Last week we read that Chelsea's on-loan striker Falcão had asked his favourite hairdresser to come from Manchester to London to give him a special keratin-enriching blow dry. It was good to know that even if the football career of the man once known as "The Tiger" has stalled – with one goal this season scant justification for Chelsea's outlay of about £12 million (€15.4 million) on his wages and loan fee – his commitment to looking great remains as fierce as ever.
Some saw the story as an example of absurd celebrity decadence, but why shouldn’t Falcão devote some of his reported £140,000-a-week wages to having his hair look nice? His current employer, Roman Abramovich, who once had £1,200 worth of sushi flown by private jet from London to Baku at an estimated cost of £40,000, would surely empathise.
A few weeks previously, two of the men who helped Chelsea to seal that deal for Falcão appeared at a press conference in Shanghai, as honoured guests of China's 34th-richest man, Guo Guangchong.
José Mourinho and Jorge Mendes were there to celebrate the conclusion of an agreement between Gestifute, the agency owned by Mendes, and a Guangchang- owned enterprise called Foyo Culture & Entertainment.
“I believe that the partnership between Foyo and Gestifute gives us the best conditions to develop Chinese football,” Mourinho told the audience. “You, on the one hand, have the economic power, and Gestifute has the other power – the know-how.”
Indispensable know-how
Ah, know-how. Nothing is more indispensable, or harder to find. Wherever a gushing fire-hose torrent of money spews forth anywhere in the world, you can be sure there is a rich person in need of a suave advisor to tell them where to direct the nozzle.
Mendes would soon demonstrate the power of his know-how by brokering a deal to take Jackson Martinez from Atletico Madrid to Guangzhou Evergrande for €42 million.
Mourinho and Mendes were joined in Shanghai by Vadim Vasilyev, vice-president of AS Monaco, who explained to the Chinese audience how Mendes's know- how had helped him and Monaco's owner, the billionaire Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, to turn the club from the principality into a European force.
Rybolovlev is a man who understands the importance of know-how. A recent story in the New Yorker detailed how he had first arrived in Switzerland from Russia 20 years ago, with a vast fortune acquired in potash and no friends or social connections in his new country.
The oligarch dreamed of becoming one of the world’s leading art collectors, and eventually he found the perfect guide to accompany him on his quest. Yves Bouvier was a stolid Swiss who had the know-how to negotiate the opaque world of the international art market.
Between 2003 and 2015, Rybolovlev spent about two billion dollars on paintings through his intermediary Bouvier. He paid Bouvier a 2 per cent commission on each transaction, for a total sum over the period of about $40 million (€36 million).
But it turned out Bouvier had a different understanding of how the relationship was supposed to work. He didn’t see himself as Rybolovlev’s agent, but as an independent middle-man who happened to have one primary client. He was buying the paintings and selling them on to Rybolovlev at hefty mark-ups. When the Russian found out what was going on, he calculated that these mark-ups had netted Bouvier nearly a billion dollars. It was a remarkable example of what can happen when know- how develops a mind of its own. The matter is now being dealt with in the courts.
Wolves of Wall Street
Whatever the Chinese Super League’s long-term prospects of dominating the global game, there is one obvious short-term threat.
How can the Chinese avoid becoming football's equivalent of the "Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf" who became the toast of the wolves of Wall Street in the years leading up to the last financial crash? Michael Lewis's book The Big Short explains how trusting German banks were disproportionately among the buyers of the toxic credit-default swaps being hawked around by traders in New York.
The enormous sums Chinese clubs have been paying for B-listers such as Martinez, Ramires and Ezequiel Lavezzi has fuelled European optimism that the global transfer market has just acquired what you might describe as a greater fool of last resort. One man who seems to have spotted this possibility is Manchester United’s executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward. “It’s difficult to predict what kind of impact [the Chinese spending] will have,” he told investors two weeks ago. “If nothing else, it’s another useful market if we are looking to sell players.”
The occasion for Woodward’s remarks was United’s release of quarterly financial results that suggest they’re about to become the first English club to make more than £500 million in a year. Woodward has charge of a gusher of money, but does he have the know-how to make best use of it?
This helps to explain why the temptation to hire Mourinho is so strong. United have a big summer of transfer business ahead of them, and with Louis van Gaal looking unlikely to keep his job, the responsibility for planning sits heavy on Woodward.
The team of Mourinho and Mendes is a one-stop shop. The know-how that crafted deals like Falcão to Chelsea and Martinez to Guangzhou would instantly be at United's disposal.
United must consider whether it's the kind of know-how they can really afford.
