change. Great clubs are shaped in the image of their great managers. It is too simplistic to view Moyes as merely an autocrat, with the inflexibility that implies. Like his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson, he wields power decisively, but sensitively. He is comfortable with ultimate responsibility – indeed he demands it – but the democratic nature of Everton’s recruitment policy informs us of the man, and the club he has created. They would not make Liverpool’s mistake, of attempting to impose a sporting director in the mould of Damien Comolli. Kenwright is a fan; he understands the mentality of his club in the way an opportunistic owner from the United States never could.
When he arrived at Goodison, Moyes made a statement of intent. He hailed Everton as ‘The People’s Club’. The defiance of the gesture, and the horror with which it was greeted at Anfield, across Stanley Park, registered with his natural constituency. In wider terms, it begged a critical question: is football still a people’s game? A League One club would assist in the search for the truth about England, and its national obsession, in the formative years of the twenty-first century.
4
Parklife
WEMBLEY STADIUM’S SIGNATURE arch, glistening in a weak sun, dominated the horizon. Viewed from the dereliction of the Warren Farm Sports Centre, across a valley mottled by the clutter of suburban housing, it had the splendour of a cathedral on a hill. Yet, like many things involving English football, its majesty was an illusion.
Miguel Rios understands the gulf between the presumptions of the apparatchiks, working in the Football Association’s ruinously expensive headquarters, and the realities of the grassroots game. It cannot be measured by the three miles which separate the stadium and a symbol of sporting decay, where park footballers play beside abandoned cricket nets, in which saplings grow through ancient, shredded green matting.
He knows, one day, soon, the boys he watches, in an attempt to detect and develop unrealised talent, will be evicted. Clubs are likely to fold. The travellers’ ponies which graze, untended, on adjoining straw-coloured scrubland will, in all probability, be humanely destroyed. The bulldozers will move in, and, sometime in the 2014–15 season, Queens Park Rangers will have a new training ground. It is expected to win more awards for the men who designed and built the Olympic Stadium.
For the moment, Warren Farm is a regular port of call for Rios, a scout who is changing perceptions of Brentford, a homely football club with expansionist ambitions of its own. The men who write the FA coaching syllabus, and the politicians who encourage a conspiracy of silence about the sale of playing fields, and the betrayal of a generation, should meet him. It may be too much to expect them to be enlightened, but they would certainly be challenged.
His is a world where parents brawl, and referees cower in car parks, as the ignorant seek retribution. Lofty edicts about the technical development of young players are simply irrelevant. Coaches regurgitate second-rate TV punditry and tactical half-truths. This is England, our England. Children, as young as seven, have the first stoop-shouldered signs of physical illiteracy. They are active, by definition, but many are overweight, or burdened by social and cultural circumstance.
Rios is a football man with a conscience, who sees the good in people, despite the dispiriting nature of his experiences. He is a refugee from the City of London, where he was a successful business analyst for banks such as UBS, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital, until he could no longer accept the dehumanising effects of a lifestyle based on accumulation and consumption. He got out before he became someone he did not like.
‘You kinda sell your soul to the money, but eventually you ask yourself why am I doing this?’ he reflected. ‘It is a pressurised lifestyle, but to be honest, I relished that. It
When he arrived at Goodison, Moyes made a statement of intent. He hailed Everton as ‘The People’s Club’. The defiance of the gesture, and the horror with which it was greeted at Anfield, across Stanley Park, registered with his natural constituency. In wider terms, it begged a critical question: is football still a people’s game? A League One club would assist in the search for the truth about England, and its national obsession, in the formative years of the twenty-first century.
4
Parklife
WEMBLEY STADIUM’S SIGNATURE arch, glistening in a weak sun, dominated the horizon. Viewed from the dereliction of the Warren Farm Sports Centre, across a valley mottled by the clutter of suburban housing, it had the splendour of a cathedral on a hill. Yet, like many things involving English football, its majesty was an illusion.
Miguel Rios understands the gulf between the presumptions of the apparatchiks, working in the Football Association’s ruinously expensive headquarters, and the realities of the grassroots game. It cannot be measured by the three miles which separate the stadium and a symbol of sporting decay, where park footballers play beside abandoned cricket nets, in which saplings grow through ancient, shredded green matting.
He knows, one day, soon, the boys he watches, in an attempt to detect and develop unrealised talent, will be evicted. Clubs are likely to fold. The travellers’ ponies which graze, untended, on adjoining straw-coloured scrubland will, in all probability, be humanely destroyed. The bulldozers will move in, and, sometime in the 2014–15 season, Queens Park Rangers will have a new training ground. It is expected to win more awards for the men who designed and built the Olympic Stadium.
For the moment, Warren Farm is a regular port of call for Rios, a scout who is changing perceptions of Brentford, a homely football club with expansionist ambitions of its own. The men who write the FA coaching syllabus, and the politicians who encourage a conspiracy of silence about the sale of playing fields, and the betrayal of a generation, should meet him. It may be too much to expect them to be enlightened, but they would certainly be challenged.
His is a world where parents brawl, and referees cower in car parks, as the ignorant seek retribution. Lofty edicts about the technical development of young players are simply irrelevant. Coaches regurgitate second-rate TV punditry and tactical half-truths. This is England, our England. Children, as young as seven, have the first stoop-shouldered signs of physical illiteracy. They are active, by definition, but many are overweight, or burdened by social and cultural circumstance.
Rios is a football man with a conscience, who sees the good in people, despite the dispiriting nature of his experiences. He is a refugee from the City of London, where he was a successful business analyst for banks such as UBS, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital, until he could no longer accept the dehumanising effects of a lifestyle based on accumulation and consumption. He got out before he became someone he did not like.
‘You kinda sell your soul to the money, but eventually you ask yourself why am I doing this?’ he reflected. ‘It is a pressurised lifestyle, but to be honest, I relished that. It
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