Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

Soccer Supremo 1

”Anything less than the Best is a felony.”

Vanilla Ice

***

1 - Heist Heist Baby

Few things in life are as satisfying as a heist movie. The planning, the meticulous preparation, the breaking down of an impossible task into a series of merely improbable ones, competent people nailing their tasks.

And then the moment the viewer dreads, which if done well is the highest moment of the film. The moment it all turns to shit. The weather turns, their man on the inside double-crosses them, the sports cars have been sabotaged. How are they going to get out of this?

Some movies start with that moment, do a super-cool freeze frame with a record scratch noise, and then bring you back in time to show you the build-up. You know what? Let’s copy that.

Location: unknown. Time: the near future.

Close-up on me. Max Best, football manager, famous for always wearing a cheap black hoodie because a young mother told me it was great that her kids could afford to wear the same clothes as their idol. I seem to be in a good mood. Why’s that? I look up at the scoreboard. A lot of people in the stadium seem to be rather unhappy with what it says. A goal flies in. Upgrade rather unhappy to spitting mad.

To my right, where the hard-core fans known as ’ultras’ dwell, there is movement. A group of hooligans has left the pack and is moving around the stadium towards me. Oh-oh.

On the grass around me is a painted rectangle. That’s my technical area, the space in which I’m allowed to stand and give instructions to my players. I do this now, but only after strutting down the touchline like I’m on a catwalk. (The ultras boo and whistle my every move.) I wave my arms around and yell nonsense. It’s for show; there’s nothing I need to change. The tactics, the method of playing, they were decided long ago. You could even say they were set in stone the very second I agreed to take this job.

To my left, more movement. A bunch of angry fans are trying to invade the pitch and the police are rushing to stop them. My head snaps to the right. The ultras are getting closer. The back of my skull tingles - the fans have coordinated this move. Get the police to one side of the stadium, attack from the other. It’s clever. It’s the kind of thing I would do.

I am briefly terrified, but I remember my mission. Acting confident is part of it, so I moonwalk back along my technical area and add a Saturday Night Fever dance move flourish.

Another goal is scored and the boos and whistles are absolutely deafening. A cameraman bravely rushes to my area and points the lens at me. I know I’m being shown on the big screen and on TVs all across Europe. The thought washes away the fear; I glow. I summon up all the joy and love I’ve ever felt and let it reach my eyes, my lips. I smile and blow a kiss to the watching world.

The boos shake the foundations of the stadium... which makes me laugh.

The hooligans have reached a point close behind me but find themselves blocked by a brave band of police and match-day stewards. The ultras light flares and hurl them towards me. My coaches and substitutes scatter, but I can’t believe my luck. Neither can the cameraman. There are half a dozen flares all around me and I’m bathed in red light, the hate of the entire stadium made plain in one neat visual. I rush to get one that landed on the pitch so that the match can continue - this game needs to finish. The result needs to go in the history books.

With a red flare in one hand, I’m reminded of the incredible, flawless movie The Rock, starring Nicholas Cage. I pick up another flare and fall to my knees, holding them above my head. The cameraman gets closer - he’s going to win some kind of fucking award for this.

I hop to my feet and use the flares to direct my players like those guys at airports who tell planes where to go.

That’s when the ultras break free. They’re by the side of the pitch, running towards me. A group of riot police appear and form a thin blue line between us. One snatches the flares out of my hands and gives me a disgusted look. I should probably stop, I think. I’ve probably done enough. I should run into the relative safety of the stadium and initiate my escape plan.

My attention snaps back to the pitch. Something has changed. There’s a new weakness. I jump around, waving my arms, shouting orders. There’s no way the players can hear me. It doesn’t matter. The change leads to another goal and once again I’m on the big screen. I get the cameraman to stand parallel to the touchline so that he can record me grinning and showing a peace symbol on my fingers while the fight between the ultras and the riot police happens behind me.

One of the riot police sees what I’m doing and switches allegiance. He wants to clobber me with his clobbering stick. His departure from the line lets a couple of ultras through, and they’re coming at me. The cameraman wisely backs away but stumbles over something. He rights the camera, which captures the scene that follows, albeit from a low angle.

It’s me on the left, with three guys running to get me, including one of the guys who’s supposed to be protecting me. There’s no escape from this. Everything has gone to shit.

FREEZE FRAME RECORD SCRATCH

”That’s me. Max Best, football manager. You’re probably wondering how I got here.”

***

AN UNKNOWN AMOUNT OF TIME EARLIER

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Tick, tock.

The sound echoed around the space, a windowless room smaller than most prison cells. Emma had once disparagingly called it my ’broom cupboard’, but I liked it. My manager’s office at the Deva stadium in Chester was a little sanctuary, a place to think. One of the reasons playing away matches was hard was that you didn’t get your own space and you had to share the dressing room with your players. Not always ideal, but certainly not a problem for me or for TJ, my rival for this evening. He was just down the corridor in the away dressing room, begging his players to be less shit.

I was alone with just a small table and a laptop for company.

Tick, tock.

Time was weird, wasn’t it? It went so slowly but then you woke up one day and three and a half years had passed.

Three and a half years ago, I saved an old dude from a mugging. He wasn’t a dude, he was a demonic trickster, and he offered to grant me a wish.

Tick, tock.

I should have wished for something fun, like to have an orange for a head. Instead I told the guy I had been thinking a lot about my favourite sport and how I didn’t understand it. He found my memories were full of an old football management game that I had played for thousands of hours, and he made that game the basis of what I called ’the curse’.

The curse gave me the computer game’s powers in real life. The game had been renamed Soccer Supremo, and guess who was on the cover of the latest edition?

From call centre drone to being the face of one of the world’s best-selling games had taken three-and-a-half years. What could I achieve in the next three-and-a-half?

I dabbed at my hair with a towel, opened my laptop, and entered the password to my most important spreadsheet. It was a list of the men’s first team squad, their wages, their contract lengths, and certain ultra-secret numbers that only I knew. These numbers told me how good my players were at football, how good they could one day get, and best of all, the numbers were infallible.

I rubbed the towel behind my ears and wore it like a scarf.

I had assembled an astonishingly good group of players given the financial constraints I was under, and almost all of my squad had room to improve. I was a maniac for making their numbers go up - the entire culture of the club was built around making these numbers go up. Ironically, that improvement came with the seeds of its own destruction.

As players got better they would demand higher wages, wages we couldn’t afford without selling other players. Selling squad members simply to fund the pay rises of other players was patently ludicrous.

In addition to keeping our wage bill low, I also desperately needed to raise funds to finish building our training ground. Bumpers Bank had lots of great pitches, a beautiful new gym, and a utility space that included changing rooms, showers, lockers, and a few offices. The rest of the operation was carried out in cold, cheap cabins, and those seemed to be limiting the level to which we could train players. I urgently needed to raise one point seven million pounds in order to fix that issue.

I also needed five million pounds to rebuild one of our stands. That money seemed more distant than ever because unlike most English football teams we were owned by our fans, not some rich arsehole, and I had already asked the fans for enough.

I stared at the spreadsheet; it stared back at me. Other clubs would only buy useful players. If we sold useful players, we would struggle in matches.

The name Lee Contreras jumped out at me. Lee was a midfielder, which meant he played in the middle. He was the only player in my squad who had reached his ceiling; he could get no better. It made sense to sell Lee but I knew for a fact that no-one was currently interested in him. I had to create demand.

I opened a browser and typed ’how to create demand for a product’. The first result went, ’By making guest posts on blogs’. I tutted and slammed the laptop shut.

Who else could go? Christian, Dazza, Josh? They were all mint as people, top professionals, and right now we had a pretty sublime mix of talents. We weren’t the best team in the league but we were playing as though we were. The spreadsheet contained projections about what the team could look like in a year, or in two years. I had a few players who could come with me all the way to the very top of the sport. I couldn’t sell them. I wouldn’t.

It was my job to make hard decisions, to keep my football club propelling forward. If I could create a market for Lee Contreras, life would get a whole lot easier.

The timer beeped. I stopped it, locked the broom cupboard behind me, and wandered along a corridor, deep in thought.

***

I emerged from the tunnel to an electric crackle of claps. Fans were on their feet, filming me, holding up match programmes for me to sign, displaying crappy little cardboard messages like ’Max can I have your babies?’ I smiled and waved. ”Why, thank you very much. Thank you.”

”Good luck, Max,” said a jolly policeman. I gave him a fist bump.

A weirdo teenager ran to the end of his row and yelled, ”You’ve got to invert the full back!”

”Absolutely,” I shouted back. ”One question, though. What’s a full back?”

He rocked back, frustrated, laughing.

The home team’s base was to the right. The Deva stadium, our fortress, was unusual in that there wasn’t a single dugout for the manager and his staff, but two separate shelters per team, each with transparent walls and a roof. I didn’t feel like sitting so I went to the technical area and pottered around.

How could I make Lee Contreras look so good that other teams would want to buy him?

”Max,” said a voice from beside me.

”Argh!” I said, moving away.

”Come on,” complained Sandra Lane, my co-manager. She was a brilliant coach who I’d stolen away from Manchester City with the promise of letting her manage games in men’s football. She was already the record-holder in multiple categories, and now that I’d promoted her to co-manager she would get even more entries on her Wikipedia page. She was pale, was speaking funny, and had a tissue poking out from her sleeve. ”I’ve got a runny nose is all.”

”Sandra, I would have sent you home if I’d seen you like this. Can you step away, please? No, I’m serious.”

”Max,” she complained.

”Would you please go to the second dugout? That can be the quarantine zone for now. Did you know the word quarantine comes from the Italian word for forty-five minutes because that’s how long a half is?”

”That’s not what it means.”

”You need soup,” I mused. ”What soup are you in the mood for?”

”I don’t want to talk about soup. I want to talk about our formation.”

”Yeah, go ahead. There are loads of tactics podcasts out there.” She didn’t laugh; I did. ”Oh, you meant with me? Save your sore throat. Crawley are the weakest team in the league so there are no changes needed. Steady as she goes! If anything mad happens, I’m in the groove. I’m feeling all-powerful. If this was a movie it’d be a nice, gentle introductory scene where the superhero swats away some bad guys to demonstrate his powers. Oh my God, you know what it is? I’m Professor X from the X-Men. I’m going to stand here and be a floating megabrain and control everything that’s happening on the pitch with my MIND! You can be thingy, ah, Magneto. You spend the first forty-five minutes of the story in a perspex prison.”

Sandra sighed. ”What are Magneto’s powers?”

”Er... quips. Withering one-liners.”

”Pass.”

”He spends loads of time with a dangerous redhead.”

”Okay, I’ll be Magneto.” She dabbed her nose. ”Goddammit, I hate being sick. You should have an assistant, though. Colin’s on the pitch. I’ll call Peter, will I?”

Peter Bauer was a player-coach who wasn’t quite ready for the rough and tumble of ninety minutes of action so I was easing him into life in England. A friend of his was over from Munich and they were watching from a sky box. He would come down and help if needed. ”Nah, it’s fine. Anyway, I don’t want my coaches to copy what I’m going to do today. It’s not the sort of lesson Peter should be learning.”

”What are you planning?”

”Um... Nothing outrageous. Oh, let’s play a game! You’ll try to work out what tactics I’m doing and why!” I jogged to the second dugout and told the people there to scarper. One was Physio Dean, currently the club’s most important medical professional. ”Dean, Sandra’s poorly. This dugout’s her plague ship. I need 50 ccs of the most healing soup, stat. What’s good for colds? Oxtail? Leek and potato?”

”Ginger and carrot,” suggested Livia, another physio.

I clicked my fingers. ”Amazing. You know what? I’ll have some of that, too. Sounds nice.”

”I’m on it,” said Livia, and she rushed away.

”She does look ill,” said Dean.

”Thanks,” said Sandra, sourly.

”Whatever it is, it escalated quickly. We should send her home, Max.”

I pretended like I couldn’t believe my ears. ”This is a crucial match for our season! I need her!”

Sandra shook her head. ”He wants me to talk to the media after the match so he doesn’t have to.”

”Fucking hell, Max,” said Dean.

”Don’t get all high and mighty,” I said. ”Use your doctor voice and order her to go home. Go on, see what happens.”

Dean gave my co-manager a nervous look. While Sandra was utterly kind and good, like most people in the industry she switched when the first whistle blew. She was a fierce, fierce competitor with a strong will to win. ”Sandra Lane,” said Dean, sternly. ”Go home.”

”Yes, okay,” she said, as she sat in her dugout.

Dean licked his lips. ”Good. Um... when will you go?”

She checked her watch. ”In about an hour.”

Dean’s voice wavered. ”Okay, but...”

”You’re blocking my view of the pitch, Dean. Would you step aside? Thank you so much.”

The referee blew his whistle to restart the action.

I scanned the pitch and brought my screens to the forefront of my consciousness. When I was present at a game, the main screen was called Match Overview. It said:

46th minute

Chester 2 Crawley Town 0

Under Chester were the names of our two goalscorers: Colin Beckton and Gabriel, along with the times of the goals, the 17th and 18th minutes.

It told me the weather (light drizzle), the name of the referee (Martin Drysdale), and the attendance (7,273).

I turned to the right. Before me stood my greatest achievement so far - the Harry McNally stand. I had demolished the old one and rebuilt it in my image - larger than life and eco-friendly. Mmm that’s terrible, cut that. My creation had a capacity of 4,000 and I loved every inch of it. I’d kept the name because Harry McNally was a maverick former manager and the stories I had read about him made me laugh.

This was our second match in the new-look stadium and the number of fans attending was down. That would normally have made me nervous, but attendances were always lower on a weekday night than on a Saturday afternoon, and Crawley had brought fewer fans than our previous guests.

I brought up a page called Live Scores and checked how our rivals were getting on in their matches. Oxford United looked like being our main competitors for the season. They were winning. I switched to a page called Live Tables. It showed what the league table would be if all the matches finished with the current scores. Chester were first on 34 points. Oxford had 28. You earned three points for a win, so we would have to lose twice for Oxford to even draw level with us. Nice to have a cushion.

I watched the action for a minute. We had the players arranged in a fairly conservative structure, which wasn’t the most exciting option but football seasons were very, very long. This was match 13 of 46, and in addition to the league we would play in all sorts of cups. In fact, this was our third game in five days and unlike other managers I wasn’t in the business of flogging my players and then complaining they were knackered.

Lee Contreras was having a decent game on 7 out of 10. The Match Overview screen had a tab that showed me the match ratings of every player. My name was there as one of the players who had started the game. It suggested my performance had been worthy of 8 out of 10. Seemed a little bit low, to be honest, but the ratings didn’t take into account what you might call the narrative of a match.

The ratings did take into account how many times a player did something well. Lee, being in the middle of the action, was often asked to win a header or make a tackle, but because we were the better team and had more skill than the opposition, what I wanted from Lee was for him to collect the ball and pass it safely to another one of my players.

Okay, I thought. Let’s optimise for that.

I crouched and brought up my tactics screens. Short passes are easier than long ones, so I worked to get more players close to Lee. I did this in my head, nudging icons closer together, and even moving a striker far out of position towards the middle of the pitch. Half a second after I did that, Colin Beckton, who had scored one of the goals and always played as close to the last defender as was possible, dropped towards Lee.

Playing God is so fucking cool, I thought. Never gets old.

The problem with being able to control football matches as if by witchcraft was the very real possibility that my secret would be discovered and I would be burned as a witch, so I rose to my feet, waved my arms around, and yelled at my players to do the things I had telepathically told them to do.

Lee was now surrounded by players, but he was just one of eleven teammates who had been trained to share the ball. I opened a menu and made Lee my playmaker. That was a somewhat out-of-fashion role, but one that’s easy to understand. A playmaker is the player the others look to. They feed the ball to him and let him dictate the speed of the play, let him decide which avenues to attack.

Lee Contreras was pretty far from being a traditional playmaker. He didn’t have craft or guile, but it didn’t matter.

I watched, satisfied, as his passing stats went up. In the first half he had made 20 passes out of 25 attempted. The numbers quickly shot up. 25 out of 30. 30 out of 36.

Lee’s match rating went to 8 out of 10.

We got a free kick that would have been perfect for me, had I been on the pitch. It was to the right of the goal at a delicious angle - the goalkeeper wouldn’t be sure if I would shoot or cross to a teammate. Lee wasn’t especially talented in these situations, but I decided to let him have a go. I used the screens to set him as my free kick taker for right-sided free kicks, and used another perk to shuffle most of our tall players to the far post. I couldn’t force Lee to play the way I thought was right, but I could encourage him.

I had another special boost for situations like these. It was a one-use-per-match perk I had bought called Free Hit and it made these opportunities 10% more likely to lead to a goal. I smashed that button.

Lee hadn’t taken a free kick since he had arrived at the club and he must have been as surprised as everyone else in Chester to find himself in front of the ball. He didn’t fully know the signals, but that was fine. He placed the ball, looked at the goal, and decided to clip it up for one of our beefy boys to attack.

I watched what happened and then read the Match Commentary to check it had gone as I thought I had seen it.

Contreras stands over the ball. He lifts his left arm.

He delays. He lifts his right arm.

He chips the ball softly towards the far side of the penalty area.

Christian Fierce jumps and heads the ball back towards the penalty spot.

Zach Green attacks the ball...

But it goes over the bar.

Okay, not bad! Personally, I didn’t like the high, slow deliveries. Much better to hit the ball hard and flat, but it didn’t matter. All football matches were analysed by teams of data nerds and this would be an intriguing new data point. Lee Contreras can take free kicks! They’re actually dangerous!

I was grinning when Livia brought me the soup. It’s not traditional for a football manager to drink ginger soup on the touchline, but not much of what I did was conventional. Case in point - turning half of an important football match into an extended sales pitch for one player.

Half a million pounds for Lee. Was that too optimistic? Probably. Four hundred K would probably be a lot fairer. Would I take three hundred? I sipped the soup.

After an innocuous bump with a defender, Colin Beckton’s Condition score dropped by ten percent. I opened his Injuries tab and saw he had a ’potential groin strain’. It didn’t seem too serious and I planned for it to stay that way. He would get off the pitch, not make it worse, and get immediate treatment. I turned to the substitutes. ”Wibbers,” I called out. ”You’re up.”

Wibbers was William B. Roberts, one of the jewels in the crown at Chester. He was already so highly rated I could sell him and solve all my money woes, but I would probably never be able to find another such talent.

He was perfect for this scenario, too - a lot more suited to the linking role I had asked Colin to play. Sure enough, within seconds of coming on, Wibbers was demanding the ball from Lee, drawing a defender away, and returning it to the playmaker. Lee’s passing stats went up and I thought I saw his match rating briefly touch 9.

I drank the soup, enjoying its warmth as the night grew cold. The away fans were pretty miserable over to the left, but the rest of the stadium was in party mode, especially the McNally.

Good times.

Trust TJ to ruin things.

Crawley’s manager had worked out that everything we were doing was flowing through Lee, so he set a player to man-mark him. That’s where a player - normally a hard-boiled defensive type - shadows a more creative one, follows him everywhere he goes, tries to stop him impacting the game.

I looked to the left and made eye contact with TJ, who was about fifteen yards away. ”Do you mind?” I said.

He snarled and turned away, pumping his arm, trying to gee up his players.

”Rude,” I said.

With a sigh, I shuffled Lee Contreras back five yards and the rest of the midfield forward as much as my powers would allow me. I kept Wibbers where he was and made him the playmaker.

Now when we got the ball, Crawley were primed to harass Lee, but we were bypassing his area of the pitch completely. With the extra space my tweaks provided, Wibbers ran amok. He was only 18 but he was powerful. First, he barged past two defenders and unleashed a thumping shot that the goalie batted away. Next Wibbers dribbled wide and pinged a gorgeous cross to Gabby that resulted in a top save. Then Wibbers crashed through a shoulder barge, hurdled a tackle, and when the goalie was expecting a thunderbolt, the talented little shit served up a delicate, spinning chip that sailed about a foot wide of the right-hand post.

Match rating 9 in five minutes of mayhem. Such raw talent was why I would never sell him. Not for less than fifty million.

Movement to my left caught my eye. TJ was bent over, screaming, having hurled a water bottle into the turf. The referee saw it, walked over, and showed him a yellow card. One more outburst like that and he would get sent off. I thought about going over there to be a catalyst for that particular process, but nah. He was a mate.

I watched as TJ undid his previous changes and went back to mere containment. It was all he could realistically do, given the players at his disposal. I gave TJ what I thought was a collegiate nod and thumbs up, but for some reason his temper flared. His assistant held him back until TJ threw his hands up to say he was calm. TJ dropped into the dugout and looked as sick as Sandra.

While pretending to give instructions verbally, I used my mental interface to restore Lee C to the playmaker role, and did what I could to make him pop on the data visualisations. To hammer home the point, when he did anything remotely cool, I turned to the subs behind me and pulled faces. ”Wow! Did you see that?”

Lee finished with a match rating of 8 but it must have been a high 8. With that sudden explosion in his passing stats, he had probably blown up a few statistical models. Appeared on more than a few data analyst’s radars. In his player profile was a section that detailed which clubs were interested in buying him. It was blank for now but with luck I would be able to get multiple clubs interested in his services and play them off against each other.

The final whistle rang out. Two-nil, a dominant and very professional performance, another small step on our epic journey from the bottom of English football to the top. I gave Lee Contreras a big hug and told him if he kept playing like that his next contract would be even better than mine, which was perfectly plausible. He smiled and said he’d felt great out there. ”I haven’t been on the ball that much since school! That was fun.”

”Top man,” I said. ”Keep up the good work.” I went to Sandra, but not too close. ”Did you work it out?”

”Something with Lee,” she said, turning over the pages in a notebook. ”Making him a pivot or something. I didn’t really get it. It was all very tidy but there was no goal threat from it except for when you unleashed Wibbers.”

”Tell the media Lee was Player of the Match. He was the glue that bound us, the star that guided us. Get as poetic as you want.”

”Oh,” she said, because she understood the implication. She looked out onto the pitch, where Lee was hugging a Crawley player who had once been a teammate. ”I like Lee. I don’t want to see him go.”

”No,” I agreed. ”But I do want to see him need a shovel to collect his wages. Uh, that’s terrible. I want to see him sleep on a bed of cash. No, that’s creepy.”

”He’s more of a Bitcoin bro.”

”Who? Lee? I didn’t know that.” Sandra’s role as day-to-day coach of the players meant she spent more time with them than I did. I cultivated a healthy distance from my employees, especially when they were infectious. ”Oh, but that’s perfect! Crawley Town are owned by Bitcoin bros. That’s called synergy.”

”You can’t sell Lee to Crawley, Max. They’ve only got one good player.”

I smiled. ”But then they’ll have two. That’s called squad building and it’s great fun. I think I’ll go and do some right now.”

”In your crevice?”

”In the Manager’s Room, yes. Pop by after you do the media, will you?”

***

I was back to staring at the numbers on my spreadsheet.

The curse turned football into something like chess. Chess with living pieces that had strengths and weaknesses. A manager who put the right piece in the right place and moved them at the right time was going to outperform one who didn’t, but although my abilities were incredible, I didn’t have as many pieces as my opponents.

My weekly wage budget was £60,000 per week.

Oxford United’s budget was £200,000 per week and while they had the deepest pockets in the league, they weren’t outliers. Ten clubs had more than double my spending power.

They were buying bishops, knights, and rooks.

I could only afford pawns, and I was desperately pushing them across the chess board so they would turn into high-value pieces. I believed there was a quagmire halfway across the board, though. A swamp. The pawns that were furthest ahead were improving more slowly because we were hitting a training cap. It wasn’t a hard cap - players were still getting better. But it was clear that there was a barrier of some sort.

I needed to raise money to put planks over the swamps, tear down the walls, build bridges, whichever metaphor you want to go with.

There was a knock on the door and as it opened, I partially shut the laptop. When I saw it was Sandra, I relaxed.

She looked pretty depressed. ”Sorry, Max. I really think I’m coming down with something.”

”Babies are little germ factories, aren’t they?”

”I hate being sick.”

”Would you mind opening the door wider and stepping back a few inches? There we go. Did you do the presser?”

”Yeah,” she said. I had promoted her to be my co-manager because she deserved it and she would help power us forward to new heights. She was a brilliant coach, a good tactician, she was daring, and she kept me in check. There were plenty of other benefits. For example, I was optimistic that having a co-manager would help me hack the curse in certain specific ways. The benefit I was most happy about, though, was that I wouldn’t have to talk to the media before or after matches ever again.

”Did you say anything cool or funny?”

”No. Just said we battled hard and gave it our all for ninety minutes and Crawley made things tough for us. I hyped Lee. Did you see his passing stats? They were off the charts.”

”Did you mention TJ?”

”No.”

I smiled. ”He’s not as bad as you think. Anyway, he likes you. He thinks you’re amazing.”

”I can’t stop him liking me,” sniffed Sandra. ”It’s a free country.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelFire; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I laughed. TJ was good-looking and liked to invite beautiful women to his house where he would cook for them and play his acoustic guitar and sing Portuguese ballads with his eyes closed. That kind of thing doesn’t always go down well in England. ”I’m giving you some time off,” I said. ”Colin and Peter will run training this week and I’ll do Barnsley this weekend, okay? You stay in bed and take Lemsip. After that, it’s Doncaster in the Vans Trophy and Sutton in the FA Cup. Two lower league teams. If we can’t beat those, I’ll quit and live up a tree or something. What I’m saying is, there’s no hurry to come back. Oh, hey! Good timing on being ill. That’s actually very considerate.”

”But you hate Sutton. You’ll smash them up and I want to see it.”

”I don’t give a shit about Sutton, Sandra. They’re yesterday’s villains. We’ll beat them and we’ll already have forgotten that match on the drive home. No, get yourself tucked into bed, get Aiden to bring you soup - you know what? How many kitchens does this club own now? I’ll get them all pumping out soup. Would you prefer one huge vat of your favourite or twenty little sample cups of different flavours? Ah, Brooke’s always telling me not to micromanage everything and she’s right. My new PA will sort it all out.”

Sandra made a surprised face. ”You hired a personal assistant? When? We’ve been telling you for years that you need one.”

”I don’t need one, Sandra, but I’m the face of Soccer Supremo and BoshCard. I’m courted by superagents and superclubs. I’m kind of a big deal and someone like me should have a personal assistant.”

Sandra frowned while her eyes moved slowly from left to right. Her face lit up. ”Got it. You found someone incredibly beautiful who’s willing to follow you around and laugh at your jokes. Does Emma know about this?”

I tutted. ”It could be a man. You know I only care about talent.”

”Excuse me,” said someone behind Sandra. Sandra stepped aside and the new character came into the little room. She was lean, in her very early twenties, a few inches taller than Sandra, and was wearing a plain white blouse under a dark blue jacket. Smart and professional, but nothing like the supermodel Sandra had been picturing. This woman could have been one of the up-and-coming captains of industry who were up in the sponsor’s boxes. Her accent was slightly German. She held a bottle of wine so that I could see the label. ”Is this the one?”

”Yes, perfect,” I said, but my smile turned to a frown. ”Did you bring a corkscrew?”

”You didn’t tell me I would need to bring a corkscrew.”

”I don’t tell you to breathe or give me disdainful looks but you manage all the same.”

She reached into a pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife. She flipped out the corkscrew attachment, plunged it into the top of the bottle, and wrenched out the cork. ”Happy now?”

I made a show of peering at the table. ”Would you pour me a glass?”

She realised her mistake and inhaled, but instead of apologising, she said, ”You seem the sort who would drink from the bottle.” She put it down on the table. ”Yes, fine. I will fetch a glass. I love fetch quests.”

”Hang on,” said Sandra, who had been watching in a state of amazement. ”This is your PA? You’re his assistant? What... What’s your name?”

The woman glared at me for a second. ”Briggy.”

”Briggy!” said Sandra. ”That will be confusing.” At the end of my first season in the football industry, I had been attacked outside the stadium. As a result, we had employed an army veteran I had nicknamed ’the Brig’. He had started as my bodyguard but once he had found my assailant, he had moved into other roles. Sandra said, ”And what’s your background?”

”I have a Master’s in Risk Management,” said Briggy.

”What! So you’re smarter than Max. You’re not who I would have expected him to hire.”

Briggy gave me another glance. ”Something tells me everyone he hires is smarter than him.”

I laughed again but Sandra actually gasped. ”Hey! Don’t talk about him like that!”

”It’s okay, Sandra,” I said. ”Briggy’s trying to get fired.”

”Fired? She just started.”

”She thinks this assignment is a punishment. She doesn’t like England, doesn’t like rain, and certainly doesn’t like football. She has realised that we’re going to be spending most of our time at football stadiums. It’s fine, Sandra, honestly.” I looked at Briggy. ”I will need that glass, though.”

”Who’s it for?” said Sandra. She knew I wouldn’t drink after a match in which I’d played unless I was incredibly depressed.

”TJ. I would ask you to join us but you’ve got the lurgy, so...”

Sandra wouldn’t have wanted to sit and discuss the match with the renowned playboy. She caught Briggy by the arm as the latter tried to pass. ”Max might think it’s funny that his PA is rude to him but I don’t. Correct your attitude or this entire city will correct it for you, one slap at a time.” They shot daggers at each other until Sandra let go and strode off.

Briggy glared at her back until she was out of sight. The German turned towards me and her lips turned up at the edges. ”Maybe this gig won’t be so bad.”

***

There was a knock at the door. I partially closed the laptop, but stopped when I saw it was TJ. ”Come in, bro. Take a seat.”

TJ’s first name was Timo but his surname was unpronounceable so we used his initials. His natural good looks were augmented by two auras. First, he was a really good football player. He didn’t play in matches any more, but he ran Crawley’s training sessions and kept in shape. Second, he was a football manager.

My fiancée, Emma, had pretty good taste in men, I reckoned. She liked faces with a bit of character, didn’t mind a scar, loved a twinkly eye and a cheeky grin. She wouldn’t look twice at a dour Scottish man if he was at the next table in a restaurant, but put the same man in the same suit and stand him in the technical area of a football pitch and she would just melt. That effect was a curse of its own, though. Being a football manager made you more attractive, but it ate you alive, turned you into a husk.

”You’re looking great,” I said, because sometimes it’s better to be polite than honest. Briggy came back and put a wine glass on the table. She looked from TJ to me to the door. ”You should stay,” I said, as I poured. ”You need to learn what I do. You don’t need to become an expert in football but you do need to know enough to appreciate how cool what I do is.” She closed the door, unfolded the crappy third chair, and sat. ”TJ, this is Briggy. She’s my new PA and she’s great. Her agency think she’s a prodigy and that’s why I picked her. How can being someone’s first pick be a punishment? It can’t. She’s smart and she’ll work it out soon enough.”

”Nice to meet you,” said TJ, shaking her hand. It didn’t seem like any of my words had landed. He took a hit of wine and stared at nothing.

The light from the laptop was still shining, so I clicked it closed.

”The famous laptop,” said TJ, as though his throat hurt.

”What’s famous about it?” asked Briggy.

”It’s got Max’s artificial intelligence software on it. It tells him everything he needs to know about football.”

I scratched my temple because I wasn’t sure if he was being serious. The AI story was just a cover, a way of explaining my supernatural gifts, but it was a story I had been expanding in recent months. I had even set up a company that pretended to offer the software’s insights to football clubs. In truth, its customers were all clubs I had a personal interest in and I had no intention of ever offering my services to third parties on an ongoing basis. I was already stretched thin.

TJ’s remark about the laptop was very, very odd. Early in our relationship I had gone down to Crawley for a week to help him prepare for a must-win game; I hadn’t used my laptop once. All it had were a few spreadsheets, some movies, and an app that showed a lot of wavy lines and numbers going up. That was my ’proprietary AI’.

Just as I had gone internal to puzzle out his comment, so TJ had gone back inside his own mind.

”You okay, bro?” I said.

He closed his eyes and made a big effort to become present in the room. ”At least I have the honour of being part of your winning streak. It’s a record, isn’t it?”

”Nine wins in a row? I don’t think that’s a record, no. I’m not really interested in the streak. I need to get loads of points on the board before - ” I glanced at Briggy. She knew that I had been asked to take over the biggest club in Germany for a few weeks while their current manager had heart surgery, but she didn’t know when. I changed horses mid-stream, so smoothly TJ didn’t notice. ”I need to get points on the board before the January transfer window.”

”Oh,” said TJ. He perked up. Actually sat up straighter.

The move caught Briggy’s attention. She asked a question. ”What does that mean?”

”Football clubs can trade players in two windows,” I said. ”There’s a big one in the summer and a little one in January. Today, a failing club like Crawley Town has to make do with the players it already has. I mean, it can take a rando off the street but most players who are useful are under contract with clubs such as Chester. We hold their registration for the duration of their contract but can trade it inside one of the windows. Take Lee Contreras, for example. He was playing for us today but come January, he could be playing for Crawley. Did you see him? He was the guy in blue-and-white wearing shirt number 8. He plays in midfield, that’s as it sounds, the middle, and what he did today is commonly called bossing the midfield.”

”Lee Contreras was bossing the midfield,” said Briggy.

”That’s right. In this role you’ll hear people talk a lot about transfers. That’s when a failing club, say Crawley Town, improve their team by buying a player who is better than the ones they have already got. For example, they buy Lee Contreras from Chester for a transfer fee of five hundred thousand pounds. They’re not buying the person, that would be sick. They’re buying the registration that allows him to play in professional matches.”

”Does the buying team need to be failing?” said Briggy.

”Ah. I see I’ll have to be more precise with my language around you. No, I only said that to rinse TJ. I could buy one of his players, too, if I wanted. Which I don’t.”

”You’re not failing?” said Briggy.

”No. We’re top of the league by six points, which at this stage of the season is mental. We have won eleven of thirteen. We’re absolutely amazing but because of our poverty we will have to break up this wonderteam, this marvellous mannschaft.”

”Hold up,” said TJ, who had been watching us talk. ”Are you trying to sell Lee Contreras? Now? Can’t you give me a minute to lick my wounds?”

”What wounds?” I said, smiling. ”You lost to the best team in the league. There’s no shame in that. Those fans getting on those buses for the four-hour drive home? They knew this would happen. They’re probably saying you did well to restrict us to two goals.”

He rubbed his forehead so hard he was leaving dents. ”Yeah, they’re probably all singing my name right now.”

”You know what you need, Timo? You need an intervention.”

”Oh, Christ.” He rubbed his head harder. ”Fuck this, I’m leaving.” He made no move to get up; I poured more wine into his glass. ”Where is Emma?”

”Briggy? Where’s Emma?”

My assistant sighed but got her phone out. She opened Instagram and scrolled. ”She’s at a party hosted by someone called Glendale Logistics.” Briggy’s eyes devoured some text. ”They’re teaching her business skills and in return she’s getting them drunk.”

TJ smiled. ”That’s how you do a negotiation, Max. Learn from your betrothed.”

”Brooke told me if I want to sell a product, a good way to do that is to create scarcity and fear of missing out. So listen up, TJ. I’m not selling Lee to you. He’s off the table. I’ll sell him to Wigan instead.” Wigan were down near the bottom of the table and there was a good chance they would be scrapping for survival along with Crawley. Those would be two good clubs to play off against each other. ”Why am I pitching to the monkey? I should talk to the organ grinder. You don’t even do Crawley’s transfers.”

”I thought he was the manager?” said Briggy.

”Right,” I said, clapping my hands together and rubbing them hard. ”Crash course in why TJ has the shittest job in world football. Heh. There are three main types of football ownership. One is some rich prick. That can be good if he puts his money into the club but it comes with all sorts of drawbacks. For example, he treats the fans like shit. Two is fan ownership. That’s good because there’s a real connection between players and fans but fans don’t have money. Three is some nerds buy loads of Bitcoin, it goes to the moon, and they think that qualifies them to run an English football team.”

Briggy’s eyebrows twitched. ”He’s joking, right?”

TJ shook his head.

I continued. ”When Bitcoin goes up, they go on a spending spree. The manager wants Lee Contreras? That’s only five Bitcoin! When it goes down, they sell the entire squad and find twenty guys from non-league who will work for cheap.”

”I don’t know what non-league means but the business model doesn’t seem to be based on sound principles.”

I clapped my hands again and got closer to her. ”You know what’s crazy? It worked! That team of randos was good! They got promoted! They went crashing down again but still. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. They were going down another level when TJ took over. They only let him have minor input into transfers but he sorted them out and next year they went up instead of Wrexham.”

Briggy’s interest increased. ”I know Wrexham. Ryan Reynolds is the owner.”

”Yeah that’s one of the craziest things about this whole story,” I said, excited. ”My story, I mean, not TJ’s. I’m on a collision course with Ryan Reynolds. Me! I’m a nobody from Manchester but we’ll share co-billing in that drama. No, really! Look at TJ’s face. He knows. Nobody nods sagely like my boy TJ. Okay, Ryan Reynolds, right? He’s rich and famous but doesn’t know anything about the sport. I’m the exact inverse of that. I’m poor and unknown but I’m what’s called a floating megabrain. Reynolds took over Wrexham; I took over Chester. We both pretty much stuck pins in the map and that’s how we got started. There’s about twenty miles between us and the fans are arch-enemies. It’s a huge rivalry. Huge. If Chester go up to the second tier, we’ll finally face our moneybags neighbours. The big showdown between pure football know-how and cold, hard cash.”

TJ had a little smile on him. ”Save me a seat, Max.” His smile, such as it was, faded. ”I’ll probably be working that day.”

I shook my head. There was some remnant of passion in there, but it was a dying ember. ”I’ll save you a seat, Timo. I wouldn’t worry about working that day. Not as a football manager, anyway.”

Briggy’s mouth dropped open slightly. She got popcorn eyes. This show kept getting better!

TJ got sour. ”Charming, as always. I suppose you’ve heard things.”

One part of the curse was a screen called Job Information. It showed me which managers were at risk of losing their jobs, and which positions were currently vacant. Timo’s job was listed as ’slightly insecure’. Unless he could extract more out of his squad, his position would degrade to insecure, very insecure, and then there would be a real-world ping on my phone.

”I don’t get sent a lot of gossip, but everyone likes MD and everyone loves Brooke.” MD was Mike Dean, the club’s managing director and the only person I could really say was my boss. He was certainly the only person who could fire me. Brooke was in charge of growing the club’s revenues, which in practice meant she was our Chief Executive. The rule of thumb at Chester FC was that if I wasn’t in charge of something, Brooke was.

TJ spoke bitterly. ”They’ve heard things, have they? Heard things.”

I took in a deep breath, exhaled, and reached over the table to take TJ by the wrists. ”Timo, listen. I like you. You’re a good person and a good manager. You’ve got the worst team in this league and you’re making them better than the sum of their parts. You had an interesting plan today!”

”That you snuffed out before we even kicked off,” he said, snatching his arms away.

The accusation hung in the air. I leaned back.

Briggy said, ”What did you do?”

”TJ has one good player. Why is he good? I trained him myself, the way I trained Lee Contreras, who is yours for five hundred K.”

”Are you fucking kidding me?” said TJ, as he slapped the table.

I put my hands to the sides of the wobbling wine glass, while Briggy did the same with the bottle. I smiled. ”I knew we’d be a good team.” I slid the glass into the middle of the table while my assistant put the bottle on a shelf at the back of the room; it was close enough to reach without her getting up. I said, ”Where was I? Okay, Crawley have a player called Sharky. He’s lightning fast, even faster than me. Don’t tell him I said that. He was falling out of love with football, the same as TJ here, but I did an intervention on him even better than this one that’s happening now. We promised to teach him how to play. How to really play, to his strengths. See, not everyone can do everything on a football pitch. It’s a sport that needs a lot of different skills and that’s why I love it. In basketball you need to be tall, pretty much, right? I’m sure there’s loads more to it than that but did you see Pascal Bochum out there? He’s a tiny little German guy but he’s fast and he’s smart. He couldn’t play basketball but when he plays football it’s like I’ve got another brain on the pitch. He makes connections and makes things happen. If you’ve got Pascal on the ball then a fast winger who can make repeat sprints becomes a legendary weapon. Sharky is like a lightsaber. Point him in the right direction and he’ll slice teams up. TJ based his whole plan today on using Sharky to do just that.”

Briggy was trying to follow. ”Yes? And?”

TJ gripped his greying hair in both hands and gave it such a tug I expected huge clumps to come loose. ”Max man-marked Sharky. The best player in this league played on the left side of the defence, where I have never seen him play before, and every time the ball went near Sharky, Max got there first. He didn’t even do any tackles. Didn’t have to. He excised Sharky more cleanly than any surgeon.”

I couldn’t disagree with any of that. ”Okay but then you moved him to left wing. That was smart.”

”Was it?”

”I mean... in theory, yeah. It’s proactive. You were trying to be the protagonist. That’s right. That’s how it should be.”

”But it didn’t work?” said Briggy.

”It did not work,” said TJ, eyes blazing, daring me to gainsay him.

I squirmed. ”Yeah, but it was a good idea, though. I’m marking you on a scale, TJ. You get points for trying. I’m not facing loads of interesting strategies in League One.”

”What’s League One?” said Briggy.

”So... you’ve heard of the Premier League?”

”I have heard of the Premier League.”

”There are 20 teams in that. Every season, three get kicked out. Demoted. They go to the second tier of English football, which is called the Championship. There are 24 teams in there. Three will get demoted into this league.”

”League One,” she repeated. ”The names appear to be quite stupid.”

”It’s a by-product of the sport’s history. It’s very old and a lot has happened. It’s called League One now but before that it was called Division Two and before that it was called Division Three. Some older fans refuse to call it anything other than Division Three.”

Despite his bleak mood, TJ smiled. ”Is that right? Why are people so strange?”

I shrugged. ”It’s the only name that actually makes sense. When I’m king of the world, all the names will be rationalised.”

TJ took a big swig of wine and turned to Briggy. ”All you need to know is that I had a good plan, a clever plan, and it didn’t even make a dent. When I tried to change it, Max trusted his young right back to handle Sharky - ”

”He’s fast,” I explained. ”And TJ doesn’t have a player as clever as Pascal to create space for Sharky so there wasn’t much risk.”

”And now that the danger was on the other side of the pitch, Max ran riot on the left. He created two goals in three minutes until I switched Sharky back to his starting point. Max didn’t so much as cross the halfway line after that. He didn’t need to - he’d already won the match.” He thumped the wall. ”But he won before he even stepped foot on the pitch.”

I tried not to show how satisfying that sounded, but, yeah. Might have got a tad smug because Briggy rolled her eyes. I rubbed my mouth hard and said, ”Listen, Timo. No-one’s going to talk straight with you so I’m going to try. If you’re happy with the next few weeks being the end of your career as a football manager, that’s cool. God knows I understand that it’s not all fun and games. If you want to cling on for as long as poss before riding off into the sunset with a six-pack and a six-string, go for it.”

”Fuck me,” he said, pulling his hands down his face.

I shook my head, but I knew something about TJ no-one else did. Just as players had profiles, so did managers and coaches. The three most important attributes - in my opinion - were Coaching Outfield Players; Judging Player Ability; and Tactical Knowledge. Good scores in those three were the basis of being a good football manager. Timo’s numbers were solid, though his tactics score was unusually high for the level he was working at.

The problem was that, in the time since I’d met him, none of the numbers had risen and two had fallen. The entries for Determination and Man Management were red.

I tried to handle this part with more tact than came naturally. ”I’m not a psychologist but you seem jaded. Burned out, maybe. You need a break but you’re not going to get one. You’re going to get sacked and it’s going to be very hard to get another job because when people see you they see an unserious playboy. You were lucky the Bitcoin boys gave you a shot. I like that about them - they’re batshit crazy but they look beyond the obvious. There aren’t many Bitcoin bros running decent-sized football clubs, are there? I should check with Lee Contreras; he loves crypto stuff. Anyhoo, most clubs make their hiring decisions based on data and the data says you’re outperforming your resources by a small margin. You’re within the margin of error, Timo. There’s no evidence you’ll definitely improve a team. The more you lose, the more your perceived flaws as a person come into focus.”

Briggy made a little noise. ”How do you survive your flaws?”

”What flaws?” I wondered.

”He doesn’t lose,” said TJ, defending me even as I was interventioning him against his will.

”I’ll be sacked the day I lose six in a row,” I said. ”Same as everyone.” I poured more wine into the glass and took a swig from the bottle. Briggy let out a tiny gasp. I handed it to her. She looked at the label again and took a swig herself. We smiled at each other. To my friend, I said, ”You’re not working on your skills. I know you aren’t motivated to do that just now but you need to. Go to watch matches. No, don’t tell me you watch games on TV. It’s not the same.” The currency of my curse was experience points. I earned them by watching live football and could spend XP to buy cool new powers. The amounts I got varied but there was one constant - it had to be live football. It stood to reason the same effect applied to people who didn’t have the curse. ”Go to matches. All levels. You’ll spot interesting players, see solutions to problems - both good and bad, and you’ll see how other managers are approaching tactical challenges. Oh, and the optics might be beneficial to you right now.”

”What do you mean by optics?”

”Maybe you’ll get spotted at a few of these matches and the Crawley fans will see how hard you’re working. Maybe your future employers will see you grinding. Maybe you’ll even meet a few club owners on your travels.”

”No-one’s going to fucking spot me, Max. No-one gives a shit about me.”

”Oh, Briggy, could you pass me the world’s tiniest violin, please? I think it’s on that shelf there.”

”Get fucked, Max.”

”Look, if you want to get papped, it’s easy. Come with me and Emma to a few games. Sit next to us and you’ll get picked up by the TV cameras. I’m the face of Soccer Supremo and those cameraman are so horny for blondes it’s actually distressing.”

TJ rubbed the side of his index finger with his thumb. ”You’d let me piggyback on your fame?”

I looked away. ”I don’t have a lot of manager friends, Timo. If you have some fight left in you, I’ll be right by your side. Not enough to give you three points or let you have Lee Contreras for cheap but anything else.” He scrunched his face up for a second. I wasn’t sure what that meant so I pressed on with the intervention. ”When I lose my passion I go to watch the kids in training, or watch the Chester Knights.”

TJ swallowed and tried to make eye contact. ”That’s your disabled team. That’s where it all started for you.”

”It’s passion, mate, pure passion. They don’t get paid. No matter how good they are, they’ll never earn a single penny. They play like I did in the school playground. Kicking that ball because kicking a ball is the most beautiful feeling. Scoring a goal. Last-ditch clearance. Kids going ’whoa!’ when you do a skill.”

Briggy interrupted me mid-flow. ”That’s what you are. You’re two hyperactive little boys in short shorts running around the school having fights and being friends again five minutes later.”

”No,” I said, in a fake-annoyed tone. ”I’m a hyperactive little boy running around having the best day ever, again and again. He’s a fucking husk.”

Briggy lifted the bottle and lowered her head. Point to Max!

TJ took a slow breath. ”You are prescribing me a dose of pan-disability football, Max?”

”I don’t know what it is for you. I only know what it is for me. It’s the Knights or the under twelves. Oh, and there’s Footy Addicts. It’s an app,” I told Briggy. ”You sign up and play a match with complete strangers. No stakes, just a bit of exercise. Football stripped back to its bare soul. Fun, teamwork, and some light showing off. For me footy was always a way to meet people and make friends. I never had a friend I didn’t meet through football. Get yourself to one of those matches, TJ. They won’t know who you are. My tragedy,” I said, turning to Briggy again, ”is that I’m so spectacular I’m recognisable even when I try to play like a normo. In my worst ever professional performance, I scored against a top six Premier League team.”

”From sixty yards,” grumbled TJ.

”What’s a yard?” said Briggy, who I think was joking.

”You weren’t very recognisable today,” said TJ. ”Except for those few minutes.”

I smiled. ”Think what people will say! How good is Sharky? Well, Max Best man-marked him for one half and when Sharky left the pitch, Max thought it was safe to do the same. What, really? Yes, really.” I rapped the table. ”That game will become part of Sharky’s legend. I look after my players, TJ. The next guy’s going to want Sharky in his team.”

”Oh my God.”

”Um...” I said, looking up. ”I think that’s the end of the intervention. Yeah, think so. Briggy, how did I do?”

”You ruined the effect by trying to sell him a player while you were doing it, but in fact I found it rather good. He won’t take you up on your offer, though. He was repulsed by the idea of going to more football matches. Perhaps I should work for him.” She was pleased with herself.

TJ drank some wine. ”How do you do it, Max? You’re always being spotted at matches. You’re top of the league but in the last few weeks you’ve been criss-crossing the country. It’s a joke on some of the chat groups. People PhotoShop you into the top news items of the day, or great moments from history. How do you find the motivation?”

I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. ”It’s fear, TJ. I’m afraid. Yeah I can handle League One, especially if I have two years to prepare for it. And okay, my team being gutted in January is going to suck but we’ll have a cushion by then and we’ll be able to find enough solutions in enough matches to stay on top. Fine. But I’ve got bigger challenges ahead. The Championship is going to be brutal. Twice a week I’ll be up against huge clubs with massive resources and there are so many interesting managers in that league. I really think it’s going to be the most fun I have in this sport, but it’s going to be dizzying and relentless and I need to get fucking ready for it, do you know what I mean? I could definitely beat one Championship team if I had two weeks to prepare. But what if I have two days to prepare and then in another three days there’s another one and another one and another one? Nah, I’m grinding hard so I don’t get humiliated up there. Oh, shit, look.” I was opening and closing my palm, getting excited and stressed thinking about what lay ahead for me. ”Actual terror sweat just from thinking about what’s coming.” I wiped my palm on my cheap black hoodie.

Briggy narrowed her eyes. ”Your pulse is high.”

I grinned nervously. ”I did something stupid, TJ. I got a job offer. I turned it down like I should have done, but then something struck me. The fixtures. So I went back and I accepted. I’m going in the deep end, mate. I’m not bad at this sport but I’m so comically underprepared for the challenge, I mean, ha, it’s probably going to be a complete disaster. You might get sacked but I’m going to get sackcloth and ashes. I’m talking about the kind of humiliation you can’t laugh off. Forget Grimsby. This is something that could haunt me for the rest of my life.”

”What’s Grimsby?” said Briggy, which was a valid question in more ways than she knew.

TJ was happy to answer. ”Max was cruising the National League North - that’s tier six - and he got bored and went to manage Grimsby. The owner promised him a suitcase full of money if he stopped them from being relegated.”

”Did he?”

”Whoa!” I said. ”Spoiler alert.”

”No, he blew it.” TJ lifted the wine to his lips but paused. ”Wait. If the potential for humiliation is so extreme and you don’t feel ready, why did you take the job?”

I got to my feet, scooted around Briggy, and put my face next to TJ’s. ”I’m doing a heist! It’s a heist movie. I’m doing a heist movie, TJ!”

He smiled but gently pushed me away; I was very close to him. ”A heist?”

I got up and paced around as best as I could. The space was suddenly too small. ”Come on,” I said, grabbing the bottle and holding the door open. They followed me into the corridor and I locked the door behind us. ”My laptop,” I explained. I led the way along the walkway, where players were leaning against walls, looking at things on their phones. Guys from both Chester and Crawley stopped slouching when they saw me striding past. ”It’s not exactly a heist. It’s more like a ts...iehuh.”

”What?” said Briggy, rushing to keep up with me.

I strode ahead onto the grass. The floodlights were on and a late-evening mist was in the air. The Deva stadium was low, only a single level, except for the majestic construct to my right. Two tiers plus sky boxes, five million pounds in cold hard cash and a million more in grants, the McNally was the crowning glory of phase one of my project. I stopped my pacing earlier than TJ expected; he nearly hit me with the glass. ”Don’t spill that or the groundsman will turn feral. And I don’t want to think there’s glass on the pitch. Ugh, that’s horrible. What an image.”

”What’s a tsiehuh?” said Briggy.

”I was trying to say heist backwards. It’s an inverse heist, okay? In a normal heist, you break into a bank and take something. You, ah, sail in on a rainbow and take the pot of gold. What I’m going to do is use the rainbow and leave a treasure.” I did a happy little leprechaun jig.

TJ and Briggy smiled at each other; it was the only response. TJ said, ”I can’t begin to imagine what that would look like.”

”I’m going to a megaclub, mate. Just for a few weeks. One reason,” I said, lowering my voice, ”is that I remembered a conversation I had when I was struggling to convince players to come here. You’d come if the manager was Klopp or Guardiola, wouldn’t you?”

”I’ve heard of Klopp,” said Briggy.

”Exactly. If I can make myself as famous as those guys, it’ll help me to get more players. That’s one more reason to do it. Not everything has to be a slow grind. If I can take a couple of well-chosen shortcuts, why not?”

”And the money will be nice,” said Briggy.

”No,” I said, looking up at the sponsor’s boxes in the new McNally. Emma was in there, was she? She loved her new role as the Princess of Chester. The Deva’s diva. For now, the sponsors loved their events being gatecrashed. Emma usually brought famous former players with her, or her beautiful friends. ”No, there’s no money,” I murmured. ”I’m doing it for minimum wage.”

”What?” snapped Briggy. ”That makes no sense. You could charge anything.”

”I know. I’m charging ten Euros an hour. I won’t go easy on the expenses, but I’m not in it for money. This is a passion project.” I gripped the bottle and took another swig. ”Ha! Briggy, keep that away from me. Passion, Timo. Adventure! Excitement. Briggy, you heard that big stand during the match? It’s fucking loud, isn’t it? Next I want to do that one.” I pointed to the opposite side of the pitch.

”The away end?” said TJ, surprised.

”Yes! Four thousand of our hard core fans to the right. Four thousand die-hard away fans to the left. The players in the middle, being battered by the noise, being elevated by the passion. This is what it’s all about.” I raised my hands as though I was trying to summon a fireball. ”This club is getting on for a hundred and fifty years old but we’ve got the product of the future. There’s no app or VR headset that will ever give you a fraction of the emotion you will get here. This is where you find community and friendship and bone-shattering noise. I can achieve most of what I want right here.” I tapped my lips and some of the mad energy left me. ”But that’s going to take time. Two and a half years to get to the Prem. It could be four years before we’re in Europe. Five, six before we’re in the big finals pissing on everyone’s chips.”

TJ said, ”Max is talking about going from tier six to the Prem in record time and somehow the idea disappoints him.”

”Do we want to piss on chips?” wondered Briggy.

”Max hates the big clubs,” said TJ. ”They’re ruining football. Hoarding all the wealth, all the players. The sport is eating itself but it seems no-one cares. So long as the gravy train is moving, there is no appetite to change.”

”So he thinks he’s Robin Hood?”

I barely heard. I was looking up at the floodlights. The ones on the new stand were far brighter than the older ones. ”I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the world is going to shit. In every sector in every country it’s going to shit. I keep waiting for someone to do something about it. No-one does anything. No-one does anything, ever, so I’m going to do one thing. One specific thing in one specific place. It will stop me from ever again getting a job at a big club but it will be so spectacular it will be worth it.”

TJ took a sip of wine. ”What could be so bad you’d never get a job again? Go on a rant in the post-match presser? Rant about all the ills in football with hundreds of millions watching you? That wouldn’t stop you getting a job if you keep winning football matches at the rate you’re going. What could it possibly be...?”

Briggy was giving me a very cold look. I stared right back at her until she looked away. ”You’ll see, I hope, but I have to earn the right to get to that moment. That’s why I’m grinding harder than ever. I’ve got a purpose. A mission. I’m in the middle of a training montage. I need to use every free minute of my days buffing myself up so I can compete tactically.”

”It’s not just the tactics, Max. You can set up a team and respond to events better than anyone I’ve ever met. If you’re really going to a big club, your challenge will be handling the star players.” He spun his finger around. ”This is your world. You’re the king of this castle. You can rule Chester with a rod of iron but when you get to your Man Uniteds, your Chelseas, it’s the players that rule the roost. They’re all gobby, they all have attitudes, they don’t listen to what elite managers have to say and they certainly won’t listen to a League One manager from England.”

”You think it’d be better if I was called Maximus Hammer?”

TJ laughed and gestured. ”Have you noticed, Briggy? He is obsessed with us Germans using the word hammer.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and eased him back towards the main stand. ”I’m obsessed with Timo being whatever nationality he wants as the case suits him. Suitcases, that reminds me. Briggy flew over today. She’s been in planes, my mini, a cramped seat in the main stand, my tiny little manager’s room. She’ll probably want to get settled in her hotel. We’re gonna shoot off, if that’s okay?”

”Sure, Max. And listen. I mean, you’re... I’ll think about what you said. I know it’s... Wait, he picked you up at the airport?”

”Yes,” said Briggy. ”Manchester.”

”Max Best picked you up at Manchester airport? On a match day?”

”Yes. Why?”

TJ was frowning hard. ”Who are you, again?”

I unlocked the door to my little room and shoved my laptop into its backpack. There was a brand I liked and I had five of the model that fit my shoulders perfectly. I tapped Timo on the chest. ”It’s not that strange, okay? I’m actually a kind and thoughtful person.”

”Riiiiiight,” said one of two managers in the top four leagues I could call a friend.

”Bye.”

I slung the backpack over my shoulders and got my phone out.

Me: Babes, I’m taking Briggy to the hotel.

Emma: She’s letting you call her that, is she?

Me: Of course. It’s her name. Will I come back to the Deva?

Emma: No, you can go straight home. I’ll get a lift.

Briggy and I walked to the corner flag and for the thousandth time, I admired the new stand. I wondered if I would ever get tired of looking at it.

”You built that,” said Briggy. It wasn’t a question.

”Yes,” I said.

She swept her gaze around the walls, the roof, along the rows of seats, back up to the sponsor’s boxes. ”My father wanted me to become an architect.”

”Oh?”

”He himself was, a, fuck I’m tired. Handwerker, how do you say that?”

”Handyman?”

”No. Ah... Craftsman. He did the work the architects told him to do. The architects and the handwerkers were not paid according to the labour that went into the buildings.”

”No. He wanted you to be on the right side of the exchange.”

”Yes. But if we are all architects, nothing will be built. I wanted to work with my hands.” She looked up again before comparing my creation to the rest of the stadium. ”This,” she said, facing the old section, ”is nothing.” She turned again. ”This is something.”

It seemed like the highest praise I was ever likely to get from this particular woman, so I pointed to a steward in his high-vis jacket. ”We go with him and he’ll escort us to the car park. I got attacked the one time I rushed off on my own, so the Brig’s set things up so I’m safe here and in the footprint.”

We followed the guy - I could never remember his name - through the turnstiles and out. Briggy said, ”Do you always use the same exit?”

”No, miss,” said our escort. ”We change it up.”

”This Brig of yours isn’t completely stupid, then.”

”Him? Never. He knows his business, miss. You mark my words: he knows his onions.”

Briggy had annoyed another member of the football community. What was she trying to do? Break my record for riling up the most people on their first day of work? She wasn’t going to get out of this assignment that easily.

”Thar she blows,” said the steward. Why couldn’t I remember his name? He was a great guy. He was rightly proud of my new car. An all-electric Mini Cooper that I’d bought because the sales blurb said it drove like a go-kart. It was plain blue for now but I was thinking of adding a couple of stripes to make it look like the Minis from the seminal heist movie The Italian Job. My new motor was in Sandra Lane’s spot because she had arrived before me and cheekily parked in mine, which was now empty, along with about eighty percent of the car park.

The Mini wasn’t everyone’s idea of a giant leap forward in the life of Max Best. Some wanted me to buy something more flash, more sporty. What this car meant to me was that I was on the right track. Three and a half years of grinding was paying off. I had a million pounds in the bank and a fuckton more was on the way. For Steve... Simon? For those who really loved the club, my Mini was another Harry McNally stand. The manager’s growth was the club’s growth. The two went hand-in-hand, hand-in-glove -

”The fuck?” I said, rushing towards the car.

There was glass all over the asphalt. Someone had smashed the rear window.

My body went mental. Throat dry, chest pounding, fists clenching, and I could feel a massive vein threatening to burst out of my forehead. The fuckers! The absolute fuckers! My new car. My beautiful, pristine new go-kart. I hadn’t even let Emma eat a sandwich. I wanted to kick the living shit out of whoever did this.

They’d be long gone, though. I began what I knew would be a long process of calming down.

Heavy footsteps made me turn.

To my left, a dude. Behind me, another. They had balaclavas pulled over their faces, wore military boots, and were carrying heavy little sticks. The place was lit up well and there were cameras everywhere. To smash the window, not find what they were looking for, and wait for me to turn up was reckless in the extreme.

My rage turned cold.

Reckless unless they were so sure of themselves - and their training - that they could meet any challenge. The analytical part of me - there wasn’t much still operating - noted that the men weren’t breathing hard, showed no signs of stress, were not worried about a stray police officer coming along. They looked the way I had done last Saturday down in Plymouth when stepping forward to take a game-winning penalty.

Ice cold and deadly.

”The fuck?” I mumbled. Something about being attacked for a second time in my own car park wound me up. I clenched my hands back into fists. I could take one of them down with me. Fuck his day all the way up. I’d been trained to punch by two champion boxers. I remembered the steward’s name. ”Simon, stay back. That’s an order. If it kicks off, run. If I die, tell Sandra her sick leave got canceled.”

One of the guys held his arms out in a friendly way. The gesture made sure I spotted his cudgel, though. Cudgel? Or was it a cosh? He spoke in an Irish accent. ”No need for all dat, Best. Give us the laptop and we’ll be on our way.”

”What?” I turned to the Mini. They’d seen a backpack on the back seat, smashed the window, and when they’d opened it, they’d found some spare kit I always carried with me. Four tops so I could join in any match - or be a referee. They had found that and a spare pair of boots, but they had been looking -

”The laptop, Best. Hurry the fuck up.”

The adrenaline was messing me up. The laptop was worthless. A few spreadsheets that I wouldn’t want anyone seeing, but nothing worth dying over. Nothing worth these guys going to prison for. ”You looking for cheat codes for Soccer Supremo? Just buy Wibbers and Youngster, mate. It’s no secret.”

I licked my lips. One guy was blocking my route to the side of the main stand. If I could get clear, I could sprint around. No way was this guy faster than me. That would take me past the exact spot of the last attack, though. No bueno. The other way was equally blocked. I could run the way we had come, but that would put Simon in danger. The poor guy was frozen. Briggy was giving me a strange look, like I was stupid. She made a chopping gesture with her palm. She thought I should go to the rear of the car. That seemed absolutely mental but my feet were already obeying.

One step back for me. One step forward for the cosh boys.

”I’m taking the backpack off,” I said, with insane volume. My pursuers stopped. My heart was pounding. This was the moment for action. I had to draw them close to me, didn’t I, and then break into the space. It was good tactics. Draw the oppo and play out from the back. Fast breaks. Play through the lines.

”Get him!”

The guy on the left came at me. I suddenly didn’t see anyone to my right, but that only freaked me out more so I dodged left, holding the backpack in front of my head partly so the laptop would block an attack but also so I wouldn’t see the blow that killed me.

There was a grunt of pain - not mine - and I lowered the backpack.

Briggy had the nearest guy by the arm and by the head as she cracked his face into the passenger seat window. She smashed it again, then drove it through the side-view mirror.

She flopped and I worried she was hurt but she had a zip tie in her hands and was wrapping up the guy’s wrists. She got up and went to the other one. I followed and saw he was out cold and my front headlight was shattered.

”Mate,” I whined, even though I was high on all kinds of brain chemicals.

She finished tying him, then hopped up and dragged them both to the next free parking space. She pulled their hoods off and took photos that she sent off to God knows who.

Simon snapped out of his shock. ”They had Irish accents!”

Briggy’s eyes rolled towards him. ”English criminals often affect an Irish accent knowing the police are institutionally racist.”

”Oh,” said Simon.

”We should call - ” I started.

”No!” snapped Briggy. She came to me and brought me away from the steward. ”They wanted your laptop. Why?”

”Because they’re thick as pigshit. What are they gonna learn? They won’t learn how to market a product, I can tell you that. And what, they’ll crack my passwords and see that I think Youngster and Wibbers could play in the Premier League? Big whoop. The big clubs already know that.”

Briggy kept looking at me.

I was dripping with sweat. It was hard to think. ”Ah. I mean...”

”Yes?”

”It’s possible they think...” I looked from the Mini to the massive new stand. Very tangible evidence that what I was doing worked. My methods were sound. No-one would ever think a demon as old as time had cursed me with these powers. How could my rapid rise be explained? It could be explained the way I had been explaining it. ”They might think I actually have an advanced AI on this laptop that lets you find players for cheap and sell them for millions and win matches while you’re doing it... It’s possible they think I’m carrying round a sort of...” I didn’t want to say it, but she kept staring at me. Unpeeling the layers of my stupidity one by one. ”Carrying around a sort of portable infinite money glitch.”

Her eyes widened, and they were wide to start with; she was loving this. She jabbed me in the chest. ”You’re an idiot.” She checked her victims were still, before gently touching my jaw and scanning me. ”Are you hurt?”

”No.”

”Before we find one of the police I want to clone their phones.”

”You... what? Okay. Just, er... I wasn’t going to involve the police right away if we can help it. We need the Brig.”

”Does he have experience in corporate espionage?”

”I don’t know. Why?”

A laugh exploded out of her. She tapped me in the chest again. ”While you’re planning your reverse heist, someone is planning to heist you. We’ve got competing heists, Max Best.”

”That’s... I don’t want that. That’s not fun.”

She laughed loud again. ”Tough shit. Call your man if you want. The Brig’s good; I’m better.”

”Um... you can tell him that yourself.”

She was astonished. ”You saw what I did to those two and you’re still more afraid of him than me?”

”Yes,” I said. ”He would have got them to tie themselves up without even punching them.”

She scoffed. ”What’s the fun in that? All right, let’s do it your way.”

I raised my phone; my hand was shaking violently. I took a huge breath and held it in. ”Briggy, do you have some post-trauma techniques to help clients who have had, like, a big shock?”

”There are things to do, yes. Steps to take. Shall we go through them?”

”Not me,” I said. ”Him. Simon.”

She liked that. ”You always look after your staff.”

”And you always wanted to work with your hands.”

She gave me a cocky grin and kissed her knuckles. She closed her eyes and when she opened them, she was transformed. She was a discreet and caring personal assistant. She walked over to Simon and put her arm around him. They moved a few steps away.

I crouched in front of my attackers and dialled the Brig. ”John,” I said. ”I’d like to report a crime. Someone stole your crown as the most badass employee. What? No, that isn’t the entire call. I’m in the car park. You’ll never guess who’s in my spot.”