Tales from the Secret Footballer Read online

  Fans can be very selective about what they decide to believe but, in fairness to them, in this case there had been a huge amount of bollocks written about the financial plight of this club. There had been even more crap put into the public domain by the owners, would-be owners and previous owners. In fact the only faction who had kept their counsel had been the players. In hindsight, maybe that was a problem for the fans, but sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The people who were responsible for plunging the club into its dire financial situation were long gone and the players were being held accountable for abuses that extended back to before most of them had even arrived at the club. It was crazy.

  To make things worse, that particular summer finding another club was tough, if not impossible, for me. Some of the younger players were walking straight into new contracts at other big clubs on good money; this meant that they could afford to wait for what they were owed and sign the deferral contracts that the club was pushing them into. My situation was slightly different, as I found out from my agent and an ex-manager that I had remained friends with.

  In the market, my name had been absolutely slaughtered by another ex-manager of mine, whom I despise. The feeling is clearly mutual, given that every phone call that my agent made yielded the same response: “We know he’s a decent player but we’ve been warned off him – he’s trouble.” He knew the situation at my current club was dire; he also hated the club for reasons that we won’t go into but must have had a bearing on his decision to warn every manager that he could think of not to sign me. The result was that I became trapped in limbo: I couldn’t get a new club because my name was being abused by a cantankerous old fuck, and I couldn’t get out of the club I was currently at because they wouldn’t pay me what they owed me. The fans were getting angrier and angrier. Something had to give.

  * * *

  In the event, it was me – I left the club without getting my money. The season was about to start and if I was going to find a club then I’d have to leave before I became a registered player. I was forced to gamble that my negotiating position would not be weakened by the fact that I wasn’t in the building any more. That had been my concern from day one, and the club knew it.

  I had signed the first deferral contract some six months earlier, and I had been told to expect the money in six months’ time. That meant six months with no income and nothing left to sell, while trying to pay a mortgage of £16,000 a month and a tax bill of hundreds of thousands, not counting fines for late payment.

  Now we were being asked to defer what we were owed again, which would have meant certain bankruptcy. I was forced to tell them that I wasn’t signing; I had to hang my hat on the fact that they owed me a lot of money. That way I would have some sort of asset when I turned up at the bank to ask for a new mortgage. To all intents and purposes, the club now had to pay me whether it had the money or not. Almost overnight the whole thing became a game of Russian roulette.

  The Professional Footballers’ Association was a disgrace throughout the entire ordeal, by the way. It was spooked from day one by this case and it ran a mile. When football takes its gloves off and the going gets tough, it seems the PFA does not give a shit about anybody unless they are an elite player at a top club. We had next to no help or contact, no advice or guidance, and the players were left to fend for themselves. The situation was so complicated that it almost appeared as if everyone who was not directly involved simply stood back to see who would blink first.

  Luckily I did find a club – a big club – and the signing-on fee that I negotiated was enough to keep the house safe, for a while at least. Even so, when the game against my former team came around my head was all over the place. At one point I thought about asking the manager to leave me out, but that isn’t me and I dismissed the idea almost as soon as it came to me. I’m not a coward, never have been, but I knew it would be bad – and so it proved.

  When my name was read out, the boos that rang around the ground were deafening. The game completely passed me by and the abuse became worse until finally it was over. I came in from the game and got changed before leaving the ground and heading home, but I felt and still feel such resentment for those fans and that club. No wonder nearly every footballer feels that fans are completely clueless. It is true that this bunch were deceived by a lot of conflicting stories, but whenever any doubt remained in their minds, they took the easy option and turned on the players.

  Then a set of very curious circumstances came about. First the bank rang to say that there had been an oversight on my mortgage and that I had been overpaying for two years. Rather than £16,000 a month, I should have been giving them £10,500. There was no apology; in fact the woman assigned to my case almost seemed to be waiting for a “thank you”. In the event she got a different two words out of me and we haven’t spoken since.

  The second stroke of luck came when the owner of my new club rang me the day after the game. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know whether you can use this in your dealings with your old club as a negotiating point, but when the fans started singing that song about you, their chairman stood up in the directors’ box and joined in.”

  “You’re joking!” I said.

  “No, mate,” he said. “I had to ask him to sit down while reminding him that you’re one of our players and that he should stop acting like a 10-year-old and show some respect.”

  “Good for you, mate. Quite right too,” I said.

  “Yeah, but when he sat down he turned to me and said, ‘Yeah but it’s only [The Secret Footballer] – he deserves it.”

  There was silence at both ends for what felt like a minute but was probably only 10 seconds or so. Eventually I cobbled some words together.

  “Say again, mate,” I said. “What did he say exactly?”

  He told me again and I lost it. There was a lot of swearing, mainly from me, and further requests for a full account of what had taken place just to make sure that I was hearing this right. I rang off and sat in silence for an hour or so, thinking about the situation. The worst thing to do when you’re angry is react immediately; these days I try to digest the information and work out the next move. That’s something I’ve learned to do over the years from friends who run successful businesses, even if it is against my nature. I decided that the first call should be to my agent, who had been dealing with this situation alongside me. I told him the story, he rang our lawyers – and all hell broke loose. The lawyers had plenty of ideas and seemed very excited by this latest development. What, they asked, did I want to do?

  “You know what?” I said. “For months I’ve been bending over backwards for them. I’ve deferred payments that were due for fucking months, years even, sold everything I own, put my house up for sale, and this is the thanks I get? Ring that chairman and tell him to stick his contract right up his arse.” (He was still hoping that I would agree to defer payment.) “Tell him I don’t want to help him and he’ll have done all this work for nothing. I don’t even want the money any more; it’s not even about the money – I just want to see him fail. I want to see what he has to say to the fans after he fails, after all his bullshit about him being the saviour of the club.”

  I was absolutely spitting feathers at this point. Despite the drugs, I can still be a spiteful bastard when the mood takes me.

  “This is the important bit,” I continued. “Tell him that tomorrow morning every single newspaper in the country is going to carry the story of what he said in the directors’ box at the weekend, and everybody will know that the reason the club failed is that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and stop himself from giving it the big one in front of his mates. Tell him that my owner is going to allow the papers to use him as a named source.”

  The last bit was an outright lie, but so far as the rest of it was concerned I was deadly serious.

  Twenty minutes later the lawyer phoned back.

  “The chairman at the club has denied all knowledge of your accusations. He did
say that he had got carried away and maybe said some things that he shouldn’t have in the heat of the moment, but that’s all.”

  “Right,” I said. “So did he or didn’t he say it?”

  He ignored me.

  “Furthermore, he wanted me to tell you that he thinks you’re a great player and that he appreciates everything you’ve done in helping him to save the club. He understands the financial sacrifice that you and the other players have made. He has asked me to apologise to you for getting carried away and has once again relayed to me in the strongest possible terms that the club has no money and will not survive unless all the players sign the paperwork that was emailed to them asking to defer payments once again.”

  “Well, that’s the situation, then, isn’t it?” I said. “Tell him that he’s just pissed away two years of his life, because I’m not signing it. I want to see him fail and I want everybody to know that the reason the club failed is because of what he said in that directors’ box. Before the week is out I’ll have his name and the comments that he made in every paper in the country, just as the club did to me when they were trying to point the finger of blame at the high earners.”

  “One minute,” said the lawyer. “It is my legal obligation to tell you that you ought to sign the deferral contract if you are to stand any chance of receiving any of the money that is owed to you.”

  “I hear you,” I said, “and I know you hear me. It isn’t even about the money any more because he has made it personal. So please go back to him and tell him I’m not signing the deferral contract. You know me. You know how serious I can be. I’m deadly serious.”

  Thirty minutes later the phone rang again.

  “Are you alone and sitting down?” the lawyer said.

  I wasn’t. “Yes,” I lied.

  “I’ve just had a call from the representatives of the club,” he said. “They have asked me to pass on their full and frank apologies once more and have also instructed me to inform you that they’d like to offer you a full settlement of the outstanding amount.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “No,” came the reply. “I’m not joking. However, there is a condition.”

  “Right,” I said. “What’s the condition?”

  “For God’s sake keep the chairman’s name out of the papers. I know you and they know you and we’re all a bit worried at the minute. You haven’t called any journalists yet, have you?”

  “No,” I said, which was another lie. Well, when in Rome …

  Let me give you an idea of what a monumental breakthrough this was. The club had preached, very publicly, that it had absolutely no money and that the situation was dire. It had even asked the fans to contribute huge amounts of money to a fund to save it. Clearly that was bullshit. The problem is that at these murky levels of negotiation you have to juggle so many factors in order to get a result, and you have to hold your nerve. My strength is that I’ll hold my nerve to the point that it’s to everyone’s detriment, even mine. So long as you’re prepared to do that you’ll always get to the truth; whether that truth helps your situation or not is another matter.

  But I also had to do something that didn’t sit well with me. I’m OK fighting against authority figures, but I do have a conscience when it comes to selling my own grandma down the river. In this case, however, I had to make an exception. Many of my former team-mates who were in the same situation as me had called to ask what I was going to do (they always do that, but only because I pronounce the t’s in words when I speak), and I told them not just that the deferral contract was our best chance of getting paid, but that I had already signed it. It isn’t personal – it’s just business as they say. As much as I enjoy the company of some of those lads, my responsibility is, as I’ve already said, to my family. And this was a desperate situation: the TSF household was on the line.

  So we finally settled, I accepted the chairman’s apology and I also agreed to keep his name out of the papers. And do you know where all that money went? HMRC. And it still wasn’t enough to pay the bill.

  And so ended one of the most depressing sagas of my life. I never wanted things to turn out this way; I just wanted to play football. But sometimes circumstances conspire against you and take that simple pleasure out of your hands; then you can either piss and moan that your luck is crap or you can stand up and fight and hope that people see the truth of the situation.

  They still hate me at that club, and that’s fine. I could do without it but I’m a big boy and I’ll live with it. But they should know that if I hadn’t got the rest of the squad to sign the deferral contracts, they’d have no football club to support and no seat from which to abuse me.

  OK, IT’S ABOUT THE MONEY

  Football is changing, though you probably don’t need me to point that out. The deals that are being put together are incredible. The American business magazine Forbes now has Real Madrid ahead of Manchester United as the world’s most valuable football club, with an estimated worth of $3.3bn to United’s $3.165bn. That’s despite the fact that independent analysis suggests that United have more than twice as many overseas followers as Madrid.

  The way Madrid have achieved this is a testament to the power of their brand. Together with Barcelona, Madrid now account for half of the $750m TV rights in Spain. And thanks to years of those lucrative TV deals, Madrid have finally been able to start work on a $320m modernisation of their famous stadium that, when finished in 2018, is expected to push matchday revenues past $220m a year.

  The most amazing part of president Florentino Pérez’s strategy, however, is the way he has been able to persuade the world’s best talent to meet him halfway financially if they want to play for Madrid. And herein lies a clue to the recent reports of disharmony among some of Madrid’s biggest stars.

  Since Pérez came to power, he has managed to convince every player who has followed him to part with half of his off-field earnings. That’s every sponsorship deal, every shirt sale and every endorsement that, as Pérez sees it, comes from piggy-backing on the famous name of Real Madrid.

  So when you hear talk of an £85m transfer fee for the supremely talented Gareth Bale, don’t be taken in. Yes, it is a real transfer fee but it won’t be handed over to Spurs all at once. In fact, not many clubs hand over the full amount up front. Real Madrid will look to spread the payments over the length of Bale’s contract. Once Bale is in the building, however, his contract starts in earnest and half of his off-field revenue will come to Madrid. In essence, the proceeds from Gareth Bale’s own commercial activity will pay for his own transfer. You have to hand it to Pérez – it is a quite sensational business model.

  How time flies when you’re raking in the cash. It was back in 2002 that Manchester United signed a 13-year sponsorship deal with Nike worth £303m, a deal that also included a 50 per cent profit split from all merchandise sold. Although the current deal doesn’t expire until 2015, both parties have already entered an exclusive renegotiation period.

  The new figure, still being wrangled over, is said to be close to £1bn for a new 10-year merchandising and sponsorship deal.

  Pushing the numbers north is the name of the game and in the last couple of years sports manufacturers and football clubs have adopted new ways of leveraging their combined potential.

  Despite the emergence of Barcelona and the ever-present power of Real Madrid, Manchester United remains one of the world’s most recognisable and valuable sporting brands, a fact emphasised by last season’s announcement of a seven-year sponsorship deal with Chevrolet worth £357m. This deal was so extraordinary that it prompted the club to buy itself out of an existing training kit sponsorship deal with DHL. In fact, it was so extraordinary that 48 hours after it was announced, Chevrolet’s parent company General Motors sacked the man behind it, Joel Ewanick, after it was revealed that GM would be paying more than twice as much as current shirt sponsor Aon.

  Putting that embarrassment aside, however, United’s ability to profit from its br
and remains unparalleled in the history of British football. Manchester United the brand is as rampant as its team was in the Premier League last season; in 2012 the club opened an office in Hong Kong and announced that staff costs had risen to £40.3m “primarily due to growth in commercial headcount”.

  With more commercial staff comes an ever-increasing amount of commercial deals: £1.3m due to their players being selected for Euro 2012; and, as a result of Old Trafford being an Olympic venue, a rise in matchday revenue to £109.1m. United’s overall income rose to £363.2m over the year to 30 June 2013, while its debt has shrunk to a similar figure.

  When people ask me where I think football, will eventually end up, I have to weigh up what I actually think will happen and how much abuse I can take once I give my answer. But with half a dozen clubs in each top European league all chasing the same commercial success, I’m afraid that when I look down the track the only thing that I can see coming is a speeding commercial freight train.

  The glory of winning in battle still exists in football, but it is a glory that is increasingly driven by people in tinted-glass boxes wearing severe suits. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with that for now. I am happy to follow football as long as what is being offered on the pitch is entertaining. But there will come a time when the only way to push financial figures skyward – particularly TV revenues – will be to play more matches against the top teams. And my guess is that this will lead to two things. First, the Champions League will temporarily revamp itself so that the top teams compete on a league basis in what were the knockout rounds. Then, when this approach fails, the top European clubs will reject Uefa, thrash out their own TV deals and create their own league – a league in which financial fair play rules do not exist and the Champions League is truly a league of the world’s championship-winning clubs.