday, Paulo came back in with his team of lawyers to negotiate for the number 10 shirt. At first we tried to tell him that we had sold so many replicas with ‘Futre 16’ on the back that it would be impossible to change, but he called our bluff. ‘How many?’ he asked. ‘I will pay £100,000.’ And that was when I knew this was an argument we could not win. Futre was willing to spend £100,000 just to be number 10. In the end, he got it a lot cheaper. John Moncur, the number 10, agreed to swap, and Paulo let him have two weeks in his villa in the Algarve, which is about the best one there, on the cliffs overlooking the best golf course. Do you know what number it is? Have a guess.

I wouldn’t want people to think every foreign venture ended in disaster or conflict, though. Quite the opposite. We got some great players out of it: Marc Rieper, Marc-Vivien Foé, Eyal Berkovic, and some of the Croatian lads, like Slaven Bilić and Igor Štimac, were outstanding. They did as much as anyone to change the drinking culture at the club. Guys like Slaven, Paolo Di Canio or Marc-Vivien, they would never have thought of going out on a bender. They influenced the younger players and gradually the atmosphere at West Ham, and throughout the rest of English football, changed.

Slaven would rather have a pint of milk than a pint of beer. He was a bright man, a qualified lawyer, spoke several languages and came from an intellectual family. Strangely, though, he made a big mistake when signing his contract, which allowed us to stop him going to Tottenham Hotspur after just six months.

We broke the club record to sign Slaven – £1.3 million – after he impressed us on trial from Karlsruher in Germany. We’d seen enough after the first day. He was a beautiful defender: aggressive but cultured and strong in the air. He was outstanding from the start and, at the end of his first season, we knew Tottenham wanted him. He came back from his holiday and he wasn’t the same boy. His mind was elsewhere, probably at White Hart Lane. His agent, Leon Angel, was very well connected there and was no doubt driving the move. Slaven said he wanted to leave and had a clause in his contract: if a club came up with £3.5 million, he could go. But that wasn’t quite correct. The contract had been worded poorly and the clause actually said that if a bid of £3.5 million came in, and West Ham wished to sell, he could go. The clause was meaningless. It might as well have put his price at a tenner. Unless we wanted to sell, Slaven was a West Ham player. You should have seen his face when I told him. ‘You bastard,’ he said. To be fair, we gave him another deal, with a release clause of £4.5 million, properly worded. Everton triggered it a year later – but at least we got another season out of him. Slaven was a good character, like all the Croatian boys. Štimac was a hard worker, too. The only one who didn’t work out was Davor Šuker, who was past his best when we signed him – but it wasn’t for want of trying on his part.