‘And yet, we’ve had just one point in our last four matches. How can we put things right? What is the best way forward for Nice? What’s going wrong?’
‘In my opinion, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just that you don’t have Qatari money to throw around like confetti on the likes of Cavani, Ibrahimovic, Luiz, Silva, or Dumas. PSG have bought their second place, just like Manchester City have bought theirs. If you had any one of those players things might be very different for you. Do you have a spare thirty-five million to buy Jérôme Dumas? Because I hear PSG might be looking to offload him in January.‘
Danton shook his head. ‘We’ve had a difficult summer. We had to reduce our wage bill quite substantially. We couldn’t afford that price.’ He shrugged. ‘Nobody can, unless they have an Arab or Russian daddy to buy them all the cakes they want.’
‘Oil money distorts everything. Not just football. Take a look around this hotel. There are people staying here who spend money like it has no real meaning.’
‘True. But it’s the same at the Meurice.’
I shrugged. ‘You’re punching above your weight, Mr Danton. Puel is doing a good job. I’m sure I couldn’t do any better than him. Not with your resources. Your goalkeeper, Mouez Hassen, made an excellent save. He kept you in the game. And if Eysseric had scored we might be having a very different conversation. In the first half the ball burned your feet. In the second you started to enjoy yourselves. I don’t see much that needs to change. Except maybe that you should tell your players to free themselves a little more, and to enjoy the game. All of which makes me wonder why you wanted this meeting.’
‘Window shopping. Like everyone else in Paris. Who can afford to do anything else in this city? Apart from the Russians and the Arabs.’
‘Don’t forget the Chinese. They may have slightly less money than the Russians and the Arabs but there seem to be more of them spending it in Paris.’
‘It’s not everyone who would be straight enough to say what you’ve said, Mr Manson. Especially when he’s unemployed. That kind of honesty speaks volumes about a man’s character. For the same reason I admire a man who’s not too proud to take the Metro. So, I hope you’ll allow me to pay for your weekend. The fact is, you’ve probably saved me quite a bit of money this morning. And I appreciate that most of all. Especially in Paris.’
3
The best way to see Shanghai is at night when the huge, neon-lit city looks like a fabulous, black velvet-lined jewel box full of shiny red rubies, glittering diamonds and bright blue sapphires. Tempest was right. It was just like Skyfall, except that I wasn’t planning to kill anyone. Not that anyone would have noticed, probably. I’d never seen so many people. Shanghai has a population of twenty million and it’s hard to imagine that the individual has any real significance. Equally, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on. Everything looks like a major metropolis but when you can’t read anything very much it’s easy to feel lost and out of your depth. There’s that and the fact that I had a hard time telling Chinese people apart, which isn’t racist so long as you recognise that they probably have the same problem with people in the West.
My host was the Chinese billionaire, Jack Kong Jia, who had contacted Tempest with an invitation for me to come and manage his football club, Shanghai Xuhui Nine Dragons, on a rolling six month contract. JKJ, as he was popularly known, owned the Nine Dragons Mining Company and was reportedly worth six billion dollars, which explained why I’d been installed in an eight thousand pound a night Chairman’s Suite on the eighty-eighth floor of the Park Hyatt, one of the highest hotels in the world.
‘Jack Kong Jia is supposedly in the market to buy an English football club,’ Tempest had explained back in London. ‘He’s not just looking for a manager in Shanghai but someone who knows English football and can help advise him about that, so it would be a good thing if you and he got along.’
‘Which one? Any idea?’
‘Reading. Leeds. Fulham. Take your pick. Owning a football club is not for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure. You might need nine dragons to give yourself the courage to do it.’
‘I don’t know if I want to work with another foreign billionaire,’ I said. ‘I worked for one before, remember? And I didn’t like it.’
‘Which is exactly why a six month contract in Shanghai would be a good idea. That way you can decide if you take to each other or not. Look, Scott, this guy might be the next Roman Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour and let’s be realistic, it’s not as if there are any other offers right now.’
‘True. But it’s not like I need the money. I can afford to wait for the right offer to come along. And I’m not sure this is right for me. It’s not as if I can even speak Chinese.’
‘I’ve only spoken to him on the telephone but Mr Jia speaks perfect English, so that’s not a problem. And half the team are from Europe.’
I grunted. ‘I keep thinking there’s a club in Germany I could manage. I speak fluent German, after all. I like it there.’
‘You’ve not been to Shanghai, have you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘It’s my opinion that to walk away from this would be like turning your back on the future.’
‘Are you speaking from experience?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re guessing.’
‘Call it intuition. Look, Scott, one of the reasons I was hired by you was so that I might have an opportunity in an almost exclusively male world. That means you have to accept that I’m going to think outside the box. I also have to tell you that I need to make a living and if I’m going to represent you I have to remind you that right now I’m earning ten per cent of nothing. So, please. Give this a chance.’ She picked up my hand and kissed it fondly. “And do try to cheer up, Scott. Smile. Things will get better, I’m sure of it.”
‘All right. And you’re pobably right. I’ll go.’
‘And when you get there don’t talk yourself out of a job, the way you did in Paris. Try not to be so very honest. The current team manager, Nicola Salieri, has already resigned. Mr Jia seems to have a high opinion of you.All you have to do is go to the match and listen to what he has to say.’
Mr Jia met me in a luxurious private box at the thirty thousand capacity Yu Garden stadium where Shanghai Xuhui — wearing a blue and red home strip that looked suspiciously like Barcelona’s — were hosting Guangzhou Evergrande. He was a handsome man in his early thirties with Michael Caine glasses, an American accent, a diamond-encrusted watch as big as the Queen’s coronation crown and, in the lapel of his suit, a little Chinese flag. We were carefully attended by eight beautiful Chinese girls wearing smiles that were bigger than their little black minidresses. They poured our drinks, fetched us food, lit Mr Jia’s endless cigarettes and took care of his large and almost continual in-play bets. He drank Krug champagne — all the time, it seemed, and not I thought because he liked it but because it was the most expensive. I restricted myself to Chinese beer — Tsingtao — because I liked it and because I wanted to keep a clearish head for business and the game in hand. But in truth we were so high above the pitch it was difficult to follow the match. The player names on the shirts were yellow and in Chinese and while they also had numbers, the programme was in Chinese too, so I had little or no idea of who was who.
‘You like Shanghai?’ he asked. ‘Your hotel room? Everything is to your liking?’
‘Yes, everything is great, Mr Jia.’