Knowledge Is Money

On the way across from the office I passed the far pitch. Marsh was on the bench by the touchline with his crutches against it, watching Doyle’s first-year scholars, and every minute or so he shouted at their back 4.

"LOOK BEFORE IT COMES TO YOU, SON! LOOK!"

A boy of 16 at centre-half looked over his shoulder, then did it again before the next ball came, and Marsh nodded at him once.

I found Kane in the car park at the training ground at 12, with a kit bag on his shoulder and his boots in a carrier bag, the same way he had come in February. Kieran had the club van running to take him to the station. chug, chug of the old diesel.

"Mr Sadler let me keep the shirt from Sunday," Kane said, and showed me the corner of it in the bag. "I asked him first."

"It is yours. You scored in it."

"93 days, 2 goals and a penalty at Wembley," Kieran said, out of the van window. "I done it on a seed bag. You can have the seed bag, Harry."

"Thank you, Kieran." He turned back to me. "I wanted more than 2, Mr Mercer."

"So did I, Harry."

"Mr Sadler says the ones in training count, but only to him."

"They count to me as well."

He shifted the bag on his shoulder.

"Will you say goodbye to Wilf for me? The old man with the notebook. He is not in today."

"He is in Glasgow. I will tell him."

"Thank you for having me here, Mr Mercer."

"Thank you for coming, Harry."

I had signed the man I remembered. For 93 days I had the boy instead.

The boy had missed a sitter at home to Bournemouth and run 60 yards back to win the ball before anybody had finished groaning. He had thanked the tea lady. He had walked up from halfway at Wembley with a minute on his legs and put the penalty in the corner.

"You will be all right, Harry," I said.

"Yes, Mr Mercer."

He got in the van. clunk of the door. Kieran put the radio on, too loud, and turned it down, and drove him out of the gate.

Wilf came back from Glasgow on the Thursday. He came up the stairs to my office, which he does about twice a year, and sat down in the chair across the desk with his flat cap on his knee.

"I said twice more," he said. "I saw him twice more. Both legs of their play-off, against Peterhead."

"And?"

"They lost the pair of them. 4-1 over the 2 games." He opened his notebook and did not look at it.

"He was the best player on the pitch in a side that lost 4-1. Up and down that touchline the whole time. He wanted the ball in the last minute as much as he wanted it in the first."

He closed the notebook. "Left-back. 19. Answers the phone at the national stadium of a morning. I would take him tomorrow."

It was the most Wilf had said about a footballer in 3 years.

"Who else has seen him?" I said.

"I went back up on Tuesday to find out. Their kit man drinks where I drink when I am up there. Dundee United. They have him in to sign on the 3rd of June, him and another lad off the same side." He put the cap back on his knee. "That is a Monday."

"Then we have until the 3rd of June."

I had known the summer he went north to Dundee. I had never known the day. Wilf had driven 800 miles to bring it to me.

"He is an amateur," Wilf said. "They pay him expenses. He will want to know he is going to play, more than he will want to know what it pays."

"Tell him Craig will see him, and Craig will tell him straight where he stands. I will ring Craig tonight. Take Margaret with you, and an offer in writing. She will want a week to get the papers right. Go up next Friday and see him on the Saturday."

"Margaret, in my car, for 400 miles."

"She will want to stop every 2 hours."

"Then I will stop every 2 hours." He stood up and put the cap on.

"Harry asked me to say goodbye to you for him," I said.

"He left word with Kieran as well." Wilf went to the door. "Good lad," he said. "Somebody will have a very good player off that boy, when he is ready. It will not be us." And he went.

Margaret came in on the Friday afternoon with one sheet of paper. She put it on my desk and did not sit down until I had read it.

"I told you the number in February," she said. "This is what it does to you. Up there they do not cap the wages. They cap what the club is allowed to lose. 3 million in a season. 8 million, if 5 of it is put in by you as equity."

She put her finger on the second paragraph. "And this is the part I want you to hear. Some spending comes off the sum altogether. The academy. The community scheme. The training ground and the stand. Promotion bonuses, if we ever pay them again. Wages and fees stay on it, every pound."

She took her glasses off. "Your coin can go into concrete and into the academy, as much as you like. It cannot cover a loss past 8 million. Go over, and they stop you registering players."

I read the sheet again. For 3 years every hole in this club had been filled from my side of the desk.

In March I had sat in the canteen at the training ground and promised 4 men money that did not come on the day I said. It cost us 3 games and the dearest sale of my life.

"This summer the coin goes into the training ground and the academy," I said. "The footballers get paid out of what the club takes in. If the club cannot pay a man’s wages, we do not sign him this summer."

"That is stricter than their rule," said Margaret.

"I remember April."

"So do I," she said. She folded the sheet and left it on my desk.

Maureen closed the green book on the last day of May.

Margaret had gone north with Wilf at dinnertime, with an offer for the left-back in her bag and a flask Maureen had filled for her. The office was quiet. tick of the radiator cooling.

Maureen had the Gazette folded to next season’s Championship, with the 24 clubs in a column down the side. She put it on top of the green book.

"Leicester," she said. "The club that bid 3 million for Jamie last summer. They are in the division."

"I saw the table."

"Their money comes from a duty-free business in Thailand," Maureen said, "and there is a great deal of it. More than Ray Sully had. More than Ray Sully pretended to have." She tapped the paper with her pencil. "They will want Jamie again. And they will see Riyad and N’Golo twice a season, close up."

"They can want him. Jamie is signed till 2017, and he is not for sale this summer, whatever they offer."

"And Harry Maguire?"

"Not him either. Not any of the 4."

"He is a Sheffield boy," Maureen said. "They are just down the motorway from Sheffield. They will ask."

In the life before, 3 of those players won the Premier League together in that club’s blue. I watched them lift it at the King Power Stadium in May 2016. A year after that, the same club paid for Harry Maguire, and later sold him for 80 million pounds.

Nobody had stood between that club and those players then. This time they would have to come to Marsh Road and ask.

And I knew what this division had done to the last little club that came up through that final. The first time round it had been Yeovil, and the Championship sent them straight back down.

"What is left of it?" Maureen said. "Your coin."

"Enough for the summer, if I am careful. Less than I had at Christmas."

"How much less?"

"The part I sold in April."

"So we plan the summer on what is left," Maureen said. "Not on what it might be worth by Christmas."

"Agreed."

I knew what the missing part was worth, to the last coin. I had worked it out on a hard chair above a phone shop in April.

I looked past her, out of the window. Beyond the car park the training ground had its second pitch pegged out in string.

She put the green book on the shelf, between the box files, and took a new one out of her drawer. Same make, same green. She had written 2013 to 2014 on the spine, and nothing else.

"What goes in first?" I said.

"The summer," Maureen said. "The training ground and the academy. Margaret says they come off the sum."

"They do."

"2 million, you said. In April. By the end of June."

"I did."

She opened the new book at the first page and pressed it open with the side of her hand. A car door went in the car park, clunk, and somebody laughed. She wrote one line, in small neat figures, and turned the book round so I could read it.

TILBROOK TOWN FC · CHAMPIONSHIP 2013-14 · PAGE 1 June 2013 · Equity, S. Mercer · training ground and academy · 2,000,000

She had written it in pencil.