January Window

24

Just after eleven o’clock Sarah Crompton appeared in my office to show me a draft of the press release announcing that I was to be the new City manager.

Sarah was a great-looking brunette in her forties, slim and elegant, and always dressed in a two-piece suit from somewhere like Chanel or Max Mara. Before joining London City she’d worked at Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam, an American-owned advertising agency responsible for Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ campaign, which hit cinemas before the 2010 World Cup. That’s the one with a bearded Wayne Rooney living in a caravan because Frank Ribery had stopped his shot going in. Sarah was smart and articulate and while I was speaking to her, even with Maurice McShane still in the room, it wasn’t obvious to me what she and he had in common beyond a love of sports; Sarah was an accomplished golfer and with a handicap of just six she could easily beat me. I had a lot of time for this woman. For any woman with a brain like hers. In many ways she reminded me of Sonja.

Since Viktor and Phil had already approved the press release I had little to add to it except the fact that I wasn’t ‘looking forward to the challenge’. I suggested that ‘trying to live up to the example set by one of the great managers of all time’ was a choice of words that suited me rather better — there were quite enough clichés in football reporting without me adding to the already enormous ziggurat.

I also told her I didn’t want to do any interviews until well after Zarco’s funeral.

‘I don’t want to make your job more difficult or anything,’ I said, ‘but I’m upset by what’s happened and I’ll need a little time to get over it. Also, I’ll need a little time to grow into the job before I feel even half comfortable talking about myself as the manager of this club.’

‘There’s a lot of interest from the Guardian in you being one of only four black managers in the Football League — you, Chris Hughton, Paul Ince and Chris Powell.’

‘I hadn’t really thought of it like that,’ I said.

‘Maybe you should,’ said Sarah.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘Players get bought because they’re good players, regardless of colour. And managers get hired because they’re good managers. I don’t for a minute believe that some kind of affirmative action programme by the FA is going to fix anything. If we can get a few players on the board of the FA then maybe things will change for the better — any players, not just black ones. Until the FA stops being a club for footloose royals and fat white businessmen then nothing can happen for the good.’

‘So, say that.’

‘Maybe when I’ve got my feet under the table a bit more. When City have won something. Not before.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But maybe there’s one interview you should do now. Hugh McIlvanney from the Sunday Times. You know him, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘A little.’

‘He sent me an email. A very nice email, actually. He’s writing a piece for next Sunday’s paper about Zarco and says he’d welcome your input. And let’s not forget that he is the best sports journalist in the country.’

I couldn’t disagree with that assessment. It wasn’t the fact that McIlvanney was a Scot that made me like him, it was his sheer ability as a writer. He never disappointed you. When George Best had died, in November 2005, it had been McIlvanney who’d written the most eloquent appreciation of George in his ‘Voice of Sport’ column. I still remembered a particularly favourite phrase of mine that he’d written then: ‘Trying to explain how or why the sight of men playing about with a ball can hold countless millions in thrall from childhood to dotage is a task beyond rational argument. But we never needed anything as prosaic as logic when George was around.’ Amen. Mac hadn’t always written kind things about João Zarco — once he’d described his approach to football as ‘forensic’ and the man himself as ‘the reigning master of sporting realpolitik’ — but he was always scrupulously fair.

‘Yes,’ I told Sarah. ‘I’ll speak to him. But only because it’s a piece about Zarco.’

Sarah put out the press release on Twitter and almost immediately I started getting texts from other managers that were an understandable mixture of commiserations and congratulations. From Porto — Zarco’s home town — I received an Instagram of the Estádio do Dragão where, underneath a mural of the club’s famous dragon, there was now an enormous brooding photograph of Zarco flanked by two members of the Portuguese National Republican Guard. While from Glasgow, where Zarco had ended his career as a very popular player with Celtic, every inch of the green railings that surrounded Jock Stein’s statue was now covered with lengths of black ribbon. In the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where for a while Zarco had managed Atlético Mineiro, the Estádio Raimundo Sampaio — a ground that always reminded me a little of Arsenal’s old stadium at Highbury — the pitch was now covered with flowers. It seemed that the man’s death had touched people all over the world.

One or two of these texts I answered, but I was rather more interested in reading the hundreds of texts that were on João Zarco’s ‘something else’ mobile phone. Mostly these were to and from Paolo Gentile who, as well as having been Zarco’s agent, had been the club’s agent, too — at least he had been in the recent transfer of Kenny Traynor. The texts between Gentile and Zarco were undated and often deliberately obfuscating, but it was quickly obvious that Zarco had taken a bung on the Traynor transfer. For a nine-million-pound transfer an agent would have made close to a million quid in commission. That was just normal pay for a top-ten football agent like Paolo Gentile, and indeed he’d made much bigger fees on higher-priced players. When Henning Bauer went to Monaco from Bayern Munich for fifty million euros, Gentile had walked away with a cool five million euros.

Put simply, a bung is an illicit payment made to ensure that a player-transfer deal is completed satisfactorily; a club sanctions a payment to an agent, some of which then gets secretly handed back to a manager in cash. Famously, during the scandal that followed on from the transfer of Teddy Sheringham to Nottingham Forest, Terry Venables alleged that Brian Clough ‘liked a bung’. And not very much has changed. Managers and agents are perhaps more careful of the FA and the Inland Revenue these days but, as anyone in football will tell you, illicit payments are more or less impossible to police. I wouldn’t ever take a bung myself, but if an agent and a manager decide between them that cash should change hands, then I don’t see how it can be prevented.

Zarco and Gentile were wise to be cryptic. The penalties for taking a bung were severe, as the former manager of Arsenal, George Graham, would testify: he was the first and only casualty of the bungs scandal that hit football in 1995. He lost his job and was punished by the FA with a year-long ban from football.

What was less obvious was exactly how and when and in what form the bung on Kenny Traynor was to be paid to Zarco. I had to read the texts several times before I could get any kind of a handle on what had happened between the two men.