not be such a brilliant idea. Here, have some more spaghetti alle vongole.’ To most players, this sort of thing comes as a bonus in a stressful life. To a few, it is essential.
After international transfers became common in the 1990s, some agents began to double as player minders. When the Dutch forward Bryan Roy moved from Ajax to Foggia in Italy in 1992, Raiola’s personal service included spending seven months with Roy in Foggia, and helping paint the player’s house. He later said, ‘I already realized then that that this kind of guidance was very important in determining the success or failure of a player.’
Many of Raiola’s players still treat him as an all-purpose helpmeet. Mario Balotelli once phoned him to say his house was on fire; Raiola advised him to try the fire brigade. Nowadays Raiola’s younger players Facetime him. He waddles around his office imitating them as they hold up their phones to show him objects they want to buy: ‘“I’m walking through the house. What do you think of it?”’ He chuckles fondly. He considers it all part of his job.
But part of the history of football is that agents such as Raiola have tended to be cleverer than the people who run clubs. Most clubs took a long time to see the value of relocation. Drogba in his autobiography recounts joining Chelsea from Olympique Marseille in 2004 for £24 million. He writes, ‘I plunged into problems linked to my situation as an expatriate. Chelsea didn’t necessarily help me.’ Nobody at the club could help him find a school for his children. All Chelsea did to get him a house was put him in touch with a real estate agent who tried to sell him one for £10 million. For ‘weeks of irritation’ the Drogba family lived in a hotel while Drogba, who at that point barely spoke English, went house hunting after training.
All Chelsea’s expensive foreign signings had much the same experience, Drogba writes. ‘We sometimes laughed about it with Gallas, Makelele, Kezman, Geremi. “You too, you’re still living in a hotel?” After all these worries, I didn’t feel like integrating [at Chelsea] or multiplying my efforts.’
Chelsea were no worse than other English clubs at the time. The same summer Drogba arrived in London, Wayne Rooney moved thirty-five miles up the motorway from Everton to Manchester United and had an almost equally disorienting experience. United had paid a reported £25.6 million for him but then stuck its eighteen-year-old star asset in a hotel room. ‘Living in such a place I found horrible,’ reports Rooney in his My Story So Far. The nearest thing to a relocation consultant he found at United seems to have been a teammate: ‘Gary Neville tried to persuade me to buy one of his houses. I don’t know how many he has, or whether he was boasting or winding me up, but he kept telling me about these properties he had.’
At a conference in Rome in 2008, relocation consultants literally lined up to tell their horror stories about football. Lots of them had tried to get into the sport and been rebuffed. A Danish relocator had been told by FC Copenhagen that her services weren’t required because the players’ wives always helped one another settle. Many clubs had never even heard of relocation. Moreover, they had never hired relocation consultants before, so given the logic of football, not hiring relocation consultants must be the right thing to do. One Swedish relocator surmised, ‘I guess it comes down to the fact that they see the players as merchandise.’
The only relocation consultants who had penetrated football happened to have a friend inside a club or, in the case of one Greek woman, had married a club owner. She had told her husband, ‘All these guys would be happier if you find out what their needs are, and address their needs.’
Another relocator had entered a German club as a language teacher and worked her way up. She said, ‘I was their mother, their nurse, their real estate agent, their cleaning lady, their everything. They didn’t have a car; they didn’t speak the language.’ Did her work help them play better? ‘Absolutely.’ The club was happy for her to work as an amateur, but as soon as she founded a relocation company, it didn’t want her anymore. She had become threatening.
And so countless new signings continued to flop abroad. Clubs often anticipated this by avoiding players who seemed particularly ill-equipped to adjust. For instance, on average Latin Americans are the world’s most skilful players. Yet historically, English clubs rarely bought them, because Latin Americans don’t speak English, don’t like cold weather and don’t tend to understand the core traditions of English football, such as drinking twenty pints of beer in a night. Few Latin Americans adjust easily to English football.
Instead of Latin Americans, English clubs traditionally bought Scandinavians. On average, Scandinavians are worse footballers than Latin Americans, but they are very familiar with English, cold weather and twenty pints of beer. Scandinavians adapted to England, and so the clubs bought them. But the clubs were missing a great opportunity. Anyone who bought a great Latin American player and hired a good relocation consultant to help him adjust would be onto a winner. Yet few clubs did. Years used to go by without any English club buying a Latin American.
In 2008 Manchester City took a gamble on Robinho. As a Brazilian forward who had had his moments in the World Cup of 2006, he was bound to be overvalued, and was also very likely to relocate badly. So it’s little wonder that City paid a then British record transfer fee of £32.5 million for him, or that eighteen months later it gave up on him and sent him home to Santos on loan. Robinho never returned to English football. The experience obviously taught City a lesson, because for the next two years the club switched to a policy of buying only players who had already established themselves in England. It also finally began to take relocation seriously.
Bit by bit in recent years, the football business has become more intelligent. Way back in the mid-1990s, Liverpool had become one of the first clubs to hire some sort of employee to help new players settle. Ajax Amsterdam was another pioneer. The woman who first handled relocations at Ajax found that some of the problems of new players were absurdly easy to solve. When Steven Pienaar and another young South African player came to Amsterdam, they were teenagers, had never lived on their own before and suddenly found themselves sharing an apartment in a cold country at the other end of the earth. Inevitably, they put their music speakers on the bare floor and cranked up the volume. Inevitably, the neighbours complained. The South Africans had a miserable time in their building, until the woman from Ajax came around to see what was wrong and suggested they put their speakers on a table instead. They did. The noise diminished, their lives got easier, and that might just have made them better able to perform for Ajax.
Most clubs in the Premier League now have ‘player care officers’ – football code for relocation consultants. Some of these officers are full-timers, others not. Some do a serious job. Manchester City in particular learned from Robinho’s failure. When we visited the club’s training ground in 2012, on a wall just behind reception we saw a map of Manchester’s surroundings, designed to catch the eyes of passing players. The map highlighted eight recommended wealthy towns and suburbs for them to live; not on the list was Manchester’s city centre with its vibrant nightlife.
These recommendations are just the start. City’s ‘player-care department’ aims to take care of almost every need a new immigrant might have, whether it’s a nanny or a ‘discreet car service’. Even before a new player signs, the club has already researched his off-duty habits and his partner’s taste in restaurants. When he arrives for pre-season training, the club might say to him, ‘Well, you’re going to be busy for a couple of weeks, but here’s a little restaurant your girlfriend might like.’ It’s not true that behind every successful footballer there is a happy woman (or man), but it probably does help.
In 2011 City signed the young Argentine striker Sergio Agüero. Nobody doubted his talent. However, many doubted whether he would adapt to English football and rainy provincial life. His transfer fee of £38 million seemed a gamble, even for Manchester City. But Agüero scored twice on debut. He finished his first English season with 30 goals, including the last-second strike in the last game of the season against QPR that won City their first league title
