Glory Of The Football Manager System-Chapter 340: The First Piece I

June 13th, 2017

Tomorrow had arrived. It was Tuesday morning, and I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall at St. George’s Park, listening to a presentation on defensive phase transitions.

The instructor was a sharp, experienced coach from a top-tier academy, and the content was good. But my mind wasn’t on the screen. It was two hundred miles away, in a small office at the Beckenham training ground, where Dougie Freedman was about to make the most important phone call of our summer.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced down. A single message from Freedman.

Going in now.

I took a breath. The first move. The first piece of the puzzle. Everything I had presented last night: the system, the vision, the entire architecture of the team I wanted to build, depended on getting the right components.

And the most important component, the one that made the entire machine work, was the deep-lying playmaker. The quarterback. The number six who could dictate the tempo of the game, break the lines with a pass, and demand the ball under pressure. There was only one name on my list for that role.

Rúben Neves.

I had been watching him for months. Marcus and I had spent hours poring over his data, his heat maps, his passing sonars. We had watched every single touch he had taken for Porto in the last year. The kid was a phenomenon.

At twenty years old, he had already captained a Champions League side: the youngest captain in the history of the competition. He had a passing range that was almost unnatural, the ability to switch the play with a sixty-yard diagonal pass that landed on a teammate’s boot as if it had been delivered by hand.

But it wasn’t just the passing. It was the composure. The press resistance. The way he would take the ball in tight spaces, surrounded by three players, and emerge with it, his head up, already looking for the next pass. He was the player I had dreamed of when I first designed the system. He was the perfect number six.

But there was something else. Something that made the move possible in a way it wouldn’t have been 2 months ago. There was a rift. Not a public one; Porto were too professional for that... but it was there in the data, in the minutes played, in the quiet, telling absence of a new contract offer.

Neves had captained Porto in the Champions League at seventeen. He had been the jewel of their academy, the boy they had built everything around. And then, somewhere along the way, the relationship had soured.

He had played fewer games last season than the one before. He had been rotated, rested, and managed. A twenty-year-old who had already captained a Champions League side was being treated like a squad player. He was restless. He wanted out. And Porto, who were not a club that liked to be held to ransom by their own players, were quietly willing to listen to offers.

We were not the only ones listening. Wolves had been in contact with his agent for weeks. They were a Championship club with serious money behind them, a club with ambitions of their own, and they had made it clear they were willing to pay.

The idea of a twenty-year-old Portuguese midfielder dropping into the Championship was absurd on paper. But Jorge Mendes had a long relationship with Wolves’ ownership, and money talked. We needed to move fast.

He was also a player who was being tracked by Liverpool, by Juventus, by half of the elite clubs in Europe. And he played for Porto, a club that was notoriously difficult to negotiate with.

Getting him to Crystal Palace was, by any rational measure, a long shot. But the rift was real, the player was available, and we had something that Liverpool and Juventus couldn’t offer: a guarantee of being the most important player in the team from day one.

"He’s the one," I had told Freedman on Saturday morning, pointing to Neves’s name at the very top of our target list. "He’s the first piece. We get him, and everything else falls into place."

Freedman had looked at the scouting report, at the estimated valuation, at the list of interested clubs. He hadn’t flinched. He had just nodded. "Right," he’d said. "Leave it with me."

Now, it was happening. The lecture ended, and the room broke for coffee. I found a quiet corner in the corridor and called Freedman immediately.

"Well?" I asked, my voice tight.

"They want twenty-five million euros," he said, his voice calm and businesslike. No preamble. No small talk. "That’s about twenty-two million pounds. And they want a twenty percent sell-on clause."

I swore under my breath. It was more than we had anticipated. "What did you offer?"

"I told them we’d go to twelve million pounds, up front, no add-ons, no sell-on. I told them the player wants to come to the Premier League and we’re the only club that can guarantee him first-team football every single week. I told them he could be the centrepiece of a team that’s going into Europe, a team that’s building something new."

"And?"

"They laughed," Freedman said. "Then they told me to call back when I was serious."

This was the game. The dance. The long, slow, painful process of negotiation. "What’s the real number, Dougie? What’s the number that gets it done?"

There was a pause on the line. I could hear the faint sound of him tapping a pen on his desk. "Seventeen million euros," he said finally. "Which is fifteen million pounds. I think they’ll take that. But they’ll hold out for it. They’ll try to start a bidding war. They’ll leak it to the press that Liverpool is interested. They’ll play hardball."

"Then we play harder," I said. "And Wolves, what’s their position?"

"Mendes has been talking to them," Freedman said. "Championship money, but it’s serious. They’re not going away. If we don’t move today, they might."

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the magic castle.