Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  Tanner’s performances prompted Souness to offer him a new three-year contract. Tanner remembers his naivety in discussing terms with Peter Robinson, Liverpool’s chief executive.

  ‘Before the Luton game in which I scored the own goal, Graeme told me to go and see Peter because he wanted to speak to me about something. He was standing at the end of a big table in the boardroom. Peter pushed a contract towards me. There were no agents involved. I just signed it. I didn’t even realize I was tripling my wages from £500 a week plus a couple of signing-on fees. Peter seemed surprised that I didn’t want to negotiate. Apparently, some of the senior players were haggling. I don’t know what John Barnes was on. But £1,500 was good enough for me. I was bloody delighted.’

  After breaking a vertebrae in a challenge with Coventry City’s Robert Rosario, Tanner struggled to regain his place in the team and ended up missing the FA Cup final in May in which goals from Michael Thomas and Ian Rush helped Liverpool beat Sunderland, an achievement that compensated slightly for the poor league finish.

  Yet morale inside the squad was on the floor and attitudes were reflected the following weekend when the squad gathered at Manchester Airport bound for Tenerife in the traditional end-of-season booze-up.

  ‘Fifteen of us were meant to go. Only five showed. There was Phil Boersma, Barry Venison, Marshy, McManaman and me. That tells you all you need to know. These used to be important social occasions. But the spirit wasn’t there. Macca spent the week hanging round the pool wearing his jeans. His legs were so white.’

  This was not a bright new dawn for either Tanner or the club. Tanner was soon diagnosed with colitis after passing blood in the changing rooms before a reserve game. ‘One of the lads used the toilet immediately after me and came out going, “What the fuck has happened in there?” I didn’t even notice the blood. The doctor told me it was a result of stress, which had been disguised a long time by drink. Deep down, I felt the pressure of football – performing in front of a crowd and trying to meet expectations, not letting anyone down.’

  Tanner trained harder in order to get back to a supreme level of fitness, something he always prided himself on. There were hundreds of sit-ups and press-ups every day. He felt a pain in his back and it did not go away. There was a second diagnosis, this time sacroiliitis – an inflammation of the joint between the lower spine and pelvis. He was subjected to acupuncture, different injections, a course of CT scans lasting five hours at a time and was sent to a chiropractor.

  ‘Twelve months later, I still wasn’t able to sit down at Anfield and watch the team play for ninety minutes without suffering pain. I’d had enough of having needles stuck in my back. You can’t replicate the buzz of playing football but it was time to pack it in. Not facing the rehabilitation every day was a relief. The back’s OK now but it flares up every now and again.’

  The decision Tanner regrets most is leaving Liverpool and returning to Bristol almost straight away.

  ‘My son, William, who’s now at university in Southampton, was born and the missus at the time was homesick. She wanted to be closer to her family with the little ’un. In hindsight, if we’d stayed in Liverpool, it would have probably been better for all of us, long-term. There would have been more opportunity to remain in football, with so many clubs being based in the north-west. Down ’ere, there are only three or four in a 150-mile radius. I jumped without thinking.’

  Tanner tried scouting with Forest Green Rovers in the Conference and eventually went into management with Almondsbury Town, where there was no budget, then returned to Mangotsfield with a budget ‘but not as much as other teams’ in the Western League, where he balanced part-time duties with his office-based job. While he dreams of full-time career opportunities in the media, he finds it frustrating that qualified coaches are fast-tracked towards the top at the expense of those with practical experience.

  ‘The FA charge thousands of pounds to teach you how to put cones out,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing in the manual that tells a coach how to deal with a player who knocks on your door telling you their wife and kids have left them, or they’ve just lost a close relative or family friend. How do you give that lad the confidence to get out on the pitch and do the business for you?

  ‘Listen, though. Football don’t owe me a thing. I started at the bottom and finished at the top and nobody can take that away from me. And I’m still the only player to score in both Bristol and Merseyside derbies …

  ‘I’m just the average fella on the street. I’ll talk to anybody. I’ve been married; got divorced. I have a wonderful son from that relationship. Since retiring from football, I’ve got back in the nine-to-five rat race and I’m always looking for different ways to better myself and to make ends meet. I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky chap, even more so since losing my dad a few years ago to prostate cancer. Live every day as if it’s your last, I say.

  ‘And I’m going to make sure it reads on my gravestone: Nick Tanner – I only cost twenty grand. I think I gave great value for money.’

  * This chapter has been revised from the hardcover edition.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ROCKET,

  Ronny Rosenthal, 1990–94

  RONNY ROSENTHAL IS talking about his career as a football consultant with a great deal of enthusiasm. ‘I have discovered many, many players – players you will recognize,’ he beams, moments after I set foot in the kitchen of his home in West Hampstead, north London. He points towards a cork noticeboard pegged proudly on the wall, where there are photographs of him and his two sons posing with footballers, some of whom are more illustrious than others. There are Vincent Kompany, Dimitar Berbatov, José Bosingwa and Aly Cissokho.

  ‘Five years ago, Aly was standing just where you are now,’ he tells me. ‘He was playing for Gueugnon in France and struggling to get into the team. They were in Ligue 2. He was going nowhere. I suggested to Vitória Setúbal in Portugal that they sign him and within twelve months he’d gone to FC Porto and then Olympique Lyonnais for around £15 million. His starting value was £150,000. It was quite a mark-up for a left-back and a lot of money was made. That’s impressive, don’t you think?’

  Rosenthal claims Bosingwa was a defensive midfielder before being converted to a right-back on his say-so and that Berbatov was on the brink of joining Liverpool from Bayer Leverkusen in 2005 only for the teams to draw one another in the Champions League, leading to a collapse in the agreement. ‘I watched Dimi ever since he scored sixteen goals in thirty-four games for CSKA Sofia,’ Rosenthal continues. ‘I see players and recommend them to clubs. It’s up to the clubs and the players’ agents to complete the transfer.’

  Over the next three hours, it becomes apparent that Rosenthal is a private scout with his own network of watchers. His company Interfoot is registered in Belgium and operates out of Liège. His most recent deal involved his own son, Tom, who left Watford’s youth academy after Rosenthal was asked by Zulte Waregem boss Francky Dury to suggest a young and cheap midfielder.

  ‘Clubs will call me and say, “We need a striker and we need a defender. We have a budget of so much; can you help us, Ronny?” There are a lot of directors at football clubs with business experience only. I understand football better than them. If they are intelligent, they develop a good relationship with me and the club benefits by increasing the value of the player and selling him on for a nice profit. It is no different to understanding where there might be a property boom – you need to appreciate the potential of the apartment.’

  I quickly get the impression Rosenthal sees our meeting as a business opportunity to advertise what he does. Yet his observations about the industry are revealing and his comments about what was happening around him during his time at Liverpool are quite thought-provoking when related to what he has learnt about the game since.

  Rosenthal uses the word ‘discovered’ a lot when describing his work, as if he’s landed in a world not previously inhabited. As he has lived in Liverpool then London for nearly a qu
arter of a century, his English is very impressive. He speaks six languages fluently and has a decent understanding of another two. Yet I find his claim to have ‘discovered’ Cristiano Ronaldo and Nemanja Vidic´ far-fetched. He surely could not have been there before each player was signed to a club.

  Soon, he is illustrating what he means on a desktop computer inside his personal office at the front of his home. He has compiled his own database, which charts almost fifteen years’ work. There is a spreadsheet that seems to go on forever, including players in every position. It can also be manipulated to reflect price range, a rough estimate of wage, length of contract and age. Another page reveals he was in Cˇ acˇ ak, Serbia, in September 2001, watching Vidic´ play for Spartak Subotica while he was on loan from Red Star Belgrade. Rosenthal spoke to the Serbian FA and contact was established with the player through a high-ranking member who was later assassinated by Serbian nationalists. ‘I met Vidic´ at a hotel near Heathrow Airport. But all the English clubs told me he was not for them.’

  Around a year later, Rosenthal was in Lisbon, looking at Portuguese midfielder Hugo Viana before recommending to Bobby Robson and Newcastle United that they should sign him. ‘The fee they agreed was too big,’ he insists. On the same trip, Rosenthal saw Ronaldo play for Sporting Lisbon. Both Vidic´ and Ronaldo later moved to Manchester United for considerable fees via different routes. ‘If the United people had listened to me, it would have been a lot cheaper,’ Rosenthal says, before finally conceding his work is maybe not so pioneering as he first implied.

  ‘There are players who start to dominate from a very young age. But there are also those who learn to dominate and become top players with a little understanding and patience. I identify players when they have made their first-team debuts at lower clubs and let the other clubs know early. They are seventeen, eighteen or nineteen, maybe twenty. I told Liverpool to sign Samuel Eto’o at this age. Kompany was the same. Belgium is my second country because my wife is from there, so I saw Vincent play a lot. Liverpool said no on both occasions. But, OK, maybe ‘discover’ is too extreme. I go; I see; I recommend.’

  During this interview, Rosenthal disappears to take long telephone calls with directors from different European clubs on at least half a dozen occasions. ‘This game never stops for anyone,’ he explains on the third return from another room, this time accompanied by his Belgian wife, Nancy, who is wearing a velour tracksuit and has an appointment at the hairdresser.

  Rosenthal has a muscular body, too restrained in his neat turquoise T-shirt and tight stonewashed jeans. He has a heavy Hebrew accent that shoots into an upper register at the end of certain words. ‘Look, everything is documented,’ he sighs. ‘You meet a lot of people in football who claim to have done this, to have done that. But look, the number of Vidic´ is right here. Look.’

  In his study, as well as framed shirts from each of the teams he represented as a player, there are hundreds of VHS videos and DVDs on a set of shelves, although, because of new technology, there is no need to record matches any more. ‘Everything is one click away on the Internet.’ There are newspapers, some less reputable than others, scattered on his desk and piled high in the space underneath. There is a large satellite dish outside and a plasma television connected to a system called Wyscout, which means he can watch any game of football from anywhere in the world at any time, day or night. Rosenthal informs me it has revolutionized the way clubs operate when recruiting. ‘It’s harder than ever to unearth the big player,’ he says. ‘But it’s also harder to trust the right person who understands what it takes to be a success. I like to think I do. You notice only certain things when watching on TV. You need to see also in the flesh.’

  Rosenthal’s interest in the movement of players stems from personal experience. During twenty years as a professional footballer, he played in Israel, Belgium and England. He would have also played in Italy had Udinese not reneged on a contract in the summer of 1989, leaving him in limbo. The uncertainty eventually led to a transfer worth more than £1 million to Liverpool, where in 1990 he helped the club to its last title before his open-goal miss at Aston Villa two years later earned him enduring notoriety. ‘I think I have enough experience to know how this business works,’ he says. ‘You have highs, lows and a lot of frustration. It resembles life, which is why we all love it so much.’

  Rosenthal was one of the first generation of children to be born in Israel after the country was partitioned into Jewish and Arab sectors in 1948. His father was born in Romania and moved there in 1951. His mother came from Morocco a decade later.

  ‘My father knew a lot of people who were sent to the concentration camps during the war but he hid in Bucharest and somehow remained safe,’ Rosenthal says. ‘My parents met in 1962 and I was born in 1963. We now live in a materialistic world but my childhood was not like that in Israel. My parents were pleased to be there and made sure we understood the sacrifices of our forefathers.

  ‘Football was not in the education programme. School was 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. six days a week because the heat was too great in the afternoon and Saturday was left for Shabbat [the Jewish holy day], where nothing happened but religious practice.’

  The Rosenthals lived within five hundred yards of the nearest Mediterranean beach in the Kiryat Eliezer neighbourhood and their apartment block overlooked the old football ground of Maccabi Haifa. Rosenthal’s father worked as a taxi driver.

  ‘It was a very friendly place. It was not posh but not poor. Young families, a long promenade and lots of green – which is unusual for Israel because the landscape is very dry. There was grass to play football. I would watch Maccabi games for free because there was a small supermarket on the side of the stadium and my parents were customers, so the owner would let me enter the stadium through his back door and I’d support the team. There would be ten thousand people screaming and I would join in.’

  Two days after Rosenthal’s tenth birthday, the Yom Kippur War started between Israel and the alliance of Egypt and Syria. It lasted for twenty bloody days. The summer before, eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by the Palestinian group Black September at the Munich Olympics. Israel was always in the news.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ Rosenthal says. ‘But I cannot remember feeling under threat during those uncertain times. For example, Haifa is an hour or so from Damascus in Syria by car – or maybe a military vehicle. But my parents were very good at making me feel protected. Jewish people had long been persecuted and I think the first people to move back to Israel wanted the next generation to live in safety and also without fear.’

  Rosenthal used his afternoons and evenings away from school to practise football. He trained with Maccabi Haifa for the first time when he was eleven years old. ‘My dream as a kid was to leave Israel and play for a top club somewhere, you know?’ He took a crucial step on that path when he made his professional debut aged sixteen and ten months.

  ‘We played a club from near the Lebanon border and they had a lot of problems hosting matches because of the political situation. I was still in school, so to score in an official game was unbelievable. The game was not on TV, so my friends only read about it in the newspaper. It meant that I could tell them what I wanted. I told them they were the greatest goals ever scored, of course.’

  Maccabi were promoted from Israel’s second division during Rosenthal’s first full season as a professional and have not been relegated since. They finished seventh and sixth before leaping into a title race.

  ‘I was the smallest player in the team. I was probably the smallest player in the league. But at twenty, I became Maccabi’s most important player. I was fast and strong. I would run straight at the defenders and they did not know what to do. Some players become men early. I see players now aged sixteen who look twenty-six. I was twenty but looked sixteen. That gave me an advantage, because everyone else underestimated me.’

  Rosenthal says he had developed an impressive physique by the time he joined Liverpool but only achieve
d it by training hard and using the gym. Although he was barely out of his teens and talked about as an important player for the Israeli national team, an English coach of Maccabi had previously tried to release him on a free transfer.

  ‘Jack Mansell was from Manchester. He’d played for Brighton and Portsmouth before becoming a coach. He moved around Europe – to Galatasaray – before landing a job with the Israeli FA. After some bad results, he left the position but wanted to remain in the country, so Maccabi appointed him. He did not like me very much. I had played for him with the national team. I was in and out. I could not find the consistency that he wanted. He wanted experienced players and I was very young. Mr Mansell went to the president and said that the club was wasting its time with me. But the president was intelligent.

  ‘He [Mansell] made me realize very quickly how ruthless football can be. It is all about opinion. The world is fragile. You think you are doing well then suddenly you vanish. That could have been me. It taught me to ignore people who doubt you and be single-minded. If you want something so much and you try hard to make it happen, it will. You focus. There are a lot of good players who become distracted easily. I did not. I wanted to stay at Maccabi Haifa. So I did.’

  Rosenthal likens his own situation then to that of some of the players he works with now.

  ‘A lot of managers only understand the moment – what is good for them as individuals rather than what is a long-term investment for the club. They cannot see how a player will develop in the future with the right guidance. I took Didier Zokora to Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth and to Alan Pardew when he was at West Ham. Didier was a central defender with [Racing] Genk in Belgium but I thought he was perfectly suited as a defensive midfielder. He had all the qualities: the discipline, the leadership and the positioning. He was available for €400,000. After the trial, both Harry and Alan said the same thing: “Not for me.” The bottom line is, both managers could have bought the player for peanuts and paid the player’s salary, which was also peanuts. Instead, Didier moved to Saint-Étienne for two seasons, where they paid this kind of money – really, really cheap. Saint-Étienne then sold him to Tottenham Hotspur for €11 million. Of course, Harry gets the Tottenham job. One day Harry called me and said, “Ronny, you offered me Bosingwa for €100,000. Now he is worth €20 million. How did I not see it?” I said, “Harry, but what about Zokora?” He did not realize the player in his midfield was the same player I took to Portsmouth three years earlier. So Harry called Zokora into his office. “Boss, I was with you for three days.” It was an embarrassing situation for Harry.’