KEN EARLY: Swansea strop can be first sign of Dyer trouble
Success has a thousand fathers but nobody could begrudge Martinez, who coached Swansea from 2007 until 2009, feeling he was entitled to bask a little in the reflected glory.
“I don’t think people understand how important this is gonna be for the future,” Martinez said. Football managers are programmed to speak about the future, but this was a moment to reflect on the past.
Swansea escaped relegation to non-league football on the last day of the 2002-03 season but the process that ultimately led to victory at Wembley actually began at the start of 2002, when the current owners took over a club that was basically bankrupt. Since then they have moved to a new stadium and been promoted three times; yesterday’s victory was the consummation of a decade of steady work.
They have become known as a place that is good for people’s careers. Players like Jonathan de Guzman and Michu came to Swansea because they knew that the team played a style of football that would help them look good.
The halo effect extends to the men in the dugout. Swansea has become a managerial springboard club, the opposite of Aston Villa, where promising careers go to sink without trace. Kenny Jackett was poached by Millwall. Roberto Martinez got a move to Wigan. Paulo Sousa went to Leicester for more money, and Brendan Rodgers pulled off the most spectacular coup of all by parlaying a play-off final victory and an 11th-place Premier League finish into a move to Liverpool.
Michael Laudrup arrived in the summer in dire need of career rehabilitation after unconvincing short-term stints at Real Mallorca and Spartak Moscow. His reputation massively enhanced by his time at Swansea, he will now probably move on to a bigger club. Laudrup’s classy and relaxed demeanour has been a huge hit in the Premier League, but Swansea’s resilience in the face of past managerial departures suggests that Laudrup’s exit would be unlikely to strike a terminal blow to the club.
Swansea made £14.6m profit on a £65m turnover last year, before selling Joe Allen and Scott Sinclair for a combined £23 million. Next year the improved Premier League TV deal could push their turnover close to the £100m mark, meaning that Swansea would suddenly have a turnover on a par with that of Valencia, and ahead of the likes of Atletico Madrid, home of Falcao, possibly the world’s best centre-forward. Unlike those two clubs, Swansea are not drowning in debt.
The implications for the wider European football picture are stunning. A club that nearly dropped out of the English league ten years ago could suddenly be in a position to poach players from clubs we have become accustomed to thinking of as Europe’s elite. They have achieved this status by doing the exact opposite of the received wisdom followed by clubs like Nottingham Forest, Leicester and QPR — the idea that success is impossible without a wealthy owner to throw money at your problems.
All that remains to be seen is whether Swansea can avoid becoming victims of their own success. The Cup final performance of Nathan Dyer was a warning in microcosm. Somehow Dyer ended up being subbed off in a sulk after scoring two goals in a fantastic display. The problem was that Jonathan de Guzman had not let him take a penalty when he, Dyer, was on a hat-trick.
When Dyer started the match he would have been delighted to be told he would score just one goal. Here he was freaking out because he wasn’t going to get an easy chance to score a hat trick. His tantrum was a welcome moment of comedy in a final that had turned into a walkover from the start, but it was also a reminder that success can mess with your head. A little taste of glory was all it took to make Dyer forget all about his team-mates in the lust for more. The argument seemed to break Swansea’s rhythm, and they only recovered it in the last few minutes of the match, after Laudrup had taken Dyer off. Swansea’s directors need to make sure that they don’t succumb to Dyer syndrome just because they’ve got their hands on a trophy.
Swansea are now one of 33 clubs to have won an English domestic trophy; a distinction nobody can take away from them. Of course, simply being a member of that fraternity means little. The list of former winners of the trophy they won yesterday includes the likes of Luton, Oxford and Swindon; there are plenty of trophy-winners languishing in obscurity. But the timing of Swansea’s arrival into the winner’s enclosure gives them a chance to cement their new status in a way that was not possible for Luton and Swindon. It’s too soon to start speaking of Swansea City as English football’s Western superpower, but if they can keep working with the kind of focus and quality that has characterised the last ten years of progress, that day might yet come.
