Pep’s Wheel of Justice
If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend the 2019 book, Pep’s City, by Pol Ballus and Lu Martin. The authors, both journalists, were given a surprising amount of access to the club between 2016 and 2019. As a result, they’ve given us rare insights into the culture at City under Pep.
I’ll be coming back to this book over the coming months, as it’s packed with really interesting stories. But I’m going to start with a roulette wheel that Pep installed in City’s changing room in 2019.
It started at a staff lunch. Doubting the value of fining multi-millionaires, Pep was looking for an alternative way of penalising players for breaking the rules. According to Ballus and Martin, one of his sports science staff mentioned a unique system used by Ralf Rangnick. As manager of Schalke, Rangnick had introduced a customised roulette wheel to deal with rule breakers. The wheel featured a series of chores related to the running of the club, one of which would be allocated depending on where it stopped.
Though he might have copied the idea from Vic Reeves Big Night Out.
Pep loved the idea, and asked Marc Boixasa, the head of first-team operations, to come up with a list. From the initial list of 25 sanctions, Pep and his assistant, Manel Estiarte, pared it down to the following:
Paying for a team dinner
Paying for a staff dinner
Working in the kitchen
Community work
A shift in the academy
Joining the performance analysis team
Working with the ground staff
Helping out the kit crew
Doing the laundry
A ‘teammates choice’ category, where the dressing room chose the punishment, was also added along with an ‘invite a friend’ option. According to Ballus and Martin:
‘The following morning, as the first-team players arrived for work, there was a new addition to the dressing room: a roulette wheel, complete with blue-and-white triangles, mounted on a stand in the middle of the room.’
And, thanks to some typically late tinkering by Pep, the wheel now included a ‘lucky escape’ option.
David Silva and Vincent Kompany were the least likely to spin the wheel, while for Aguero, Mahrez and Mendy laundry duties became a part-time job.
As well as helping create team spirit, Estiarte believes that the players’ increased understanding of the amount of work done by backroom staff heightened the sense of unity at the club.
However, like all systems, I feel it would improve with some refining. For starters, it would be nice to have something that benefitted fans. For instance, rather than paying for a team dinner why not have the player pay for snacks at half time? You could even add a lottery element to the stadium catering. When you go to pay for your pie, a message could come up on the till saying: ‘Your tasty half-time snack is free thanks to Phil Foden forgetting to turn his phone off.’
And of course, it’s always possible to get a bit more creative with the punishments. So here are some alternative suggestions:
Driving a 1983 Mini Metro to the training ground (repeat offenders have to take the bus)
Dinner with Phillip Schofield
Wearing clothes bought from Primark (does not apply to Bernardo Silva)
Watching Season 3 of Ted Lasso
Doing the minutes for City Matters
Clearing the sick off handbags that Ruben Dias has vomited on
Listening to Jurgen Klopp’s autobiography on audiobook (in German for repeat offenders)
And if anyone from City’s coaching staff is reading this, feel free to use any of these. It’s all part of the service.
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