Footballer turned Coach
He’s an Arsenal and England footballing legend, so why is Tony Adams 2,500 miles from home, managing a small-town club in a remote corner of Azerbaijan?
WORDS BY PETER WATTS | PORTRAITS BY PEROU
TONY ADAMS IS ANSWERING AN EMAIL.
It’s from the wife of a player from Cameroon, who is leaving Croatia to join Adams in Azerbaijan but first wants to ask about local schools. ‘Being a manager isn’t just about football now,’ says Adams with a smile, before turning off his phone and settling down for the interview. Such undivided attention is not always offered by footballers, but Adams has never been typical. His career has seen extraordinary highs and lows, taken him from prison to university, and from London’s East End to Gabala, a mountainous region in northern Azerbaijan, three hours from the capital Baku.
Which makes the first question very simple. What is Tony Adams, former England international and Arsenal legend, doing, 2,500 miles away in Azerbaijan? ‘I’m building a club,’ he says. Gabala FC is owned by Tale Heydarov, the son of a government minister, and Adams intends to put the club – and with it the town – on the map. A new stadium is being built – the population of the entire city would more or less fit inside its 13,000 seats – as are state-of-the-art facilities. There will be grass pitches, all-weather pitches, a youth academy and a dome for winter training. ‘We get a lot of snow,’ says Adams. ‘I should have bought my snaps.’
All this is being masterminded by Adams. And he’s also building a team with a view to getting Gabala into Europe in the next three seasons. Gabala finished last season seventh out of 12 teams in the Azerbaijan Premier League, but Adams believes this year they can challenge for the top three. It’s a mammoth project, but one that could bear short-term results and be completed with the minimum of pressure. ‘It’s a lovely environment to work in,’ he says. ‘The whole country is only 18 years old, it’s all being developed at such a fast pace. The city of Gabala is changing all the time, it’s quite scary, and football is part of the plan.’
After retiring in 2002, Adams had frustrating experiences managing Wycombe and Portsmouth, and was wondering where to go next, when he met Alastair Saverimutto, Gabala’s chief executive. The idea of managing Gabala was floated, and Adams decided to take the job. He was ready to leave England. ‘I wanted to win again, and there are only so many games you can realistically win at the lower end of the Premier League. Also, I believe England is not conducive to the development of young coaches, it’s too cut throat. Most managers get sacked after one year and three months. The people who run the clubs aren’t supporting the managers. So I made up my mind this wasn’t the country for me to develop in, especially because of the career I’d had as a player.’
It was some career. Adams, born in 1966, made his Arsenal debut in 1983, became captain in 1988 and retired in 2002 winning four championships, three FA Cups and 66 England caps along the way. He was a formidable defender, a resolute captain and a heavy drinker. The stories are legion and relayed in unflinching detail in his 1999 autobiography Addicted. In 1990, he spent Christmas in prison after a drunken car crash, a lifestyle he maintained until 1996 when ‘it gave me up’, he says. ‘I just couldn’t carry on. It got really bad in 1994 and 1995 and I’d had enough. I stopped drinking a couple of months before Arsene Wenger arrived in 1996. When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.’
Wenger’s arrival at Arsenal is seen as a watershed for English football. The French coach arrived with a reputation as a fastidious organiser and an appetite for attacking football. Wenger set about transforming the culture at Arsenal, changing diet and fitness regimes, and encouraging a more attractive style of play. Adams doesn’t quite see it like that.
‘Wenger walked into a squad of great players,’ he says. ‘I’d love to have walked into a squad of players that good. He brought everything he learnt, but we’d learnt an incredible amount under George Graham, and trained very hard, every day. We weren’t half boozing a lot, but it was a super team.’
When asked about Wenger’s changes to diet and fitness, Adams says, ‘We’d had doctors and dieticians at Arsenal for ten years before Arsene walked into the club. Arsene came with his own ideas and strategies, and brought an osteopath and acupuncturist, but he had great players. Diet won’t change anything. I still ate fish and chips every week for six years under Wenger. Every Friday on Putney Bridge, I went and got battered cod and sat there looking at the river.’
At this point, Adams pauses and then leans forward. ‘One of the gifts Arsene has got is that he’s a lovely human being and I respect him a great deal,’ he says. ‘But I’ve got to get it real: coaching isn’t his strong point [he puts this in rather stronger language at first, but later asks if he can tone it down]. I love him dearly, he’s a fantastic physiologist but he’s not a great motivator. I’d just laugh at his attempts to gee us up – but I come from a different place, time and culture. But Arsene Wenger got me in the best condition I could possibly get in to do my job, and for that I love him.’
After absorbing ideas from every coach he has played for, Adams is now developing his own style. He has a hunger for knowledge, which took him to Brunel University to do a sports science degree, to Holland to work at Feyenoord and Utrecht, and to Italy, where he spent ten days at Internazionale with Jose Mourinho. ‘Mourinho told me, “Tony, I spent 15 years under Luis Van Gaal and Bobby Robson, nobody knew me and I was just able to get on with my job and learn. That’s what you need to do”’.
Adams is angry at the way the role of the manager is trivialised and misunderstood. ‘Every manager I see on TV is different to the man I know, every single one. You get 30,000 people singing “You don’t know what you’re doing,” and I’m not sure those people know what a manager’s responsibilities are.
They just see a guy standing by the side of a pitch for 90 minutes. And I don’t think people want to know, it’s just a release on a Saturday. But more importantly, I’m not sure the chief executives know what a manager does, and they don’t know how to go about choosing a manager. How can you sack a manager and hire a new one a week later? In most businesses there’s a six-month recruitment process. They disrespect my profession on a daily basis.
There have been 50 managers sacked since I started at Gabala and that’s really insulting for all of us. How many chief execs have lost their jobs in the last year? I’m just so grateful I’m not in that madness. I’ve fallen on my feet. I’ve a good owner who lets me do my job. I’ve got my hands on the budget and the whole club is at my disposal. I’m the boss.’
Adams ‘realised very early that I couldn’t change English football, but I could change Azerbaijan football’, but admits that ‘I’d like to have the resources to put a team together and motivate them to win the Premier League. But this is a project that will take me another few seasons.’ And he certainly loves managing, and proudly explains how he has developed his coaching and playing teams at Gabala. It’s not always been easy – football is not the national sport and Adams talks about giving out footballs to local six-year-olds who simply did not understand what they were supposed to do with them – but Adams has recruited an international squad that means team talks must be conducted in five languages. ‘I like putting a squad of people together and learning how they tick,’ he says. ‘I like coaching, I like motivating, I like recruiting players. It’s an addiction. There’s a kick, an adrenaline buzz and it can be very seductive. If you’ve been playing football all your life, you become very lonely when you stop.
I’ll never get that physical and emotional buzz but coaching gives me a different emotional pleasure, it’s deeper and more satisfying. But the grief and stress is immense.’
Not that he could avoid it even if he tried. ‘My parents gave me the greatest gift I could have wished for and that’s fight. I’m a fighter, knock me down and I get up again. It’s irritating at times, sometimes I wish I’d just stay down, but I always get up and keep going again… and again… and again. I could be sitting in my garden in Gloucestershire smelling my lovely roses, but I’m in Azerbaijan…. Come on, I must want this.’
