There are a lot of odd decisions made in football – but few odder, perhaps, than accepting a job with a team that does not exist.
Yet that is exactly the challenge facing former Norwich City, Luton Town and Swansea City midfielder Adrian Forbes, the first sporting director of Texoma FC.
The 45-year-old gave up a job as lead coach at Luton’s academy to move to a club in the United States with no players.
Texoma have a place in USL League One for next season and Forbes not only has to find players for the team – but now has the dual responsibility of being head coach.
“I’m now building the squad to actually coach the squad as well, something you’d never see in the UK,” Forbes told BBC Radio Norfolk.
“I don’t know if I can sack myself – if I get a few games in and we haven’t won, I’ll have to have an interesting conversation with myself.”
LinkedIn approach leads to land of opportunity
Forbes spent five “really good” years on the coaching staff at Luton in a variety of roles, from age-groups coach to first-team coach and even, for a time, assistant to then manager Nathan Jones.
So how did the chance to head across the Atlantic come about?
“Randomly I just got a message on LinkedIn from a gentleman over in Texas. He mentioned about starting a new team and they wanted to create a link between Luton Town and this new franchise in the US called Texoma FC,” Forbes said.
“I thought ‘I’ll try and reach out to the right people at Luton to see if that was something they’d be interested in, but it coincided with the time where Luton were trying to get promoted and reach that holy grail of the Premier League, so any outside noise at that time wasn’t going to be relevant.”
Forbes got back to Texoma to tell them the link-up was not going to happen, but was surprised to be offered the job of sporting director which he said was “too good an opportunity to turn down”.
‘My first job is to sign a player’
Undoubtedly, moving to the US is an exciting time for anyone, but Forbes has since been confronted by the reality of what is facing him in Sherman, Texas.
“We are in the middle of building absolutely everything. We kick-off in probably the first or second weekend in March and my first job is to sign a player,” he said.
“We have staff that are working alongside myself, but we don’t currently have any players, so that’s the most important thing for me at the moment.
“We’ve got the key facilities around the stadium, training facilities, everything you would need to have and run a club, but at present we don’t have that squad.”
Although members of Forbes’ extended family were not keen on him moving, he is hoping to persuade some players from England to follow his lead.
“That’s been something I looked at straight away,” he said.
“I’m going to throw myself into it to make sure it is a better life we can create out here. And I see it as exactly the same for the players.
“There are some really good opportunities for players to come over here to develop.”
‘The area has never had a team before’
Simon Keizer and Ben Watson are co-owners of the club and they also have the task of establishing a fanbase.
“We are 45 minutes north of Dallas in a small place called Sherman, population just short of 50,000 people, but there’s a lot of key areas outside of Sherman itself and hopefully we’ll be getting a lot of buy-in from those communities as well,” Forbes added.
“The problem you have over here is soccer isn’t as big an entity as American Football. That’s a fact, and you’re trying to build a team in an area that has never had professional soccer before. So there’s a lot of education going on behind the scenes… the club want to be really prominent in the community as well.”
Texoma will be playing in what is effectively the third tier of US football and Forbes admits it will be a “long way into the future” before they could contemplate trying to be part of Major League Soccer.
“There is no promotion and relegation, so at this specific moment in time, it is an impossibility for this club to get into the MLS,” he explained.
“Everything over here is franchise-based so if you’ve got the money, you can pay to go to that next level, but not on to the MLS – I don’t know if I could see them jumping on board but that would be the icing on the cake.”
‘Have I made the right decision?’
Settling into American life has not always, Forbes admits, been “a walk in the park”.
And initially, Texoma will play in a school stadium before moving to their own purpose-built ground in a couple of years.
But he is relishing the “excitement of being part of building everything from the bottom up” in the hope of establishing a club that will have “longevity”.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. There’s been times where I’ve gone ‘have I made the right decision?'” he added.
“But when we get to that first game at the stadium… knowing you’ve been part of not only signing the players, building out the roster as they call it over here, but also coaching and developing them is going to be a really surreal moment.
“I hope I can produce a team that fans will be excited to come and watch, a team where fans can look at players and go ‘I can see myself in that hard-working individual there’, ‘I can see myself in that person that’s just put that tackle in’ – and that’s what’s going to be important to me in trying to build a team that the community and my owners can be proud of.”
Forbes began his playing career at Norwich City, and even now says he does not know why he was allowed to leave in 2001.
“My wife and I have laughed about it. Who knows one day what individuals back at Norwich might be looking at and thinking ‘we let this person leave our club and look what he’s gone on the achieve’,” he said.
“That’s also important to me because I want to be taken seriously in this role.”
