Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 115: The Foundation II

I want to tell you about three.

The first one arrived in a suit that cost more than our floodlights and shook my hand like he was testing fruit, pump pump, and told me, for twenty minutes, about "synergies" and "the brand" and "leveraging the promotion narrative," and used the word "product" about our football team four times, and had a laminated plan.

The panel put a readout over his head. Name: Unknown.

It stayed Unknown.

"He’s not for us," I said, when he’d gone.

"No," said Maureen, writing something very short on her pad. "He asked me where the executive parking was. We’ve got a gravel bit and a bollard, Sam. He asked about the executive parking."

The second one was a woman of about fifty in a good coat that had been mended, and she sat down and did not talk about brands.

She asked how many turnstiles we had and whether they worked. She asked what our matchday staff got paid and whether they got fed.

She asked to see last season’s gate figures and then read them properly, with her glasses on, in silence, for two whole minutes, while Maureen and I sat there like children waiting on a report.

Then she looked up.

"You’re leaving money on the turnstile," she said.

"You’ve a stand that holds three thousand on paper and you’re getting four hundred through the gate. I know it’s not safe for a thousand, I’m not daft."

"But you’re not even getting the thousand it IS safe for. Nobody in this town under forty knows the games are on, because you’ve no way of telling them, because you’ve got one woman doing the job of six and no time to do the telling."

Maureen went very still.

"And that’s not a criticism of the one woman," the candidate added, not looking up from the figures. "That’s the opposite.

That one woman has kept a Football League club’s entire back office running on her own through an administration. I’d want her word on everything.

I’d not change a system in this building without asking her why it’s there first, because a system that’s survived what this one’s survived is usually there for a reason."

The panel, over her head, quietly resolved.

Name: Margaret Bell.

I looked at Maureen. Maureen was looking at Margaret Bell with an expression I had only seen her wear once before, at a play-off final, and I knew we had our operations manager, and I knew I hadn’t hired her.

Maureen had.

"She asked to see the filing," Maureen said to me afterwards, as if that settled it, which it did.

The third one I want to tell you about was for a smaller job, and it is the one that got me.

I had put out, almost as an afterthought, that we were looking for someone to help Stan. A grounds and kit assistant. Nothing money, a young person’s first job, because I could not watch a seventy-one-year-old man carry the goals off on his own for one more season, and Stan would sooner die than ask.

A lad turned up. Nineteen, maybe. From the estate.

He had not brought a CV because I do not think anybody had told him that was a thing, and he sat on the edge of the chair like it might be taken back off him.

When I asked him why he wanted the job he went red and said he didn’t really know how to do a job interview.

"Do you know Stan?" I asked.

"Everyone knows Stan," he said. "He let us get the balls back over the fence when we was kids. Never chased us off. Some of the old boys chase you off.

Stan used to kick ’em back to us." He looked at his hands. "He’s getting on a bit though, ain’t he.

I seen him carrying the nets in the rain last year and I nearly went and helped him only I thought he might not like it."

And that was the interview, really. That was the whole thing.

Name: Unknown, said the panel, and then, as the lad sat there going red about a seventy-one-year-old man carrying nets in the rain, it did the thing it does, the thing I have never been able to explain to anybody, and it made its quiet decision.

Name: Kieran.

"When can you start?" I said.

That is what the building money bought, in the end. Not fireworks.

It bought Margaret Bell. And a young woman called Priya to do the commercial and the telling-people-the-games-are-on. And a proper physio called Dev who had done two years in the actual Championship and wanted, God knows why, to come and put a promoted fifth-tier club’s bodies back together.

And a chief scout, a quiet old boy named Wilf who had watched football in the rain for forty years and had an eye like a hawk and a car like a skip.

And it bought Kieran, nineteen, from the estate, who turned up at half seven the next Saturday and carried the goals off, the frame scraping on the concrete, without making a thing of it.

I watched Stan clock him from across the pitch, and say nothing, and then, about an hour later, hand him a spare pair of his own gloves without a word.

I hired a scout because I can no longer be the scout. That is the truth of it, and it is the pivot of my whole life, so let me say it plainly.

For a year I have been the best talent-spotter in England, because I remembered who was good. That is running out.

League Two is at the far edge of what I can remember being sure about, and beyond it is a fog, and in that fog I am going to need a quiet old man named Wilf with an eye like a hawk, because I am about to stop being able to see in the dark.

I am, in every way that counts, going blind. And the only sane thing to do about going blind is to hire people who can see.

Then there was the other thing, the big one, the thing that was never really about this season at all.

I founded an academy.