As far as Rámon Rodriguez Verdejo — the man everyone knows as Monchi — is concerned, there is as much work to do as there ever was. The game of soccer is paused, indefinitely, placed in the same anxious limbo as every other sport, as every other industry. But on laptop screens and cellphones, the business of it rumbles on as best it can.
So for Monchi, Sevilla’s sporting director — in charge of the club’s recruitment operations — there is still data to trawl and video to watch. Agents keep calling, pitching players, detailing salary demands. Monchi and his team feed it all in, then they deliberate and adjust their calculations accordingly. It is just as it would be in an ordinary April, in an ordinary world.
“The only difference is that meetings take place on video calls,” Monchi said. “So you do not have to wear a suit.”
European soccer is now a month into its first hiatus since the end of World War II. With a couple of exceptions — Turkey held out for a few more days, Belarus plays on, even now — nobody has kicked a ball since the strange, liminal evening of March 12, when a raft of Europa League games went ahead, several without fans in attendance — a last act before the sport’s delusion of immunity to the coronavirus pandemic was finally shattered.
Those first few days, of course, were fretful and busy. Stopping brought its own logistical challenges, as coaches scrambled to design conditioning programs for players confined to their homes and clubs rushed out specialized equipment — treadmills, exercise bikes, GPS units — to squads suddenly locked in isolation.
“We sent them all programs,” said Mark Molesley, the coach of the under-23 team at the Premier League club Bournemouth. “Exercises they can do at home, core workouts they could download from the internet, just as many ways to keep fit as possible.”
The complication, of course, was that nobody knew how long the cessation would last. Nobody knew what, or when, they were working toward. The players’ schedules were reviewed every week, altered as the date of a potential return to training — and then to games — was shifted back.
For Molesley’s Bournemouth colleague Carl Fletcher, the primary concern was player welfare. Fletcher’s role is to monitor the 26 players the club has out on loan; they are largely young, in their late teens and early 20s, farmed out to teams in the lower tiers of English soccer or sent to Scotland to hone their trade. (Though one, the experienced goalkeeper Asmir Begovic, is currently at A.C. Milan.)
“We had to make sure we knew where they were, what they were doing, and for the younger ones that they were fully aware of the situation,” he said. Fletcher felt it was crucial, too, that the players knew they could ask questions. “Mostly,” he said, “it was making sure they were coping, especially the ones that were quite far from home and not living with anyone.”
But once the fitness programs and the lines of communication were in place, the frenetic world of elite soccer had to learn a new, deeply unfamiliar virtue: patience.
Talks between Europe’s clubs, its leagues and its governing bodies have continued for weeks, but each round has only served to highlight the reality facing the sport: that the pandemic will determine the timetable, and nothing else.
As they wait — “just sort of floating,” as Sean Dyche, the Burnley manager, put it — all that managers, coaches, scouts and those in soccer’s back rooms and front offices can do is try to use their time as best they can.
Their experience will be familiar, by now. There is, front and center, the dull ache of anxiety over the virus, the concern about family, friends and colleagues. “The health and safety of everyone, the welfare of the players, they are the most important things,” Dyche said. Burnley, like most clubs, has made all of its services — conditioning, nutrition and psychological — available to its players.
There are the practical issues — looking after children no longer in school, arranging meals, checking on family, addressing the complexity of life in lockdown — and there are the displacement activities, the jobs that have never quite been done: Molesley has been building a patio (“It is nice to do some proper work,” he said); Dyche joked that he is “running out of things to jet wash.”
But there is also work. Some of that is the sporting equivalent of patio building: getting around to all the tasks that should already have been done, or might never have been done, as the season rolled remorselessly on as normal. “I’ve had a chance to go back through games that I hadn’t seen,” said Fletcher, the loan director. “We can look through videos and clips of individual performances, see what sort of things we might look out for, what we might have missed.”
Using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime — the whole virtual arsenal — Dyche has tried to use the time for an internal appraisal of his team’s season. “There’s been some reflection on what we are doing,” he said. “We’ve asked whether things are going where we wanted them to be going, whether results tally up with what our instincts and our data are telling us. We have tried to lift our heads out of the sand a bit.”
And then, of course, there is recruitment. At most clubs, that is the one department that remains, effectively, fully operational in the absence of live matches, though some, including Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur, have placed their scouts on furlough. Many who make recruiting their work would echo Monchi’s thoughts, that it continues “with a certain normality, with our focus on the future.”
Across Europe, teams are working painstakingly through lists of targets, checking reports and analyses, identifying priorities. Thanks to the subscription services Wyscout and Instat, clubs can stream games involving possible signings. Hudl, a soccer-specific app, allows them to dive deeper still.
Then there are the virtual meetings. In some ways, several scouts said, the shift online should lead to better decisions: not only can more people dial in to discuss strategy or contribute to a decision, the lack of extensive travel means there is more time to come to a conclusion.
The complication is that nobody knows what the clubs are planning for. Even the richest ones are expecting a considerable financial downturn. The extent of that is not yet known, but in Italy, Spain, England and Germany, the estimates run at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Clubs do not know how much money they might have to spend. Most have downgraded their expectations and adjusted their equations to take into account new realities. Agents, increasingly, find that their inquiries are being met with a confession of ignorance.
It is here that even those bits of soccer that are still operating run into a wall. What Dyche called “background” recruitment can carry on. So much of the research has been done, so much of the data already gathered, that the absence of a handful of games at the end of the season hardly makes a difference.
But anything more concrete than that is impossible, when so much of what is to come is hypothetical. Nobody knows when soccer will return, what it will look like, what its budget might be, and nobody is prepared to guess. The future, like the present, is frozen.
That applies, too, to contract discussions. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has tried to guide clubs and players that current deals should be extended to cover the expansion of the current seasons — something that will depend both on good will, on both sides, and national contract law — but that is not enough to stave off the financial uncertainty.
Many clubs have shelved talks with players about extending or improving their current contracts. In some cases, offers that had been on the table only a few weeks ago have now been summarily withdrawn. The numbers on the page, both sides suspect, may look very different when they are next submitted.
Nobody knows when that will be. The game’s authorities keep talking, keep planning: late May, early June, late June. They will probably play out this season. They will protect next season. Belatedly, soccer’s power brokers have come to realize they are not in control of the situation.
And so, on their laptops and their cellphones, those who can still work in soccer do what they can. For everyone else, in an impatient, restless business, there is nothing to do but wait.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
