Glory Of The Football Manager System

I hadn’t seen either of them in the flesh since May, and I stood in the lobby of a hotel in Voronezh that wasn’t ours, watching the doors, feeling like a kid waiting on his mum at the school gates.

Dougie Freedman came through first. One bag, the same coat he’s worn for a decade, glaring at his phone, bzzt, moaning at whatever was on it.

Then Sarah behind him, dead on her feet off the flight and still somehow put together, the woman I’d left holding my football club together while I went off and ran somebody else’s.

She dropped her bag on the marble, thud, took one look at the state of me and stuck out her hand.

”You look terrible, gaffer,” she said, shaking it.

”Cheers. How’s my club?”

”Still yours. Nobody’s burnt it down.” She let go and glanced round the lobby. ”Try not to want it back too quick.”

Dougie put the phone away long enough to shake my hand, then thought better of it and pulled me in and thumped my back once, hard, thump, which off a Scotsman like Dougie is about the most you get for free.

”Some carry-on you’ve caused, son,” he said. ”Some carry-on.”

We sat in the corner of that hotel bar, the three of us, and for an hour it wasn’t about the boy or Russia or any of it. It was Palace.

Who was due back for pre-season and when, who’d finished the season carrying a knock, the drainage they were digging up across the training pitches, the under-23 lad Sarah wanted signed before anybody else clocked him.

Home. My actual job, the one I’d left running while I went and lived somebody else’s dream for a summer.

And it got me, sat there with a pint I wasn’t really drinking, clink, how much I’d missed the ordinary of it.

6 weeks of the biggest football on earth, 40,000 singing and cameras in my face and a whole continent adopting me, and what I’d been homesick for was Dougie moaning about invoices and Sarah telling me the under-23 lad needed a new deal.

Then Dougie drained his glass, put it down, and the coat came off.

”Right,” he said. ”The boy.”

They laid it out. The bid was in, £15 million and the sell-on, and Real Madrid had gone quiet in the way that means they’re thinking, not the way that means no. The money was near enough done. It was the kid that wasn’t.

And I could not be within a mile of that part. We went over it 3 times, the three of us, drawing a line on the table and then sitting well back from it.

I was Morocco’s manager. I’d picked the lad, I’d send him out against Russia in 4 days, and if one whisper got out that I’d used any of that to line him up for my own club, the whole thing was poison. It would kill the deal, and it would finish me.

”So you go nowhere near him,” Dougie said. ”Not a word. Not a look. You manage your football team. We’ll do the rest.”

”His agent flew in this morning,” Sarah said. ”Bruno Salas. We’ve got him tomorrow, early, before your session. Coffee, no pressure. Just us and him.”

I couldn’t make the introduction. Couldn’t be in the building. But I knew the man from the lad’s international bits, and I could tell them what I knew, which was all I had to give.

That Salas was sharp. That he’d have 6 offers bigger than ours on the table by the weekend. And that the one card we held that the big clubs didn’t was the card I wasn’t allowed to play.

The kid trusted me. He’d told me so, out on that pitch in Kaliningrad, with his mouth to my ear. And I couldn’t breathe a word of it to the man who ran his career.

”We’ll carry it,” Sarah said. She’d caught the look on me. ”You don’t have to. We’ll find a way to say it that keeps you clean.”

Before they turned in, I walked them through our little world, because I wanted them to see it. Voronezh had made a home of us without ever asking permission.

The days between matches had found a rhythm you could set a watch by. Pool at 10, splash, Rebecca walking the line of them like a sergeant, Sofyan moaning that his calves belonged to the federation now. Lunch long and loud, 3 languages going at once across one table.

Then the card school, which Boussoufa ran like a casino and won like one, and the FIFA tournament on the big screen that Ziyech had been knocked out of in the first round and declared corrupt.

En-Nesyri hadn’t stopped talking since Kaliningrad. 4 days of silence before Spain and now you couldn’t shut him up. The lads had started begging him to go mute again.

And the city had adopted us. The woman at the bakery by the reservoir put a Morocco flag in her window after the robbery, and it was still there this week, only now with a little Russia one beside it.

She pointed at the pair of them when I came in, shrugged, and said something in Russian that needed no translating.

The kids on the fence at Chaika were the same. A dozen of them at every session since the first week, and they’d started turning up in Russia shirts now, and still wanted Hakimi’s autograph after. Sunday’s enemies, every day’s mates. That’s this tournament all over.

The next morning I took training on the other side of the city while Dougie and Sarah sat in a café and tried to talk the most wanted teenager on the planet into Selhurst Park. And I couldn’t so much as text to ask how it was going.

So I coached. A light one, legs still full of lead from Kaliningrad, boots dragging through the wet grass, thud thud. Pheep.

I ran a session for Morocco with half my head in a room across a Russian city, where two of my people were talking about a Morocco player for Crystal Palace. If that isn’t the daftest sentence in football, I’ve not heard one.

And the truth is the session near ran itself, because this group had got greedy for the work.

They’d stopped needing telling. The video room booked itself out now. Nordin had asked Marcus for a cut of Russia’s left side before I’d asked Marcus for one. Benatia had started giving me my own team-talks back, half a day early, in better French.

Sofyan wanted the pressing trigger in case the hosts went to a back three. Bounou stayed 20 minutes after with Steeley, then another 10 on his own, hammering low ones into the corners, thud, thud. 6 weeks ago I’d walked into a squad of strangers. Now they were finishing my sentences and asking for homework.

I stood at the side of it with a coffee going cold and let the numbers come up, just for me, the way they only ever come up for me.

[Hakimi. CA 149 to 154 since May, PA 178]

[En-Nesyri. Composure 15 to 16]

[S. Amrabat. Stamina 17 to 18, Form 15]