BALOTELLI AND CO KEEP PLAYER LIAISON BUSINESS BOOMING
When Manchester City were trying to get the best out of Mario Balotelli, the club’s player support staff put together a plan of action almost unprecedented in detail.
In a bid to counter the underlying feelings of loneliness and disaffection they believed were the root cause of his disruptive behaviour, staff at City attempted to bolster every part of the young Italian’s life.
It was deemed unwise for Balotelli to live alone. Meanwhile, his tendency to accumulate motoring offences was to be countered by driver training in high-performance cars.
Invitations to film premieres and music studio sessions were arranged as cures for boredom.
none of it worked, of course. The threats to his career identified by City — such as a ‘ poor quality entourage’, ‘ female threats’ and ‘ limited people skills’ — got him in the end.
now viewed as wasted talent, Balotelli is 29 and playing for Brescia.
I thought of him this week when reading about Danny Drinkwater at Burnley. The midfield player has work to do to ingratiate himself with manager Sean Dyche after injuring hims e l f in a nightclub. Some things change in football but much doesn’t and the threats to young men’s careers posed by influences away from the field remain real.
‘It is the same as it ever was,’ one experienced player liaison official working in Lancashire told me this week.
‘The nature of the problems have changed a little over the
years but the root causes are the same. Too much time, too much money. It used to be drinking, whereas now it’s more likely to be issues with social media or gambling or, much more recently, problems with criminal gangs trying to attach themselves to players. Our job is to see these issues coming and, if we can’t, to deal with them as quickly and quietly as possible.’
Player liaison — or player support — is a booming industry these days. Some club do it very well, others less so.
Drinkwater should be OK. Burnley have an established player-care unit. not as lavish or as well-resourced as City’s but experienced to the extent that if a talented player such as Drinkwater doesn’t eventually settle then he will only have himself to blame.
elsewhere it is more mixed. At one big club in the north, for example, one member of the support staff supplemented his income by selling players joints of meat out of the back of his car. At a big London club, meanwhile, one employee arranged a fleet of Mercedes for the first team only to run into problems when they were found to be inadequately insured.
Generally, standards are improving and a clear distinction is now made between what a player thinks he wants and what he actually needs. Sometimes the signs of trouble are easier to spot than others.
‘I had a player who consistently denied he had a gambling problem,’ the club official in Lancashire told me. ‘But when I took his car in for a service, there were casino chips scattered across the passenger seat.’ You may think that modern footballers live such gilded lives that they should be grown up enough to drive their own car to the garage. You may have a point.
however, the truth is that many of them — especially those for whom english is not a first language — would sink without trace if not led by the hand through parts of their lives away from the club. Premier League footballers are assets worth millions of pounds and as such must be looked after.
Drinkwater will be given every help he needs to make a go of it at Burnley, just as Balotelli once was down the road at Manchester City.