Philip Kerr - Hand of God

But mainly, like most Premier League managers, I hate the World Cup because of the sheer bloody inconvenience of it all. Almost as soon as the domestic season was over on 17 May, and after less than a fortnight’s holiday, those of our players who had been picked for international duties joined their respective squads in Brazil. With the first World Cup match played on 12 June, FIFA’s money-spinning competition gives no time at all for players to recover from the stresses and strains of a full Premier League season and affords plenty of opportunities for them to pick up some serious injuries.

Ayrton Taylor looked as though he was out of the game for two months and seemed certain to miss City’s first match of the new season against Leicester on 16 August; worse than that, he was likely to miss City’s Group B play-offs against Olympiacos in Athens the following week. Which — with our other striker now the subject of intense speculation as to the true nature of his sexuality — is just what we don’t need.

It’s at times like these I wish I had more a few more Scots and Swedes in the team as, of course, neither Scotland nor Sweden qualified for the World Cup in 2014.

And I can’t decide what’s worse: worrying about the ‘light adductor strain’ that stopped Bekim Develi playing for Russia in their Group H match against South Korea; or worrying that the Russian manager Fabio Capello was playing him against Belgium before he’d given Develi a chance to properly recover. You see what I mean? You worry when they don’t play and you worry when they do.

If all that wasn’t bad enough I have a proprietor with pockets as deep as a Johannesburg gold mine who’s currently in Rio looking to ‘strengthen our squad’ and buy someone we really don’t need who’s not nearly as good as all the TalkBollocks pundits and callers insist he is. Every night Viktor Sokolnikov Skypes me and asks my opinion of some Bosnian cunt I’ve never heard of, or the latest African wünderkind who the BBC has identified as the new Pelé, so it must be true.

The wünderkind is Prometheus Adenuga and he plays for AS Monaco and Nigeria. I just watched a MOTD montage of the lad’s goals and skills with Robbie Williams belting out ‘Let Me Entertain You’ in the background, which only goes to prove what I’ve always suspected: the BBC just doesn’t get football. Football isn’t about entertainment. You want some entertainment, go and see Liza Minnelli fall off a fucking stage, but football is something else. Look, if you’re trying your damnedest to win a game, you can’t really give a fuck if the crowd are being entertained while you do it; football is too serious for that. It’s only interesting if it matters. Just watch an England friendly and tell me I’m wrong. And now I come to think of it, this is why American sports are no good; because they’ve been sugared by the US television networks to make them more appealing to viewers. This is bullshit. Sport is only entertaining when it matters; and, honestly, it only matters when it’s all that fucking matters.

Not that there’s anything very honest about the way football is played in Nigeria. Prometheus is just eighteen years old, but given that country’s reputation for age-cheating he might be several years older. Last year, and the year before that, he was a member of the Nigerian side that won the FIFA U-17 World Cup. Nigeria has won the competition four times in a row, but only by fielding many players who are much older than seventeen. According to a large number of bloggers on some of Nigeria’s most popular websites, Prometheus is actually twenty-three years old. The age disparities of some African players in the Premier League are even greater. According to these same sources, Aaron Abimbole, who now plays for Newcastle United, is seven years older than the age of twenty-eight that appears on his passport; while Ken Okri, who played for us until he was sold to Sunderland at the end of July, might even have been in his forties. All of which certainly explains why some of these African players don’t have any longevity. Or stamina. And why they get sold so often. No one wants to be holding those particular parcels when the fucking music stops.

That’s just one reason why I won’t ever become the England manager; the FA doesn’t want anyone — even someone like me, who’s half black — who’s going to say that African football is run by a bunch of lying, cheating bastards.

But it isn’t the true age of Prometheus, who plays for AS Monaco, which is currently occupying the journalists grubbing around the floor for stories in Brazil — it’s the pet hyena he was keeping in his apartment back home in Monte Carlo. According to the Daily Mail it bit through the bathroom plumbing, flooding the whole building and causing tens of thousands of euros’ worth of damage. A pet hyena makes Mario Balotelli’s camouflaged Bentley Continental and Thierry Henry’s forty-foot-high fish tank look sensible by comparison.

Sometimes I think that there’s plenty of room for another Andrew Wainstein to start a game called Fantasy Football Madness in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real-life footballers and score points based on how expensive those players’ homes and cars are, and how often they get themselves into the tabloids, with extra points awarded for extravagant WAGs, crazy pets, lavish Cinderella-style weddings, stupid names for babies, wrongly spelt tattoos, daft hairstyles and off-menu shags.

I bought Fergie’s book when it came out, of course, and smiled when I read his low opinion of David Beckham. Fergie says he kicked the famous boot in Beckham’s direction when his number seven refused to remove a beanie hat he was wearing at the club’s Carrington training ground because he didn’t want to reveal his new hairstyle to the press until the day of the match. I must say I have a lot of sympathy with Fergie’s point of view. Players should always try to remember that everything depends on the fans that help to pay their wages; they need to bear in mind what life is like for the people on the terrace a bit more often than they do. I’ve already banned City players from arriving at our Hangman’s Wood training ground in helicopters, and I’m doing my best to do the same with cars that cost more than the price of an average house. At the time of writing, this is £242,000. That may not sound like much of a restriction until you consider the top-of-the-range Lamborghini Veneno costs a staggering £2.4 million. That’s almost chump change for players making fifteen million quid a year. I got the idea of a price ceiling for players’ cars the last time I looked in our car park and saw two Aston Martin One-77s and a Pagani Zonda Roadster, which cost more than a million quid each.

Don’t get me wrong, football is a business and players are in that business to make money and to enjoy their wealth. I’ve no problem with paying players three hundred grand a week. Most of them work damn hard for it and besides, the top money doesn’t last that long and it’s only a few who ever make it. I’m just sorry I didn’t get paid that kind of loot when I was a player myself. But because a football club is a business, it behoves the people in that business to be mindful of public relations. After all, look what’s happened to bankers, who today are almost universally derided as greedy pariahs. Perception is all and I’ve no wish to see supporters storming the fucking barricades in protest against the disparity in wealth that exists between them and professional footballers. To this end I’ve invited a speaker from the London Centre for Ethical Business Cultures to come and talk to our players about what he calls ‘the wisdom of inconspicuous consumption’. Which is just another way of saying don’t buy a Lamborghini Veneno. I do all this because protecting the lads in my team from unwanted publicity is an increasingly important way of ensuring you get the best out of them on the football pitch, which is all I really want. I love my players like they were my own family. Really, I do. This is certainly how I talk to them, although a lot of the time I just listen. That’s what most of them need: someone who will comprehend what they’re trying to say, which, I’ll admit, isn’t always easy. Of course, changing how players handle their wealth and fame won’t be easy either. I think that encouraging any young men to act more responsibly is probably as difficult as eradicating player superstitions. But something needs to change, and soon, otherwise the game is in danger of losing touch with ordinary folk, if it hasn’t done so already.