Southampton defender discusses his passion for business, how to deal with racism and why the walloping by Leicester was needed

Ryan Bertrand was glued to the footage of the government summit from Dubai in February 2014, specifically the talk on how to build a results-driven organisation, which is not a line that can be written about too many Premier League footballers. The Southampton left-back, though, is not a typical footballer.

The guest speaker at the conference was Ferran Soriano, the chief executive of Manchester City, and Bertrand has total recall about a particular exchange. Soriano had outlined why he felt City’s management structure was set up for success, one in which the power is devolved from the head coach and shared among several bosses, including a director of football, when he was challenged by the compere.

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It was put to Soriano that Manchester United had done pretty well in recent years under Sir Alex Ferguson, who had left his post as the master of all he surveyed at Old Trafford the previous May. Was the autocratic model not the best practice?

“You will have an opinion about this now that Ferguson is gone,” Soriano replied. “Maybe next year, I come here again and we see how United has done without Ferguson and with this autocratic structure.”

Bertrand nods. “It’s exactly right what Ferran said. He’s called that. He said: ‘We’ll see how United operate with Ferguson gone,’ and you can look at it now and you think United are not currently the United and everyone is saying it’s perhaps behind the scenes, the structure. As a business, you shouldn’t be determined by one person. This person will go. In football, there is a high turnaround. So the business needs to continue. You can see the difference now between City and United.”

Bertrand is preparing for Saturday’s game at Liverpool and Southampton will travel with their tails up, having won seven of their last 11 to rise to ninth in the table. The trauma of the 9-0 home defeat against Leicester from late October has been quarantined. Bertrand describes that as being “like a relegation in itself, the lowest of the low but, at the same time, something people needed because, if we’re being honest, we haven’t got things right on the field or off it for a few years now”. The collective mindset has been jolted into sync and the principles of the manager, Ralph Hasenhüttl, look a lot clearer in a 4-4-2 system, especially with regard to pressing.

But what Bertrand wants to discuss is his passion for business and his ambition to become a director of football. It is in his blood and, growing up in London, he remembers the times when he accompanied his mother to offices of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, where she worked in the administration department.

“She was a single mum and sometimes I had to go with her to work – when they had the open days, when the kids were allowed,” Bertrand says. “I remember being wowed by the buildings in Isle of Dogs, Canary Wharf. That’s what sparked my interest.”

At 18, Bertrand started trading and he has since been involved in a couple of ventures – first, in 2015, a fintech start-up called Silicon Markets, a brokerage dedicated to, in his words, “bringing institutional tools to the at-home trader”. The following year, he got behind FootiEmoji – together with two other players, John Terry and José Fonte – and helped them to launch a short-lived emoji app.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryan Bertrand, in action for Southampton against Tottenham, has been involved in two business ventures. Photograph: Matt Watson/Southampton FC via Getty Images

“With the fintech thing, myself and my business partner went in there, made a good product and learned a lot,” Bertrand said. “If you want to be in business, it’s important to start and the sooner you do that, the better. We sold that a while back. We exited to a Malaysian firm. But we’d built a company, developed it and gone through the exit process.”

Aged 30, Bertrand has a good few years left on the pitch but his thoughts have taken in what to do after he retires, how to make his way in business and he has been guided by a standout piece of advice: stick to what you know. What he knows is football and so a role as a director of football holds great appeal.

Bertrand has started researching it while also making study plans. He hopes to attend the four-day business of entertainment, media and sport programme at Harvard Business School in June and, at some point, the Football Association’s technical director course. His learning has invariably led him to figures from mainland Europe, such as Soriano, who worked at Barcelona before moving to City, because there are not many examples of people who champion directors of football or hold the position in England.

“It’s when things are new and if managers are set in their ways,” Bertrand says. “At first, English managers could possibly fear it. No one is telling me which players to buy, they’d say. But if you look at it, the demands on one human in the modern-day game … you can’t become six of you. There are specialisms – player recruitment, making sure the club’s methodology is being kept from the youth team up. That’s ultimately what the director of football’s role should be.”

Bertrand believes that he would be well-equipped for the job because of the depth of his experiences in the game. He has played at the top level, winning 19 caps for England and the Champions League with Chelsea in 2012, but also further down – in the Championship with Norwich, Reading and Nottingham Forest and League One with Bournemouth and Oldham. There was a relegation season at Norwich in 2008-09. He has worked under 19 managers at club level.

Then, there is his network. Off the top of his head, he mentions how he played with Frank Lampard at Chelsea and Eddie Howe at Bournemouth. Both are now the managers of those clubs. Terry, another former Chelsea teammate, is an assistant coach at Aston Villa.

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“I’ve had a real different path,” Bertrand says. “Someone who has won World Cups and Ballon d’Ors will probably make a great director of football but I’d like to champion my kind of learning – the broad scale of it. Possibly, it’s what’s actually necessary. I have learned a lot in terms of people; what works, what doesn’t, what’s needed, how the players are reacting.”

What shines through is the force of Bertrand’s personality. He is a leader, particularly now in the Southampton dressing room, where he is a big brother figure to Nathan Redmond, Jack Stephens and Michael Obafemi. He believes that he must use his platform and profile in the right way and he has tried, for example, to help the people affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017.

Bertrand is also a strong voice against racism, something that he was subjected to as an England youth international. “It was under-18s or under-19s and it was somewhere in eastern Europe,” Bertrand said. “I can’t even remember the actual place but that doesn’t matter.

“I was warming up on the side of the pitch, there weren’t too many people there because we were in the middle of nowhere and it was just one guy being racist. But you look at him, where he’s at and you can’t let that guy affect you. He looks like a joke. So you’re just like: ‘It’s a joke, just keep going about your business.’

“But that on a bigger scale … if you received that from a whole section of a crowd, it becomes a lot more impactful, especially when you look around and think: ‘No one is doing nothing.’

“There needs to be more accountability. You can flick back to the England game in Bulgaria last October [when England’s black players were racially abused] and there’s people sitting there doing nothing. They don’t have to fight a battle or something but report it. And we can work from there. There’s so much to do and the laws need to be readjusted because it’s becoming a lot more frequent.

“I think Brexit has fuelled a rise in nationalism. There will probably be some people who are pro-Brexit and have hidden agendas within that. It naturally gives a rise to, or a bit more of a voice to, the nationalists.”

Bertrand wore a special pair of boots against Chelsea in October 2018 that featured an image of Martin Luther King and his iconic quote: “I have a dream.” Bertrand did it to mark Black History Month but he says that the push for greater awareness and integration should be “a forever thing”, organic throughout the year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 2018 Ryan Bertrand wore boots with an image of Martin Luther King and the ‘I have a dream’ quote. Photograph: Matt Watson/Southampton FC via Getty Images

“Seeing these people rise up, like Jesse Owens, too … you build a confidence or a willpower knowing that they did it in their time,” Bertrand said. “You think: ‘Wow. If I’m experiencing this in my time, imagine what it was like for them in their time.’ If they can do it then, I can do it now.”