by Chris Harris
Catherine returned early in the morning and made Greg a cup of tea and took it up to Greg and at twenty-five past eight they were sitting together watching the BBC sports bulletin when they very nearly spat their tea across the room, because standing outside Denham Phoenix Football Club was a BBC reporter surrounded by what appeared to be an ever-growing crowd of young Koreans, dozens of them milling around behind him, taking photographs of the ground, filming themselves on their phones.
The presenter proceeded to tell what he described as the almost miraculous story of how one of South Korea’s biggest pop stars had somehow ended up signing for an English non-league football club, the report interspersed with footage of their new player prancing around enormous stages singing the sort of banal pop songs that Greg could barely endure for thirty seconds, followed by grainy clips of him playing football as a youngster and then, rather more significantly, some considerably better footage of him representing South Korea at under-18 level, which was the first moment Greg really began to understand that beneath all the celebrity nonsense there might actually be a serious footballer involved.
The reporter interviewed three of the young Koreans outside the ground, all of whom appeared almost deliriously happy simply to be standing there, and Greg and Catherine were still staring at the television in disbelief when Greg’s phone pinged with a message from Big Mal.
“You both better get down here now.”
Within ten minutes Greg had both showered and changed, before racing back towards the ground, where Greg discovered to his horror that he was about to be interviewed alongside Big Mal for the bulletin just before nine, something for which neither of them had received the slightest preparation and which Greg, despite having spent much of his life perfectly capable of talking to anybody about almost anything, found strangely intimidating once somebody pointed a BBC camera at his face.
Greg smiled, muttered and mumbled his way through his answers with the slightly apologetic expression of a man who appeared embarrassed that any of this was happening to him, and when he watched the interview back later he was mortified by how uncomfortable he looked, whereas Big Mal, from absolutely nowhere, suddenly transformed himself into a statesman of non-league football and began waxing lyrical about what an extraordinary opportunity this represented not merely for Denham Phoenix but for the local community. It was a bittersweet moment for Greg, realising how the chairmanship had added a real confidence to Big Mal.
Needless to say, the coffee shop was absolutely rammed with excited young Koreans, some of whom had apparently travelled considerable distances simply to see the ground at which their hero was now going to play football. Photographs, short videos and increasingly bizarre pieces of content began flooding social media at such a rate that nobody at the club could possibly keep track of them, and even completely uninvolved people playing on the padel courts or training on the 3G pitches found themselves accidentally appearing in videos being watched thousands of miles away, briefly becoming minor celebrities in South Korea without having the faintest idea what was going on.
By now everybody on the board and within the football management had received a message from the Korean superstar himself, apologising profusely for all the disruption his arrival was causing and clearly somewhat embarrassed by the circus developing around him, which impressed everyone no end, although nobody could quite work out what he was supposed to be apologising for.
Most of them were punch-drunk by this stage, carried along by the sheer absurdity and excitement of everything happening around them, but Piotr, although privately every bit as excited as the rest, understood that somebody now had to concentrate on the one thing everybody else was in danger of forgetting, which was football.
For somewhere between the next match and three months from now, the footballing world — or at least a surprisingly large corner of it — was going to be looking at Denham Phoenix Football Club, and Piotr knew that their responsibility was not to become intoxicated by the attention, start behaving like celebrities themselves and ultimately make complete fools of themselves, but to remember that they had somehow acquired an exceptionally talented footballer who, based on everything they had seen, appeared millions of miles too good for the level at which he was about to play.
However spectacular the financial consequences might prove to be, their job was to make sure that he shone on a football pitch, because all the sponsorship agreements, Korean television crews, social-media followers and excited visitors in the coffee shop would become secondary very quickly if the football itself descended into a circus.
Piotr also recognised something else that perhaps nobody had yet properly considered, which was how enormous the next few weeks were going to be for Dean, because Dean had created much of this momentum and would inevitably become one of the public faces of whatever happened next, while simultaneously being expected to manage a football team, integrate a player unlike anybody he had ever worked with before, deal with the media attention surrounding him and somehow continue doing all the ordinary, tedious work that nobody outside football ever noticed. The secret weapon was Piotr. He knew, with the coaching badges he had and his already short but successful tenure at the club, that he was bloody good at it. A very long way to go, but his confidence was soaring. In all management duos, one is always going to be more football-based, the other club management-based. It’s just they had only been doing it for a few weeks.
Piotr therefore decided that his most useful contribution was to take as much footballing responsibility off his shoulders as possible and make certain that, amid everything happening around them, his friend did not simply sink under the weight of it.
Fortunately, Piotr was an uncomplicated and exceptionally hard-working man who still had plenty of holiday owing from the previous year, and because he worked for the construction company involved with Denham Phoenix, an arrangement was quickly reached whereby he would take a few weeks off from his normal job, with Greg and the contractors splitting the cost of his wages, allowing him to devote himself entirely to the football club during what everybody now accepted was going to be the most extraordinary weeks of their lives.
Greg’s home had, almost by accident, become the epicentre of the entire operation, and with it increasingly obvious that nobody was going to be keeping normal hours for the foreseeable future, they had made up all the spare rooms so that anyone working late could stay over, have a drink if they wanted one and avoid having to drive home at some ridiculous hour before returning again first thing the following morning.
Dean had brought in his friend Libby Hopkins to help with the social-media operation, which was already becoming far too much for one person to manage, and between them they had effectively commandeered the conservatory, setting up laptops, chargers, phones and paperwork around a large trestle table, while two enormous six-foot-by-four-foot whiteboards had been propped against the wall and were rapidly filling with names, companies, telephone numbers, deadlines, fixtures, media requests and increasingly urgent notes about who was supposed to be doing what.
By Thursday the 12th, the latest problem for Stephen to deal with was television, because substantial enquiries were now arriving about broadcasting Denham Phoenix’s forthcoming matches, and for once the club’s position at such a low level of the football pyramid presented an extraordinary advantage: there were no central television rights in the Wessex Waste Products League to complicate matters and, where Denham owned and controlled its own ground, Stephen’s understanding was that there was considerable scope for the club to negotiate access to its home matches itself, subject, of course, to whatever permissions and competition rules applied.
The away fixtures were more complicated, because Denham could hardly sell rights to somebody else’s ground, so Stephen had already asked Lucy Lotwell to begin discussions with the clubs hosting the eight away games that fell within the possible three-month period, working out what arrangements could be reached and, more importantly, what financial incentive might persuade them to cooperate with something that could potentially bring them considerable attention and funds as well.
They had also negotiated with Lewes Football Club to stage the Sussex Senior Cup quarter-final at their ground towards the end of the month, where a capacity of around three and a half thousand would give them the opportunity to accommodate an audience vastly larger than Denham could realistically handle at home, while also turning what would ordinarily have been a relatively modest county cup fixture into another potentially significant event.
The house had consequently become a hive of almost continuous activity, with people wandering from room to room carrying phones and pieces of paper, conversations taking place simultaneously in the kitchen and conservatory, Lucy working through agreements, Libby and Dean trying to keep on top of the social-media explosion and Stephen moving from one commercial negotiation to another, while Greg looked around at all of it and could barely prevent himself from hearing an imaginary ching, ching, ching every time another telephone rang.
Stephen was becoming increasingly of the view that the £350,000 gain he had estimated was nowhere near the real potential.
“I’ve already given you a ballpark figure for what I think you’re going to earn from the sponsorship agreements and the longer-term legacy of all this,” he told him, “but I’m telling you now, Greg, if we actually see these three months out, there’s going to be a lot more coming our way than anything we’ve put on those whiteboards so far.” He paused to reflect.
“Your job now — and the same goes for your lovely partner — isn’t to chase every last pound that appears in front of you, because there are enough people here doing that already. Your job for the next few months is to keep everybody sweet, keep the managers happy, keep our Korean superstar happy and, above everything else, keep the whole bloody lot of them grounded.”
Stephen gestured towards the living room and conservatory, where the operation was carrying on around them.
“Everyone’s excited at the moment, which is perfectly understandable, and I can already see that some of this is going to go a little bit off-piste, because how could it not when something like this suddenly happens to a club like yours? People are going to get carried away, people are going to start having ideas above their station, somebody will inevitably say something they shouldn’t, and sooner or later somebody is going to become convinced that all this money and attention is somehow entirely down to them, I’ve seen businesses with windfalls crash and burn”
Welcome to Denham nr Lewes 