Gareth Bale’s agent and Ballyburn owner: I prefer jumping to Flat season as transfer window is shut
The Mayfair office of David Manasseh, part-owner of the odds-on Gallagher Novices’ Hurdle favourite Ballyburn, does not disappoint. It is everything you ever hoped a football super agent’s office would look like, apart from the fact the walls are not dripping with photographs of his players.
In the corner, there is a humidor housing a cigar the size of a sawn-off telegraph pole.
Manasseh’s CAA Stellar football agency boasts among others Jack Grealish, Luke Shaw, Jordan Pickford and Ivan Toney. He looked after Gareth Bale throughout his career, including for his £85 million move from Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid.
More pertinent, perhaps, to Wednesday’s race is Manasseh’s role looking after half a dozen Brighton players, given their chairman, Tony Bloom, owns the second favourite, Ile Atlantique.
Manasseh, 55, set up a sports agency in the mid-Nineties when he took on the West Indian cricketer Brian Lara as his first client before moving into football. He never looked back.
His father, omnipresent on the big Flat days, has always owned racehorses – he won the 1977 Lincoln Handicap with Blustery when Manasseh was still in shorts – and still has horses with Simon Crisford.
What was not already in his DNA was augmented in his early twenties when, through the Queens Park Rangers footballer Don Shanks, he met Walter Swinburn, Shergar’s jockey, who got wind that, as a left-arm spinner, Manasseh had played for five years in the Harrow School XI, playing four times at Lord’s and captaining the side.
Swinburn asked him to join the Newmarket trainers’ cricket XI, where he played with Michael Stoute and two other old Harrovians, Julian Wilson and William Haggas. “I knew I was good,” Manasseh recalls of his own cricket career. “And arrogant!”
His first horse was with Martin Pipe. His first decent one was Whispered Secret, who won a chase at Cheltenham Trials day in 2007 for Martin’s son, David. His Street Entertainer won at Punchestown in 2011 with Sir Tony McCoy up.
McCoy subsequently introduced Manasseh to David Casey, Willie Mullins’s assistant, at Royal Ascot and he persuaded him to have a share in MC Muldoon, beaten a short head in the Ascot Stakes.
His passion is jumping because the Flat season coincides with the summer transfer window – “you try doing a deal on the phone at Goodwood with no service” – and for the past 15 years Manasseh has had a box at Cheltenham on the Tuesday and Wednesday, to which he invites friends and the parents of his footballers.
“I met Ronnie Bartlett [Ballyburn part-owner] a few times. His son-in-law is the ex-footballer Hal Robson-Kanu. I invited him to my box at Cheltenham two years ago and said ‘Ronnie, do me a favour, if you ever want a partner in a horse, call me up, I’m in’. A couple of months, later he says ‘I’ve found one’. I said ‘I’m in. Stick it in your colours, send me the bill, and I’ll come with you for the journey because I’m very busy at work’. That was Ballyburn.”
‘This is like the semi-final to final of the Champions League’
Since the six-year-old has won a Grade One novices’ hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival in February by seven lengths, Manasseh has been the definition of excitement, a child on Christmas Eve to the power of 10.
“This is like the period between the semi-final and final of the Champions League for a footballer – don’t get injured,” he says, offering a comparison.
“A few people have said from when he won at Leopardstown, pray you don’t get a phone call from Willie Mullins. A bit like a player, you want to get to the final, but you’ve got three league games, you don’t want to get injured and the horse has three bits of work to do.
“He won his first bumper. He was beaten but Patrick [Mullins, the jockey] gave him a slap and he picked up. Then, when he won at Punchestown, I was leading him back in and Patrick said ‘wow, this has got a sixth gear’. I knew then he might be pretty good.
“I spent all last summer looking at Oddschecker and Betfair. It convinced me he might be better than average because people were backing him already for the Festival.”
If Manasseh wakes in the night, he looks on Betfair. “Sometimes, if his odds are drifting, it’s midnight and I get this desire to ring Willie to see if everything’s all right!” he says.
“First time over hurdles, he was beaten by Firefox. Next time, he won his maiden over 2½ miles by 30 lengths, Paul Townend [the jockey] just gave him a squeeze, the second and fourth have won since. His form stands up everywhere.
“At the Dublin Racing Festival, we had the option of a 2¾-mile race but went for a two-miler, he won that well and until last Thursday we weren’t sure whether Willie would go for the Supreme [two miles] or Gallagher [two miles, five furlongs].
“Personally, I know very little but people were telling me it was a penalty kick for the Gallagher, a drop kick for the Supreme. That’s what I was hearing.
“Patrick wrote in an article that it takes 30 seconds for the accelerator to kick in but when it does, it does. That sounds more like Gallagher to me.
“I can’t believe it’s happening. I didn’t realise that when you have a top horse like Ballyburn you just want to get to the next race. I don’t know if other owners ring their trainers, but I haven’t rung Willie since he won in Dublin. I don’t want to. I’m not ringing him and he hasn’t rung me. I know he’s in the best hands.
“This is one in a million. Ronnie’s had winners at Cheltenham and he just says ‘enjoy the journey’. When he got beat, he said it would take the hype out of him. I’m in a good business, I’m out and about a lot and it takes your mind off it a bit. The last 14 days, I’ve been to 11 cities in Europe with the job. I have a good working relationship with Tony Bloom – we’ve had battles over players, on Wednesday it will be over horses!
“Mullins thinks I’m a good owner because I understand sport. I get that you win some, lose some, but enjoy the good days. There are more bad days than good days in sport. Don’t take good days for granted.
“There’ll be a celebration if this wins at Cheltenham, we’ll be the last box to shut on Wednesday night.”
