clubs that pay millions of pounds for foreign players are often unwilling to spend a few thousand more to help the players settle in their new homes. Instead the clubs have historically told them, ‘Here’s a plane ticket, come over, and play brilliantly from day one.’ The player fails to adjust to the new country, underperforms, and his transfer fee is wasted. ‘Relocation’, as the industry of relocation consultants calls it, has long been one of the biggest inefficiencies in the transfer market.
All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation can be assuaged. Most big businesses know how difficult relocation is and do their best to smooth the passage. When a senior Microsoft executive moves between countries, a relocation consultant helps his or her family find schools and a house and learn the social rules of the new country. If Luther Blissett had been working for Microsoft, a relocation consultant could have found him Rice Krispies. An expensive relocation might cost £20,000, or 0.05 per cent of a large transfer fee. But in football, possibly the most globalized industry of all, spending anything at all on relocation was until very recently regarded as a waste of money.
Boudewijn Zenden, who played in four countries, for clubs including Liverpool and Barcelona, told us during his stint in Marseille in 2009:
It’s the weirdest thing ever that you can actually buy a player for 20 mil, and you don’t do anything to make him feel at home. I think the first thing you should do is get him a mobile phone and a house. Get him a school for the kids, get something for his missus, get a teacher in for both of them straightaway, because obviously everything goes with the language. Do they need anything for other family members, do they need a driving licence, do they need a visa, do they need a new passport? Sometimes even at the biggest clubs it’s really badly organized.
Milan: best club ever. AC Milan is organized in a way you can’t believe. Anything is done for you: you arrive, you get your house, it’s fully furnished, you get five cars to choose from, you know the sky’s the limit. They really say: we’ll take care of everything else; you make sure you play really well. Whereas unfortunately in a lot of clubs, you have to get after it yourself. … Sometimes you get to a club, and you’ve got people actually at the club who take profit from players.
For any foreign player, or even a player who comes in new, they could get one man who’s actually there to take care of everything. But then again, sometimes players are a bit – I don’t want to say abusive, but they might take profit of the situation. They might call in the middle of the night, just to say there’s no milk in the fridge. You know how they are sometimes.
Raiola laughingly endorses Zenden’s assessment of golden-age Milan: ‘I always used to say, “I think they’ll come and put a pill on your tongue if you have a headache.” Whereas Inter would say, “Here’s your contract, go and figure it all out yourself.”’
In football, bad relocations have traditionally been the norm. In 1961, two fifteen-year-olds from Belfast took the boat across the Irish Sea to become apprentices with Manchester United. George Best and Eric McMordie had never left home before. When they landed at Liverpool docks, they couldn’t find anyone from the club to meet them. So they worked out for themselves how to get a train to Manchester, eventually found the stadium, and wound up feeling so lonely and confused that on their second day they told the club: ‘We want to go back on the next boat.’ And they did, recounts Duncan Hamilton in his biography of Best, Immortal. In the end, Best decided to give Manchester one last try. McMordie refused. He became a plasterer in Belfast after leaving school, though he did later make a respectable football career with Middlesbrough. Just imagine how the botched welcome of Best might have changed United’s history.
Yet bad relocations continued for decades, like Chelsea signing Dutch cosmopolitan Ruud Gullit in 1996 and sticking him in a hotel in the ugly London dormitory town of Slough, or Ian Rush coming back to England from a bad year in Italy marvelling, ‘It was like another country.’ Many players down the years would have understood that phrase. In 1995 Manchester City bought the Georgian playmaker Georgi Kinkladze, who spoke no English, and stuck him on his own in a hotel for three months. No wonder his early games were poor. His improvement, writes Michael Cox in The Mixer, ‘coincided with the arrival of two Georgian friends and his mother, Khatuna, who brought some home comforts: Georgian cognac, walnuts, and spices to make Kinkladze his favourite dishes.’
But perhaps the great failed relocation, one that a Spanish relocation consultant still cites in her presentations, was Nicolas Anelka’s to Real Madrid in 1999.
A half-hour of conversation with Anelka is enough to confirm that he is self-absorbed, scared of other people and not someone who makes contact easily. Nor does he appear to be good at languages, because after well over a decade in England he still spoke very mediocre English. Anelka was the sort of expatriate who really needed a relocation consultant.
Real had spent £22 million buying him from Arsenal. The club then spent nothing on helping him adjust. On day one the shy, awkward twenty-year-old reported to work and found that there was nobody to show him around. He hadn’t even been assigned a locker in the dressing room. Several times that first morning, he would take a locker that seemed to be unused, only for another player to walk in and claim it.
Anelka doesn’t seem to have talked about his problems to anyone at Madrid. Nor did anyone at the club ask him. Instead he talked to France Football, a magazine that he treated as his newspaper of record, like a 1950s British prime minister talking to The Times. ‘I am alone against the rest of the team,’ he revealed midway through the season. He claimed to possess a video showing his teammates looking gloomy after he had scored his first goal for Real after six months at the club. He had tried to give this video to the coach, but the coach hadn’t wanted to see it. Also, the other black Francophone players had told Anelka that the other players wouldn’t pass to him. Madrid ended up giving him a forty-five-day ban, essentially for being maladjusted.
Paranoid though Anelka may have been, he had a point. The other players really didn’t like him. And they never got to know him, because nobody at the club seems ever to have bothered to introduce him to anyone. As he said later, all that Madrid had told him was, ‘Look after yourself.’ The club seems to have taken the strangely materialistic view that Anelka’s salary should determine his behaviour. But even in materialistic terms, that was foolish. If you pay £22 million for an immature young employee, it is bad management to make him look after himself. Wenger at Arsenal knew that, and he had Anelka on the field scoring goals.
Even a player with a normal personality can find emigration tricky. Tyrone Mears, an English defender who spent a year at Marseille, where his best relocation consultant was his teammate Zenden, said, ‘Sometimes it’s not a problem of the player adapting. A lot of the times it’s the family adapting.’ Perhaps the player’s girlfriend is unhappy because she can’t find a job in the new town. Or perhaps she’s pregnant and doesn’t know how to negotiate the local hospital, or perhaps she can’t find Rice Krispies (‘or beans on toast’, added Zenden, when told about the Blissett drama). The club doesn’t care. It is paying her boyfriend well. He simply has to perform.
Football clubs never used to bother with anything like an HR department. As late as about 2005, there were only a few relocation consultants in football, and most weren’t called that, and were not hired by clubs. Instead they worked either for players’ agents or for sportswear companies. If Nike or Adidas is paying a player to wear its shoes, it needs him to succeed. If the player moves to a foreign club, the sportswear company – knowing that the club might not bother – sometimes sends a minder to live in that town and look after him.
The minder gives the player occasional presents, acts as his secretary, friend and shrink, and remembers his wife’s birthday. The minder of a young midfielder who was struggling in his first weeks at Milan said that his main task, when the player came home from training frustrated, lonely and confused by Italy, was to take him out to dinner. At dinner
