In 2017, Arsene Wenger commented on the ever-increasing size and complexity of the Arsenal organisation: “When I arrived here we were 80 staff; today we are 700. Most of them I don’t know anymore.” Many of those 700 people might have been doing excellent and important jobs, but it was hard for even someone as well-placed within the company as the Arsenal manager to tell.
Besides star players and managers, we now have star training-ground coaches, like Anthony Barry and Pep Lijnders, star directors of football, like Fabio Paratici, Michael Edwards and Dan Ashworth, and star administrators and executives, like Manchester United’s new signing as chief executive, Omar Berrada.
United’s poaching of Berrada from City Football Group, where he had worked as chief football operations officer, has been hailed throughout the football media as a “coup”. The club’s official statement presented Berrada’s arrival as the first step on their journey back to the very top: “It is our stated ambition to re-establish Manchester United as a title-winning club. We are pleased that Omar will be joining us to help achieve that goal, so that, once again, United fans can see, in the words of Sir Matt Busby, the red flag flying high at the summit of English, European and world football.” (Which part of that is Sir Matt Busby supposed to have said?)
Kenyon belonged in the second category. His ‘one weird trick’ as chief executive was to occasionally tap up Sven-Goran Eriksson, a move he pulled at United and Chelsea
The thinking behind United’s move is conventional enough. City are the world’s most successful club; all they touch turns to gold. Berrada has been working there in various capacities since 2011, he’s seen how it’s done and he knows how it all fits together. By hiring him, United are saying: this man has already built one superclub, now watch him build another.
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They would not be the first club to try to kickstart a new era of success by hiring expertise from the market leaders. City did it in 2012, when they appointed the ex-Barcelona directors Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain. In 2003, Roman Abramovich poached Manchester United’s chief executive Peter Kenyon to do the same job at Chelsea.
In both cases, the upwardly mobile executives were capitalising on the halo effect of having worked for their previous clubs during periods of massive success. Of course, it’s not easy to determine just how much they had contributed to that success while it was happening. Were they key players, or had they just been lucky enough to be present at moments of greatness?
Kenyon belonged in the second category. His “one weird trick” as chief executive was to occasionally tap up Sven-Goran Eriksson, a move he pulled at United and Chelsea. He has not run a club since leaving Chelsea in 2009. The world of football seems to have looked at his six years at Chelsea — a spell in which the club won two Premier League titles and several times reached the last stages of the Champions League — and concluded that Abramovich could have appointed a dancing bear as chief executive and won about the same number of trophies.
Soriano and Begiristain do have one obvious and important contribution to City’s years of success: they were the ones who convinced Pep Guardiola to come to Manchester in 2016
This is because everyone understood that at Chelsea, Abramovich was the real MVP [most valuable player]. Nobody bothered trying to replicate the structure that had brought such unprecedented success to Stamford Bridge, because everybody knew the crucial element in that structure was Abramovich’s money.
Soriano and Begiristain do have one obvious and important contribution to City’s years of success: they were the ones who convinced Pep Guardiola to come to Manchester in 2016. Begiristain had previously recommended that Barcelona hire Guardiola in 2008. (If this is his “one weird trick”, it’s been a useful one).
Yet even their vaunted persuasive powers would not have been enough to tempt Guardiola were it not for the financial advantages bestowed on City by the ownership of Abu Dhabi and the limitless sources of funding it represents.
Manchester City’s dominance has been built on a set of phenomenal footballers: Kevin de Bruyne, Erling Haaland, Rodri, Bernardo Silva and many more — transformed into even more than the sum of their considerable parts by the coaching genius of Guardiola. But none of them would be there without Abu Dhabi.
It therefore seems optimistic to expect any former City executive could go elsewhere and replicate the success of that unusual organisation. And that is before you consider the most salient question of all: what about the charges?
If United seem blithely unconcerned about the potential reputational risk, maybe it’s because the very notion has come to seem increasingly quaint
As the whole football world knows, City are embroiled in a years-long process of defending themselves against multiple charges of breaking the Premier League’s spending rules. Were they to be found guilty, it would be English football’s biggest corruption scandal in more than a century. And Manchester United have just appointed a chief executive who occupied the high-powered role of chief operations officer at City when some of the alleged breaches were taking place.
If United seem blithely unconcerned about the potential reputational risk, maybe it’s because the very notion has come to seem increasingly quaint. Fabio Paratici had to resign from his role as Spurs’ managing director of football last April after the Italian Football Federation and Fifa banned him for 30 months for his part in the Plusvalenza scandal. Yet the terms of the ban do not prevent him from acting as a kind of transfer market consigliere to Tottenham, and he is basking in the glory of a terrific couple of transfer windows for Spurs.
At Brentford on Saturday night, Ivan Toney was given a hero’s welcome on the occasion of his first match back after completing an eight-month ban for gambling. Toney had sabotaged his career and damaged the prospects of his club, but it seemed nobody had held it against him; he soon reaffirmed his greatness with a goal from a free-kick. For those who succeed, all can be forgiven.
