The Nowhere Men (3 page)

There was an easy rapport between the pair – ‘not a lot out there is there?’ – and each knew not to read too much into the small talk. They strayed beyond the immediacy of the match, to engage in a discussion about the best culture in which to inculcate young players. Holden, a former school teacher who had retained a broad Geordie accent, insisted: ‘Players recognise the best players. They’ll have a young one in the group if they see something in him. Players also challenge coaches. They know if the coach isn’t good enough, the outstanding player in the group will regress to the level of the others.’

The gossip was global. Jaap Stam was making a positive impact as Manchester United’s Brazilian scout, and was pushing hard for Dede, the Vasco da Gama central defender. Barcelona had taken out first options on 39 young players at Boca Juniors. Glenn Roeder, the former Newcastle manager, had been added to Aston Villa’s scouting staff. By the time the litany of opportunity was complete, the second half was underway.

We were joined by Anderson, Liverpool’s youth scout, who exclaimed ‘there’s our boy again!’ when Todd Kane delivered a cross on the run that enabled Chelsea colleague Patrick Bamford to extend England’s lead with a stooping header. Johnson’s other duty involved monitoring winger Nathan Redmond, who was introduced as a substitute, midway through the half. ‘Watch him,’ he counselled. ‘He won’t really be trying. He’ll be more worried about playing for Birmingham on Saturday, and in the Cup replay against Chelsea next week.’ Sure enough, Redmond was measured, to the point of indolence. He contributed little, apart from a languid flick and brief bursts of pace in insignificant areas. Another early departure was entirely excusable.

Again, Johnson had rationed his intelligence. No one had detected his interest in the goalkeeper. ‘The trick in this game is never to let people know what you are thinking, or how you are working. There are plenty out there happy to feed off your knowledge.’ His report on Zima, who had been signed by Genoa from Slavia Prague, was on the Anfield system by 2 a.m., with a recommendation that he be watched by Liverpool’s Italian scout.

It was one of 200 such reports, submitted that week. Whether it would receive the attention it deserved was another matter entirely.

THE WHIFF OF
cordite was disguised by the sweet scent of fresh lilies, which saturated the lobby at the Melwood training ground, where an honour guard of men in late middle age cradled scrapbooks sanctified by the scrawl of superstars and superannuated underachievers. A bronze bust and an inscription, set in polished granite and extending from floor to ceiling, demanded due homage to the heroic contradictions of Liverpool Football Club.

The inscription read: ‘Above all, I would like to be remembered as a man who was selfless, who strove and worried so that others could share the glory, and who built up a family of people who could hold their heads up high and say: “We are Liverpool”.’ It was signed, in spidery copperplate, ‘Billy Shankly’.

Behind the façade of unanimity, that family was dysfunctional. It appeared divided by doomed romanticism, emotional incontinence and institutionalised ignorance. The football club which enshrined the socialist philosophies of the Ayrshire mining community that shaped Shankly’s character now existed only in the imagination of its followers. It was, like Nye Bevan’s NHS, an unsustainable ideal, a relic of cultural change.

Social circumstances were forbidding. Merseyside was a predictable prisoner of recession. A derelict site, opposite the entrance where the men congregated on a bright, cold day, was boarded up. Melwood was protected by three strands of barbed wire, stretched above walls consisting of rectangular slabs of pre-stressed concrete. Pallid, three-storey blocks of flats, the residue of 1960s planning policies, had signs relaying the bleak message: ‘Ball games prohibited.’

Mel Johnson visited infrequently, but understood the dynamics of the situation. He respected manager Kenny Dalglish, and revered the doctrines of the Anfield Boot Room. Yet he represented modernity, and the influence of Sporting Director Damien Comolli, whose 4 a.m. emails signalled the start of many working days. ‘Damien expects you to work as hard as he does,’ said Johnson. ‘That means you have to be prepared for silly hours, and silly trips, but you want to do as well as you can for the fella.’

This was not a universal consideration. Comolli has been seen as a polarising figure. Though knowledgeable and discerning, he was accused of overstating his influence at Arsenal. He recruited well at Tottenham, but had a difficult relationship with manager Martin Jol. He had his critics at Saint Etienne, a club riven by internal politics. However, Liverpool’s new American owners were convinced by the authenticity of his links to Billy Beane, the patron saint of
Moneyball
, whom he had first met as a student. The fault lines between tradition and innovation were widening, imperceptibly, but inevitably.

Moneyball
was a game changer for a certain type of owner, enticed into English football by the commercial potential of its globalisation. They wished to match Beane’s success, in turning the Oakland Athletics into baseball’s most conspicuous overachievers through a novel recruitment strategy based upon the analysis of previously unconsidered statistics, and the defiance of conventional wisdom. Comolli was in on the deal, long before Hollywood turned Michael Lewis’ book, which gave the analytic movement its brand name, into a vehicle for Brad Pitt.

Comolli was waiting at the head of the open-plan stairs which led to the inner sanctum. His chameleon qualities were immediately apparent: his suit matched the corporate grey of the landing carpet, and his open-necked striped shirt, offset by Paul Smith cufflinks, was expensively mundane. Here was a self-contained man, accustomed to revealing as little as possible of himself. His overriding instinct involved placing everything in the context of past achievement, rather than unsubstantiated or inconvenient opinion.

His office reflected his character and lifestyle. A carry-on suitcase in the corner testified to his recent schedule: he had returned from Europe that morning, after watching six matches in five countries in the previous five days. There were few signs of human warmth, apart from two small family photographs, taken on a beach holiday, but hidden behind an incongruous, commemorative football. A French book,
Le But
(‘The Goal’), sat on a coffee table before a plush leather sofa. A framed copy of the two-page press release announcing his arrival at Anfield was on the wall. The Academy Performance Plan, 2012–13, nestled at the top of a neatly stacked in-tray.

He wore his authority well. He exercised strategic control of Liverpool’s recruitment policy, and organised a weekly conference call involving six key figures in recruitment. Domestic policy was carried out by Johnson, in the South of England, and Alan Harper, the former Everton midfield player, in the North. Steve Hitchen, based in Le Mans, had a global role, which included responsibility for a network of European scouts. Academy recruitment was overseen by Frank McParland and Stuart Webber, supported by David Moss, the former Luton winger. All had their own networks of scouts, contacts and informants.

Comolli spoke in a Eurodrawl which had eerie similarities to that of former Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier. He explained: ‘It is a mix of being humble enough to say I don’t know everything and I can be wrong, and being self-confident enough to be comfortable with the decision I am going to make. It is a balance. That is something I took from my experience at Spurs. At one point I isolated myself too much from the scouting staff. I wasn’t listening sufficiently. That is a mistake I won’t make again. In the end you are the one who is going to be responsible. You are the one who is going to get criticism. You have to have thick skin. But I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t care what is said about me. People need to understand that when we make a decision on the successful player we go through the same process with a player who is a failure. There could be ten thousand reasons he went wrong, and one reason why the other player went right. The professionalism, the way we look at it, is exactly the same, whether it is a failure or a success.

‘There are no rules in scouting because you are dealing with human beings. Emotional intelligence is very important, but it is not the only thing you need. It is a business which challenges everything about you. We review our system every six months. Have we got the right strategy in place? Have we got the right people? Do we need to adjust? What about the type of players we are looking at? Is our coverage in South America good enough? Is our coverage in Asia good enough? Everybody works differently. You have directors of football who don’t travel to games, but I do, and I watch a lot of games on video. I am at the very end of the process. It is very pre-remedial.

‘The local scout sees a player: either he says “I am convinced” or “I would like to have another opinion.” Then someone else goes. If it is abroad it is Steve. If Steve tells me “I am convinced” I go to watch, and decide. Sometimes he says “I want you to look.” I don’t think trust is the whole thing, but it is part of it. If Mel goes to see a player that three other scouts are recommending, and I think he is good enough, but Mel tells me he isn’t, I will listen to him, and understand why. It is about challenge, and being challenged. Talking to Arsene, he said to me a fantastic thing: “The more I am in football the less I understand it.” And that is Arsene Wenger. So who am I, you know, not to be humble? I cannot afford not to show humility. It is impossible. I can only talk about football, but that is probably true of successful people in any sphere.’

They were fine words, shiny sentiments which required the sandpaper of scrutiny. There was a compelling logic to the conventional wisdom, whispered in tea rooms and corridors, that Comolli’s reputation, as a data evangelist, had set him on collision course with Dalglish, headmaster of old school football management. Both men portrayed their differences as strengths, and argued that they operated well, in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect, but such statements of faith are rarely taken at face value in such a cynical environment as professional football.

Alex Smithies was one of the guardians of the club’s conscience. He had been a fixture at Liverpool since being employed by Bob Paisley in 1979, and understood the accumulated weight of wisdom, acquired over 50 years in the game. He was based in Newcastle and specialised in assessing impending opposition, but his status, as Dalglish’s most trusted scout, involved making a final check on principal transfer targets. He operated on the front line, where statisticians were regarded as armchair generals: ‘I was at a meeting with Kenny the other day, when one of the whizz kids tried to get clever. Kenny told him: “At this club we rely only on our eyes and our ears.”’

Those twelve words defined the battleground. Dalglish had been brought up to believe in the subjective judgement of a football man’s eye and the timeless quality of peer recognition. Comolli, by instinct and inclination, believed in the objectivity of raw data, and the complementary expertise of a new generation of technically adept, university educated analysts like Liverpool’s Michael Edwards, who blended mathematical algorithms with flesh, blood and bruises. He was too politically conscious to fail to detect the obvious challenge of my artful description of Dalglish as ‘a traditional British manager’.

To be honest, it didn’t take much to break the code. ‘I don’t like the definition,’ he said, leaning forward, utilising equally obvious body language to emphasise the point. ‘Kenny is extremely progressive and very, very open minded to everything which is new. When he left management I’m not sure he’d ever had a fitness coach. Now he is back we have five. He has bought into it. He trusts people. The scouting is the same. He said, “Before I didn’t need scouts. I didn’t need anybody abroad. Now it is global.” The real Kenny is not traditional. He is progressive.’

Anfield was a place of whispers and moans; an overt challenge to Dalglish’s fundamental faith in British players, who carried a forbidding financial premium in an overheated transfer market, was out of the question because of his legendary status. Yet the numbers didn’t appear to add up. The £85 million paid for Andy Carroll, Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam and Stewart Downing compounded problems created by the profligacy of the Rafa Benitez era. The deals didn’t conform to the rigour of the
Moneyball
model, although Comolli argued, with some justification, that they had to be judged over a three or four year period. Liverpool’s immediate future depended on an uneasy compromise, and an unusual outbreak of patience and perspective.

Though the endgame had still to be played out, Comolli had a missionary’s ebullience: ‘For the people who are open minded enough, the revolution has already happened. It can only keep growing and growing. We are at the point where we are advanced enough, in terms of what we can look at in the data, to make real progress. At the moment there are eight clubs in the Premier League who are either using statisticians or appointing them. Whether that will increase is very difficult to predict. You have dynamics within clubs, politics. You might have a statistician. But at what level does he operate? What interaction has he with the people who make those decisions? I know some of those details, but not all.

‘When Michael Edwards was in America, he was not alone. Fulham were there. Everton were there. West Brom were there. That’s why I speak with Michael every day. The first time I went to see Billy Beane in Oakland I had my biggest lesson. I realised then how much you can, and should, know your players. You look at fitness data, tactical and technical data. For first team recruitment you have two aspects: availability and money. If we know there is a top player somewhere, but not in a position we need, or not of the style we are looking for at this moment in time, we still monitor him on a regular basis. But the reality is we concentrate only on the ones who are going to come in and make an impact in the first team.