http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/159e0c10-72fb-11de-ad98-00144feabdc0.html
Uprooted footballers need support on and off the pitch
By Simon Kuper
Published: July 17 2009 22:27 | Last updated: July 17 2009 22:27
This summer European football clubs will probably spend a record sum on buying players. However, many of those hundreds of millions of pounds will be wasted because the transferred players fail to adjust off the field.
An uprooted footballer has to find a home, a new life for his family, and gain some grasp of the social rules of his new country. No wonder so many players have flopped abroad since the English striker Luther Blissett mused in Milan 25 years ago: “No matter how much money you have here, you can’t seem to get Rice Krispies.â€
This summer will provide a test-case. English football has been professional on the field since the 1870s. Now it’s slowly creaking into professionalism off the field too. Perhaps Premier League clubs are finally taking proper care of their foreign players. Or perhaps relocation is just too complex for football clubs to manage, so that international transfers will always be high-risk.
In recent years a new animal has appeared inside English clubs: the player liaison officer, whose job is to help new players settle. “Certainly the big four clubs have them,†says Danny Naisbitt, co-founder of Players Relocation, a British company that helps sportsmen find houses. The player liaison officer at one Premier League club told me that the first of his breed was hired by Liverpool in about 1996. In those days continental European footballers found provincial England an alien, practically non-European land, devoid of essentials like fresh fish. “You’d barely see a deli. Now they’re on every high street,†says the player liaison officer.
Yet even today, many clubs offer inadequate help. Boudewijn Zenden, a Dutch player with Olympique Marseille, formerly of Chelsea, Liverpool and Barcelona, says: “It’s the weirdest thing ever that you can buy a player for 20 mil, and you don’t do anything to make him feel at home. The first thing you should do is get him a mobile phone and a house, get him a school for the kids, get something for his missus, get a teacher in for both of them straight away, because obviously everything goes with the language. Sometimes even at the biggest clubs it’s badly organised.â€
The player liaison officer says almost all Premier League clubs now have someone doing his job, albeit often part-time. “Still,†he adds, “some very well-known managers have said to me they can’t understand why you can possibly need it. They have said, ‘Well when I moved to a foreign country as a player I had to do it myself.’ Well yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You probably had to clean boots too, but nobody does that now.â€
This very morning footballers earning £2m a year are sitting with a crying baby in their club’s own mid-range hotel in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to build a new life while barely speaking English. Naisbitt says: “I’ve heard just recently of a Spanish player who came over, and he’s seen about 35 properties in 10 days off his own back. I’ve had the manager of that club on the phone asking us to help because the player can’t concentrate on his training.†Louisa Allen, Naisbitt’s co-director, says footballers are prone to falling for fatally flawed houses that they cannot sell afterwards.
Football’s master of relocation, many people in the game agree, is AC Milan. Zenden says: “Milan – best club ever. Anything is done for you. You arrive, you get your house, it’s fully furnished, you get five cars to choose from, you know the sky’s the limit. They really say, ‘We’ll take care of everything else, you make sure you play well.’†Zenden cautions that certain footballers could take advantage: “They might call in the middle of the night to say there’s no milk in the fridge. You know how they are sometimes.â€
Let’s hope this summer’s arrivals have someone to call. Allen warns: “It won’t be the first or last time that we’ve read in the paper, ‘This player didn’t settle, his family didn’t settle, he’s decided to go back.
Zenden makes this comment elsewhere in the paper:
You could call it the thread that runs through my career, that I can adjust quite well. I think if you go abroad you have to try to adapt. I remember there was a Spanish player in Liverpool: all the food he got came from Spain, he only had Spanish TV, his family wasn’t happy because it was raining. If you look at all the negatives and you try to keep a hold on what you had before it’s never going to work. He ended up going back.
Who was that? Morientes?
Uprooted footballers need support on and off the pitch
By Simon Kuper
Published: July 17 2009 22:27 | Last updated: July 17 2009 22:27
This summer European football clubs will probably spend a record sum on buying players. However, many of those hundreds of millions of pounds will be wasted because the transferred players fail to adjust off the field.
An uprooted footballer has to find a home, a new life for his family, and gain some grasp of the social rules of his new country. No wonder so many players have flopped abroad since the English striker Luther Blissett mused in Milan 25 years ago: “No matter how much money you have here, you can’t seem to get Rice Krispies.â€
This summer will provide a test-case. English football has been professional on the field since the 1870s. Now it’s slowly creaking into professionalism off the field too. Perhaps Premier League clubs are finally taking proper care of their foreign players. Or perhaps relocation is just too complex for football clubs to manage, so that international transfers will always be high-risk.
In recent years a new animal has appeared inside English clubs: the player liaison officer, whose job is to help new players settle. “Certainly the big four clubs have them,†says Danny Naisbitt, co-founder of Players Relocation, a British company that helps sportsmen find houses. The player liaison officer at one Premier League club told me that the first of his breed was hired by Liverpool in about 1996. In those days continental European footballers found provincial England an alien, practically non-European land, devoid of essentials like fresh fish. “You’d barely see a deli. Now they’re on every high street,†says the player liaison officer.
Yet even today, many clubs offer inadequate help. Boudewijn Zenden, a Dutch player with Olympique Marseille, formerly of Chelsea, Liverpool and Barcelona, says: “It’s the weirdest thing ever that you can buy a player for 20 mil, and you don’t do anything to make him feel at home. The first thing you should do is get him a mobile phone and a house, get him a school for the kids, get something for his missus, get a teacher in for both of them straight away, because obviously everything goes with the language. Sometimes even at the biggest clubs it’s badly organised.â€
The player liaison officer says almost all Premier League clubs now have someone doing his job, albeit often part-time. “Still,†he adds, “some very well-known managers have said to me they can’t understand why you can possibly need it. They have said, ‘Well when I moved to a foreign country as a player I had to do it myself.’ Well yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You probably had to clean boots too, but nobody does that now.â€
This very morning footballers earning £2m a year are sitting with a crying baby in their club’s own mid-range hotel in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to build a new life while barely speaking English. Naisbitt says: “I’ve heard just recently of a Spanish player who came over, and he’s seen about 35 properties in 10 days off his own back. I’ve had the manager of that club on the phone asking us to help because the player can’t concentrate on his training.†Louisa Allen, Naisbitt’s co-director, says footballers are prone to falling for fatally flawed houses that they cannot sell afterwards.
Football’s master of relocation, many people in the game agree, is AC Milan. Zenden says: “Milan – best club ever. Anything is done for you. You arrive, you get your house, it’s fully furnished, you get five cars to choose from, you know the sky’s the limit. They really say, ‘We’ll take care of everything else, you make sure you play well.’†Zenden cautions that certain footballers could take advantage: “They might call in the middle of the night to say there’s no milk in the fridge. You know how they are sometimes.â€
Let’s hope this summer’s arrivals have someone to call. Allen warns: “It won’t be the first or last time that we’ve read in the paper, ‘This player didn’t settle, his family didn’t settle, he’s decided to go back.
Zenden makes this comment elsewhere in the paper:
You could call it the thread that runs through my career, that I can adjust quite well. I think if you go abroad you have to try to adapt. I remember there was a Spanish player in Liverpool: all the food he got came from Spain, he only had Spanish TV, his family wasn’t happy because it was raining. If you look at all the negatives and you try to keep a hold on what you had before it’s never going to work. He ended up going back.
Who was that? Morientes?
