Glory Of The Football Manager System-Chapter 342: The Dominoes I

June 15th - 20th, 2017

The Neves announcement broke on a Wednesday morning. I was in the middle of a lecture on session design when the club’s official Twitter account posted the news.

I didn’t see it happen. I was sitting in a classroom at St. George’s Park with my phone face-down on the desk, trying to concentrate on what the instructor was saying about progressive overload in training blocks.

But I felt it. The way you feel a shift in the weather before the rain comes. My phone, which I had set to silent, began to vibrate with a low, persistent hum against the desk. It didn’t stop.

I flipped it over during the break. The notifications were coming in so fast that the screen was barely keeping up. Twitter mentions. WhatsApp messages.

Missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognise. The club’s official post had already been retweeted forty thousand times. The fan forums were moving so fast they were barely readable. The headlines were already being written.

Crystal Palace sign Rúben Neves in stunning £15m deal.

Palace’s boy wonder manager strikes again.

Neves to Crystal Palace: the transfer that has stunned European football.

I read them standing in the corridor, a cup of coffee in my hand, the sounds of the other coaches chatting behind me.

I felt a quiet, private satisfaction that I kept entirely off my face. This was what we had planned. This was the signal. The first domino. And now the world was watching to see what came next.

The reaction from the Palace fans was something I had not quite prepared myself for. I had expected excitement. I had not expected the scale of it.

The club’s website crashed within twenty minutes of the announcement. The official club shop sold out of the new home shirt in under an hour, before Neves had even had his medical.

The message boards and fan forums, which had spent the previous week in a state of collective panic over the purge, had transformed overnight into something close to euphoria. The fans who had been calling for my head were now calling me a genius.

The ones who had been posting "12 players sold, we’re finished" were now posting "Trust the process."

Football supporters. I loved them for it.

But the reaction that meant the most to me was not from the fans. It was from the other clubs. Within twenty-four hours of the Neves announcement, Freedman’s phone started ringing.

Not from clubs trying to buy our players. From agents. Representing players who wanted to know if we were interested in their clients.

The signing of Neves had sent a message to the market that was louder than any press release: Crystal Palace were not a selling club anymore.

They were a buying club. They had ambition, they had money, and they had a manager who knew what he was doing. And suddenly, players who would not have considered us a month ago were asking questions.

That was the power of the first domino.

I drove back to London on Thursday evening, the motorway dark and quiet around me, my mind already on the next move. I had a list. Freedman had a list. And for the next five days, we were going to work through it.

Ibrahima Konaté was the first name on the list after Neves. I had been tracking him for two months: since the moment I had taken the senior job and Marcus had run an analysis on every available centre-back in Europe under the age of twenty-one.

Two months was not a long time in traditional scouting terms. But I had an advantage that no traditional scout had. Something private. Something I had never explained to anyone and never would.

I had known from the first time I had looked at Konaté’s data that he was the one. The profile was almost embarrassingly clear.

Marcus had confirmed it through his own work, arriving at the same conclusion by a different route, and had added a note in his own handwriting at the bottom of his report: This kid is going to be a problem for someone.

Might as well be for us. He was eighteen years old, six foot four, and built like something that had been designed in a laboratory to play centre-back. He was at Sochaux in the French second division, his contract expiring in the summer, which meant he was available on a free transfer. In theory.

In practice, a free transfer for a player of his potential was never truly free. The money that would have gone to Sochaux in a fee now went to the player and his agent in wages and signing-on bonuses.

And because he was a free agent, every club in Europe had the same access to him. The Bundesliga clubs had been circling for months. Borussia Dortmund had sent scouts. Leipzig had made an approach. We were competing against clubs with Champions League football, bigger wage bills, and far more established reputations.

What we had was a different kind of argument.

"He’s eighteen," I told Freedman on the phone, pacing up and down my hotel room in Burton-on-Trent on Thursday night.

"He doesn’t want to go to a big club and sit in the reserves for two years. He wants to play. He wants to be the man. Tell him he’s not coming here to compete for a shirt. He’s coming here to own one."

Freedman had made the call. The agent had listened. And the agent had told Freedman something that I hadn’t expected: Konaté had already been watching us. He had seen the Neves signing. He had seen the purge.

He had seen the Europa League third qualifying round draw: the first time in Crystal Palace’s entire history that the club had ever been in European football at any level. They hadn’t qualified yet.

They still had to earn it. But the fact that they were there at all, that a club that had spent its entire existence on the outside of European football was now standing at the door, was historic.

And he had seen something in the story of a 28-year-old manager, appointed on April 23rd with five games left and a club in freefall, who had not only saved them from relegation but taken them from 16th to 7th and into the European qualifying rounds in the space of five weeks, that he found compelling. He wanted to know more.

I called him myself on Friday morning, between sessions. I sat in a quiet corner of the car park at St. George’s Park, the June sun warm on my face, and I talked to an eighteen-year-old French kid about what I was building and what his role in it would be.

I told him about the system. I told him about the high defensive line and the physical demands it would place on him. I told him I needed a centre-back who could defend huge spaces, who was dominant in the air, and who had the pace to recover when the press was beaten.

I told him that player was him. That I had watched every piece of footage the System had on him, every game, every training clip, every data point, and I had not seen a single centre-back in Europe his age who was better suited to what I was building.

There was a silence on the line. Then he asked me one question. "Will I play every week?"

"Every week," I said. "From the first game of the season." 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

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