André Villas-Boas is a thoroughly nice man. Unlike so many of his fellow managers, he`s not an ex-footballer, he`s made a career out of coaching. In fact, he obtained his first UEFA license at the age of 17, and was national coach of the British Virgin Islands at 21. Villas Boas also learnt from great figures in the game, whether Bobby Robson (who lived in the same apartment block as Villas-Boas) or José Mourinho. Leaning from his peers, seizing opportunities, but also hard study have made Villas-Boas the coach that he is.
This summer, as Chelsea coach, Villas-Boas brought in Juan Mata. Mata is a regular in the Spanish national team, and it is said that AVB wants to build a team around the winger, who is only 22. But as well as playing for Chelsea, Mata is taking correspondence courses in business management. Mata has arrived at Chelsea with a working knowledge of English, and posts regularly on Facebook in both Spanish and English. The club has given him a private tutor to brush up his language skills, although Mata has also revealed that AVB speaks to him (and the rest of the Spanish contingent) in Spanish. That`s not surprising, Villas-Boas speaks 5 languages.
Another of the summer signings was Romelu Lukaku. A Belgian international, Lukaku is the son of Roger Lukaku, who played for Congo. Lukaku just turned 18, and despite being a regular for Anderlecht, playing week in, week out, he also spent May and June ? studying for his final school exams. His parents pushed him not to abandon his studies to focus on football full-time. Lukaku speaks two of the three official languages of Belgium (French and Flemish) and is pretty proficient in English also. On top of Lingala, the language of his family`s part of Africa.
We could also mention Oriol Romeu, a product of La Masia, Barcelona`s player factory. At La Masia, Barça believe not only in developing great footballers, but also great people. As well as receiving a football education, the output of La Masia receive a general schooling. When you see the Barça players in the national team (Iniesta, Xavi, Puyol), these are quiet and unassuming lads, even if they are insufferable about FC Unicef.
What links all of these newcomers to Stamford Bridge? The value of education, language skills, cosmopolitan attitudes ? intelligence born not of instinct but of hard work and training. Yes, they are all middle class, and are the vision of a changing club. In fact, the changing face of football.
Football is (as the cliché goes) a working class game. It has its roots in the pastimes of the working man, by contrast to all sorts of other activities that were more the preserve of the affluent. But football in 2011 is no longer a working class game. It is a universal activity; over the weekend, Eton-educated David Cameron went to watch ‘his` Aston Villa draw. Coincidentally, Prince William purports also to support Villa. Everyone in the UK is interested in football. Then again, pretty much everyone in the UK is middle-class: the proportion of kids who attend university is growing (despite the government`s best efforts to make that more difficult), all the trappings of the middle class are available to more and more people. Fewer people earn their living from their own toil, we are a nation of service industries.
Football itself has changed. Alongside its mass appeal it has also become an expensive hobby. Who can afford the £1000 plus season tickets to go to the Emirates? Teams based in big cities will continue to attract a local constituency of people who can still afford to live nearby. In the case of Chelsea, it would be difficult for the catchment area to be more affluent. A lot of football is only accessible to the middle classes.
And then there are the sociological changes to the practitioners of the game. Put bluntly, you need to be intelligent to play at the highest level nowadays. Not only to interact with 15 different nationalities in the dressing room, to spend time overseas as part of your career development, but to understand intricate game plans. Match preparations involve complex deconstruction of the opposition`s moves and working out, often using statistical models, what they will do in a given situation. That`s for the managers in the run-up to a match, but also for the players who will be expected to understand what their opponents are going to do and to anticipate it.
You also need a special intelligence born of the match geometry. One of the most lovely moments in a game is the excellent pass to the other side of the pitch, when one player understands where his team-mate, moving at a particular speed and in a given direction, is going to be when the ball hits the ground. That`s not just instinct or ‘skill`, it is intelligence. David Beckham had that. It always struck me when people said that Beckham was a thicko: to be able to read the game requires an intelligence. Just because he was (and still is) inarticulate doesn`t mean that he is not intelligent.
Of course, the match still needs instinct and skill, it`s just that the modern game requires something more. When you look at the great national sides of the moment, particularly Spain, Germany and Holland, these are very middle-class groups. English football, however, is still to embrace the sociological changes that have swept through the game in the rest of the world as well as English society itself.
In that sense it is good news that Chelsea has become more middle class. For all the nostalgia about the game, English society has moved on, and so has football. The people watching games are certainly middle class; that`s neither good nor bad, it`s just fact. The players and staff with whom we identify might be better off looking like we do. If anything, they are likely to perform better in a game that has become more complex and requires a different type of intelligence.
Of course, the 2011 influx are not the first middle class players (or managers) at Chelsea. Eidur Gudjohnsen famously also spoke five languages, Adrian Mutu (for all his sins) has a university degree. And, of course, there is Frank Lampard, grammar school product as a result of the value that his parents gave to elevating themselves. These were, however, individuals rather than a system.
In deciding to bring in a player, the club will look not only at performance on the pitch but also other attributes, such as the ability to fit in with a very particular group, but also the capacity to understand complex match instructions. How to understand the requests of a very middle-class coach. At some point, Chelsea has decided to become more middle class. Enough of the inverted snobbery about education and aspiration; I, for one, welcome it.
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