by Chris Harris
Boxing Day, 30th December and New Years Day saw three games and nine points, but more importantly, the moves were beginning to click better as indifferent results from the chasing pack saw the Phoenix 12 points ahead.
Both Piotr and Dean were in foul tempers for the away game at Petersfield, 6th January, although neither had football to blame. Piotr’s problems had begun at one in the morning when, inexplicably, the tap in the clubhouse kitchen had fallen to pieces while he was trying to get himself a glass of water. Water had spurted everywhere, an emergency plumber had eventually been summoned, and by the time the problem had been brought under control it was five o’clock, which was normally when Piotr got up anyway. He therefore arrived for the game having effectively missed an entire night’s sleep.
Dean had managed to achieve much the same result without the assistance of defective plumbing. He had allowed himself to get dragged into an argument with one of his social media followers. The irritating thing was that the bloke wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t abusive, either. He was simply highly critical of Dean’s decision to move more and more of his content away from the Premier League and towards his own exploits at Denham Phoenix Football Club. Worse still, quite a few of his points struck home. Dean had spent half the night composing increasingly brilliant replies in his head, followed by increasingly brilliant replies to the replies he imagined receiving, until eventually morning arrived and he realised he had spent several hours arguing with a man who, for most of that time, was almost certainly asleep.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that when Denham Phoenix went in one-nil down at half-time, neither Piotr nor Dean was in the mood for the traditional managerial response. A pep talk seemed inadequate. Instead, Piotr and Dean looked at each other and reached roughly the same conclusion: three of them had been bloody awful and should come off. The only problem was that at their level they had just three substitutes. Use all three at half-time and an injury in the second half would leave them playing with ten men. Convention therefore said they should be cautious. Piotr and Dean, ignored convention. They made the changes. Denham Phoenix won 3–1, sparking thoughts of a fresh approach.
Interim management, Dean and Piotr were beginning to realise, was largely a matter of learning on the hoof and then retrospectively pretending there had been a philosophy behind it. In non-league football, where squads were small and money even smaller, substitutions traditionally amounted to waiting until the final twenty minutes and identifying whichever players looked most knackered. Modern professional football had moved somewhere else entirely. It was about squads rather than elevens, with the manager having enough alternatives on the bench to change the shape of a game rather than merely replace somebody whose legs had gone. Sitting together at the front of the coach on the journey home, Piotr and Dean began wondering why Denham Phoenix couldn’t do the same thing. Not literally the same thing, obviously. Manchester City could solve a problem by purchasing an international footballer for £60 million. Denham Phoenix could solve one by asking whether somebody’s mum was available to drive him to training. But the principle, they decided, was transferable.
By the time the coach was halfway home, an idea had become a plan. They would go to the board and propose ripping up the old rulebook. Bigger squad. More competition. More rotation. No more hanging on to a player for half a season simply because there was nobody else to play in his position. It also fitted rather conveniently with their longer-term ambitions. The more young players they brought into Denham Phoenix, the more players they could develop, and the greater the chances of discovering two or three who might eventually be worth something. Inevitably, some wouldn’t work out. That was football. With a squad of eighteen the season was pretty much predictable, with a squad of 25 and a properly drilled under 18s team your options would be blown wide open.
There was, admittedly, one small flaw. Large squads cost money, Denham Phoenix had money but the overriding plan was self-sustainability and anyway as young managers what was the fun and challenge in being given a chequebook? This was where Dean believed his social media following could finally become useful for something other than preventing him from sleeping. They wouldn’t compete for players by offering wages but by offering association. Denham Phoenix were already becoming the most progressive and fast developing non-league club people were talking about. There were plenty of talented young players floating around academies, universities and lower-level football who wanted an opportunity to progress at a platform with, albeit a small one, with a little bit of coolness rather than wanting fifty quid in an envelope after a match.
Find enough of them and Denham Phoenix could build a large, hungry squad for little more than travel expenses. Whether the board would regard this as visionary football strategy or two sleep-deprived men inventing an entire recruitment policy on the front seat of a coach remained to be seen. By the time they arrived home, however, Piotr and Dean were convinced they had discovered the future of non-league football!
Although Greg was on the coach, Dean and Piotr decided not to disturb him. Everybody knew how important his new romance had become, and Greg and Catherine were sitting together in a manner that suggested neither particularly wanted a conversation about squad rotation. So they waited until everyone was back at the Red Lion, where, over drinks, they sat down with Greg and Catherine and ran the idea past them. Greg’s initial reaction was hardly enthusiastic. There was already an extraordinary amount going on at Denham Phoenix. For a non-league club at their level they were attempting more changes, more quickly, than probably anyone else at that level in Britain. Now Dean and Piotr wanted to rip up the footballing form book as well.
What mainly worried him was that responsibility for this latest revolution would be in the hands of two men who had barely been football managers for a month. Even so, somewhere underneath the caution, he trusted their instincts. Later, when he discussed it properly with Catherine and Big Mal, the three of them came to much the same conclusion. Promotion that season already looked about as close to guaranteed as anything could be in football. They therefore had some room to experiment. If Dean and Piotr’s grand squad-building project began to interfere with results, they could simply be told to rein it in. Permission was granted, therefore, but with caveats. They were to do it slowly and there would be no wholesale influx of players. Dean and Piotr accepted the conditions immediately, which was easy enough when both were convinced there was no possibility whatsoever of the plan going wrong.
Dean spent Sunday at the clubhouse with Piotr, the pair of them disappearing into Piotr’s den to begin turning their coach-journey theory into something resembling a strategy. They had already earmarked two players to move on, both of whom had made it fairly clear that the proposed move to two training sessions a week wasn’t something they wanted in the longer term. Dean put a message across his social feeds announcing that Denham Phoenix Football Club was looking for young, ambitious players prepared to play for the glory of the club and their travelling expenses.
It sounded slightly ridiculous when written down, but of course they would retain a core of semi-pro’s on decent wages for the current level and obviously as they climbed the leagues the younger players would need proper renumeration, but there again the club income would increase to cover that, but Dean’s entire theory was that there were enough talented young footballers who cared more about playing, developing and being noticed than they did about picking up a few quid on a Saturday afternoon. They agreed on a deliberately gradual target: approximately one new player every month for the remainder of that season and throughout the next. Allowing for injuries, departures and the normal wastage of non-league football, they reckoned that would eventually leave them with a squad of around twenty-four.
When Dean checked his emails on Monday morning, there were already four applications. Two lasted less than a minute. One advantage of spending an unhealthy proportion of your life talking about football on the internet was that Dean had developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the better young players in the area, and he recognised both names immediately as players who were nowhere near the standard Denham Phoenix now required. The third was different. A young player currently at Hastings United. That was interesting enough for Dean to reply immediately asking for more details.
Then he opened the fourth application and stared at the screen. He read it once, assumed he had misunderstood it, and read it again. Then he Googled the name despite already knowing perfectly well who it was. Jin Seo-jun. Not another hopeful teenager from Sussex. Jin Seo-jun from NEON7, one of the biggest K-pop bands in the world. More importantly, at least from Dean’s suddenly football-obsessed perspective, Lee had played under-18 international football for South Korea. NEON7 were apparently taking a three-month break from band activities, Lee was fanatical about English football, and somewhere along the way he had developed the wonderfully romantic idea that spending part of his break playing English non-league football would be fun. He had been following Dean’s social media for some time, had seen the appeal for players and had simply applied.
Dean sat there looking at the email as the implications began arriving one after another. The plan had always contained a commercial element. They weren’t merely trying to build a squad capable of climbing towards National League South over the next few years; somehow, the process had to help generate money as well. Develop players, create stories, attract attention, increase crowds, grow the club. But this was on an entirely different scale. Jin Seo-jun playing for Denham Phoenix? Dean imagined the photographs, the social-media numbers, the Korean fans discovering the club, shirts being ordered from Seoul, television crews appearing at fixtures where the normal media contingent consisted of somebody’s uncle taking photographs from behind the goal. Underneath all of that madness was the detail that mattered most: the bloke could apparently actually play football. Dean resisted the temptation to ring everybody he knew before he had established that the email was genuine. Instead, he pressed Reply and tried to compose something professional. He deleted his first attempt because it sounded too excited, deleted the second because it sounded as though Denham Phoenix routinely received applications from internationally famous pop stars, and eventually settled on something somewhere between the two. He asked Jin for more information about his playing history, fitness, availability and what exactly he hoped to get from his three months in England. Then he sent it, sat back and looked at the screen again. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he and Piotr had been sitting in a little den at a non-league football clubhouse wondering whether they could persuade one decent young player a month to turn out for travelling expenses. By Monday morning, a South Korean pop star with international youth experience wanted a game. Even by Denham Phoenix standards, the plan appeared to be accelerating.
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