False Nine

34

London was cold and grey and wet which was fine by me. I’d had enough of living out of suitcases for a while. I just wanted to draw the curtains, switch on the telly and stay home for a week. Chelsea were top of the Premier League — José was on his most brilliantly provocative form ever — Arsenal were third and London City were in the drop zone. In spite of City’s desperate travails it felt good to be back home, even if that meant a trip to an FA independent regulatory commission hearing into my alleged misconduct.

The FA headquarters used to be at Soho Square and before that in Lancaster Gate but, since August 2009, it’s been at Wembley. It cost the FA £5 million to leave the eight-floor building at Lancaster Gate, a not insignificant sum given the £10 million it had already cost to relocate, and at a time when the FA was struggling to find a sponsor. But then the FA has always been very good at wasting money and ripping off football fans. Why else are the FA Cup semi-finals now played at Wembley? To make money for the FA, of course, and to hell with the cost and inconvenience for the fans. But they can’t even find a sponsor for the FA Cup since the Budweiser deal ended. For all the good these bastards do, the home of English football might as well still be the Freemasons Arms in Covent Garden. Very little seems to have changed since 1863 in the way these goons think. About the only way they’re better than FIFA is that they’re probably too dumb to be corrupt.

Wembley. Whenever I think of it now I think of Matt Drennan, who hanged himself on Wembley Way because he couldn’t bear to be out of the game. That and a whole lot of other things — booze, pills, depression, divorce. The trouble is that when we play football professionally we’re too young to know how lucky we are. Unfortunately by the time we know how lucky we are, it’s too late and we’re on the cusp of retirement. Football is the cruellest sport. I watched a telly programme about bees, and the way drones are kicked out of the hives at the end of the season reminded me of the way we treat footballers who are similarly considered to be past it. The drones fly off and try to figure out what to do with themselves but in the end the result is always the same; they die. Football is almost as bad as that.

I drove to Wembley in my Range Rover. You know what the outside of the place looks like: it’s a big, modern, overpriced stadium with a carrying handle like a shopping basket at your local Tesco. You’ve seen it often enough when England are scraping a 2–2 draw with Switzerland or 1–1 with the fucking Ukraine. Thank God for Frank Lampard. Not so much three lions that night as three pussies.

That’s not a joke I’d make on Twitter. I was glad I’d closed my Twitter account. I wish I’d done it sooner.

I nudged my way through the waiting newsmen and into the car park. It was a Friday and there wasn’t much to write about, obviously. A few die-hard feminists had rolled out the red carpet for me. Literally. On the carpet was written: This is what a real period looks like. And there were banners which I slowed down to read. It seemed the least I could do. MENstruation: as usual the problem begins with a Man. And You’d think a big c**t would understand about periods. I kind of liked that banner. I even winked at the cute girl holding it in front of my windscreen.

Wembley. Inside the offices of the Football Association, things are a mess — some wanker architect’s idea of what the future looks like, with the kind of brightly coloured, essentially uncomfortable furniture you might have expected to find in a Stanley Kubrick film of the early 1970s. Whenever I’m there I half expect to see Malcolm McDowell strolling around with a blackthorn stick in one hand and a bowler hat on his head. And without doubt I was expecting a solid kick in the balls. Not to mention a hefty fine.

Wembley. As if the place wasn’t already hopelessly opaque, all of the windows have ‘privacy panels’ made of frosted vinyl, presumably to stop disgruntled England fans with sniper rifles getting a bead on any of the cunts who work there; meanwhile the carpets in the so-called ‘breakout areas’ — I think I know what that is on a football pitch, I’m not so sure what one looks like in a suite of offices — are grey, red and green like some hideous piece of abstract art that’s been entered for the Turner Prize. And why not? A fucking carpet is no worse than any of the crap that wins the prize, year on year. Everything about the interior of the FA at Wembley jars like a bad LSD trip and seems to confirm exactly why England football is in such a parlous state; as you walk from one eyesore office to another, you tell yourself that if they can’t get something as simple as the interior decor right, how can they possibly expect to be any better with the management of English football?

Wembley. The wall in the tiny room where my barrister and I were asked to wait until the actual hearing began had a full-length picture of the England Ladies’ football number 10, Jodie Taylor. A nice-enough-looking girl if you like women in football kit but it was as if someone was trying to remind me that women play football too, and that a tasteless Twitter joke about a man who couldn’t stay on the pitch and finish the game because it was his period was not going to be tolerated. I pointed this out to Miss Shields, my brief.

‘I’m sorry some women were offended by my joke,’ I said. ‘In defence I should say that my social media offence was committed in Barcelona, where people have a sense of humour, and not in England, where apparently they don’t. But at least now I know why having a period is sometimes called the curse.’

‘An offence allegedly committed on social media renders all such national borders meaningless, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Shields, who’d been selected by my solicitors. ‘The fact remains that lots of women in the UK were offended. And that’s the substance of the FA’s charge against you, Mr Manson. You might almost say that it’s an offence of strict liability. You said something. Lots of people were offended by it. Therefore the comment brings the game into disrepute. It’s really that simple.’

‘They said they were offended. That’s not quite the same thing as being offended. Sometimes I think there’s a special Twitter feed that’s there to round up the kind of people who have a pitchfork handy so that they can go straight round to Frankenstein’s castle and burn it to the ground. There ought to be a special equation used to compute the speed with which people in Britain now take offence at almost anything. Like the hedge funders have, to calculate shit about financial futures. The Clarkson Ratio. Or the Rio Ferdinand Formula. Or the Ashley Cole Calculation.’

Miss Shields nodded patiently. ‘It’s best you get it all off your chest while you’re in here with me now, and not in there where you’ll only talk up the fine.’

‘I guess you’re right.’

‘Now then. You’ve been charged under the terms laid down in relation to media comments and social network in FA Rule E 3(1). In that you made a comment which was improper, which brings the game into disrepute, and which is insulting.’

‘I deleted the tweet,’ I said. ‘And closed my account. Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘Sadly not. I have read the written observations you provided to explain the context of why you said what you said but I now think it’s best we don’t use those. Just in case we aggravate the original offence.’

I nodded. ‘You’re probably right.’

‘So,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Plead guilty. Offer some mitigation. You know the kind of thing. Take the fine.’ I shrugged. ‘They’ve got to raise the money for English football somehow. Sure as hell no one’s going to be interested in a friendly against the Republic of Ireland. The moth-eaten blazers at the FA don’t seem to understand that there’s no such thing as a friendly in football these days. Not at over a hundred quid a pop. There’s nothing friendly about England ticket prices. And no one gives a shit about an under-23s match between England and China. Or a disability eleven versus the Russian Blind.’

Miss Shields frowned.

‘You think I’m joking, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, flatly.

‘Well, I’m not.’

She nodded. ‘You know, I think it’s probably best that you leave all of the talking to me.’

‘I agree.’

They called us into a room and you could have cut the atmosphere with a pair of plastic scissors. The four-man hearing was actually three men and a woman. I guess the dog couldn’t make it. The chairperson was a man but it was the woman who did the talking and she seemed a little disappointed that I’d decided to plead guilty. The pencil she was holding in her tiny fist looked as if she’d sharpened it especially to stab my cock with it.

Miss Shields did her best but in spite of her eloquent arguments to the effect that most normal women wouldn’t take offence at the tweet I’d made, the FA still felt inclined to fine me twenty-five thousand quid. Which is a nice round sum and the same fine they gave Mario Balotelli for his infamous Instagram post about Super Mario and the Jews. It will probably keep them in expense-account lunches and dinners for about a month. FA independent regulatory commission hearings are like speed cameras; if you drive in London, you’re bound to get a fine and three points eventually. It’s the same with being in English football. The pain in the arse is the lecture you get, especially when it was obvious the chairman thought the whole thing had been whipped up by the media. But of course the FA is terrified of the media and is more likely to pay attention to some idiot’s tweets — and that includes me — than the fact that we can’t seem to win international matches against anyone who matters, when it matters most. Scoring goals and winning trophies used to be the proper province of the FA; now it’s all about adjudicating petty grievances on social media, or punishing managers who say what everyone in the game knows: that referees are making too many mistakes.

Ignoring the press who were waiting in the car park like a pack of scavenging dogs, I drove back to my flat in Chelsea and made a cup of Bonifieur coffee and watched my ugly mug on Sky Sports News. Always good for a laugh. There was a famous sportswoman in the studio who called me a dinosaur and said she hoped I would not be welcomed back into sports management any time soon. Which seemed to be a fairly safe expectation. To my relief she was cut short by the news that London City’s manager, Stepan Kolchak, had resigned with immediate effect, ahead of the big game with Arsenal. A minute later my landline started ringing. I was going to ignore it until I noticed that the number identified the caller as Viktor Sokolnikov. Momentarily unnerved by this call from the dead, I picked up the handset and found myself speaking to Viktor’s Russian-American daughter, Yevgeniya. I’d met her once before; ferociously smart, and famously beautiful, she was studying for an MBA at Harvard. Or so I had thought.

‘I was very sorry to hear about your father,’ I said. ‘In spite of all our differences I always liked him.’

‘Thank you, Scott.’

‘Is there any news about his killer?’

‘No. And there won’t be. But everyone knows who ordered his death. He wouldn’t pay the Kremlin the protection money they were demanding. And so they killed him. That’s how it works, these days. Since Berezovsky. Since Khodorkovsky. You pay up or you find yourself dead or in prison. This is something I’m going to have to get used to myself, since I inherited the bulk of my father’s fortune. Not to mention his football team.’

She sounded more American than Russian.

‘I take it that Stepan Kolchak’s resignation had something to do with you.’

‘That’s right. He was useless, of course. Couldn’t manage a team of painters and decorators. I asked him to resign. To give him a little dignity. But I was much more inclined to sack him.’

‘It sounds like you’re going to be taking an active role in the club, Yevgeniya.’

‘Very active. I’m given up Harvard and I’m back here permanently. To manage all my father’s affairs. Including London City. My father always liked you, Scott. Admired you very much. I believe that he would have asked you to come back to manage the club at the end of the season. Of course by then it will be too late. We’ll have been relegated and we can kiss goodbye to a hundred million pounds’ worth of television money.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure that he would have asked me back. And I’m not so sure I’d have wanted to go back to City.’

‘I’m not my father. So. Mr Dinosaur. Mr Sexist Pig. What do you say? I will pay you what Arsenal pay Arsène Wenger: £7.5 million a year, plus a five million pound bonus if you keep us up. A three-year contract. And here’s your chance to prove all those women wrong who were calling for your head today. I think it would actually do you good to have a woman boss. Come and work for me, Scott. Come and work for a woman. Only please, come soon. As I’m sure you know we have a very important game against Arsenal on Sunday. Perhaps the most important game in our season. So, just don’t keep me waiting, okay? I have the curse right now and I become very irritable when I don’t get what I want.’