I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  If you don’t have that natural spikiness, you need someone with you. Sir Alex Ferguson understood the mentality of young players. He knew that a lad of twenty-two would find it difficult to contradict a man with his track record of winning trophies and promoting precocious talent. And so he would secure the best deal for the club, rather than necessarily what the same player may have been able to get elsewhere.

  Sometimes players will know that an agent isn’t being entirely honest with them. They’ll see through the smoke and mirrors and work out that they aren’t being shown how all the sums are being worked out. They reconcile it with the thought that they are getting more than they could on their own. You might ask the agent, ‘What are you actually getting out of this?’ and never get a straight answer. You might know that this is a straightforward deal that could be settled by a single phone call. The club wants you. You want to go there. But the size of your slice of the pie will be bigger this way, even if someone else is filling their face too.

  And it’s not just transfers. One of the most useful aspects of the agency I’m with is the team that comes with them: accountants, mortgage advisors, a commercial manager for boot deals and adverts, a financial advisor. When you’re twenty-one and suddenly on thousands of quid a week you don’t realise that you need an accountant, but you do. You have no clue how to buy a house. You’ve spent your entire life thus far in the football bubble. Footballers do not talk about variable interest rate loans. Believe me.

  Players need that help and sometimes think they need a whole lot more on top. Some use agents like adult nannies. You want a new car: you phone your agent and they sort it out. Your car gets a flat tyre: you call your agent. Can’t be arsed organising your own child’s birthday party? You lob the responsibility on them and spend the afternoon playing golf instead. Tables at restaurants, tickets for gigs: a percentage will be added to each deal, but what do you care when you have one phone number that can deal with everything?

  It’s why good agents get passed around. A gentleman with white mutton-chop whiskers named Harry Swales made Kevin Keegan English football’s first millionaire, was then recommended to Bryan Robson, and was then in turn passed on to Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes. Personal recommendation works when you’re a young footballer with strangers coming at you from everywhere.

  There is a downside. If someone else does your life for you, what happens when that person is no longer there? You still don’t know how to do your tax return, or buy a house, except now you’re forty and lost rather than young enough to learn. As soon as football is done with you, a lot of agents are finished with you too. You might have a contract with an agent, but there’s no stipulation that they have to call anyone for you. They might be contractually obliged to get you the best deal possible, but if there are no deals being chased, best means nothing. The moment most players stop kicking a football they are no longer making their agent any money. And money is why it starts, finishes and ends.

  Sometimes you’re best off with a big agency. They do one deal and they use another player as a makeweight. They get one pro on a big TV show and they have the number and trust of the executive next time they want to boost the profile of another part of their stable. There’s also a lot to be said for what we might call the Jerry Maguire model: one man working himself into the ground for you and you only. You feel special, you feel reassured that they won’t be eating if you’re not eating. They are the pilot fish to your whale, or at least the plover bird to your crocodile. It works for Ed Sheeran and his manager Stuart Camp. Total dedication, total dependency.

  Agents are seldom quiet men. They have charisma, or an edge, or both. Mine began as a cricketer, became a cricket intermediary, went into football with us young guns and was once spotted by me riding a motorised trike lit by UV lights around Marble Arch, wearing a fur coat and smoking a cigar. Before I met Sky Andrew, the man who did Sol Campbell’s infamous free transfer from Spurs to arch-rivals Arsenal, I assumed he must be an awful man. I had been raised at Spurs. How could anyone who countenanced the sale of another homegrown talent to the Gunners possibly be anything but a rogue? And then I met him, and I really liked him. He was funny, he was interesting. I found out he’d represented Great Britain at table tennis in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He’d won three Commonwealth gold medals two years on. He may have made a couple of million from Sol’s move, but Sol wanted to go, and Arsenal were getting a defender worth £20 million on a free transfer. It all made sense. Unless you were a Spurs fan.

  It was the same with Pini Zahavi. You hear so much about him – about his power, that he’s a super-agent. But you meet him and he comes across as a lovely little man. I had mentioned to Rio that I fancied going to Israel on holiday with Abbey. He told me that Pini would look after us. And he did, even though I had no contract or other links with him. Hotels, trips out, transport. It was like having an extraordinarily well-connected travel agent.

  They’re different, the big dogs. I think of Jorge Mendes, who represents Cristiano Ronaldo and David de Gea, José Mourinho, Diego Costa and James Rodríguez. He began as a DJ and nightclub owner, and got his first deal with a player he met in a bar, which tells you quite a lot about agents. He brought Mourinho to Chelsea, Pini brought Chelsea to Mourinho.

  At Wolves he has dominated their transfer dealings, bringing in six of his own players plus the manager in two years. You look at Wolves in 2019 and it’s hard to argue with where they are, and it’s hard not to see it happening at several other clubs. For an overseas owner, naïve about football and how transfers work, it’s far easier to hand all responsibility to one agency. They will tell you they can provide the players you need. You give them the money. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. As a player you only understand how great the reach of the big dogs is when the team-mate sitting next to you casually asks how so-and-so is. It’s like discovering the existence of some vast secret society. What, you’re one of us too?

  Quite a few agents know very little about football. It matters less to them than you might think and sometimes less to their players too. You don’t want their advice on tactics: you want their ability to convince someone else that their tactics will only work if they sign you and pay you handsomely. I knew one agent who was a season ticket holder at QPR just so he could enjoy the catering facilities of the club’s CClub private members’ area. He used to arrive two hours before kick-off, have the full dinner, then leave before kick-off. No one batted an eyelid.

  Quite a few players don’t trust their agents. The real revelation is that this is probably a good thing. It is sensible to realise that they are doing a useful job for you but don’t necessarily care about you. You trust an agent when you see that you can trust them. As long as you’re careful, an agent is a good thing to have. That doesn’t mean that you need three agents when you’re seventeen years old and yet to play two games for the first team, as I have seen recently. It doesn’t mean you should let your agent talk to the manager if you’re not happy about the way you’re being used or not being used at all. I saw a couple of lads at Stoke who were fuming about being left on the bench. I asked them when they were seeing the gaffer. They told me their agents were flying in from Spain and Italy to do it for them, which meant you now had an unnecessary game of Chinese whispers rather than a simple direct conversation between two grown adults.

  Managers hate players coming to see them. They say that their door is always open, but they seldom mean it. But they hate agents coming to see them even more. They’re in all the time at training grounds now, easy to spot as the only ones in full suits, the only ones who drive both expensive cars and step out of them with leather briefcases. They will be looking out for their clients but looking out for others too. Agents like to fish and they like to cast some bait. One of the lads will sidle over and say, my agent wants to speak to you, do you mind if I pass on your number? And the next day the call will come, always beginning the same way: ‘I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes …’ they’ll sa
y, before proceeding to step all over them.

  It used to be like warfare: agents going after other agents’ players, slipping little sleeper deals in, driving in a wedge, offering what the other agent never could, knowing they couldn’t either but by the time the player realised that, the goalposts would have moved again. And then, like the cartels of Colombia, it was as if a truce had been called, as if they realised enough blood had been shed, or more likely that there was even more money to be made. I don’t know whether Pini or Jorge or Kia Joorabchian summoned the others to a secret meeting in a car wash, safe from prying ears, but a new way of working came into practice. You will still get the call about stepping on toes but it will now be followed by a ‘I’ve already spoken to your man, and he’s fine with it.’ It’s just business. Two will go halves on a deal that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. The player may not be privy to it. They’re the pawn being bought and sold, the commodity to be traded. Their life is a good one so they don’t complain.

  And they don’t complain because the money has never been so big. More players getting paid more by more clubs. You know it’s too much, but you know the clubs are getting more, and you know the clubs are getting more because the media companies paying for television rights are making more money out of it too. Unless they’re Setanta or ITV Digital, but that’s another story.

  THE BENCH

  They say that if you want to know how something works, ask an expert. In which case, as the man who has made more appearances off the bench than any other player in Premier League history, I feel much of my career has been waiting for this chapter to arrive.

  There’s a strange synchronicity to many careers. You begin as an unproven young player being given the occasional chance to impress off the bench. You end it as an overly proven old player given the occasional chance to remind people that you’re still actually alive.

  In between, even when the bench has become a place to walk slowly to having been taken off five minutes from the end to save your precious legs for the next match, soaking up the adoration of the grateful supporters as you do so, you still reset to the beginning every time you move up a level. You start games in the Championship, you score goals. You get a move to the Premier League and you’re on the bench again. You score goals, you get called up to England. Back on the bench, at least until you’ve proved yourself again.

  It’s an odd thing, being a sub. You train all week with the team, prepare with total attention to detail. You work on the team’s set pieces, you study the planned tactics. And then someone tells you you’re not playing, and it all goes to waste. It’s like a musician rehearsing all week, travelling to the venue, doing the soundcheck and then the gig being cancelled. Except the musician probably hasn’t eaten a massive and unattractive breakfast of plain pasta and chicken that he now has no way of burning off except by jogging along a thin strip of grass near the touchline every twenty minutes or so.

  It makes you angry. As one of football’s older gentlemen I could understand that I didn’t start every week any more. I had opposition fans shouting, ‘OI CROUCH – YOU NOT RETIRED YET?’ at me as I sat there, just in case the manager needed something to back up his decision. I knew I could still do a job if given the chance, and even at thirty-eight I felt as capable of moving slowly around a restricted area of the pitch as I did at twenty-three. But as a younger man, full of self-righteousness and raw passion, I was furious every time I wasn’t picked to start.

  You question the manager. You question yourself. It’s like being dumped by a girl you secretly really fancy, or at least ignored on a big night out by a girl you thought you were already dating. You’re in your best shirt. You’ve remembered to wear smart shoes. You’ve had a proper wash, and you’re wearing an inappropriate amount of cologne – and yet the only time she speaks to you is to tell you she’s going to dance with a bloke who you’d always worried was a slightly better-looking, more charismatic and successful version of you anyway. And there’s very little you can do about it. She might shun you every week. And you have to sit there on the edge of the dancefloor, watching your rival busting his moves and everyone loving it and no one even remembering those amazing shapes you were making yourself just a few short weeks ago.

  Being on the bench takes a certain mentality. There are players who are so furious with the manager that they don’t want to go on. If the team are losing, they consider it unarguable proof that they should have started in the first place. If they do get on they’ll jog around rather than run, just to make sure the manager knows quite how unhappy they are. ‘How dare he? Doesn’t he know who I am?’

  That makes no sense to me. It’s you that looks like the idiot. Imagine if I’d sulked my way through the Champions League final of 2007. What would have been the precious memories to pass on to the grandkids? ‘Yeah, I came on in the greatest club game there is, playing for a side that’s won it six times against one of the two clubs that’s won it more, but I couldn’t believe that a Dutch bloke with strange wet-look blond hair started instead of me, so I moped in the centre circle until it was over.’

  I’ve always wanted to win the doubters over. Dump me and I’ll change my wardrobe and get a new haircut rather than lie on the sofa all day getting drunk and swearing at daytime TV. Leave me out and I’ll want to score a goal or at least create one to show you what you’re missing. The trouble with that approach is that you can be too keen to impress. You’re so all-action and aggressive when you come on that you end up clattering around like a lunatic. I did it for Stoke, coming on against Southampton: released from the traps with eyes blazing, one yellow card almost before I’ve touched the ball, another one before I’ve had the chance to do anything constructive. I wanted to get stuck in. Instead I went slightly mad.

  I came on at Stamford Bridge once, the stadium where I used to spend Saturday afternoons as a ball boy, playing the team my dad has loved all his life. Desperate to show everyone that I should have been on from the start, I chose to do so by inflicting on Cesc Fàbregas the worst tackle I’ve ever made. It was horrific. I had to text him afterwards to apologise. The Stoke lads were all looking at me in the dressing-room afterwards as if they no longer knew who I was. ‘What the hell was that about?’ I couldn’t explain. I hadn’t wanted to do it. I liked Cesc. We’d appeared together in a critically acclaimed World Cup commercial for popular tube-packed potato snacks Pringles. Experiences like the summer 2010 Pringoals campaign bond you, yet the anger and desire had grabbed hold of me and taken me to a place I never wanted to go. Frightening.

  It could be confusing on the bench. I always wanted the team to do well even when I wasn’t playing, but deep down, I didn’t really want the strikers to score. Why would I? They were doing my job. They were on the end of crosses that were meant for me. If they kept scoring I’d be finished. I’d never get off that bench.

  I’ve experienced it both ways. Sometimes the manager is keeping faith in you and naming you in his starting eleven and you’re not scoring, and you know that certain players will be going to him behind your back to tell him he’s got it wrong and he needs to select them instead. I’ve had it at club level. I’ve seen it with England. You try not to take it personally. Professional football is a horribly cut-throat profession. You’re either on the way up or you’re on the way down. All those players you’ve leapfrogged over the years? You’ve taken their livelihood for your own gain. You have been ruthless and so will they, because it has happened at every level you have played at. You go to district trials as a kid: they take one striker. From the entire youth squad of a Premier League team, only one kid gets a pro contract. You’ve got to be that guy, and then you have to be the kid who gets in the reserve team, and you have to win that battle, and you have to be the one who gets a chance with the first team.

  The higher you go, the more selfish you have to become. Rio Ferdinand once told me that Ruud van Nistelrooy would be fuming if Manchester United won 3–0 and he hadn’t scored, but had he scored a hat-trick in a 4�
��3 defeat, he would be absolutely buzzing. I’ve played with strikers who would shoot from anywhere rather than pass to you and risk being benched in your favour. When Jermain Defoe scored five in one match for Spurs against Wigan in 2009, he could have slipped me in with four of them. I don’t begrudge it. It’s a selfish business. Anything to get picked. Anything to avoid the bench.

  There are players who don’t want to perform when they come off the bench, not to punish the manager but so as not to make him think it was the right decision. If you play well as a sub, you might be thinking it’s a solid case for you to start the following game. But the manager may be thinking it’s proof that you’re the best game-changing sub he has, and decide instead to make it a permanent role. I’ve often been seen as that last resort, a sort of desperate Plan B. Even when I was scoring in every match for England I was still thought of as the back-up, something that was ticking things over while they worked out a better idea. I scored eleven goals in one calendar year for England. It hadn’t been done since 1929 and it hasn’t been done since. Despite that I was never really Plan A.