Dickheads and Lost Boys, Old Dogs and Egotists, Smart Buys and Starmen
Another chapter from This Red Planet, the book that this substack takes it name from, and here’s part one (because it’s a huge chapter) for subscribers to read if they haven’t bought the book!
Success in the transfer market isn’t just about buying the right players; it’s also about avoiding the wrong ones. This chapter addresses the need to avoid bad eggs, but also, how players lose their way, while others remain seemingly evergreen, at least on an individual level.
One theme I keep addressing when assessing the ongoing success of Jürgen Klopp is his strict rule on ‘no dickheads’; none will be signed, no matter how talented – a personal maxim for him and his coaches beginning in his Mainz days, as he continues to seek unity as a way of a team exceeding the sum of its parts, and which endures while working on a smaller budget than rivals. Two years on from my last book, Perched, it’s amazing how many other clubs, in that time, have continued to sign dickheads, disruptors, egotists and fading forces; while Liverpool continued to do the exact opposite.
Dating back to his earliest days as a manager, Klopp used strict questionnaires to discover what really made a player tick, asking a prospective signing about how hard he’d be prepared to run; if he was the kind of player who didn’t like to train too hard – happy to coast and reserve energy – but would promise to give his all during matches; if he’d be happy scoring a couple of goals without doing the hard graft, either for the team or in preparation.
Anyone who wasn’t prepared to work insanely hard all week in training as well as giving their all 90 minutes each game for the team found themselves instantly dismissed.
While most clubs would now say that they have a ‘no dickhead’ policy, few seem to stick to it. I’ve detailed in my previous two books the Liverpool players who, in the years before Klopp arrived, would have failed the test. Two that Klopp inherited – Mario Balotelli (just not a serious trainer and a general distraction) and Lazar Marković (not a dedicated trainer) – were never even considered by the German.
The ‘dickhead’ – in football parlance – may just be a bad or lazy trainer. Or, he may be a bad teammate – a selfish player. He need not be a bad person, albeit that can obviously be an issue too (team harmony isn’t helped by sleeping with a teammate’s wife, for example). He could be a lovely bloke, but a pain in the arse; a time-drain on the management and coaching staff. Sometimes, he’s just a Lost Boy: taken from a safe environment, and suffering under the spotlight, or bereft of direction and motivation; someone potentially recoverable, but where it may take time and effort (and that’s okay if you have the time to make the effort). While you can get a bargain if you can rekindle their spirit and desire, you can also get a white elephant who drains resources and saps team spirit; especially if he’s paid based on past glories, rather than current effort.
With every passing season, ‘no dickheads’ is a rule that makes more sense to me, as I observe what makes some teams tick and others implode, as Liverpool continue to sign model professionals – and many big-spending rivals rack up high-profile signings who rock the boat, and upset the apple cart, and piss in the pool; or various other metaphors that show how negative effects can spread. The whole concept of the bad apple – why it’s so disastrous – is that it rots the rest; the full phrase being that “one bad apple can spoil the barrel”. Another metaphor is that the weakest link breaks the chain, and so you don’t want weak links in terms of attitude. While scouting players and managing a football team is about much more than this one rule, it remains vitally important.
It has even spread to dickhead family members and dickhead agents, all of whom need to be avoided. Hangers-on need to be scraped off like unwanted barnacles. A united team and a united squad requires a sublimation of the ego – what I call the egosystem – to make for a whole that pulls in the same direction. Again, it’s no coincidence that modern Liverpool don’t sign superstars, and that players become superstars at Liverpool; and if they leave, certainly after shining under the management of Jürgen Klopp, they often return to being mere mortals.
Part of this is having a wage structure that allows no one individual to be out on his own.
It’s about focusing on their football to the exclusion of other excessive energy-drains and distractions.
It’s about players wanting to be here.
All of these require strong leadership, from the manager, the coaching staff and the analytics and scouting staff who make the big decisions. The stronger the leadership, the easier it is to keep everyone in line; but strong and unfair leadership can prove disastrous, too. Again, it’s one thing assembling a squad without bad apples, and another to get them to play great football, and remain committed and enthused over the longer term.
When reading this chapter, think about whether or not Liverpool would have made some of the decisions discussed. Remember, these are players often earning more money than those who play for Klopp, and in some cases, at least twice as much. Later on, I’ll discuss the positive impacts of some of Liverpool’s record-breaking squad, as well as the difficult decision of when to phase out great servants.
Dele Alli’s Brother
In mid-January, before Dele Alli moved to Everton for a fee that ranged from £0 to £40m, Jonathan Northcroft wrote about the player’s strange decline in the Sunday Times.
“[Mauricio] Pochettino voiced fears about the pitfalls the player faced as early as in 2017, in his book Brave New World. ‘Dele is experiencing a new situation. Praise can create confusion,’ Pochettino wrote. The Argentine also observed that Dele ‘needs to be surrounded by the right people’ and in the agency world they wonder whether his representative is the best-placed person to gee him up and push him on. Dele’s previous agent was the experienced Rob Segal, who has a reputation for being able to challenge his clients, but since 2017 he has been managed by his best friend and adoptive brother, Harry Hickford, who is part of a group of mates with whom he enjoys socialising.
“Another lives with him, and anyone who has met Dele will attest to a laidback, fairly shy, polite and gentle nature.”
So, he’s not some nasty lunatic, but the warning signs had been there since 2017, with the alarming change of agent and the best recent-years Spurs’ manager’s warning; and 2016/17 marked the player’s peak, with 2017/18 seeing a halving of his league goals, from 18 to nine. Between 2020 and 2022, he scored just once – for Spurs and in his first five months at Everton. Indeed, he didn’t even start a league game for the Toffees until the final game of the season: a 5-1 defeat at Arsenal, where he departed after 67 minutes with the score 4-1. Maybe his talent will shine through again, but it needs hard work and dedication.
Relating to another sport, but with parallels of the pitfalls, in May 2022, Owen Slot in the Times wrote about how one of Britain’s greatest-ever boxers saw his career derailed on the back of family interference.
“Some would argue that it was Hamed’s family who removed him. The great soap opera of ‘Prince Naseem’ was the family takeover; the Hamed brothers took over the management from Frank Warren and took Naseem away from the [Brendan] Ingle gym and overseas.
“‘They ruined him,’ is how Warren reflects on it now. ‘I mean, if Naz played for Man United, does that mean they could manage Man Utd?’”
[As an aside, here, could they have done much worse than the actual managers United chose?]
“Maybe this is a side of the story still to be told because one of the few Hamed siblings left in Sheffield is Ali, four years Naseem’s younger, now a personal trainer, who is trying to sell a TV documentary about how boxing’s millions detonated an everyday Asian working-class family.
“‘Unfortunately the family has eroded,’ is how he puts it. He alleges that the considerable estate left behind by their late parents, which is a consequence of Naseem’s success, is now being scrapped over by the kids.
“This is a family that always appeared so tight. “That is what it looked like,’ he says, ‘but internally, it was an absolute free-for-all with the younger ones not having the maturity or the intelligence to be able to grasp the millions on the table.’”
Too much too young, as the two-toned poet Terence Edward Hall put it in 1979. Occasionally a family member or friend can offer a wise guiding hand, but too often it now seems to be about spreading out the wealth within an entourage at the expense of proper guidance and long-term career planning. Friends and family do not tend to offer dispassionate advice, especially in an age where ‘home truths’ are no longer fashionable, and there’s a culture of just telling people how brilliant they are; that they are perfect, just as they are. That’s an invitation to stagnate.
(The French midfielder Adrien Rabiot’s mother, Veronique, who acts as his agent, is famously overprotective, to the point where dealing with her, and her son, sounds difficult in the extreme; even if family difficulties led to the decision to ‘helicopter parent’ his career. Chaos seems to follow the player, wherever he goes.)
After moving clubs, and with a lot to prove after two years of decline, Dele Alli arrived at his first training session in a £300,000 Rolls-Royce. While people may not want to be judged by the cars they drive – and clearly it does not sum up everything about a person – the choice of a vehicle is a conscious decision, that displays something.
Zlatan Ibrahimović wrote of his time with Pep Guardiola in 2009/10: “At Barça, players were banned from driving their sports cars to training. I thought this was ridiculous – it was no one’s business what car I drive – so in April, before a match with Almeria, I drove my Ferrari Enzo to work. It caused a scene.”
Yet as great as an individual player Ibrahimović was, he did not fit in at Barcelona, the best team he played for. Barcelona got better without him. He got better without them, too, but no team he played for got close to the Barça team he was essentially booted out of. And even then, you could argue that if anyone had the right to drive a Ferrari Enzo to work it was Zlatan. But did it help anyone? Did it help him? Did it help Barcelona?
Who won?