Knowledge Is Money

9 March. I had that date in my head 5 months before the man who owned the club did.

Wilf drove. I let him, because he had earned the wheel on this one. Up the country in the good car, a folder on my knee, the radio reading the story out every half-hour like a shipping forecast.

"...remain in administration tonight, with a 10-point deduction confirmed and the entire first-team squad understood to be available..."

"Turn it down a touch," I said. "I know how it ends."

Wilf turned the dial. tk. The motorway hummed under us, flat grey country going by at 70.

"Say it back to me," I said. "The way we agreed it."

"We go in kind. We do not lowball a corpse." His eyes stayed on the road. "We pay a fair scrap, we take the one man, we leave them their pride to bury the rest with."

"And the number."

"You said 40. I could get him for 25 if I leaned on it. A club that has not paid its lads this month takes 25 by Friday and thanks you."

"We pay 40."

"That is 15 grand you do not have to spend, boss."

"25 is what he is worth to a vulture," I said. "40 is what he is worth to a decent man. It is still a tenth of what he is worth to me."

I watched a bridge go over.

"It does not come around often, a day like this one. Do not spoil it saving a few quid off a dying man’s wages."

The ground came up out of the town like a thing already half in the past.

I have stood in a dying club before. In this life I stood in one, on a Tuesday, with 9 days on a clock and a winding-up letter folded in my coat. I remember all of it. Most of all the taste of the air.

It tastes of nothing. A club with the life going out of it goes quiet the way no graveyard ever manages. A graveyard was always quiet. This was a Saturday, once.

The car park was half empty on a working Wednesday. We got out, and the doors going shut, chunk, chunk, were the loudest thing for 100 yards. A gull went over and said nothing.

The club shop had a sheet of A4 taped inside the glass. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, in a soft font somebody on reception had picked because nobody had the heart for a hard one.

A lad of 16 was carrying a bin bag of training kit out to a car. The laundry firm had stopped coming, so somebody’s mum was doing the washing now, in a machine at home, for a Football League club.

"Christ," Wilf said, under his breath. "It is like walking round a house the morning after the ambulance has been."

"It is exactly that."

I stopped him at the door with a hand on his arm.

"Mind your face in there. These are not marks to be turned over. These are people on the worst morning of their working lives, and we are the undertakers who happen to be carrying a chequebook."

Inside, half the corridor lights were off to save the bill. Our steps went out ahead of us and came back, clack, clack, off walls still hung with 100 years of team photographs no one had taken down, and might never now.

The heating had been off long enough that the chill had got right into the brick. I kept my coat on going down that corridor, and so did Wilf.

A phone rang somewhere off the corridor and rang out, brring... brring.... Nobody left in that office was being paid to answer it.

A woman on reception looked up as we passed and gave us a careful, hopeful half-smile, not knowing yet whether the men walking in were here to help or to pick the bones.

I have stood on the wrong side of a smile like that. I said good morning to her like I meant it, because I did.

The administrator met us in a boardroom with good chairs and a portrait of a chairman who was not coming back. He had the worn, level manner of someone who does this for a living and has trained himself not to look at the walls.

A chair scraped. We sat.

"Mr Mercer. You are the first buyer through the door. That is unusual. Most of them wait a week for the price to fall."

"I know what the price is going to do. I would rather pay today’s than next Friday’s."

He almost smiled. "First time a buyer has said that to me in 20 years of the job."

"Then let me be quick and clean about it, and get out of your way."

I set the folder on the table. thp.

"Your captain. Sean Prentice. I am here for him, and only him. And I am not going to haggle you into the floor for a man who does not deserve to hear it done."

"He is in the last accounts at 400,000."

"He is. I am offering 40. Paid this week, cleared, no clauses, and no keeping you dangling while your staff go without wages."

I let it lie there on the table between us.

"It is a robbery, and we both know it. It is also the best offer you get for him from anyone with the cash ready this side of the deadline."

"I will not insult you by calling it fair. I will pay it fast, and I will treat your captain like a man, not a lot at auction."

He looked at the number longer than a tired man looks at a figure he has already decided to take.

"You could have offered 25."

"My scout keeps telling me. I am overruling the pair of you."

"Why."

"Because I stood where you are sitting, a couple of years back. The far side of this exact table, hearing men price my club by the pound."

I closed the folder.

"One of them could have been kind and never bothered. I have not forgotten the difference it would have made. Today I get to be the other man. It costs me 15 grand. Cheapest thing I will buy all year."

He was quiet a moment. Then he stood and put his hand across the table, and shook mine like it weighed something.

"Go and see your centre-half," he said. "The little gym, down the corridor. He will not go home."

He sat back down to his phones.

"Comes in every day since it started, as if turning up might hold the roof up on its own. You are getting a good one. Better than the number says."

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