More details continue to surface on Claude Anelka, recently announced as Head Coach of the AC St Louis squad that begins play in USSF Division II this year. An earlier article in the Guardian, from 2008, included Anelka on The 10 worst football managers list:

Bad managers are two a penny – every club in the land could muster a lengthy list all their own. For this 10, then, run-of-the-mill ineptitude wasn’t enough

#9 – Claude Anelka

In 2004, tired of engineering transfers for his restless brother Nicolas and fed up with ‘the crazy things’ he saw managers do, agent and DJ Claude Anelka decided he wanted to be a boss himself. With a ‘mystery’ backer, he offered £300,000 to any lower-league club who would let him be manager, and got a bite at Raith Rovers, in Scottish Division One. Citing Cruyff, Wenger and the boss of Chinawhite nightclub as influences, his philosophy and signings – some from the Paris seven-a-side leagues – brought Rovers just one point from 24 before he stepped aside.

Now The Herald in Scotland offers some background on Anelka’s five months at Raith Rovers:

If there are two words that irk Raith Rovers supporters more than “Dunfermline” and “Athletic” then they are probably “Claude” and “Anelka”.

The Frenchman, brother of the Chelsea striker Nicolas, arrived at Stark’s Park in May 2004 as part of a curious arrangement in which he invested around £300,000 to effectively “buy” the manager’s job.

A DJ and agent with no history of coaching, Anelka decided he had had enough of “the crazy things” he believed managers did and decided to have a bash himself, vowing to turn Raith into the third force in Scottish football. As experiments go, it was an unmitigated disaster.

So who knows what Jeff Cooper has gotten himself into. It shouldn’t take long to find out it would seem. Even Claude’s brother Nicholas, who plays forward for Chelsea now, seems to have distanced himself. It seems to have worked as well

It is instructive that little is heard these days from Claude or the other Anelka brother, Didier. For the early years of Nicolas’s nomadic, often turbulent, career, the pair acted as his agents and advisers, engineering so many lucrative transfers that Nicolas has the distinction of being the most paid-for player in football history. More than £85million has been spent securing his services. A sizeable cut, and a fair amount of publicity, went to his siblings. Recently, Nicolas has become professionally distanced from Claude and Didier. In France it is not seen as a coincidence that the Chelsea striker has now emerged as a steadier, more laid-back person. He is even perceived as more open-minded. He is increasingly sociable. He has married and become a father. All in all, he is as settled as he has ever been.

The run continues this season, with Nicholas scoring a pair in a 7-0 win over Sutherland as he returns from a hamstring injury.