An interview with Daniel Agger

Daniel Agger insists that his life is unremarkable. The fact that he’s an international football captain and now a deputy at Liverpool is merely a fact rather than something more. He does seem incredibly ordinary. This view is only a snapshot, but considering his talent and status, maybe such an impression of himself while accurate is – ironically – quite remarkable.

  Speak to people who know him well and they say similar things. “He’s a lovely man, very humble,” offers one former coach. “He plays, goes home, takes care of his family and sleeps well,” observes another.

 Agger admits openly that he does not like the “circus” which surrounds football. “If you can prove yourself on the pitch, there’s nothing else to discuss. Everything behind it comes second,” he says. Look at his Twitter page – set up to promote his own charitable foundation – and none of the people he follows are well-known celebrities. He admits too that he does not really like doing interviews or talking about himself publically: cultivating a personality. “I will do it [talk to the media] but its just part of the job, nothing else.”

 Agger enjoys his own space, living in the south end of Liverpool with his wife and young son. “Luckily, there are a lot of players that don’t want to be private,” he smiles. “They can take a lot of the attention away from me…”

 Having emerged from Brondby’s youth system, a club whose Latin motto when translated means roughly ‘Nobody over the club’, Agger’s professional focus has always been the games, what actually happens: the tackles, the headers, and the shots; the goals and misses. He is not interested in offering platitudes just to please an audience and canvass popularity. The adulation of the crowd does not concern him. “All that matters,” he says, pausing contemplatively, “is that when it has all finished, we have won. It’s nothing to do with being a senior player because I’ve always been like this. I want to win. When you play for a club [like Liverpool], winning should be all you care about. Silver means nothing. Nobody remembers second.”

 Daniel Agger the footballer wants the same things as Daniel Agger the person. “You have a football life and a private life. But the person, the way I act during games – that’s me. I’m not trying to be something else. There is no reason to try to do that. It’s just me: me being natural.”

 In England there is a tendency to divide captains into two categories: the strong subtle type who leads by example or the non-stop shouter-organiser. Agger believes such an assumption is far too simplistic. “I talk a lot,” he says firmly. “I try to help my team-mates the best I can. I always say what is on my mind. I will not be quiet if something is wrong. People either like me or don’t like me and that’s it.”

 Even when Jamie Carragher was there, Agger led. Watch and listen closely and he would be talking and pointing other players in what he believed was the right direction. He takes responsibility for the team by what he physically does too. In the opening minutes of Fernando Torres’ debut for Chelsea against Liverpool at Stamford Bridge in 2011, Agger positioned himself defiantly when Torres tried to knock the ball past him. The Spaniard collided with a one-man roadblock and somewhat embarrassingly lay on the floor, ego suitably bruised. Only a few days before, Agger and Torres were team-mates. But sentimentality did not matter. Torres was going nowhere. A statement needed to be made.

 “I haven’t changed much,” he emphasises. “Maybe you could hear Carra more. But I will always do what I think is right. I won’t change.”

 Agger admits, though, that he has learnt from other players and other captains. He refers to Steven Gerrard as a “genius.” But the art of leadership is not something he studies intently. It’s a case of learning from personal experience, observing others and applying it to the present. 

 “Of course, you have to look at other people. That’s the way you become a better player, better person. You take the best parts, look at the worst parts and put it all together to do what you think is right. I wouldn’t say it [leadership] fascinates me like maybe it does others. But if there is a situation, which needs controlling, I will try my best to deal with it straightaway. My idea is that if there is a chance to give something, you should always do it.”

On a field somewhere away from the neat linear streets, small shopping precincts and low-rise apartment blocks of Hvidovre, Daniel Agger was spotted as a nine-year-old playing football by scouts of some of Copenhagen’s most reputable clubs.

 Hvidovre is a blue-collar district and unexceptional, south of Copenhagen’s business centre. From its highest building on one of two vast housing estates, the mammoth Oresund Bridge is visible to the east, stretching five miles across a strait of the same name to Malmo in Sweden.

 To the west rests Brondby, a middle-class district associated closely with football. With more than 2000 members, Brondby IF remains the most popular club not just in metropolitan Copenhagen, but also
in the whole of Denmark.

 Agger first signed official forms at Brondby at a time when the club was dominant in its domestic league. They also performed impressively in Europe. Dan Eggen’s goal knocked Liverpool out of the UEFA Cup in 1995. It was the club to support and the place where the majority of young footballers aspired to be.

 Agger arrived there as a left-footed striker of diminutive build. Even until his mid-teens, his frame was slight. Aged 15, however, he was promoted into the Under 17s team managed by veteran tactician John Ranum Jensen. A stalwart of the club, Ranum Jensen had seen “hundreds, maybe thousands” of youngsters come and go at Brondby since first being employed as a youth-team coach in the summer of 1979 after his own football career was ended by a serious knee injury before he’d left school.

 “Sure, we knew Daniel,” Ranum Jensen remembers. “His potential was known at eight, nine years old – the ability was obvious.” Among more than 300 children aged below 15, Agger shone. “All the coaches speak. His name was always discussed.”

 Agger, though, had two problems. The first was his size. The second was his fitness. Like Ranum Jensen, Agger suffered a knee injury. Although not as serious, it might have stunted his development at a crucial time. In the pages of this magazine, Martin Kelly, now one of Agger’s teammates at Liverpool has spoken before about how at that age, a six-month injury can have long term-implications. “It isn’t just the six months. It’s the time you spend getting back to the levels you were at before. By that time, your contract is expiring,” he said.

 Ranum Jensen believes that if Agger was concerned, he did not show it. “My impression always was that he is very strong mentally. When things are not going his way, he was always working. Hard work has always been within him.” In the months away from competitive football, Agger played more golf. He became accomplished. The staff at Brondby were concerned he may choose a different career path. “There was a talent and golf people told him that he had a very big future. But he loved football. Golf was just for fun,” Ranum Jensen recalls.

 Rejoining a team that also included future Danish internationals Thomas Kahlenberg (later of Auxerre and Wolfsburg) and Michael Krohn-Delhi (Ajax and Celta Vigo), Agger played as a left back, still considered too willowy for a more central position. “Soon he learnt how to use his body. As a second year player, you could see how his understanding had improved. If there was a weakness, he found a way to adapt and get better.”

 Finally, there was a growth spurt. “We did not worry that Daniel wouldn’t make it because of his height. But he probably couldn’t have been a centre back being so small. His determination said to me that he would have been a top footballer no matter his size.”

 Agger was never in a rush. On the pitch, he played in an unhurried manner. Off it, he thought of education, completing a three-year course at Copenhagen’s School of Business. Ideas of being elsewhere – bigger European clubs – was not an issue.
 It was not the case with all of Brondby’s teenagers. “This particular team was good. Lots of other clubs looked at our players. Obviously we were convinced it was a better idea to stay at Brondby. Unfortunately, Michael [Krohn-Delhi] decided to go to Ajax. It was a bad move because he ended coming up back to Brondby later and did not play international football for a long time. Then you see Daniel. He did not move to Liverpool until he was 22. He took his time. Daniel wanted to finish his school. He’s very smart. Sometimes there can be a lot of focus on football. It would be tempting to do nothing else. But Daniel wasn’t like that. He had the ability and determination to do both. We know that all footballers who come to us will not make it as professionals. So we try to give them an education. Some listen. Some don’t. Daniel did.

 “As a person he’s always kept himself a little bit in the background.  He has always had a tight bond with his family. It means everything to him. People who treat him well will receive it back. He is a very secure person, motivated by happiness. Money never has been and never will be an issue. He has never chased anything. He works and opportunities arrive.”

        

        

Since moving to Liverpool, there have been such opportunities. Last summer Barcelona were supposedly interested in recruiting him. But Agger was happy. And so he stayed. He is now one of the longest-serving foreign outfield players at a Premier League club.

 A player of his style would suit any of Europe’s best teams. The style has always been there: striding effortlessly forward, head up – looking for passes along the floor. With Ranum Jensen’s youth team, he scored close to 10 goals a season from left-back, an equal number direct from free-kicks and open play. As a 19-year-old, he made his debut for Denmark’s Under 20 side and scored again. “In that game, everyone saw that we had an international standard – a top European player. He was so calm. Nothing could push him, make him nervous,” Ranum Jensen says.

 By then, he had been incorporated to Brondby’s first team structure under the undisputed king of Danish football, Michael Laudrup. It was Laudrup’s assistant, John Jensen (not to be confused with John Ranum Jensen) who recommended the promotion.

  “The players out of the side needed practice so we arranged a mini-tournament with the Under 18s,” remembers the former Arsenal midfielder. “I was focusing on the first-team players. But from the first minute, I was so impressed with this left-back. We knew about him already, of course, but the thing that stood out the most was his commitment. It was as if it was his last game, flying into tackles.

 “I went and told Michael [Laudrup] straight away about what I’d seen. This was a player we needed in the first team. So we took him. It was like he’d been in the team all his life, outshining many experienced players. It was as if he had five years behind him already.

 “Michael was surprised. Daniel just went in there and did his thing. Most young players when they start [in the first team], take it easy – maybe play within themselves. But Daniel looked like an experienced international player. Michael wanted to play through the midfield and from the back to the front. Daniel took responsibility of the ball. Michael liked that.”

 Agger’s ability on the ball often overshadows his defensive abilities. Very rarely does he get caught in possession or out of position. When he does need to make a tackle, he is aggressive. “When he saw an opportunity, he’d really go for it,” Jensen says. “That applies to both attacking and going forward. He doesn’t hold back. His judgement is very good now. When he was young, maybe he rushed into these situations – a bit like Steven Gerrard. We’d watch him and think: surely he can’t win this… He’d usually get there. When he reached the first team and as the years went by, he learnt which ones were achievable and which ones were not.”

  Once a midfielder, Jensen appreciates how important it is to have an understanding with the players behind him. At Arsenal he knew that Tony Adams and Steve Bould would not bring the ball out of defence. “That made my responsibility a lot clearer. It is very hard to find the combination of a good defender who is also a good attacker. Usually, if a defender attacks people question his defending. But that has never been the case with Daniel. It’s because he can see the whole pitch and knows when there is an opportunity to attack.”

 In early training sessions, Agger was positioned in the centre. Aged 18, he had grown to over six feet. From there, he could dictate the tactical approach of his side in practice matches. “With Daniel, it was normal for him from day to be a part of the offensive plan. When you see him receive the ball, his head is already up. He doesn’t even need to look at the ball. He’s looking for options. But his first option is to pass forward or diagonally, never to the left-back or inside. When you are the manager of an opposing team and you know you are facing a defender who goes forward, it is very difficult to prepare. We knew he could be a surprise threat in this Brondby team.”

 Agger’s opportunity came when Brondby sold Andreas Jakobsson, the Swedish defender, to Southampton so late in the transfer window that there was no chance to replace him. It was a classic case of taking the money without having an alternative in place. There was only the youth ranks. There was only Agger.

 “Me and Michael just said, ‘Now is the time for Daniel – let’s throw him in there’. During the second game, we were sitting on the bench and Michael whispered to me, ‘We may just have the best young defender in Denmark here – maybe in Europe.’ Daniel had been waiting for that chance. He just needed it. He took it.”

 Agger played alongside Per Nielsen, a Danish international who’d spent his entire career at Brondby. Nielsen had just passed his 31st birthday. “We realised it was important to have someone alongside Daniel who could take the heat,” Jensen recalls. “That person was Per. But at the same time, Per learnt a lot from Daniel. Before, Per was not so good on the ball. Suddenly, he became much better. He took pressure off Daniel and his leadership became stronger. I would say they learnt a lot from each other.”

For Agger, playing under a Danish legend like Laudrup was not something he thought deeply about. Even when they first met, Agger was not a wide-eyed teenager who needed a winch to heave his jaw off the floor. “Football was not an obsession in terms of it was all I wanted. I had other interests outside football. For me was about playing and having fun rather than being seen. I never thought about what it would be like to play in front of 60,000 people. It was just about how I did in the park.

 “It happened so quickly. I wasn’t meant to be there. I had other plans. But they offered me a contract. I signed it. I got into the team. I started to play every game. And now I’m here.”

 Both of his coaches at Brondby agree that Agger was a different type of leader. “He always had his own opinion but he followed the coach and the team,” says Ranum Jensen. The other Jensen adds that he is captain material because of his consistency. “Against the better players, he played even better than normal. You always have a few bad games. But that is why Daniel is one of the best in the world. His bottom level is still very, very high.”

 When Agger has slipped into Jensen’s “bottom level,” he has learnt. Such is the relentless nature of modern football, some players bury bad moments and move on. Agger faces a problem and thinks. When asked whether he gets over a bad result quickly, the answer is swift and emphatic. “No,” he says, pausing again to consider his fuller response. “It’s important to learn from your mistakes, to take the bad things and try to improve them. If you don’t think, you could be ignoring something important. I know other people have different views. Some say you should try and forget straightaway. But the only way you get better is if you take
a little time to reflect.”

 He believes the extra responsibility of being vice-captain at Liverpool can improve his game further. “You have to learn and become better all the time. That is a challenge for any human being,” he concludes. “Of course, I’d love to get better every game, every season. But I’m doing things the same as I’ve always done them. I’m not forcing it. You could say that really, development is just maturity.”

The problem with English football

The clock ticked past 2.15 on a Wednesday afternoon. This was a biology lesson. The teacher was explaining eagerly why photosynthesis is crucial to the ecosystem. I did not care about biology. I did not care about photosynthesis. At that time, I did not really care for the ecosystem. Yet here I was with four other third set lads waiting to leave.

 The school had an important football match. It was the semi-final of the district cup. My year was particularly good at football. I was usually a substitute. But the three others in this class were outstanding. The team could have done without me. But the team could not have done without them.

 The game was being played two miles away. As usual, we would travel there by walking for half an hour. There was no funding for a school bus. Being early spring, darkness was falling at around 6.30.pm. In order for school football matches be completed in time, the kick off had to be early. In theory, it occasionally meant that classes would have to be sacrificed. Surely it would be no big deal. Surely missing one or two biology lessons would not alter the destination of a human being. There were ways of catching up on lost time: over lunch perhaps - maybe just doing extra homework.

 But no - it would not be so simple. Sport does not really fit into the state education system – especially something like football: unruly, aggressive and competitive. Attending one or two more biology classes will teach you more in the long term than being a part of a successful group. Apparently.

 I was never going to be a footballer. I was never going to be a biologist. Although the other lads were never going to be biologists either, they were determined enough to become footballers. With the right guidance, it might have happened.

 That did not matter here. By leaving at 2.15, it would have allowed enough time to reach the ground, get changed, warm-up properly, have a laugh in the dressing room and get going. Yet the message had not been transmitted. The school had always boasted successful football teams. But this was an era of OFSTED reports, education, education and education. Maybe it did not intend to turn out like this, but football did not seem to be considered as education. It was all about achieving the right results, pass rates being hit and a path to university. Any person or any institution that did not conform was left behind. Sixteen-year-olds did not have apprenticeships. Schools were shut down. It was an industrial education with scant consideration for the individual.

 Perhaps this all contributed towards why, at 2.50, the teacher finally permitted our departure. It meant we arrived 30 minutes late: no time for a warm up - just straight into the game. One of the budding biologists got injured early on. Another just wasn’t his usual self. It went to extra time. We were not prepared. There was no energy left. We lost. We deserved to lose.

 This week, I discovered that one of the boys in the opposition was scouted by a professional club, partly as a result of his performance in this game. Now aged 30, he has enjoyed a reasonably successful career and is currently playing abroad.

 The point of this story is simple. We say football is engrained culturally in this country. Yet this is at odds with what is really happening in education and above that, in government.

 For football to flourish, there needs to be a shift in culture. The FA could, indeed, do a lot more. But the problems in football run deeper than the decisions made by those in charge of the sport.

 There was so much wrong with Greg Dyke’s speech about the future of English football this week. He claimed there is a need for radical action within football if the England national football team is to remain competitive. It was timed conveniently before a period, which will decide whether England under the management of Roy Hodgson will qualify for next summer’s World Cup in Brazil. If England fail to reach that target, there now is a ready made excuse. Hodgson is excused. The people who appointed him are excused. Self-preservation rules.

 Alarmingly, there was a lack of focus from Dyke on the primary reason why there are so few English footballers of genuine international class. Grassroots football is failing. It is just too expensive to play football. Participation figures suggest that football remains as popular as ever. It isn’t. There are fewer English players in the Premier League. But there are fewer kids playing football. Figures are misleading. Every amateur league demands that a player – be it a youth or an adult – signs forms at the start of every season. Most clubs will also charge signing-on fees, which, contribute towards the cost of the pitch, the cost of the kit, the cost of administration, the cost just to enter a league and the cost of facilities like changing rooms, which, reliably, are as inviting as a cell in a Turkish prison.

 The team I currently play for on a Sunday morning has more than 20 registered players. By the end of the season, that number will have fallen to 13 or 14 at most. Several will drop out, understandably fed up with shelving out petrol costs just to attend matches only to be selected as a substitute.

 The FA should find a way to subsidise costs – particularly at junior level. For the money involved in playing a full-season of amateur football you can buy a season ticket at Anfield or Old Trafford. That’s how expensive it is.

 The FA is awash with cash. It needs to play its part. But so does the government – those in charge of education. If you are good at football, you should be encouraged to play it – just like they are in other leading countries: Spain and Germany.

 Education is important. But football is an education. By being able to participate, a young person learns important transferable individual and team skills. Like in any other area of industry, a footballer won’t get very far without hard work.

 Maybe if the clock wasn’t allowed to drift onto 2.16, the landscape of football might not appear so desperate.

Shankly, Busby and David Peace...

It says much about Bill Shankly’s regard for the person as well as the job Sir Matt Busby did at Manchester United that when Liverpool directors first approached him asking whether he’d like to take charge of the ‘best club in the country’ he supposedly responded sharply: “Why, is Matt Busby packing up?”

 A year earlier his Huddersfield Town team had beaten Liverpool 5-0. He later recalled Liverpool’s directors leaving the ground “in single file with their shoulders slumped, like a funeral procession.” Undeterred, Shankly accepted the role at Anfield and would change the history of football. Fifteen seasons on Liverpool had emerged from the old Second Division to win three league titles, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup. They had became the most consistently successful team in England. At the start of the same summer that Shankly retired, United were relegated – a mark of the shift in power.

 Shankly’s reign was not without its struggles, however. He fought with board members, people he believed were just there “to sign the cheques.” He accused Liverpool of lacking ambition. Players like Johnny Morrissey were sold behind his back. He offered to resign several times.

 Shankly was a talker. He’d relish telling other managers how good his team was with phone calls late into the night. He’d talk on and on, rarely affording an opportunity to interject. Only Liverpool mattered. But that was his passion.

 In the bad times, he’d talk then too. Busby was a confidant. More than once it is thought that Busby convinced Shankly not to walk away from Anfield. When the Liverpool board searched for Phil Taylor’s successor, they canvassed the opinions of eminent figures. They spoke with Geoff Twentyman, the Liverpool captain and a former player of Shankly’s at Carlisle United. They spoke with Walter Winterbottom, the England manager. Then there was Busby. Because Busby too had been a Liverpool captain, he understood the people of the city; he understood the Anfield crowd. He understood it was the right place for a person with Shankly’s character to thrive.

 This aspect of Shankly’s story is, perhaps, one of the most intriguing elements to David Peace’s outstanding novel Red or Dead. At 720 pages long, the book covers a 22-year period. It begins in the wintertime at Huddersfield with Liverpool chairman TV Williams and his accomplice Harry Latham walking towards Shankly at the old Leeds Road ground, carrying what they believed to be an interesting proposal. It ends with sobriety at Shankly’s death in 1981.

 The first half is especially tough to read. There is a visceral power rare in football-themed books, which are usually created for entertainment, distancing us from the true impact of the sacrifice that went before the glory. By using repetition Peace sustains the story. You begin to feel how Shankly must have felt – proud, drained but determined to do it all over again for the greater good.

 It is possible, though, that had it not been for Busby’s intervention at crucial times Liverpool would not have become the sporting institution it is now. Possibly Shankly would have gone elsewhere and achieved greatness. Red or Dead suggests Aston Villa approached him to be their manager. Perhaps Villa could have won all of those titles instead. Liverpool may have remained in the second tier of English football – it could have even got worse. Maybe.

 The relationship between Shankly and Busby was unique in the sense the pair were rarely photographed together. In his time Shankly must have been the most photographed person in the North West of England. Shankly was pictured with everybody – with players, with family, with friends, with unfamiliar adults hoping just to be near the man they believed was the greatest, and with children who just wanted an autograph. But there are few with Busby.

 The pair would meet in private, often inside offices at Old Trafford rather than Anfield. They sympathised with one another. Through the eyes of Busby, the book tells the story about a time when a director sitting behind him during a match asked the United manager why he wasn’t playing a certain player. Busby apprehended the director later on in the toilets and in the next board meeting placed an issue at the very top of the agenda. It read: no interference by directors.

 Shankly and Busby must have seen each other as comrades: Scottish men of mining stock, away from home trying their best to be the best they can. In Red or Dead the relationships between others of similar backgrounds are explored. There is Jock Stein, the Celtic manager, who Shankly always calls ‘John’. In the second half of the book Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, features heavily.

 Peace believes Shankly’s, Busby’s, Stein’s and Wilson’s upbringings helped them emerge as leaders. “It certainly shaped the way they viewed work and team,” he says. “Especially where Bill came from, you can’t go back and romanticise the conditions. There was harshness and poverty. But there was an idea there that everybody had to help each other out, rely on each other. Otherwise you weren’t going to succeed. The only way to move forward was to get everyone to pitch in. From that experience they were able to inspire other people. I don’t think Shankly saw himself as a leader. He just saw himself as the person that was trying to move the whole thing on.”

Shankly could relate to other managers. They had something in common – a union. If he fell out with any of them it did not last for long. Liverpool, Manchester United and Leeds United were regularly positioned towards the top of the league. Yet those in charge at each club would remain in regular contact.

 “Most Saturday nights, Bill would ring Don Revie and they’d talk about the games they’d had that afternoon,” says Peace. “Revie was really insecure and completely different from Shankly. One year Leeds had a bad start to the season and were really low down in the league. Revie was worried about relegation and he told Shankly about these concerns. Shankly told him that he had Billy Bremner – one of the greatest players in the world. ‘Of course you’ll be fine, Don!’ Bill put down the phone but five minutes later he calls him back. ‘Don – all that stuff I said about Billy Bremner was right – but don’t forget he’s not as good as Tommy Smith’.

 It is true that some managers in the modern game speak to each other regularly. Sir Alex Ferguson for instance had associations with David Moyes and Sam Allardyce. Peace believes it is very possible that Ferguson adopted the skill of developing alliances from Shankly and Busby. “Again, their backgrounds and histories are similar.”

 Ferguson has recalled behaving like a groupie on the evening he was welcomed to Anfield by Shankly. Shankly shook Ferguson by the hand and overwhelmed him with compliments before warning that his Aberdeen side had no chance against “our great team” in their forthcoming European Cup tie. Ferguson regarded the former Liverpool manager, along with Stein and Busby, as a deity, which made his suffering all the greater when, over the weeks that followed, Shankly’s prediction was proved right. Aberdeen were beaten 1-0 at Pittodrie before being taught a few awkward lessons on Merseyside, losing 4-0 to a team who, under Bob Paisley, were on course for a third European Cup in five seasons.

 “Had Busby not been there for Shankly, perhaps Liverpool mightn’t have grown,” Peace wonders. “But had Liverpool and Shankly not emerged, perhaps Ferguson wouldn’t have learned his lessons early in management too. I suppose you could say that’s ironic.”

Red or Dead is published by Faber and Faber is available from most book stores.