Glory Of The Football Manager System

I had never been on a plane before.

I know how that sounds. Twenty-eight years old, a Premier League manager, and I had never once set foot on an aircraft. Never had a reason to. Never had the money. I grew up in Moss Side.

My world was a grid of terraced houses, the grey Mancunian sky, the buzz of the Curry Mile, and the roar of the crowd from Maine Road, and later, the Etihad.

The furthest I had ever been from home was the coach journey down to London when I took the Palace U18 job. That had felt like moving to a different planet. This? This was a different galaxy.

So when the wheels of the British Airways 777 lifted off the tarmac at Gatwick, and the ground just... fell away, and England became a patchwork quilt of green and grey and then nothing at all, I gripped the armrest of my business class seat with a force that probably left a permanent impression in the leather.

I said nothing. I kept my face a perfect mask of calm neutrality. I was the gaffer. I was supposed to be the calmest person in any room, on any aircraft, at any altitude. Inside, my stomach was trying to climb out of my throat.

Sarah, sitting in the seat beside me, glanced down at my white-knuckled hand and said nothing. She just subtly pushed a glass of water towards me. She was a good assistant. She understood the value of silence.

The flight was thirteen hours. Thirteen hours of sitting in a pressurised metal tube at thirty-five thousand feet, hurtling through the dark at five hundred miles an hour. It was a long time to think. I thought about the UEFA A Licence course.

The FA had been surprisingly flexible. The course was structured in intensive, residential blocks at St. George’s Park, followed by periods of practical application and assessment back at your club.

This pre-season tour, the friendlies, the integration of new players – it was all part of my assessed work. I had a portfolio to complete, sessions to log, and a final practical exam to prepare for. It wasn’t a holiday; it was homework.

I thought about the squad, a strange and wonderful collection of millionaires and journeymen and kids, all of them now my responsibility.

I thought about James Rodríguez, the Galáctico, who was somewhere behind me, probably asleep, probably dreaming of Bernabéu nights and golden boots.

I thought about what I was building, this fragile, beautiful thing, and whether it was real, and whether a lad from Moss Side was good enough to see it through. And somewhere over the vast, dark expanse of the Indian Ocean, with the low hum of the Rolls-Royce engines a constant, reassuring presence, I finally fell asleep.

The first thing that hit you when you stepped out of Changi Airport was the heat. It was not the gentle, apologetic warmth of an English summer, or even the damp chill of a Manchester morning.

It was a physical wall, a thick, soupy blanket of humidity that wrapped itself around you and squeezed. It was like walking into a greenhouse that smelled of rain and flowers and jet fuel. I stood there for a moment, blinking in the sudden, fierce brightness, and felt the sweat start to prickle on my skin before I had even taken a second step.

Ben Chilwell, who had probably never experienced a climate warmer than a mild Leicestershire afternoon, physically staggered.

”God,” he muttered, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead before it had even had a chance to form properly. ”Is it supposed to feel like this?”

James Tarkowski, a man who had spent the last three years in the bracing, horizontal rain of Burnley, looked like he was melting from the inside out. ”I think my skin is trying to leave my body, gaffer,” he said, his voice a low, mournful groan. ”This is genuinely unnatural.”

And then, through the shimmering heat haze of the arrivals hall, I saw it. A small, defiant splash of red and blue. A group of about twenty people, huddled together behind a barrier, holding up a homemade banner that had clearly been painted with more passion than skill.

”Welcome to Singapore, Palace,” it read, the letters a little wobbly, the eagle looking more like a startled pigeon. One of them, a kid in a Zaha shirt, saw us and let out a yell that was pure, unadulterated joy.

The players, who had been looking like a collection of condemned men on their way to the gallows, visibly straightened up. Wilf, ever the showman, gave them a little wave, and the small crowd erupted. It was a reminder. Even here, seven thousand miles from home, we were not alone.

The bus ride to the hotel was a masterclass in silent, open-mouthed gawking. The players were pressed against the windows like kids on a school trip, their phones out, their faces a mixture of awe and disbelief. Singapore wasn’t a city. It was a science fiction film.

The skeletal, otherworldly supertrees of the Gardens by the Bay, the three-towered behemoth of the Marina Bay Sands with a cruise ship balanced on its roof, the endless, gleaming skyscrapers that pierced the clouds. I heard Connor Blake, a boy from the estates of Croydon, whisper, ”It’s like something out of a video game.” He wasn’t wrong.

For me, it was something else entirely. I had grown up in a world of red brick and grey concrete, of narrow streets and the distant, muffled roar of the crowd. I had never imagined a city like this, so clean, so green, so vertical. I pressed my own face against the glass and thought, quietly and privately, that the world was a great deal bigger than I had ever allowed myself to believe.

Our hotel, the Marina Bay Sands, was another level of absurdity. The lobby was a cathedral of capitalism, a vast, echoing cavern of polished marble and designer boutiques, with a river running through the middle of it.

A literal river. With boats. I saw McArthur, a man not easily impressed, just stand there and shake his head slowly, a look of profound, almost spiritual confusion on his face. ”There’s a boat,” he said, to no one in particular. ”In the hotel.”

We were met by a man named Mr. Tan Wei Liang, the head of partnerships for the Singapore Tourism Board and our main tour sponsor.

He was a small, immaculately dressed man in a pale blue suit, with a smile so wide it looked like it had been surgically installed, and a handshake that was surprisingly firm for someone who looked like he had never broken a sweat in his life. He was, I realised with a sinking heart, a talker.

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