The Nowhere Men (24 page)

‘I revelled in the intensity of being with Rangers. Plenty of good players are unable to handle that aspect of the club, but I was used to it, from an early age. You have to win. It is as simple as that. But the great majority of the fans don’t realise the mutual respect which exists between Rangers and Celtic. When I go to Celtic Park I am treated magnificently. Walter Smith and Ally McCoist were pallbearers at the funeral of Tommy Burns.’

His spells at Ibrox were punctuated by two years at Fulham, and an association with Paul Lambert, initially at Livingstone in 2006: ‘It looked pretty terminal. They were twelve points adrift, but we signed nine players and kept them up. You begin to understand the implications of success and failure in a situation like that. Avoiding relegation saved a lot of people’s jobs. You saw the worry in their faces, and also the joy, when they realised they were going to be allright. It sounds a bit trite, but that gives you a great feeling.’

He linked up with Lambert at Norwich in May 2010, and, in 15 months at Carrow Road, helped fashion a side based on ‘youth and hunger’. He had a slightly different brief on his return, when the strategy of continuing to cherry-pick emerging Football League players was augmented by the signings of defenders with Premier League pedigree like Sebastian Bassong, from Tottenham, Javier Garrido, from Lazio, and Michael Turner, from Sunderland.

Team building is an inexact science. Timing, opportunism and the certainties of first-hand knowledge are pivotal parts of the process. Memories are long and nerves must be strong. It took Chester four years to secure Alex Tettey, a naturalised Norwegian defensive midfield player. He failed to sign him for Rangers, on the recommendation of former Manchester United defender Henning Berg, but did so for Norwich, who paid Rennes £1.3 million.

Chester did not allow a lifelong allegiance to Rangers to deter him from taking advantage of their plight. Steven Whittaker, a right back signed from Hibernian in the scout’s second spell at Ibrox, engineered a fractious move to Norwich as a free agent. Robert Snodgrass, the winger whose career Chester had helped launch at Livingstone, was signed from Leeds for £2.8 million. It wasn’t quite Friends Reunited, but it worked: ‘It is a tightly knit group. As scouts, we take our work ethic and philosophy from Chris. Over the past fifteen years most managers have stopped going to games. The fixture schedule is relentless, and the media and commercial side of the game has grown. Chris still gets out there, but we are given carte blanche. We follow up leads, see players in different circumstances, then come to a consensus.

‘Managers do sign players you don’t agree with, but you can’t go around broadcasting that fact. If mistakes are made, I do my best to keep them out of the public domain. It is about trust and accountability. You can’t fudge in this game. If I give Chris twelve names, I would be hiding behind him. If I give him two or three, I am helping him. We have a structured, computerised system. We keep revisiting our lists. It can be a long process, because we are not afraid to walk away and consider every aspect.

‘It is far too simplistic to say the scout with flat cap and muffler has no part in a more technological era. I have an open mind, and will embrace new ideas if they add to our knowledge base, but I am there to find players, not to be a technical wizard. The first opinion I form when I go to a game is usually fairly accurate. It is an intuitive thing. I get sent a lot of DVDs, but they are mainly an encouragement to get out there, and see the player live.

‘Value goes in cycles and scouting, like football itself, follows trends. Fifteen years ago we all flooded Scandinavia, in search of a bargain. Manchester United got Ronnie Johnsen and Ole Gunnar Solksjaer out of Norway. Bolton were successful in Finland and Iceland, with Jussi Jaaskelainen and Eidur Gudjohnsen. Then we went to Europe to look for holding midfield players; the prototype was Michael Essien. I watched him at Bastia and Lyon.

‘Everyone is now all over France and Spain. There’s still value in Eastern Europe; a lot of clubs are starting to scout extensively in Poland. Udinese are very successful in South America but in general terms the biggest clubs, the Champions League clubs with the biggest budgets, have the biggest reach.’

Football might have infinite possibilities, but footballers are finite entities. Chester’s relationship with Norwich chief executive David McNally, established when they worked together at Fulham, gives him greater influence than many of his peers. He has developed a professional sense of detachment, so that he can utter the fateful words: ‘go and find a new home’ to a player whose purpose has been served.

‘Ultimately it is my job to recommend players. The manager makes the decision, and the chief executive closes the deal. If I can be helpful, by investigating the parameters of a potential agreement, I do so. I can instigate deals and if we want to move a player on, I would have enough clout to contact other clubs, to see if they are interested.

‘Human nature being as it is, you need man management skills. Some players suspect you of having a decisive input into the decision to let them go, others are more philosophical. I try to help a player get the best possible move, but I am also selfish enough to know that my principal responsibility is to remove him from the wage bill. It is as clinical as that. My job is to generate as much money as I can for the club.

‘In football you need to be strong-minded. There are more downs than ups. We’ve all been sacked at one point or another. When that happens, you go on to autopilot, waiting for the next chance. You feel it when you are on the outside, looking in. You miss that sense of involvement on game day. Enjoy it, because it doesn’t last for ever.’

FULHAM’S HUMAN RESOURCES
department despaired of Barry Simmonds. The club’s chief scout had taken four days off in four and a half years, and showed little inclination to respond to their suggestions that he should restore his work–life balance. They shared the communal shock when, one summer’s morning, as torrential rain swept across the training ground in the South-west London suburb of Motspur Park, he decided he needed time and distance to gather his thoughts.

On impulse, Simmonds called a travel agent, with instructions to find the first flight to ‘somewhere hot’. By that evening he was nursing a beer in a beachfront bar in Alicante. He had given himself a three-day break, though the battery life on his two mobiles would be tested as thoroughly as ever. He could stay in touch, and take stock. Pavel Viktorovich Pogrebnyak was still on his mind.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, through quiet, self-deprecating laughter. ‘I am the saddest person. We move on, but this was a tough one. I am a cog in a wheel. I do everything I can, but if a decision is made above my head I just have to condition myself to the reality of it. Scouting is art, science, timing and mood. You can’t let it get to you. It is difficult to live this life if you are not even-tempered. You see injustices and it can flip you over very quickly.’

It was a testing time. Clint Dempsey was agitating for a move, which would take him to Tottenham instead of Liverpool, as originally envisaged, hours before the transfer window closed at the end of August. Simmonds’ fears that Fulham would be unable to retain Mousa Dembele were in the process of being realised. The European Championships were of limited value; he knew the players, and had organised a video scouting service, augmented by performance analysis. Those scouts who chose the alternative, £1,000-a-night hotel rooms and supposed VIP seats amongst the fans behind the goals, picked up little more than carefully slanted gossip.

It is not the recurring sense of betrayal which saps the spirit, or the butchery of a system that sells footballers like slabs of sirloin. It is the insistent whisper of the scout’s inner voice, which struggles to be heard above the cacophony of conjecture, neediness and posturing. It asks a series of stark questions about relevance and respect. The answers can be intimidating.

The loss of Pogrebnyak, on a Bosman free transfer to Reading, hurt. The Russian was straight from central casting, an archetypal action movie villain, blond and blessed with a parchment-pale face which soaked up emotion. He was Dolph Lundgren in Adidas Predator boots. His muscularity was emphasised by skin-tight shirts, and even his nickname, ‘The Cellar’, had an ominous ring to it. Simmonds, though, had spent three years getting to know the man.

Simmonds had first heard the buzz about him when he played alongside Andrey Arshavin for Zenit St Petersburg. Fulham manager Martin Jol tried to sign him for Hamburg, at that time. Pogrebnyak held the ball up well, and, despite intermittent injury, developed his all-round game when he moved to Stuttgart, in 2009. He was Simmonds’ principal target the following year, when the Bundesliga club staged its mid-winter training camp in Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast of south-western Turkey.

It was the perfect place for a busman’s holiday. The resort, Turkey’s biggest, has 300 grass pitches. It attracts clubs from Germany, Belgium, Holland, Russia and the Ukraine. When Simmonds was in town, it also hosted teams from Japan, China, South Korea, Kenya and Brazil. Football created its own subculture, in which scouts, coaches, agents and journalists collided gently, amicably. The training sessions were open, and the informality was instructive.

Recruitment is an intuitive process. Simmonds turned down one player whose mother-in-law had him on speed dial, because he sensed the dangers of external pressure on someone with a submissive personality. He has the authority to make decisions on loaning players, and matches personalities with club profiles. He had attempted to ferret for clues about Pogrebnyak’s character:

‘The stats wouldn’t tell you he is a player, but you knew you were looking at one when you watched him in the Bundesliga. In Antalya I basically stalked him for four days, watching everything he was doing. One thing, a small incident, stood out. He tried a shot which went spinning into orbit, way behind the goal. They had two old boys there, whose job was to collect the balls. He saw them turn to go and fetch his shot, and stopped them. He waved them away and got his ball himself. It was a simple, selfless act. Very respectful. That taught me a lot about him.

‘It was the same soon after he signed for us. I watched him in the canteen one day, after training. He carefully put his knife and fork down on to his plate, and carried it to the ladies serving behind the counter, so it could be washed up and put away. The other players, who let others do the menial stuff, got on to him about that, so he soon changed. But it told me a little bit extra about his character.’

So much for behavioural psychology. Simmonds was confronted by a classic clash between nature and nurture. Pogrebnyak had been in the Russian system since the age of six, when he enrolled at the Spartak Moscow school. He survived a season in Siberia, with Tom Tomsk. Like many of those emerging in post-Soviet society, he was conditioned to making materialistic judgements. His six goals in 12 games on loan to Fulham towards the end of the 2011–12 season were hard currency. Simmonds fretted as a three-year contract remained unsigned.

Scouting, like everything in football, reflects the cycle of boom and bust. Reading had decimated their scouting structure after relegation to the Championship in 2008. They had rebuilt it, in preparation for a return to the Premier League. Steve Head, who had been overseeing opposition scouting for Fulham, was their new head of scouting and recruitment. His inside knowledge was important but the drive of new owner Anton Zingarevich was decisive. When he visited Russia’s training base during the European Championships, Simmonds knew the game was up:

‘In my experience, as chief scout, it is your job to ensure the CEO or manager is not surprised by anything in the transfer process. You can’t allow anything to trip them up. You get them as much information as possible. My due diligence on a player has to go beyond whether he can head or kick a ball. But when a Russian owner meets a Russian player with an agent who specialises in the Russian market you know you’re in trouble.

‘Your strategy has to be fluid, because of certain factors, like a change of coach, owner or status. But there are very few secrets out there. We live in a YouTube generation. People are everywhere. Drive, say, three hours outside Prague, and you will get to some cement stadium in the middle of nowhere. There will be eighteen clubs there, on the off-chance.

‘It takes a special arrangement with the owner, CEO and head of recruitment to facilitate progress. Clubs live from hour to hour, not even from day to day. It can take so little time to completely destroy the work of six weeks, six months or six years. It’s football’s way. Things can change so quickly.’

Pogrebnyak duly joined Reading on a four-year contract, estimated to be worth anywhere between £45,000 and £65,000 a week. He received a seven-figure signing-on fee, thought by some to be close to £5 million. Dr Oliver Wendt, a Hamburg-based agent on the periphery of the deal, surprised absolutely no one when he admitted money was a determining factor. Simmonds understood the rules of the game: ‘We all move on to the next one.’

Fulham had a frantic but successful window, despite high-profile departures. Dimitar Berbatov, perhaps the only footballer who could get away with playing in white tie and tails, signed from Manchester United for £5 million, despite being courted by Fiorentina and Juventus. Strikers Mladen Petric and Hugo Rodallega were signed as free agents after leaving Hamburg and Wigan respectively. Former Real Madrid midfield player Mahamadou Diarra committed himself to a permanent contract, Iranian winger Ashkan Dejagah signed from Wolfsburg, and full back Sascha Reither agreed to a season’s loan following Cologne’s relegation.

‘It was what I call a player recruitment window, rather than a scouting window. You don’t need much scouting for players of that quality and reputation. We had a few get away, but we all have our fisherman’s tales. Everyone has their running order of potential recruits, but it is ultimately determined by external forces and sources. That’s why it is such a game of cat and mouse. Some clubs try and do their business early, but it is the English way to get the deals done in the last few hours.