Until recently, Dr Erkut Sogut has been waking at 5.30am every morning and creeping downstairs to the kitchen to write at his laptop for between 90 minutes and two hours, depending on when his family wakes up.
Sogut, the agent of former Arsenal and Real Madrid midfielder Mesut Ozil, has been using the quiet time to write a thriller novel set in the world of football agents. The book — Deadline — is set to be published as an eBook on Thursday 3 March and is based on his 20 years of experience in one of the world’s most lucrative industries that still remains so shrouded in mystery and intrigue.
While it is widely believed corruption finds its way into every nook and cranny of the game, much of it is difficult to prove and, as in the case of Deadline, much of what goes on is not illegal but instead ethically questionable.
“I wanted to share the knowledge in a different way — open people’s eyes,” Sogut told i on Monday. “Show people what is going on behind-the-scenes in a fictional way but based on fact. For years I have been saying I have so many stories.
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“I think the book is authentic. It’s the world I am in. I’ve seen so many things in so many countries — probably 50 countries. And I’m still seeing it.”
Deadline focuses on nepotism, but Sogut has ambitious plans to write two novels a year, each highlighting football’s various grey areas. “Nepotism is a huge problem in football,” Sogut says. “But it’s unspoken. A manager might come into a club and say, I want to sign these three players, my cousin as a scout, my son as a player. And it can affect people who deserve the job or to become a player.”
The book references Sir Alex Ferguson giving his brother, Martin, a job as Manchester United’s chief European scout and his son, Darren, winning a Premier League medal in 1993 after making 15 appearances. Roy Keane has pointed this out in the past, too, claiming that Darren, who went on to play for Wolves and Sparta Rotterdam, would not have got anywhere near Manchester United’s first team had it not been for his father.
Annabel, the book’s football journalist, explains that Tony Pulis “signed one player three times. Anthony, his son. There’s more. Johan and Jordi Cruyff; Garry and Lee Johnson; Ronnie and Ian Thomas-Moore; Paul and Blair Sturrock. It’s all over the place, and that’s just English clubs. There are cases all over Europe where the same thing’s happening.”
None of it is illegal, but is it ethical? That’s the question that threads throughout Sogut’s novel.
He was inspired to write by John Grisham, whose legal thrillers he consumed as a law undergraduate in Germany and taught him much about the American legal system. Before Grisham’s writing career took off, he would get up at 5am to write for an hour every morning prior to starting his day as a working lawyer. After three years, he had written A Time to Kill, published in 1987, that launched his career as one of the world’s most commercially successful authors.
Remarkably, English is only the third language of Sogut, who was born and raised in Germany to Turkish immigrant parents, although he says now that his English is stronger than his Turkish because he has spent so much time in England and speaks it with his family.
Given most people can’t write a novel in their first language, let alone a second or third, Sogut explains that reading voraciously in English helped. He read, for example, the Harry Potter series in German, then read it in English (he is now reading it in Spanish).
In Deadline, David Miller is the fresh-faced lawyer who, alongside two friends he met at Oxford University studying international law, is trying to make it as an agent. He is on the verge of his first major deal, taking a highly-rated young German player to Manchester United when he receives a call from Ander, the agent of the club’s manager, Marco Anaia, who also happens to be his brother. Nobody goes in or out of the club without Ander’s say, Miller is told. But Ander, who has six players at Manchester United, has his own problems with the conflicting family ties of other senior staff members at the club.
“Welcome to the dark side of football,” Annabel tells Miller, adding: “For all its benefits and brilliance it is still a world rife with corruption, money laundering, criminals, mafia, gangs and other dirty business.”
There is the sense of small fish being eaten by bigger ones, but even the big fish constantly facing the threat of sharks circling above. And an agent muscling in on another agent’s deal also features. Sogut knows the experience well.
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“It happens every day in football,” he says. “I went to one of Europe’s capital cities and I was meeting a sporting director in a five-star hotel. Suddenly, there’s another agent with him who I recognised. He said “hi”. I was like, “Oh you know the sporting director very well? I didn’t know you guys know each other.” “Yeah, we’ve known each other for years,” he says. “He says you have your meeting and let’s have lunch afterwards.
“Over lunch he said: “If you do the deal with us it will go much smoother and faster and everything will be fine, you just have to share the commission.” It’s very cynical. They are controlling the deals. They have a player, or the coach. I didn’t do the deal, I had other options.”
Presumably the inclusion of kidnap and murder in the book are where the line is drawn between fiction and fact. But who knows? As Virginia Woolf posed in A Room of One’s Own, “Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/em9rKzA
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