Chapter 94: The Coat I
The fax machine in Maureen’s office is older than three of my players and it has printed one interesting thing in its entire life, and it printed it on the Monday morning after Wrexham, at 9.04, while I was stood there with a cup of tea I never got to drink.
Whirr. Chunk-chunk-chunk.
Maureen watched it come out. She has a way of reading upside down that comes from forty years of watching men try to hide things on desks.
"Calderwell County," she said. "The Championship lot."
"I know who they are, Maureen."
A yo-yo club with a new owner and a hole up front. A Fleetwood scout had watched Vardy three times off the back of a coach, and scouts talk, and word travels up a division the way water runs down a hill.
She tore it off. She read it. And Maureen Tully, who has not shown me a feeling on purpose since 1987, went a bit still.
"They’ve offered four hundred thousand pounds," she said, "for James Vardy."
Four hundred thousand pounds.
Let me put that number where you can see it properly, because a number on its own is just a number.
We owe two hundred and thirty-three thousand.
Four hundred thousand pounds would clear the debt on the last day of this month, in one go, for ever, and leave a hundred and sixty-seven thousand pounds in a bank account belonging to a club whose best month on the ledger was eleven pounds forty to the good.
It would put a roof on the Bovril End.
It would build the first brick of the thing I drew on an envelope and cannot afford.
It is, to the pound, almost exactly what I have spent eight months and three quarters of a miracle failing to find.
And it arrived on a fax machine on a Monday morning, and all I have to do to have it is sell a lad I found on a beer mat in a steel town who has done nothing but everything I asked.
I sat in my office and I looked at that fax for a long time.
And here is the thing I have to tell you, because I have been honest about the crying and the sums and I’ll be honest about this.
I thought about it.
Not for long. But I would be lying to you if I said the number went past me without stopping, because it did not. It stopped. It sat down.
That’s the honest bit. The number was good enough to make a good man think.
Then I did the other sum. The one the fax didn’t know about, and I did it the way I do all of them now, cold, with the part of me that has already lived this.
Four hundred thousand pounds for James Vardy, in the summer of 2011, is not a good offer.
I know that the way I know my own name.
He goes to Leicester in a year’s time for a million, and that is not a guess, that is a memory, and a million is the floor, not the ceiling, because the Vardy I remember had not had a year of Craig Sadler teaching him where to stand.
Mine has. Mine is better than the one I remember at the same age, and I have watched it happen on my own training pitch.
So here is what Calderwell are actually asking me to do.
They are asking me to sell an asset for four hundred thousand pounds that I know will be worth a million inside twelve months, and more than that if I hold my nerve and let my manager keep working.
That is not a football decision. That is a man offering to buy a house for half what it’s worth off somebody he’s been told is desperate.
And selling a lad who has been at this club barely a year, at the very bottom of what he’s worth, to plug a hole in a balance sheet, is not hard-headed business. It is the opposite.
It is the single most financially illiterate thing a chairman could do, and the only reason it looks clever from the outside is that everybody in that outside thinks four hundred grand is the top of the market for him.
It isn’t the top. It’s the opening bid. And you do not take the opening bid on the best thing you will ever own.
Calderwell know he’s good. They think they’re buying a Championship squad player for four hundred grand and a tidy profit before anyone works out what he is.
They are trying to buy the Bank of England with a fiver, and they do not know it, and I am the only man alive who does.
I picked up the phone and I rang the number on the fax.
Their football man was called Gedney, and he was pleasant, and he opened with the thing they always open with.
"It’s a life-changing amount for a club your size, Sam."
"It is."
"Four hundred. And we’d do it clean, first week of July when the window opens, cash up front, no add-ons to argue about later. The money’s real and it’s there, and, between us, it’s more than the lad’s worth and we both know it."
"You’re right," I said. "It’s more than he’s worth today."
A little pause. He’d heard the word.
"Today," he said.
"He’s twenty-four, Barry. He scores thirty a season in this division on a wage that would embarrass you. What do you think he does in yours?"
"I think he does all right. I don’t think he does four hundred grand’s worth of all right, which is why I’m offering it, because I’m a generous man and my chairman’s had a drink." He laughed. I let him.
"Come on, Sam. You’re skint. Everyone knows you’re skint. You had a bucket round at your last home game."
And there it was, the thing the whole town has hidden behind all season, said down a phone by a stranger as a reason I should give up.
You’re skint.
"We are," I said. "We’re skint, and the ground can’t be sold, and the stand’s held up with faith, and our best month was eleven pound forty. You’ve done your homework.
So you’ll understand that if I’m turning down four hundred thousand pounds that I could have in the bank on Friday, when I need it more than any club in England needs it, then it might just be worth your while asking yourself why."
Silence.
"Because I’ll tell you why, Barry. It’s because I’ve seen him play. You’ve seen him three times off the back of a coach with a lanyard on. I signed him off a beer mat last summer and I’ve watched him every day since.
And a man who’s watched him every day since last summer does not sell him for four hundred thousand pounds to anybody."
I could hear him breathing.
"He’s not for sale," I said. "Not to you, and not for that.
And when he goes for what he’s actually worth, and he will, every scout who filed a four-hundred-grand report on him is going to spend a long time explaining to somebody why they valued the best finisher in the country like a decent squad man.
I’d not want to be the name at the bottom of that report."
I put the phone down before he could, clunk, which I learned off a man I do not like.
Then I sat in my office above a chip shop, having just turned down the exact amount of money that would have saved my football club.
Because that’s the other side of the cold sum, and I’ll not hide it from you. I am fifty grand short of clearing that debt even after the beans do their thing in June.
Four hundred thousand pounds does not just help. It ends the whole problem this morning, the debt, the roof, the lying to Maureen, all of it, gone before lunch.
I know all that. I did that sum too, sitting right there with the fax in my hand.
And I still put the phone down, because a man who sells a million-pound player for four hundred grand to fix a cash-flow problem does not have a cash-flow problem for very long. He has a going-out-of-business problem, slower.
The right call and the thing you want are not always the same call. This was the first time in two lives they’ve been this far apart.
And I put my head in my hands and laughed until I nearly cried, because I am either the cleverest man in Essex or the biggest fool in it.
And the only way anyone will ever know which is if a seventeen-year-old and a beer-mat striker take a marsh to the Football League in the next five games.
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