Exposed at the Back (4 page)

Ambitions

‘The post-mortem report isn’t ready yet. What I can give you is a short summary of the report from the first unit on the scene, but you can’t tell anybody where you got it,’ said Arnold Nesje, on the other end of the phone.

‘Of course not,’ said Benedikte.

As a sports journalist, Benedikte had some regular sources. She had a couple of players who could speak well for themselves, and whose clubs used them for everything from advertising jobs to entertainment programmes, as well as requests from journalists. She had a couple of coaches in clubs that were so uninteresting their boards had given them strict instructions not to hold anything back. She had directors of football who almost wept tears of joy when somebody called them, and fellow journalists with chronic verbal diarrhoea. For the Golden case, though, Benedikte needed to think beyond her normal sources, but it was a little harder to call Nesje than most other people, they’d had an on-off relationship for several years. Nesje was in the police, currently with the National Police Immigration Service.

‘Golden’s neck was broken,’ he said. ‘It’s presumed that some kind of striking weapon was used, making several perforations in his neck, about a centimetre in depth. The impact killed him instantly. But there are also signs of a struggle before the fatal blow.’

Benedikte took a note of the information. A broken neck, a weapon, holes in his neck, a struggle. This was something brutal, but was it planned? Was it done in anger? Was hate behind it? Or was it money? Bearing in mind that a football agent was involved, it could be a combination of all these factors.

She had so many questions, but she knew that Nesje couldn’t answer them yet, nobody could. She looked back down at her notepad.

‘I need more help,’ she said.

‘What are you up to, anyway?’

‘I’m trying to investigate the killing of Arild Golden.’

‘I know that, but why?’

A couple of months previously, Benedikte had presented a story about a 29-year-old Norwegian sprinter who’d had to retire. She couldn’t get the story out of her head. It reminded her of the more senior colleagues she’d seen vanish from the TV screen. Colleagues who hadn’t managed to keep their positions after maternity leave. Colleagues who’d had to watch others being offered the job of presenting the
Gullruten
TV awards or
Idrettsgallaen
, the star-studded annual review of Norwegian sport. Her meeting with Steinar Brunsvik made her reflect on this too. He was younger than her when he stopped playing. If there was one thing sports personalities and female faces on commercial TV channels had in common, it was their early sell-by dates.

The Golden case was her big chance to be something more. Success depends to a large extent on luck, and journalists depend on other people’s achievements or failures. Where would Woodward and Bernstein have been without Nixon? Things like that didn’t happen in football. People in football barely knew who Nixon was, let alone Woodward or Bernstein. The biggest news stories would always deal with somebody getting mixed up with a prostitute, and that somebody would almost without exception be a player in the English Premier League. So for her as a sports journalist, a homicide at the epicentre of Norwegian football could only be described as one thing: a stroke of luck.

‘I want to go deeper,’ said Benedikte.

‘Give me the names and I’ll check them out.’

She was still young, but the experience of how easily life could change was burnt into her. How easily a life could be destroyed. It was so long ago, but those tough years still haunted her.

A Team Sport

Steinar needed to study something serious when he came back to Norway and ended up choosing law. Law was a marathon, a 50 km ski race, it was certainly nothing like the explosive nature of football.

The lecturers and his fellow students soon realised that Steinar wasn’t interested in talking football. The law faculty was well insulated from the Norwegian sports press, so Steinar was able to study in peace. Not long after his last exam, he started as a trainee in Tangen’s law firm.

One day Steinar assisted in an industrial dispute negotiation meeting. His company was representing a business carrying out massive changes to its employees’ contracts without really needing to, coming up against quite legitimate opposition from union representatives in the process.

The battle was ended by senior partner Edvin Tangen throwing the statute book on the table and saying: ‘Tell me where it says in here that employees on temporary contracts have the right to stay in their positions.’ The employees’ lawyer, who was terrified of Tangen – known for taking well over 3,000 kroner an hour – capitulated on the spot. At the same time, Steinar felt the appeal of working for the company vanish. He handed in his resignation the same day and rented a small office of his own at Sandaker, in the north of Oslo.

He had to air out the office for two weeks, painting every square inch of the yellowed walls. He replaced the wall-to-wall carpet with light parquet flooring and bought a large, semi-circular desk. To finish with, he ordered business cards and a sign for the door, showing the name Sandaker Criminal Law. Even now, he was wary of revealing his name. Nonetheless, he was still asked fairly frequently: ‘But aren’t you…?’

Maybe a bit of extra PR wouldn’t go amiss, though. Steinar had
taken on both criminal cases and civil cases; he had sufficient practice as a trainee lawyer and had taken the required exam. He could now dispense with the word ‘trainee’ in his title and rightfully call himself a lawyer, but he was still not getting enough cases. They weren’t covering the company’s running expenses.

The years spent studying law, his investments in his own company and life in general had eaten into the savings from his football career. If the current situation continued, Steinar would soon have to swallow his pride and beg Tangen to give him back his job. If nothing else, that would at least make the work Christmas party a bit more interesting than it was in his one-man firm.

The quiet days gave Steinar time to think, bringing back how much he missed football. He started to think of the man who’d ruined everything, Golden’s partner. Steinar had even given the man a name. He called him Vlad Vidić.

There was something intense about the man, something harsh, something bottled up that made Steinar think of the Balkans. Perhaps he’d unconsciously named him after Manchester United’s tough centre-back, Nemanja Vidić, a footballer he’d noticed even though he was trying to close himself off from the game.

Steinar checked that his phone wasn’t on silent. No missed calls. Then he sent a text message: ‘I’m on my way.’ Then he started thinking of Vidić again.

Nemanja was too sweet as a first name. When Steinar played football, he always used to focus on his opponents’ weak points. If a goalkeeper often let in low shots on the left, then Steinar would send the ball blazing towards that corner at the earliest opportunity. If a player was a little apprehensive when challenged, Steinar wouldn’t be adverse to tackling him over the touchline. And if he’d been up against Nemanja Vidić in a match, then he would’ve just thought about what a sweet, innocent name Nemanja was, merely to get the psychological upper hand.

Was that why he’d given Golden’s partner a more bloodthirsty first name or had the name Vlad Vidić come from somewhere else?

Steinar got up and watched the tram going past. There were two questions he couldn’t quite answer, nor get out of his mind. How had Vlad Vidić managed to stay anonymous all these years? And had Arild Golden himself had a hand in what happened to Steinar?

Soccer School

Benedikte sat in one of the large substitutes’ shelters next to the astroturf ground at Valle. Vålerenga’s training session was officially over, but some of the players had stayed on for a bit of extra practice.

Per Diesen fired the ball on target. From 20 yards he bent it up in the air, over an imaginary wall, past an imaginary keeper, in off the post and into the empty goalmouth. He put down another ball and sent it curving almost as high into the corner. Per Diesen was the best free kick taker in Norway.

Benedikte liked to see how carefully he prepared the ball. How he paced it out and how he exhaled before every shot. How high and hard he kicked the ball. Journalists don’t spend enough time studying what footballers actually do, she thought.

A short distance away, Marius Bjartmann was doing sit-ups. He’d taken off his T-shirt and was using it to lie on. The sweat glistened on his sculpted abs.

Kalid Jambo was still there too, running a series of 17–13 intervals. He shot along the length of the pitch, turned and went back a good distance in the 17 seconds he was running. Then he walked for 13 seconds to recover, throwing the odd remark over at the players fetching the balls.

Picking them up were Otto Cana and a couple of the other young lads. It was traditional in most football clubs to give that job to the youngest players. And it was also traditional in most football clubs for the youngest players to moan about it.

Bang, Diesen hit the crossbar, which rattled.

He shot off another three free kicks, and Bjartmann finished his strength training. They left together, walking by the Vallhall Arena, the large sports hall next to the pitch, Kalid Jambo tagging along. After
a couple of minutes’ vaguely focused searching, the young lads found the last ball, then they too headed off towards the arena, where the changing rooms were to be found.

The structure of the grey and blue arena, with its curved roof, was becoming worn. Pieces kept falling off. When this happened on the wall facing the car park it looked like a large, beached whale with tooth decay. That day, the team had probably done their training outdoors on the astroturf because their next league match was away at Aalesund’s Color Line Stadion, with its artificial pitch. But why, in winter, did Vålerenga’s first-team players prefer to train outdoors in the slush and freezing temperatures, and right next to one of the busiest roads in Norway, rather than inside the warm arena?

Vålerenga’s development coach, Andrei Sennikov, went over to Benedikte when they’d finished training, as agreed. The development coaches were responsible for the most talented young footballers, with the responsibility of nurturing them into first-team players. The idea was that they would take four to six players in each club under their wing, teach them about nutrition and training, and make sure they went to school and did their homework. A large part of the development coach’s day consisted of making home visits.

This social care dimension was important, but the development coaches had ever-expanding job descriptions. The less money the clubs had at their disposal, the more they tried to squeeze into these positions, Benedikte thought. Nothing changed for the managers. Goalkeeper coaches went on shooting straight instep drives at their apprentices at the start of training sessions, while the development coaches became increasingly worn out. Hardly anyone stayed in the role past the age of 50.

The development coaches possessed enormous knowledge. They were the ones who knew the most about what was going on in Oslo’s football world, and if there was anybody who could fill in the gaps in Benedikte’s knowledge of football agents it was Vålerenga’s development coach.

Sennikov led Benedikte up the wide metal steps and into the long, narrow corridor where the Vålerenga offices were.

‘These offices are reserved for the marketing department. Those of us who work on actual football, we have to fight over these meeting rooms.’

Andrei spoke without so much as a trace of accent. Although he was
of Russian ancestry, Benedikte knew that he’d lived his whole life in the East End of Oslo, but she still found herself listening out for a foreign twang.

‘Sorry, but with everybody complaining to me the whole time, I have to speak my mind now and then.’

‘What do they complain about?’

‘Either it’s the smaller clubs saying we’re stealing their best talent, or it’s people on the board or even you lot from the media saying we’re not bringing enough good players up through the system. It’s all wrong anyway.’

‘How do the transfers from smaller clubs take place? Via an agent?’ Benedikte didn’t have the patience to listen to his complaints.

‘There are normally agents involved. It’s not unusual for 13-year-olds and their parents to have advisers.’

‘Isn’t there a lower age limit of 15?’

‘To get a written contract you have to be 15. Many of them come along to meetings for “support”, or they come up with some other excuse. But you’re right, the players have to be 15 to have a legally binding contract. Anyway, these agents are just getting worse and worse.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Benedikte.

‘We’ve seen some agents going through matches on video with the players.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘We’re the ones who are supposed to go through matches with them. We’re supposed to say what they’ve done well or what they can improve on, based on Vålerenga’s playing style. What do you think is at the forefront of an agent’s mind?’ asked Sennikov. For the sake of his forefinger and of the meeting room table, Benedikte hoped that he wouldn’t use the word ‘we’ much more today.

‘That the players should make themselves marketable,’ she answered.

‘Exactly, so the agents, who often lack any technical background in football whatsoever, tell the players that they shouldn’t pass, but that they should shoot from every possible range; that it’s their own performance that counts, not that of the team.’

‘Who are the most active agents?’ asked Benedikte.

‘Arild Golden practically had a monopoly on the biggest talent. Things are a lot less clear now that he’s dead. But don’t despair, if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that other vultures will turn up.
Would you like some coffee, by the way?’

Benedikte shook her head. Sennikov pushed down a few times on the top of a large pump-action coffee pot, which squirted out smaller and smaller doses. A gurgling sound filled the meeting room, and eventually Sennikov sat back down. He looked into his cup, which was far from full, and groaned.

‘Back to Golden. Have you thought how insane it was that he had his own soccer school? A travelling soccer school. With the pretext of bringing money to smaller clubs, his Golden Boys system allowed him to appraise and make contact with the best 14-year-olds in the country.’

‘Pretext? What do you mean?’ asked Benedikte. She’d heard about Golden’s soccer schools, but had thought of them as a charity gesture on his part, as if he’d sucked so much money out of football that he’d decided to organise them on a not-for-profit basis almost to redeem himself.

‘Golden let the smaller clubs arrange a camp every year, and the clubs made a couple of hundred thousand kroner out of it, but that wasn’t the main idea behind the camps. The best 14-year-olds took part in the camps with the football association’s blessing. Camps that were off-limits to other agents. Think how ludicrous that is. The Association sent talented players to a camp closed to other agents that they themselves had licensed. They gave Golden a monopoly. Golden filtered out the best talent in Norway and got to know the boys and their families. That’s how he got control of Stanley.’

Benedikte nodded as she thought about it. It seemed incredible that the NFF, Norway’s largest single-sport association, could allow itself to be so manipulated by a single agent, and that they let one agent take control of the country’s best 14-year-olds. 14-year-olds who would soon be 16 and would go on to international academies with Golden Boys owning their rights.

‘You just said now that the state of the market has become a lot less clear since Golden’s death. Why? Did Golden have partners?’ asked Benedikte.

‘He might have done, but the contracts are tied to each agent individually, not to companies, so many of Norway’s most attractive players are unrepresented now. There’s a power vacuum, and the transfer market opened yesterday.’

Benedikte thought about Stanley. He was a potential international star. Norway’s Zlatan. Almost 15, which was a golden age, foreign clubs
couldn’t sign players then, but agents could. And surely Golden Boys wouldn’t just want to let him go? They had a verbal agreement with his family, after all. Or did they? It struck Benedikte that Golden had been such a visible front man for his agency that she didn’t know whether he had any other employees. Benedikte’s thoughts were interrupted by Sennikov.

‘Football’s not like it used to be,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got superstars at lower secondary school and first-team players who are reality stars. I don’t know how they manage to keep focused.’ He shook his head slowly while dipping his fingers into a box of
snus
tobacco, digging out an improbably large pinch and manoeuvring it into position under his lip in a masterly fashion.

‘Has the club got involved in this?’ asked Benedikte.

‘It’s hard to have an overall policy. It’s so new for us to see our players broadcasting from their own flats. We have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis, but it’s no secret that we had meetings with Golden to make sure that Per stayed focused on his football.’

‘How did that go?’

‘Golden made some good arguments, Per was performing better than ever, after all. Vålerenga wanted to maintain good relations with Golden too, so perhaps we weren’t as critical as we should’ve been.’

‘Didn’t Golden have a point, though? Diesen is at the top of the fantasy football stats in most newspapers, and not just in
VG
, which is probably giving him high marks to promote their
PDTV
series anyway.’

‘That’s just it. The club let it lie, as long as he kept on playing well, but where should we draw the line? Reality TV’s fine, but what about porn? Is that okay as long as they score on the pitch too?’

Benedikte started fidgeting with something in her pocket in the somewhat uncomfortable pause that followed. It was the business card she’d been given by that portly football agent she’d met at Nordre Åsen. She fired a shot in the dark.

‘What about Ola Bugge? Do you know him?’ she asked.

‘Bugge, yes. He’s different,’ said Sennikov.

‘In what way?’

‘Golden had the ones with the very best talent, while the fairish ones were swept up by other agents. Bugge started something completely different, he signed Oslo’s worst footballers.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a business plan,’ said Benedikte.

‘Players were queuing up. He had the ones who’d played on the
second-best youth team at Kjelsås, the ones who’d turned 28 and still thought that Real Madrid had their eyes on them, the ones who were in their third year playing for Bjølsen and thought that they deserved a contract they could live on, or even that they could live well on. These were players who weren’t paid by their clubs, in some cases players who didn’t even have a club, who couldn’t even get a Fifth Division side to go to the trouble of submitting a transfer form to the local association. Players who were perfect for Bugge’s plan.’

‘Perfect?’ asked Benedikte.

‘These people were so bad that nobody wanted them, while they themselves thought they were good enough for any top-flight Norwegian team. Then Bugge played on the fact that Golden and the other agents could easily demand 20–30 per cent of players’ salary, which of course can be enormous in cases when players earn 20–30 million kroner. So, instead, Bugge asked for what he called a symbolic payment, in other words a flat payment of 1,000 kroner a month.’

‘So Bugge’s profits are based on his number of players?’ asked Benedikte.

‘That’s right. If he could get enough players to pay 1,000 kroner a month, he could just lean back without doing anything at all and make a good wage for himself.’

‘Genius,’ said Benedikte.

‘Just one problem. Judging talent is an art. Anybody can see that Stanley from Skeid is going to become a professional footballer, but often the next best players carve out careers for themselves too, not least out of real need or hunger, and it’s a lot harder to gauge those ones. Two of Bugge’s players turned out well: Kalid Jambo and Otto Cana.’

‘I didn’t know Bugge was their agent. I thought they were with Golden Boys too,’ said Benedikte.

‘They were with Bugge until they were selected for the national under-17 side. Golden became their agent immediately after that.’

‘How did he get them away from Bugge?’

‘I don’t know. Who knows how Golden really operated? In any case, Bugge’s now more involved with the better players. Actually I think he’s dreaming of signing Stanley,’ said Sennikov.

‘Why haven’t you taken him on? I thought Vålerenga could practically have any players they wanted in Oslo.’

‘He’s too good.’

‘Too good?’

‘He’d leave Norway before playing a single first-team match with us. The big international clubs are counting down to his sixteenth birthday next year, when he’ll be able to go abroad. The only unknown about Stanley is who’ll be his agent, and who’ll end up hauling in the big catch.’

‘What would you advise Stanley to do?’

‘The same thing I advise all players. Listen to your coach and stay away from agents.’