A half-hour of conversation with Anelka is enough to confirm that he is self-absorbed, scared of other people and not someone who makes contact easily. Nor does he appear to be good at languages, because after well over a decade in England he still spoke very mediocre English. Anelka was the sort of expatriate who really needed a relocation consultant.
Real had spent £22 million buying him from Arsenal. The club then spent nothing on helping him adjust. On day one the shy, awkward twenty-year-old reported to work and found that there was nobody to show him around. He hadn’t even been assigned a locker in the dressing room. Several times that first morning, he would take a locker that seemed to be unused, only for another player to walk in and claim it.
Anelka doesn’t seem to have talked about his problems to anyone at Madrid. Nor did anyone at the club ask him. Instead he talked to France Football, a magazine that he treated as his newspaper of record, like a 1950s British prime minister talking to The Times. ‘I am alone against the rest of the team,’ he revealed midway through the season. He claimed to possess a video showing his teammates looking gloomy after he had scored his first goal for Real after six months at the club. He had tried to give this video to the coach, but the coach hadn’t wanted to see it. Also, the other black Francophone players had told Anelka that the other players wouldn’t pass to him. Madrid ended up giving him a forty-five-day ban, essentially for being maladjusted.
Paranoid though Anelka may have been, he had a point. The other players really didn’t like him. And they never got to know him, because nobody at the club seems ever to have bothered to introduce him to anyone. As he said later, all that Madrid had told him was, ‘Look after yourself.’ The club seems to have taken the strangely materialistic view that Anelka’s salary should determine his behaviour. But even in materialistic terms, that was foolish. If you pay £22 million for an immature young employee, it is bad management to make him look after himself. Wenger at Arsenal knew that, and he had Anelka on the field scoring goals.
Even a player with a normal personality can find emigration tricky. Tyrone Mears, an English defender who spent a year at Marseille, where his best relocation consultant was his teammate Zenden, said, ‘Sometimes it’s not a problem of the player adapting. A lot of the times it’s the family adapting.’ Perhaps the player’s girlfriend is unhappy because she can’t find a job in the new town. Or perhaps she’s pregnant and doesn’t know how to negotiate the local hospital, or perhaps she can’t find Rice Krispies (‘or beans on toast’, added Zenden, when told about the Blissett drama). The club doesn’t care. It is paying her boyfriend well. He simply has to perform.
Football clubs never used to bother with anything like an HR department. As late as about 2005, there were only a few relocation consultants in football, and most weren’t called that, and were not hired by clubs. Instead they worked either for players’ agents or for sportswear companies. If Nike or Adidas is paying a player to wear its shoes, it needs him to succeed. If the player moves to a foreign club, the sportswear company – knowing that the club might not bother – sometimes sends a minder to live in that town and look after him.
The minder gives the player occasional presents, acts as his secretary, friend and shrink, and remembers his wife’s birthday. The minder of a young midfielder who was struggling in his first weeks at Milan said that his main task, when the player came home from training frustrated, lonely and confused by Italy, was to take him out to dinner. At dinner the player would grumble and say, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to tell the coach what I really think of him,’ and the minder would say, ‘That might not be such a brilliant idea. Here, have some more spaghetti alle vongole.’ To most players, this sort of thing comes as a bonus in a stressful life. To a few, it is essential.
After international transfers became common in the 1990s, some agents began to double as player minders. When the Dutch forward Bryan Roy moved from Ajax to Foggia in Italy in 1992, Raiola’s personal service included spending seven months with Roy in Foggia, and helping paint the player’s house. He later said, ‘I already realized then that that this kind of guidance was very important in determining the success or failure of a player.’
Many of Raiola’s players still treat him as an all-purpose helpmeet. Mario Balotelli once phoned him to say his house was on fire; Raiola advised him to try the fire brigade. Nowadays Raiola’s younger players Facetime him. He waddles around his office imitating them as they hold up their phones to show him objects they want to buy: ‘“I’m walking through the house. What do you think of it?”’ He chuckles fondly. He considers it all part of his job.
But part of the history of football is that agents such as Raiola have tended to be cleverer than the people who run clubs. Most clubs took a long time to see the value of relocation. Drogba in his autobiography recounts joining Chelsea from Olympique Marseille in 2004 for £24 million. He writes, ‘I plunged into problems linked to my situation as an expatriate. Chelsea didn’t necessarily help me.’ Nobody at the club could help him find a school for his children. All Chelsea did to get him a house was put him in touch with a real estate agent who tried to sell him one for £10 million. For ‘weeks of irritation’ the Drogba family lived in a hotel while Drogba, who at that point barely spoke English, went house hunting after training.
All Chelsea’s expensive foreign signings had much the same experience, Drogba writes. ‘We sometimes laughed about it with Gallas, Makelele, Kezman, Geremi. “You too, you’re still living in a hotel?” After all these worries, I didn’t feel like integrating [at Chelsea] or multiplying my efforts.’
Chelsea were no worse than other English clubs at the time. The same summer Drogba arrived in London, Wayne Rooney moved thirty-five miles up the motorway from Everton to Manchester United and had an almost equally disorienting experience. United had paid a reported £25.6 million for him but then stuck its eighteen-year-old star asset in a hotel room. ‘Living in such a place I found horrible,’ reports Rooney in his My Story So Far. The nearest thing to a relocation consultant he found at United seems to have been a teammate: ‘Gary Neville tried to persuade me to buy one of his houses. I don’t know how many he has, or whether he was boasting or winding me up, but he kept telling me about these properties he had.’
At a conference in Rome in 2008, relocation consultants literally lined up to tell their horror stories about football. Lots of them had tried to get into the sport and been rebuffed. A Danish relocator had been told by FC Copenhagen that her services weren’t required because the players’ wives always helped one another settle. Many clubs had never even heard of relocation. Moreover, they had never hired relocation consultants before, so given the logic of football, not hiring relocation consultants must be the right thing to do. One Swedish relocator surmised, ‘I guess it comes down to the fact that they see the players as merchandise.’
The only relocation consultants who had penetrated football happened to have a friend inside a club or, in the case of one Greek woman, had married a club owner. She had told her husband, ‘All these guys would be happier if you find out what their needs are, and address their needs.’
Another relocator had entered a German club as a language teacher and worked her way up. She said, ‘I was their mother, their nurse, their real estate agent, their cleaning lady, their everything. They didn’t have a car; they didn’t speak the language.’ Did her work help them play better? ‘Absolutely.’ The club was happy for her to work as an amateur, but as soon as she founded a relocation company, it didn’t want her anymore. She had become threatening.
And so countless new signings continued to flop abroad. Clubs often anticipated this by avoiding players who seemed particularly ill-equipped to adjust. For instance, on average Latin Americans are the world’s most skilful players. Yet historically, English clubs rarely bought them, because Latin Americans don’t speak English, don’t like cold weather and don’t tend to understand the core traditions of English football, such as drinking twenty pints of beer in a night. Few Latin Americans adjust easily to English football.
Instead of Latin Americans, English clubs traditionally bought Scandinavians. On average, Scandinavians are worse footballers than Latin Americans, but they are very familiar