Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Voronezh, Russia. Wednesday 4 July 2018.]

Marcus found me at breakfast with the news that I had broken another record in my sleep.

”Youngest to 6 things now,” he said, and slid the tablet across the eggs. ”They keep finding new ones.”

I did not look. There is a point where the records stop being about you and turn into a game somebody else plays with your name, and I had gone past it about a week back.

Here is what nobody warns you about becoming history. It gets boring. The first one lands like a firework.

By the sixth, a man with a spreadsheet in an office in London has decided I am the youngest manager ever to reach a quarter-final, the youngest to win a knockout on Russian soil, the youngest to do a dozen things I never knew were things.

And I am sat over a plate of eggs wondering if he will run out of records before I run out of appetite.

A kid at the fence yesterday held a shirt out for me to sign. I signed it. By teatime the photo was on three continents, and a paper in Rabat had run it under a word about hope.

A shirt. A biro. Hope.

Elena caught me on the way out with the camera already up, Tomás a stride behind her lugging the boom.

”Danny. 10 seconds. How does it feel?”

”No.”

She dropped the lens an inch, grinning. She has learned. ”You never give me a thing.”

”You’ve had 6 weeks of me. You’ve got me sick with nerves before Spain, you’ve got me flat on my back at Luzhniki. What else do you want, tears over the eggs?”

”A bit, yeah. People love the tears.” She lifted the camera again anyway.

That little documentary about a plucky club had turned into the biggest thing Netflix had bought all year, and Elena knew it, and to her credit she had never once asked me to be anything but what I am. Which is a man who gives a film crew nothing and somehow makes better telly for it. Her words.

I was the subject of my own share of the nonsense, whether I wanted to be or not.

Marcus showed me a back page that had stuck me on a shortlist for the Real Madrid job, which was news to Real Madrid and news to me. Another had United sniffing.

A Saudi thing had leaked out half-right, with a number on it big enough to make the Palace fans twitchy and to make Steve Parish ring me at midnight, half a joke and half not, to ask me straight out if I was leaving him.

”Steve,” I said. ”I am contracted to Crystal Palace until roughly the year 3000. Go back to bed.”

He laughed, and I heard the relief come down the line under it, and I did not hold it against him for a second. Every soul on earth was busy writing my future for me that week, and not one of them had thought to ask the only two people who get a vote.

Which is me, and a woman who would sooner I managed a pub side than missed another Christmas at home.

What kept me sane was the base, because the base could not have cared less who I was on a screen.

Rebecca had the treatment room lit before dawn, elbow-deep in the dead legs and tight hamstrings that 90 minutes of Luzhniki had left behind.

Out on the far pitch, in the cold, Steeley stood firing balls at Bounou, one after another after another, same as every morning for a month. The world can crown a keeper a hero on the Sunday. It changes nothing about the bag of balls on the Wednesday.

In the lounge, the card school ran the way it always ran.

”He is cheating again.” En-Nesyri flung his hand down and appealed to the room. ”Look at his face. That is a cheating face.”

Boussoufa never glanced up from his cards. ”You said that when you thought you were winning.”

”I was never winning. He does not let you win, he lets you feel like you are winning, and then.” En-Nesyri drew a finger across his own throat. The table went up.

The lounge ran on gossip as hard as it ran on cards, and there was a tournament’s worth of it in the air.

Hakimi was getting it worst. Every club in Europe had been linked with him in the papers that week, and somebody had printed the list out and pinned it to the wall like a takeaway menu.

”Bayern want you,” Boussoufa read off it, not lifting his eyes from his hand. ”PSG want you. City. United. Madrid keeping you Monday, Madrid selling you Tuesday.” He turned a card over. ”Chelsea. Even Chelsea, Achraf. You must be desperate.”

”I am going nowhere,” Hakimi said, which none of us believed, and which he said the way a man says it when he is not allowed to say the true thing.

”He is going to the moon,” En-Nesyri said. ”Have you seen the number they are printing now? 40 million. 40! For a boy who cannot grow a beard.”

And they went at the rest of it the way footballers do, half of it invented and all of it stated like gospel. Brazil were bottling it. Neymar was on the floor more than he was on his feet and the whole planet had turned on him.

France had a 19-year-old up top who was terrifying grown defenders. England, someone said, had walked into the soft side of the draw and did not have the first clue how lucky they were.

That started a row about whether we would sooner meet them or the winner of Sweden in a semi we were not allowed to mention out loud for fear of jinxing it, and everybody mentioned it anyway.

Then there was the daft gossip, which is the best gossip. Whose girlfriend had flown in. Who was texting a girl back home he should not be texting. The clip of Ziyech dancing that had 8 million views and that he was pretending to be mortified about and was not mortified about in the slightest.

A dressing room is a village. It runs on the exact same fuel a village runs on, which is other people’s business, and business was booming.

When the call to prayer came up on somebody’s phone, the game stopped without a word.

Half of them drifted to the corner and went down. The rest waited. Nobody made a thing of it either way. I do not share it, and I have stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing anything that is simply true about people you have come to care for.

Lunch was long and loud and the best hour of the day.

The federation chef had spent a month being told, gently and then less gently, that his tagine was not anybody’s mother’s tagine, and he had it close enough now that Benatia only insulted him twice a meal.

Today one of the young lads, 19, barely off the bench all tournament, came in last, and there was nowhere left to sit.

Before I could open my mouth, Benatia was up. Three plates and a captain’s word shifted to open a space at the top table, and En-Nesyri was building the boy a plate without being asked, still slaughtering Boussoufa about the cards the whole while, like it was nothing.

It was nothing. That is the point. In a lot of rooms I have stood in, that boy eats on his own by the window. Not this one.

Sofyan told me once, over a coffee, quiet, that his mother had cleaned 3 houses a day for 20 years and never missed a game of his in her life.

He said it the way you would report the weather. That is who I am managing out here. Not a football team. A debt being paid back, 11 ways at once.

On the walk to the pitch I stopped at the fence, because you have to, and because I like to.

The same faces most mornings. Voronezh kids who had taken us in the way you take in a stray that turns up and will not leave. One of them, a boy of about 10 in a washed-out shirt three sizes too big, was front and centre every day and never asked for a thing. He just watched.

Bounou clocked him weeks ago. Left a pair of gloves out at the gate one morning, no fuss, told nobody. The boy wore them everywhere now, even in the heat, flapping off the ends of his hands, and he threw himself about in a make-believe goal against that fence like he was Bounou himself.

Nobody wrote that one down.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.