Glory Of The Football Manager System

Elena had been asking me for three days. "I need to leave Beckenham."

"The training ground has everything you need."

"The training ground has the football. It doesn’t have the story." She looked at me across the production office, her legal pad covered in notes, the rushes from the Arsenal dressing room still loading on her monitor.

"The story is out there. In the streets. In the pubs. In the living rooms. The people who make Selhurst Park shake on a Saturday are not in this building, Danny. They’re in Thornton Heath and Peckham and Croydon and Norwood and Crystal Palace and a sports bar in Nairobi. I need to film them."

"You don’t need my permission for that."

"I don’t need your permission. I need your understanding. Because the film I’m making is not a football documentary. It’s a community documentary that happens to be about football. And if you don’t understand the difference, the documentary will fail."

I understood the difference. I had understood it since the first morning I stood on the Selhurst Park touchline and heard twenty-five thousand voices singing a name that wasn’t mine and felt, for the first time, the weight of what a football club carried for the people who loved it.

"Go," I said. "Film everything. Talk to everyone. And when you’re done, show me what you found."

She left Beckenham on Monday, January 15th, with Tomás, Ruth, and Film Marcus. Davi and Clara stayed behind to manage the training ground footage. The crew took a grey Mercedes van that Elena had hired because she refused to drive a vehicle with a Netflix logo on the side. "We’re documenting a community," she said. "Not advertising a streaming service."

I know what they found because Elena showed me the footage a week later, sitting in her production office, the two of us watching the monitor in silence while the people of South London told their stories.

The first interview was the one I had been waiting for.

The grey-haired man from the Holmesdale. The sixty-year-old in the faded Palace shirt that had turned pink from thirty years of washing. His son beside him.

Elena had found them through the club’s community team, who knew the man because he had been a season-ticket holder since 1983 and because his father, who had died in 2011, had been a season-ticket holder before him, and his grandfather before that. Three generations. Ninety years of Palace football in a single family.

His name was George. George Elphick. His son was called David.

Elena filmed them at their kitchen table in Thornton Heath. The table was small, the kitchen was small, the flat was small.

But the Palace memorabilia was everywhere: photographs on the walls, programmes in a bookcase, a scarf from the 1990 FA Cup final draped over the back of George’s chair.

A photograph of George’s father, Arthur, in a flat cap and Palace scarf, standing outside Selhurst Park in what appeared to be the 1970s, the old ground visible behind him, the paint peeling, the stands half-empty.

Elena: "Tell me about your father."

George looked at the photograph. He didn’t speak for a long time. Ruth’s microphone picked up the sound of the kitchen clock ticking. David, beside him, put his hand on his father’s arm.

"He took me to Selhurst in 1972. I was seven. We stood in the Holmesdale. There were no seats. Just concrete and crush barriers and men in coats. It rained. The match was terrible. I think we lost three-nil to Coventry. And when it was over, I said to him, ’Dad, can we come back next week?’ And he said: ’You’re hooked, aren’t you?’ And I said yes. And he said: ’Good. That means you’re a Palace fan. And a Palace fan is a Palace fan for life, son. You don’t choose it. It chooses you.’"

Elena: "He passed away?"

"2011. November. He was eighty-two. He saw the 1990 Cup final. He saw us go down and come back up three times. He saw the Premier League start, and he saw us in it, and he saw us out of it. But he never saw us in second place."

George’s voice caught. "When they sang about the Champions League on Boxing Day, I heard his voice in it. I know that sounds mad. But I heard him."

David: "It doesn’t sound mad, Dad."

"He would have loved Danny Walsh. He loved managers who cared. He always said you could tell the difference between a manager who was using the club and a manager who was serving it. He said most of them were using it. A stepping stone. A CV line. A year or two and then on to the next one."

George looked at the camera. "Danny Walsh is not using this club. Danny Walsh is building something that wasn’t there before. And my dad would have known. My dad always knew."

The second interview was with a woman named Lorraine. She ran a supporters’ bus from Peckham. Had been running it for fourteen years. Every home match, every away match within a hundred miles. The bus was a converted minibus she had bought from a school in 2004 for two thousand pounds.

Elena filmed her beside the bus, which was parked in a side street in Peckham, its Palace crest painted on the side in a slightly uneven hand that suggested Lorraine had done it herself.

"She breaks down," Lorraine said, patting the bus’s flank. "Regularly. The engine coughs like a smoker on a Monday morning. The heating only works on the left side, which means the people on the right bring blankets. The suspension is gone, so every pothole between here and Selhurst feels like a car crash."

Elena: "Why not get a new one?"

"With what money?" Lorraine laughed. "I’m a teaching assistant from Peckham. The bus costs me four hundred quid a year in repairs. The lads chip in for petrol. I fix whatever breaks because the mechanic I used to take it to moved to Brighton, and I refuse to give a single penny to anyone connected to Brighton, even indirectly."

Elena: "How many people ride the bus?"

"Twelve. Regular. Same twelve for the last eight years, give or take. Malcolm’s been coming since 2006. He’s seventy-three. He sits in the front seat because the back makes his hip hurt. Sharon sits behind me because she gets travel-sick and needs to see the road. The kids, there are four of them, teenagers now, they sit at the back and make noise that would get them arrested on public transport."

Elena: "What has this season been like?"

Lorraine’s face changed. The humour dissolved. Something else replaced it. Something that looked like awe.

"I have driven this bus to Selhurst Park for fourteen years. I have watched Palace lose more matches than I can count. I have driven home from grounds in the rain with twelve miserable people in the back, nobody talking, the radio playing rubbish, and I have thought: why do we do this? Why do we spend our Saturdays on a minibus with broken heating, watching a team that breaks our hearts?"

She paused. "This year, I know why. Because this is what it was for. Every terrible Saturday, every broken-down motorway, every three-nil loss to a team whose name I can’t even remember, it was all for this. For the season when it meant something. And when I drive that bus to the Emirates next week for the semi-final, with twelve people who have been waiting fourteen years for a match like that, I will know that every mile was worth it."

Elena, watching the playback later, said: "Lorraine is the spine of episode two. She’s the audience’s way into the community."

Then the Nairobi call.

Elena had arranged a video interview with the Crystal Palace supporters’ club in Nairobi, Kenya. The club had grown since December. When Parish’s commercial team had first reported its existence, the membership was over two hundred. By mid-January, it was three hundred and forty.

The Christmas video, two hundred people singing "Glad All Over" at one in the morning in a sports bar in Westlands, had gone viral within the Palace fan community. New members had joined from Mombasa, from Nakuru, from Kisumu.

A teacher in Eldoret had started a secondary branch. The owner of the bar, a man named James Ochieng, who had grown up in Croydon, emigrated to Kenya in 2008, and had never stopped following Palace, was now managing an operation that required a WhatsApp group with four hundred members and a schedule of organised screenings that rivalled most European supporters’ clubs.

Elena filmed the call at Beckenham, on a laptop in the production office, because the time difference meant it was eight in the evening in Nairobi and four in the afternoon in London. On the screen, James Ochieng sat in his bar, the Palace scarves visible on the wall behind him, the tables empty because it was a Tuesday and the next match wasn’t until Saturday.

Elena: "James. How did this start?"

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.