The following is an excerpt from the “Managing Kids,” a short story in Ian Plenderleith‘s latest book of soccer fiction: The Last Amateur and Other Stories Paperback.
The wages that these lads are on, they had some bloody nerve. A delegation of three players trooped into my office and said they were representing “all the first team squad.” And the message was that they did not wish to be considered for the FA Cup game on Sunday.
They were tired and needed a rest. It was the Europa League first leg on Thursday, then the FA Cup on Sunday up north at Carlisle, and then all the way to Greece for the Europa League second leg a few days later. They just couldn’t promise that they’d be able to give 100 percent. It was for the good of the team, they said. It was the chance to give some of the younger boys a run-out. The experience would do them good.
I sat back in my chair and swiveled a little. I let some silence do my talking for a minute or two as I stared them in the eye, one by one. I am beyond incredulous, I wanted to let them know, but without shouting, without even speaking. One Englishman, one Spaniard, and one Brazilian, all of them seasoned internationals. Combined pay of God knows how much, I can’t even get a grasp on their salaries anymore.
Professional players at the peak of their fitness, at one of Europe’s most revered clubs, and still in the running for three trophies. And now they needed a rest. Bless them.
Ten or 15 years ago, I’d have chased them down the hall. I’d have yelled at them and thrown things. If I did that now, I’d probably be clearing my desk by tomorrow morning. It’s all about player power these days, and this is what player power means: having the money to moan about every tiny thing. Or getting their agents to do the moaning for them.
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The press was already on my back after two successive league defeats. That’s all it takes nowadays, a run of two losses, and a club like ours is “in crisis.” Idiots with computers start speculating about my future. Other idiots with calculators start working out how much it will cost us if we miss out on qualifying for the Champions League again. And almost inevitably, someone will spot the club’s owner, a foreign gentleman whose name and country of origin I can never exactly remember (it ends in ‘-stan’ and has a lot of oil), in a European capital city, where he’s presumed to be courting a new manager, usually a Dutchman or an Italian.
I’m old school, as you’ve probably gathered. I’ve maybe got five years left in me at the top of the game. I don’t have a coaching badge, or a license, or whatever the hell it is. There was no call for them 30 years ago when I quit playing. If you had half a brain, you just went straight into managing. I’d seen and played every possible situation by the age of 35, I didn’t need tutoring by some berk drawing lines with arrows on his laptop. …
“Boss?” said Terry Barnett. I’d swiveled my chair so far around that I was now looking out the office window, thinking about Villa and QPR and Bolton and Southampton too. They all ‘let me go.’ I managed teams to promotion and then qualification for Europe, and I kept getting to the bloody League Cup final and losing, but I’d never won a major trophy. I’m proud to say I never walked out on any of them when things got tough, or because I was offered a fatter wage elsewhere. There’s no return loyalty in football, though, no one’s naive enough to expect that. It’d start with a bad run, then a few fan banners and chants from the stands, and then one board meeting of sparrow-headed, pig-bellied, suit-wearing morons later and you’d be gone. Never mind having the chance to re-build a team or forge a coherent style of play.
“Are you gentleman aware,” I said to the Englishman, Spaniard and the Brazilian, “that this club has not won a trophy for 17 years?” of that time. The other two, who’d only come the summer before, probably had no idea. “We’re aware of that, boss,” he replied. “But we feel that if we maximize our energy … ”
“Terry, don’t use words like maximize in my presence,” I said. “I might be tempted to knock your head off and practice my volleys.” I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. There’d probably be an official written complaint from his agent that I’d physically threatened his client.
“The lads think it’s a case of concentrating on the big prize,” he went on. “A lot of us are carrying niggling injuries right now. We feel that fourth place is more important, in the long run.”
“Do the lads think that it’s more important than winning the oldest cup competition in the world? It seems daft when we already made it through the third and fourth rounds. We’re almost halfway to Wembley.”
He still wouldn’t give me a direct answer. All that bloody media training they get nowadays. “It’s not a case of trophies, boss, it’s the prestige of being in the Champions League. For the club and the players.”
“Scared you won’t be worth as much next season?”
That shut him up. Fernando and Silvio were staring at their shoes. You could see they’d only been brought in for moral support and were too shy to speak. Terry was the captain. He was captain of England too. Some called him the backbone of the English game. Others called him a whining git who specialized in underachievement, and whose self-pushed reputation far outweighed his talent.
“If I was truly in charge of this club,” I said, “I’d kick the bloody lot of you out. Your paymaster — that bloke who occasionally comes to watch a game — would probably reverse that decision, though, and kick me out instead. As it is, I certainly don’t appreciate your interference in my team selection. If you’re on the team sheet for Sunday, you’ll play. It’s only bloody Carlisle, you’d think you could manage that without your poor tired bodies having to put in too much effort.”
They nodded, and shuffled out. I sat shaking my head. Then I called in the youth team coach Arie van Heeken and asked him to brief me on the best up-and-coming players.
When he was done, I said, “On Friday afternoon you will tell them that on Saturday they’ll be taking the plane north, and on Sunday they’ll be making their first team debuts in the FA Cup.”
He looked at me like I had gone insane. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Arie, I’ve never seen you laugh once in the eight months I’ve been here. Do you think I’d waste my breath trying to cheer you up now?”
“I really don’t think they’re ready,” he blustered. “Maybe one or two of them only. It could be a disaster.”
“Today is Tuesday. You and I will take them tomorrow all day, and on Thursday morning, and all day again Friday. Believe me, by Sunday they’ll be ready.”
On Thursday, the first team could only draw 1-1 at home to AEK Athens in the Europa League. “I thought it was Sunday you wanted a rest, not tonight,” I said. That was my post-game talk in full. The dressing room was very quiet.
On Friday, I released my team sheet to the media. …
- This excerpt was the first third of the short story, “Managing Kids,” from: The Last Amateur and Other Stories Paperback By Ian Plenderleith, 254 pages (Halcyon Publishing, 2025). Available in Paperback.
- Book Review: A soccer literature golazo: Ian Plenderleith’s short stories deliver the genre’s magic By Mike Woitalla