Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

12.

One of the biggest downsides to being famous is that people take liberties. They come up to you in the supermarket and chat like you’re old friends. If they see you in a restaurant, even a fancy one, they come steaming in, demanding selfies, insisting on telling you all about their lives. If you refuse or ask to be left alone, they get lairy, complain that you’re arrogant, and record themselves giving you abuse so that when you snap back, they can get engagement on their socials. There is very little you can do about it other than not engage, not give them the satisfaction.

That was why I was so looking forward to playing against Bradford - on the pitch I was allowed to let it all out. I would scream as I hit a screamer. Punch a volley, bombard the goal, parry, thrust, hook, finish.

Here in the NEC Arena, I wasn’t allowed. I had to take my rage and bottle it.

This guy Pradeep - rhymes with creep - had made no attempt to shape his long black hair into what one might call a trim; it just flopped around. He was thin, wore a pale pink office shirt, and was lugging around a huge backpack. If I punched him right in the stupid gob, the backpack would break his fall. Or would it? It was probably full of laptops. Anyway, whether I hurt the guy or not, I would be on the front page of the papers within minutes. Mad Max Curries an Indian. Seal Clubs Man. Or if the Daily Mail got there first: Brave Brit Gets Jabby On Punjabi.

I assessed our relative sizes and confirmed to myself that one lusty swing would absolutely ruin him. Knowing I could handle him helped me get past the initial rage; I could give him the benefit of the doubt until he produced a syringe or started pouring chloroform onto a large cotton pad.

Pradeep let go of my arm but he was beaming. He seemed to have no clue that I was furious. He was babbling away but I wasn’t listening. Why hadn’t I brought Briggy? Because the Expo was full of nerds. Who would win a fight between one highly trained athlete and a hundred nerds? Me. I would. I had sparred at Donnie Wormwood’s gym, for God’s sake!

Briggy hadn’t been convinced but I had snapped at her, telling her I didn’t need to be protected from board game fans who didn’t know I existed. What sort of life was it if I couldn’t learn about the latest developments in warrior space monks without being flanked at all times? Briggy had agreed that I was right and that she was over-reacting, and then had gone behind my back to arrange for the venue to send a guy to follow me around. Well, never let it be said that I can’t admit to being wrong, and never let it be said that I’m ungrateful; I would send my personal assistant to buy Briggy something nice.

I saw movement and to my relief Stu, the security dude, ambled into view. His eyes widened and he ran.

”Is everything okay, Max?” The guy didn’t fill me with confidence - unlike my other protectors he had never reversed a car fast along a highway or used martial arts to throw one baddie into another one - but his main function was as a de-escalant. He would protect me from myself.

”Stu, this guy is rude and has no boundaries. He assumes a prior relationship that doesn’t exist. Can you keep him away from me, please? I’m gonna pee, say bye to Jacob, then fuck off home.”

Saying the last word pissed me off. Why did I have to go home already? I wanted to roll some cool hand-made dice and maybe find a board game I could give to Peter as a birthday present. Leaving early was sensible, though. I had to put my safety first. For my own safety, I had to leave a games and hobbies convention. What the absolute fuck?

I was about to kick the bathroom door hard, but just about restrained myself. What if there was a guy on the other side? That wouldn’t go well for him. And what if I wrecked my leg, the day before my last ever shot at revenge at various people who had seriously wronged me? Nah, I would bottle this anger and unleash it against Bradford City. Bottle it, label it, add it to the other bottles, light them up and toss them towards the home team’s dugout.

Sandra said I played well when I was angry but that she preferred me happy. Tomorrow I would make her reconsider. Tomorrow I was going to vent a hell of a lot of demons. I would get Folke Wester sacked, take millions off Gerry Star’s investment, and send R. Brown back to oblivion.

I went into the bathroom and checked every cubicle - I’d seen enough thrillers to know where serial killers hid. I did the needful, then went to the sink to wash my hands. By the time I had finished annihilating my germs, I was much calmer. This whole Pradeep situation was my fault for thinking I could lead a somewhat normal life. My fault for thinking there might be a public space where members of the public would behave.

I needed to start thinking about building a big, secure house that would have everything I needed. Cinema room, snooker table, tennis court, swimming pool. Kitchen with a flat attached for our live-in cook. I would make it so that I would never need to go anywhere to have the lifestyle I wanted, and I would erect massive billionaire walls around it.

When I returned to the bathroom door, I hesitated before pulling it open. I didn’t particularly want to see Stu and certainly didn’t want to see Pradeep.

The guard was there; the stalker wasn’t. Good job, Stu! I would get my assistant to send him a basket of something. Jams? I could imagine Stu smothering his breakfast toast with jam. Wordlessly, warily, I walked back in the direction of the bar, while my protector followed.

”Fuck me,” I said, when I got closer. Jacob was in the same place I had left him, but he was now talking to none other than Pradeep. They were leaning over a large tablet computer, and Jacob seemed impressed. I glanced at Stu. ”Evasive manoeuvres,” I said, turning sharply away. I would text Jacob from my car, invent an emergency.

”Best!” yelled one of the nearby Soccer Supremo fans, tipsy after two mouthfuls of beer. ”Best will tear you apart, again!”

I was just about to urgently whisper ’My cover’s been blown, extract, extract!’ when Jacob called out. ”Max! Where are you going? Over here.”

The funny thing is, I could have walked away from the money, no problem. Two hundred thousand pounds? Not worth getting ulcers over. But having my face on the cover of the game, being able to call myself the Soccer Supremo, I loved it more than Stu loved a farm-fresh marmalade. I would let this next scene play out and then leave. Once Jacob knew Pradeep was a nutjob, it would make sense that I was giving myself the red card.

I covered my mouth and spoke so only Stu could hear. ”Stick around for ten minutes, please.” We went to the table where Jacob and Pradeep were standing. Jacob had got himself a beer.

”Max,” he said, excited. ”You have to see this. It’s incredible.”

I didn’t smile back, but looked from Pradeep to Jacob. ”Do you know each other?”

”No, just met,” said Jacob, swiping on the tablet. ”Pradeep, wasn’t it?” The Indian nodded. Jacob could barely take his eyes off the screen as he mumbled, ”Pradeep told me he had annoyed you just now and could I help him undo the damage because he has used his life savings to come over... My God,” he said, bringing the tablet closer to his face.

”Life savings?” I said, dubiously.

Pradeep shook his head, which I had read was the Indian way of saying yes. That was going to be confusing. ”England is so expensive! And the hotels, my word, what a scandal they are! But it is worth it to finally meet you. How else could I make contact when you disregard my endeavours?”

”Endeavours?” said Jacob.

”This guy has been emailing me for years,” I said. ”Texts, DMs. I get a new phone, he gets the number. I get an assistant, he harasses my assistant. It’s one thing having a super creepy online stalker but him turning up in person puts me on Defcon 2, Jacob. I’m really not happy about this.”

Now Jacob was able to tear his eyes away from the tablet. ”Stalker?” He gave Pradeep a longer appraisal. ”But you’re one of our beta testers. You were in the audience for Max’s speech. That’s quite a coincidence.”

”No coincidence!” said Pradeep, proudly. ”When you sponsored Max I became a beta tester and put in many hundreds of hours and boosted my profile to make it a virtually certainty I would win one of the seats for the speech. But even if I didn’t, I knew this was my chance to come and finally meet him.”

”You boosted your profile?” said Jacob, warily.

”He hacked your servers and made himself a winner,” I said. ”Not being funny, Jacob, but this isn’t healthy for me right now. I’m gonna shoot off.”

Jacob got a bit panicked. ”Oh, but you aren’t unhappy with us, are you?”

”No,” I said. ”Only with him.”

Jacob was relieved and I could see the very moment he made a decision to cut ties with Pradeep, but as he was about to hand the tablet back, he couldn’t. Jacob licked his lips. ”Max, now, let’s take a beat. This is extraordinary stuff and Pradeep has come a long way - you have come from India, yes?”

”Yes, indeed. Bengaluru.”

”And what is your purpose? Why have you come?”

”I dearly desire to work in the world of football and most specifically for Max Best.”

”I wonder if perhaps we are experiencing culture clash. Pradeep, do you understand that there’s a fine line between being enthusiastic, pursuing your dreams, refusing to accept rejection, and being a pest and a bother?”

”A bother?” said Pradeep, and for a second he looked like he was 7 years old. ”But what I have to offer is mast. It’s awesome.”

”What is it?” I said. ”What job do you want?”

”I’m a data scientist,” he said. ”I create advanced algorithms that feed off extant datasets and are then fused with data extracted from video. With terabytes of raw data, I build models that are unprecedented in their granularity and accuracy.”

I stretched my arms a little. ”Why would I want that?”

Pradeep’s non-stop enthusiasm dimmed. Wasn’t it self-explanatory?

Jacob helped him. ”Max, just look at this.” He came next to me and swiped backwards. What I saw was a black screen with a few numbers on the top left corner that reminded me of a surveillance camera’s date and time output. I wasn’t far off. Jacob explained. ”This is the dataset number. The season, the unique match number. This is the first match of this season and we’re looking at squad number 3.”

”Men or women?”

”Men,” said Pradeep, as he started to move round to join us behind the tablet. ”To do this with the women I would need access to their data. Intimate access.”

I pulled Stu into place so that Pradeep couldn’t get too close. ”Stu, you heard that, right? That was creepy as fuck, right?”

”In the current climate, it wasn’t great.”

”In any climate! Christ.”

So far, all I had seen was some numbers and a black screen. ”Pradeep, dude. You keep banging on about knowing my system. Is this it?”

He nearly levitated, he was so psyched. ”Yes! I have watched your progress with increasing astonishment. How can you outperform to such unprecedented levels? At first I thought you had secret funding and were paying players off-book, but I social engineered my way into some bank accounts and ruled that out.”

”Stu,” I said, ”you heard him confess to a crime, right? I’m not the only one who can hear all this?”

”I heard it.”

”It’s no crime,” said Pradeep, waving his hand. ”I didn’t take anything, I only checked my hypothesis until it was disproven. I was able to state to a high degree of certainty that you were paying your players exactly what you claimed to be paying them. So if there was no external explanation, what was the internal explanation? What was allowing you to win so many matches on such a low budget when every model said it was impossible? I worked and I worked and finally, I did it! I replicated your system.”

This was the most chilling thing he had yet said. ”Go on,” I said, mouth somewhat dry.

”I took all the publicly available data plus some that was stored on a very insecure secure server - ”

”Stu?”

”I heard it.”

”And I trained an AI to watch football streams and extract extremely good data. I hate it when they cut to people in the crowd. What is Tom Brady, anyway?”

Jacob said, ”Focus, Pradeep.”

The Indian’s enthusiasm was sky-high again. ”So on what factors should I base my model? Of course I started with Non-Penalty xG per ninety - ”

”Of course,” said Stu, who was beginning to enjoy himself.

Pradeep shook his head hard. ”Of course! But I combined it with open play xA per ninety, xOVA per ninety, xT from carries, and this gave me a partial model. Where could I go next? I was stuck, so I put all your post-match interviews and podcast transcripts into a custom LLM and compared it with other managers to see which phrases you used more commonly than the rest. You disproportionately talk about one-twos, and they are very, very often used in the match descriptions of the goals your teams score, so I used the one-twos opened and one-twos closed metric, too. That elevated my numbers, but I was still incredibly far from an explanation.”

”Explanation of what?” said Stu.

”Explanation of the Max Best system. How does he get more out of his wage budget than his rivals? It is patently obvious that he has either perfected football or broken it.”

”What,” said Stu, giving me a new kind of look. Respect?

I nodded. ”I have broken football. That part’s actually true.”

Pradeep slapped his hands together. ”Yes! I know it! And when I went back to basics and mixed in some pass accuracy and passes per offensive action, I got closer to the truth still. But then I hit a brick wall.”

I frowned. Part of my brain had hit a brick wall some time earlier. ”Did you say you want a job? Working or Chester or Maxterplanalytics or what?”

”Max!” complained Jacob. ”I’m absolutely spellbound. Continue, Pardeep.”

”Pradeep,” said Stu.

The Indian’s enthusiasm doubled, somehow. ”The breakthrough cost me a lot of anguish! There was a word in the Max Best word cloud that he used at more or less the same rate as every other manager, so why did I focus on it? I do not know! Except...” Pradeep’s madcap energy dimmed and the way his eyes locked onto some distant memory hinted that maybe he did have some inner depths. ”I watched Max’s goals and assists and I was struck by how often he made the right decision.”

”Confirmation bias,” said Jacob. ”Survivorship bias. If you only look at the goals, you only see the times he made the right decision.”

”Yes, I agree totally, but I became intrigued by one soundbite in particular. Max said that he liked players who, when you paused a move in progress and said out loud which pass they should play next, that is the pass they actually tried to play. I tried it with Max a few times and normally he did what I thought was correct. However, I am quite the amateur! So how could I take my biases out of this investigation?” He nodded a few times. ”I wrote a program to express every moment in a match - every moment that is shown on screen, at least - and how strongly it contributed either to a final third entry or an opposition entry into your final third. I had to alter the parameters very much because there are not enough goals for meaningful outcomes, but I worked at it and came up with something satisfactory. Something that expressed a clear difference between a Max Best player and the others in the league! Something that can predict success. Something that explains four promotions in four seasons!”

I stared at him, then at the black screen. The number in the top left ended with 3. ”And you’ve done all that... for Cole Adams?”

”For as many players as I could get the data, in as many matches as I could get the data.”

I squeezed my eyelids shut, feeling like I was missing something obvious. And Pradeep had missed something obvious. He didn’t know about the raw, clear feeds that people like me had access to. If I hired him, I could hook him up with those and he could make his data scraping thingy ten times better. There was no prospect of me hiring such a weirdo, however. I tapped the screen, watched what happened next feeling bewildered and lost for a few seconds, and then got massive, full-body tingles.

The first match of our season had been an away match against Northampton Town, one where Sandra had been in charge. Cole had been CA 88 and had played in a back four.

The screen stayed black, except for on the left of the screen, where blobs of colour appeared like in a heat map. It wasn’t static, though, like a normal piece of football data. It was animated. Above a football pitch, which I now saw was a different shade of black to the rest of the background, a simple number was progressing from 1 to 90. Number of minutes played. To the left and right of the pitch, all kinds of metrics were rising and falling.

But I was totally focused on the heat map. When it finished, I played it again. And again.

”This shows how well Cole played,” I said, hungrily.

Pradeep clapped his hands with ear-splitting volume. ”Yes! I knew you would understand!”

”Holy crap,” said Stu. ”What are you seeing that I’m not?”

I showed him. ”When there’s a red blob, that’s, like, my player doing something good. He’s tackling or passing or winning a header. Blue is something bad. Cole normally faces Christian Fierce to his right, so you can see him collecting the ball and moving it onto his left foot. See?”

”Um...” said Stu. ”Kind of.”

”It’s crystal clear to me,” I said, and once again felt a pang of hunger. This was fucking amazing! ”Hey, look, there are sort of sparks when he combines with a teammate. Pradeep, did you programme that?”

”No, it is the code learning. Teaching itself. Passes are good. Connections are good. Two players combining to recover a lost ball is very, very well regarded by the model.”

”Stu,” I said, playing it again. ”This player. Is he positionally disciplined?”

”Yeah. He’s always in and around that area. I’d say yeah. Although... is that him running down the wing?”

”Yeah but he’s allowed when the time’s right. That’s fine. And is he combining with the players around him?”

”I’d say so. There are lots of those sun flare things.”

”Solar flares! Yes! That’s what it looks like. I always wanted flair players. Heh. And look at him popping up in either box, too. Full backs who can win headers, yeah? That’s such a bonus.” I used the speed controls to go to a certain moment in the game and slow it down. ”That’s him getting a defensive header, I think.”

”No,” said Pradeep, on his tiptoes. ”That’s him competing for the header in a way that prevents his opponent from getting clean contact. Tap this icon here.”

I obeyed and the TV company’s stream of this match popped up in a window. When I scrubbed back and forth, the video followed. ”Fuck,” I said, impressed.

”I learned you don’t need to win a header to be useful. Simply preventing good contact is also beneficial to the team, and this can be measured.”

I frowned, clicking away the TV feed and focusing on the heat map animation, playing it for the twentieth time already. ”You can just look at this and see how well Cole played. That’s...” My mind was fizzing. This would be an amazing tool for our coaches, but would I want the players to see it? They would start doing mad things in order to get their animations looking cool. That’s how players treated new tools.

Jacob said, ”What do you call it?”

Pradeep nodded. ”It doesn’t have a name! I’m a data scientist, not a poem writer! Ahahaha! But it is common to use names such as expected goals, expected assists, expected threat. This could be expected decisions, or expected decision outcomes. My working title is EDO.”

”EDO,” I said, softly, reverentially.

”Max!” complained Jacob. ”You haven’t even got to the good part yet. Give me that.” He swiped a couple of times, then showed the screen to Pradeep. ”Is this the one?”

”Yes.”

Jacob said, ”This is Cole Adams’s season, distilled into one animation.”

My eyebrows knitted together so hard I could easily have sprained them. What I saw was the Northampton animation as one burst of ’flame’, followed by his next performance, against Stevenage, and so on, like a rolling fireworks display. Some matches seemed a little brighter than others, but there was a clear and unmistakable trend: Cole Adams was heating up.

Pradeep was the most excited puppy. ”This is the Max Best system! You select players for their EDO, their decision-making skills, and you improve them further over time! Wage budget is still by far the number one factor in determining league position, but EDO comes above any other metric. I lack the processing power and storage to map EDO to every team in the division but so far everything I have tested fits within a tolerable margin of error.”

”Okay but... What’s the use of this? It’s undeniably cool but what’s the point of knowing?”

”So many uses!” said Pradeep, asking for the tablet. Jacob gave it to him. Pradeep tapped a few times and showed another animation. ”Cole Adams when playing behind Charlie Dugdale.” That one was pretty hot. He clicked again. ”Cole Adams when playing behind Adam Summerhays.” Not hot.

”Yeah but that’s expected. I know that.”

Jacob chimed in. ”Pradeep, couldn’t you refine this output to show which moments were causing positive outcomes? Like when Cole passes to, ah, Charlie Dugdale’s right versus his left. Could you say, hey, pass this way to generate better outcomes?”

”Yes! That would be very possible!” Pradeep tapped and I thought he was going to code that right then and there, but instead he showed me another screen. It had the number 4 in the corner.

”Peter Bauer,” I said.

”Yes,” said Pradeep. ”Watch.”

Peter’s flames erupted in something of a circle, with flares coming out. ”Just like the sun,” I said. ”That’s beautiful. Shows he’s a 360 degree player who’s elusive.”

”Elusive?” said Pradeep, eyes bulging wildly. He whipped out his phone and tapped away. I exchanged a look with Stu. He gave me a tiny shrug. Pradeep was back in the room. ”But look at this.”

He tapped on the tablet to bring up another animation, but this one didn’t have the same coding system. In the top left corner, it simply said, Tyler Jansen.

”Tyler’s a midfielder playing for Tranmere Rovers,” I explained to Stu.

Pradeep nodded. ”Yes. Max Best approved player. A good point of comparison.”

He clicked the screen and the animation played. It looked quite similar to Peter’s. To hammer the point home, Pradeep made a split screen so the players could appear at the same time.

”You see!” said Pradeep. ”Peter Bauer is a midfielder! You are playing him in the wrong position!”

I relaxed fully for the first time since Pradeep grabbed my arm. He was human after all. Pradeep wasn’t a threat, and neither was his programme. ”Okay, I’ll take that under advisement.” Now that the shock and awe of Pradeep’s EDO model was wearing off, I wondered just how useful it was. What were the coaching implications? In what way was it actionable? ”This thing,” I said, slowly. ”You can turn the flames into a number, right?”

”It already is a number,” he said. He pinched the tablet to show me one of the numbers that littered the display. This one had about ten decimal places.

”So can you use that to award a Man of the Match?”

”It’s simply the player with the highest number, yes.”

”Who do you have as Man of the Match for when we played Stockport County?”

He tapped a few times. ”You.”

”Leyton Orient?”

He tapped again. ”Joel Reid.”

That was interesting. The curse had awarded that one to Colin Beckton, who had scored twice, but Joel was a good shout. The curse always over-indexed goals. Two thoughts dropped at the same time.

One, this guy knew nothing of curses. That was a relief.

Two, if I hired Pradeep I could go through this data and ’teach’ it, couldn’t I? Refine it to give the results I wanted. Maybe tweak it until it was identical to the curse, flaws and all. That way, my coaches could be given accurate match ratings for their players, which was something that I found incredibly useful. My eyes widened - if we invested a few quid, could we replicate the curse’s output and send it to a tablet that the assistant manager could hold? One of the ways I was overpowered compared to other managers was that I knew when a player was giving me a 5 out of 10 performance and I could do something about it, instantly.

”Can you tweak this to give real-time data?”

”Oh,” said Pradeep, dropping to a mere 8.350703974 out of 10 on the enthusiasm scale. ”Tricky. Very tricky. It would depend on what real-time sources were available. It is... theoretically possible.”

I was listening, but my train of thought had skipped tracks and was heading to Norway. The model made Pradeep think Peter Bauer was playing in the ’wrong’ position theory. While that theory was wrong, it was the right sort of wrong. I wondered what the model could tell us about Helge Hagen. If SK Brann would share their internal data with us from when Helge was playing striker and if we ran it through this tech, would it show that he should be a full back? If it did, that could lead to optimisations in our youth system and in our scouting. I didn’t need it, of course, but it would help Sandra, Colin, Peter, and Spectrum. If we spent a couple of years working to improve it and how its results were analysed, that would really help the club when I was gone.

The train skipped tracks again, this time heading for Denmark. ”This stuff has potential but let me tell you what I need more than this. If I hire a tech megabrain, his first job will be to hack into our breathing trainers.”

”What?” said Jacob.

”We bought these breathing trainers,” I said. ”They look like the mouth bits from scuba gear. It was good and cool and useful and you could see your lung capacity going up if you did it for ten minutes a day. Top. But recently they changed the user licence, demanding that we share all our data with them. Like, first of all, get fucked you cheeky fucks. Second, I can’t send my players’ data to Denmark. How many laws would that break? What the actual fuck are they thinking? So they’ve basically bricked their product after we spent thousands of pounds on them.” Thinking about that company wasn’t good for my blood pressure.

”What’s the interface?” said Pradeep.

”Bluetooth to an app.”

”You want me to extract the raw data and put it into a CSV file?”

”Sure, I guess, but I also need you to hack the app and make it seem like we’re sending the data because the actual breathing exercises are good. Is that in your skillset?”

He was staring at a certain point in the bar. ”I could do it but it would be more useful for me to develop my model.”

”No,” I said, ”it would be more useful for my players to increase their lung capacity.”

”Oh.”

”You love your model but I love improving players and winning football matches. And this EDO has potential but it will never be able to tell you when the best decision is to make the wrong decision.”

”Pardon me?” said Pradeep.

”My system tells me that far post crosses lead to more goals than near post ones, but I mix in some near post crosses too. Why? Because that comes with intangible benefits. It means that when I get the ball, twice as many defenders are stressed and they have to cover more ground, run more, expend mental and physical energy. It means the goalie finds it harder to leave his line.

”Your model might look at three failed crosses and flag me as shit and you could take those findings to a director of football and you could order his teams to only hit far post crosses. Defenders would adapt, it would stop working, you would be sacked for giving bad advice, the director of football would be under pressure for hiring you. Your model is a tool. A good tool. A very interesting way to visualise some parts of a match and I can see how it could lead to some useful insights in the right hands but if you think this is going to solve football, you’re going to be very disappointed.

”If you aren’t prepared to be adaptable, that’s fine, you can just do what you’re doing and hope there’s a director of football with much less vision than me.”

”Less vision?” said Stu. ”Oh. I get it.”

Pradeep fell quiet. I wondered how long he had spent believing his model was going to ’solve’ the sport.

”Jacob,” I said, ”wouldn’t this sort of thing help you make a better Soccer Supremo? Why don’t you hire him? Then he can do this forever. Take your database of attributes, plug them into this EDO model, spend some time optimising it and bosh, you’ve got a much more realistic game.”

Pradeep woke up. ”I don’t want to make a game. I want to make a difference.”

I eyed him. ”Pardon me?”

”I said I want to make a difference. Help you take Chester all the way to the top.”

”Why?”

”Because... it’s there. That’s... What do you mean why?”

I took a breath. For a second, I thought he had been on the verge of expressing some human feeling. ”Never mind.” I had an idea. One way I could use Pradeep’s work - and restore some of the idiot’s life savings - would be to rent his model for a specific purpose. In my fight against the EFL, I could demand a hearing and absolutely blind them with science. I would prove with awesome heat map animations that Adam Summerhays was on track to be a baller. Look, I would say, this Indian megabrain says Adam is mast. ”Have you got the data there for Adam Summerhays?”

Pradeep rolled his eyes. ”Ugh. Summerhays. A rare air shot from you. One of the only players who refuses to improve.”

He tapped on his screen, not realising that I was giving him daggers. Stu sensed how I was feeling and actually took a little step away from me. I could batter fifty Stus.

”Here,” said Pradeep, dismissively. He clicked and my eyes went to the top left and saw the squad number 27. The EDO animation was, to be fair, on the pitiful side, with Adam emitting very little ’heat’. This had the bizarre benefit of getting me excited. This fucking tablet was showing Current Ability clear as day!

What if this could be extrapolated across every league in Europe? Pradeep could be our scouting department. Max, there’s a guy in Croatia whose numbers are rising faster than anyone! Max, I heard your friends at Tranmere want to buy this midfielder but he is very, very terrible!

I rubbed my eyebrows. Clearly, there was potential in this data science stuff. Brentford FC had spent twenty million pounds funding PhD research into all sorts of things relating to football. They got a little back through government grants, but it was still a hefty investment; it must have been providing good value. Chelsea and Notts Forest were doing something similar, while Liverpool had a whole shed full of boffins.

Even boffins needed some social skills, though. ”All right, Pradeep, I’ve made my decision. Not long ago, you sat in that hall over there and listened to me give a speech about how football isn’t just about numbers, it’s about the human aspect too.”

”What?” he said, startled. ”When was that? I only attended the one where you talked about numbers.”

”Jesus wept,” I said. ”Mate. This is a social sport. It’s a team sport. You’ve got something with this model. It does things that I haven’t seen anywhere else and it shows the value in player connections and it accepts that the sport is messy and that players don’t need to be cleanly winning headers to be contributing. That’s all gold. But then you’ve just told me you think Adam Summerhays is shit. I can’t work with someone like that. Everything we do at the club is about getting the most out of Adam Summerhays and players like him. If you think he is not improving, your model is broken. If you think we should just bin him off, you’re not the right fit for Chester. If your work can’t help me improve him, you’re no good to me.”

I thought about another guy with an Indian background, a defender called Vivek. I had scouted him and brought him to training. A coach at Chester said he was dogshit. That coach was wrong, but we had found a way to work together and now he was in charge of our youth system.

”If it was just this, we could maybe get past it, but it’s everything. It’s the bombardment of emails, texts, the hacking, the stalking, the weirdness. You want to get into football because you think it’s loads of numbers but it’s not. It’s people. You wouldn’t be working with me. Look at the league table; I don’t need you. You’d be working with my coaches, with Spectrum from the youth teams, with the players themselves. How old are you?”

”28.”

”Right. You’ve spent a lot of time working on your tech skills and zero effort has gone into social skills, soft skills, emotional intelligence, being a team player. I do not give a shit how smart you are, how brilliant, if you sigh and roll your eyes when a certain player is mentioned. It’s our job to take raw material and make it better. Not everyone is elite. I just scouted a kid who could hit the top end of the fifth tier. Doesn’t he deserve to be treated with respect? Yeah, which is why I signed him. I think there’s value in taking anyone at any level and raising them to their potential whether it’s Premier League or National League. I’ve grown out of tech bro absolutism.

”My system isn’t EDO, it’s seeing high potential in everyone and going to insane lengths to unlock it. For a minute I thought there was a chance you could be part of that, but in the end, you’re not a good fit. So look, this was very interesting and based on what I’ve seen, I’m sure you will get a job at another football club. You can tell them I was impressed. Please don’t contact me again. Don’t contact my assistant.”

I moved to the right and gave Jacob a tiny shoulder massage. He said, ”Are you leaving?”

”Yeah. Have to crush my enemies tomorrow. Early night.”

”Okay, seeya.”

”Bye,” said Stu.

I gave him an exasperated look. ”You’re coming with me!”

”Right right right.”

I left the bar without looking back at Pradeep. Stu and I worked our way through the NEC Arena while I gave the various stands longing looks. I stopped briefly at the one selling hand-made dice. ”Stu, would you rather have an exquisite, unique set of dice... or some jam?”

He perked up. ”Jam, definitely. Blackcurrant. Mmm, yes please!”

”Interesting.” I tried to look blank but inside I was rejoicing. My model was flawless.

***

I had a choice of what to do next. I could go to the hotel and have an early night, or drive back to Chester and sleep next to Emma. Normally, that wasn’t something I needed to think about for very long, but something about the way Pradeep had ruined my mood made me want to be alone.

I went to the hotel and took the elevator. It was filled with some songs that had been turned into an abstract, presumably royalty-free version of itself. It was incredibly familiar but I couldn’t place it. I hummed it in the shower and brooded for a while, slowly coming to the conclusion that while Pradeep was irritating and Danish sports equipment companies should be put in a stockade and publicly shamed, they weren’t the main reason for my grump.

No, it was me coming into contact with Bradford City and their axis of evil.

Gerry Star, the owner, had become interested in English football as an attempt to force Brooke, his daughter, back into his life. He was a deeply sinister person, but Chip Star, Brooke’s brother, was the dimwit who actually ran Bradford. He had signed a few former Chester players, plus a bunch of others that I was interested in. These included Tom Hickman, who I would have turned into a solid Championship defender but who had vanished off the face of the earth, and some Exit Trialists who had believed Chip’s false promises. I hated Chip a hell of a lot more than Pradeep, who was just a nerd who didn’t believe it when he read on LinkedIn that people skills were important.

Then there was Folke Wester, the manager. He was listed as ’insecure’ on the Job Information screen, which made me far too happy. Wester blamed me for his dad, who was also a manager, getting sacked. As part of a long-running feud, Wester had commissioned an article that had slagged me off in all kinds of ways, which didn’t bother me, and that had taken swipes at my mother and Emma. That did bother me. That was unforgivable.

And finally, there was R. Brown. I had discovered him in Manchester when he was a bouncer at a little casino. I’d worked hard to get him to Chester and it turned out he wasn’t just a guy with PA 139, he was a box-to-box midfielder. Just when things were looking rosy for Chester, Brown had used clauses in his contract to sell himself to Saudi Arabia. After a failed spell there, he had returned to England and had helped Bradford to the League Two title. Great. But now they were languishing near the bottom of the League One table and Chester were going to the second tier, just as I had always promised him. Most likely, he would never get close to fulfilling his potential, would never get anywhere close to his maximum earning potential.

Good.

But Adam Summerhays would. That kid had PA 137, two points less than Raffi, but I would make sure he got all the way there. Because of my running battle with the EFL, Adam was in the news and people were looking at him closely. When he started to hit his stride, people would go, shit, Max was right, and that would only make him more marketable. It wouldn’t be all that long before he was earning ten times what R. Brown earned.

Very, very good.

Okay, that was enough spite for one day. I lay on my hotel bed and looked at the ceiling while trying to force myself to think more positively. Start a revolution from my bed? Easy. I only needed to think about Playdar.

The month I’d had with the upgraded Playdar had been little short of amazing; I was building an army.

As a first step, I had bought the Feedback Loop token for 2,500 XP. That was the one that promised XP bonuses when Playdar finds hit certain milestones. A really long-term play considering I wasn’t even sure how long the curse would last, but the thought of finding megastars and missing out on all the free XP was stressful. Plus the token wasn’t all that expensive.

My next purchase wasn’t related to Playdar, but it felt important. Being able to see Dazza’s Morale had helped with that particular crisis, and I had long wanted to add more age groups to my menus. For 2,000 XP, I added the boys under 18s, thinking they were the most likely to be at risk of major meltdowns, and because having their player profiles in my head would allow me to get to know them. That knowledge could help when it came to winning the Youth Cup next season.

Then I had hit the streets of Chester in earnest, only to make too many annoying discoveries - 50-year-old flying wingers playing walking football, 40-year-old goalies playing striker in their work leagues - so I spent 3,000 XP to buy the ’maximum age’ token. I set the age limit to 18, thinking that even if I found a kid with CA 1, I could still train him up into something useful. My clubs had the resources to let someone train quietly in the background for a few years, plus we had a wide network of clubs where our players could get some low-stakes match experience. That was the theory, anyway, and it was put to the test soon after.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences.

Those three purchases left me with:

XP balance: 1,650

If I did a little extra grinding, I would soon have enough to unlock another Attribute. I didn’t like the idea of going an entire season without unlocking one, but being able to use Playdar twice a day was really transformative, and going to three hits a day at a cost of 6,066 XP seemed like the bargain of the century.

What gems had I been unearthing with my twice-a-day scans?

I was still getting some hits in Chester and its environs, but the highest PA guys were coming from a little further afield.

One of the most intriguing finds was a guy called Lucas Hussain. He was 18, a D LC, CA 1, and he only had PA 74. That meant he could be the best player in the National League, or do a half-decent job in League Two. In some ways, not worth bothering with, but why not put him in training, let him spend a couple of years getting to some sort of level, and then reconsider? CA 74 would make him the best defender in the Welsh league, for example, so I registered him with Saltney Town.

Next came Finn Burton, a 16-year-old centre back with PA 110. What a find! He was also CA 1, so a lot of work needed to get to Youth Cup levels; he went straight into Chester’s under 18s squad.

The hits kept coming. Rocco Andrews, 15, CA 1, PA 117... defensive midfielder! Score! When meeting his parents, I casually tossed out the idea that Rocco could train with different age groups so he could progress faster and his dad nearly bit my hand off. Yes! He’ll train every day! I had to talk him down from that particular ledge. Don’t put extra strain on a growing body! That’s how you get massive injury setbacks. Learning to relax is as important as working hard.

Just when I was looking at my squad lists thinking gosh I’ve got a nice crop of 15- and 16-year-old midfielders, Playdar took me to another one. This was in the area around Crewe, which had its own football club famous for developing young players, but they didn’t seem to have been as thorough as I had been in Chester. That’s how I found Chris Ross, 16, MC, PA 114, and on the same day, Rudy Cooke, another centre back, PA 117. Rudy was only 9, but that was fine by me. Stocking up was the name of the game! Every good player we added to an age group was a threat and a challenge to the existing players. Standards went up, as did the numbers of matches they won. Kids were bonkers about winning matches. They found it really motivational for some reason. Something about their underdeveloped little brains, I think. I hoped they would grow out of it. Play with a smile on your face, lads! Enjoy it!

Stephen Watson, the 13-year-old PA 146 DM I had scouted in Liverpool while waiting for Jackie Reaper to get his knees checked, was still the outstanding kid in the younger age groups, but there were more and more triple digit kids swelling our ranks. Exciting.

And that was just the boys. I had also found five girls, though they skewed younger. There was a 16-year-old M RC with PA 133, and then four girls aged 10 or younger. PA 85 goalie; PA 106 left winger; PA 127 left-sided defender; PA 113 left winger.

The girls now had at least five triple-digit prospects in each main age group, with the under 12s looking really strong. The top talent was still Devi Peyad, a PA 149 right midfielder.

Yeah, so much talent, and they were coming into a system full of examples of what patience would get you. What loyalty would get you. What trusting Max Best would get you. Money, glory, fame, progression.

There were not many examples of what happened when you betrayed me, but one was enough.

***

Saturday, April 3

I checked out early and drove north to Manchester to check on mum, her Polish friend Anna, and to walk Solly the dog.

As I got the little guy’s lead from its spot beside the fireplace, Anna eyed me. ”You’re in a black mood.”

I thought about making a joke but Anna would see right through my attempts at deflection. Anyway, she was wise, and she knew about the curse. ”If we win today, we’re promoted. It’s going to be the single best day in the history of Chester FC.”

”I see,” she said, frowning because she didn’t see. ”Who is the opponent?”

”Bradford.”

”Ah. Yes.”

”I’ve got all this anger in me still. I sort of thought I was past it. Anger and resentment.”

”What was the name of the...? This is about the young man with the young baby, yes? Solly liked him.”

”Solly’s an idiot,” I said, sourly, just as my mum came shuffling into the room. ”Last time I trust a psychic dog.”

Mum saw me standing by the fireplace and said, ”Take that look from off your face! If the wind changes you’ll be stuck with it.” She walked on by.

Anna gave me a gentle poke and spoke more quietly. ”She’s doing well. This house has been very good for her. You did a good thing. You are doing many good things. The neighbourhood cats are all very pleased with you.”

”Cats plural?”

”Tell me about Bradford.”

Seeing mum up and about, using her favourite sayings, yeah, that cheered me up. I didn’t want to think about the negatives if I didn’t have to. ”I need to walk Solly.”

”So? Solly can wait. You need to talk to someone. Talk to me.”

”It’s not just R. Brown. Okay, he walked out, which meant he didn’t trust me. Thought I wouldn’t live up to my promises. That hurt. And what’s gonna happen at full-time today when we get promoted and Bradford slip back into relegation danger? Am I going to laugh in his face? I don’t want to do that but I’m not sure I won’t.

”And it’s the manager, as well. He was behind that scurrilous article and he had no problem blasting mum and Emma while he was shooting me. That’s awful. I can’t get over how shit it is to even think to do that. I’ve gone grey mode on a couple of people but not their mums! Jesus Christ. I probably will laugh in his face. If we run up the score I might even be able to get him sacked this weekend.

”And then it’s the owners, too. They’re terrible but they aren’t even in the top 10% of bad owners in this country. I’m supposed to be saving football, right? Yeah, Chester’s flying high but what about every other club?

”I’m going to Bradford this morning to record a podcast but I don’t know what to say. I’m angry and when I daydream answers to likely questions I just sound bitter and resentful and what’s the point of that? I don’t know, Anna, I’m just a bit messed up. I want to play angry but I don’t want to be angry. Not sure if that makes sense.” I tried to explain. ”Playing angry makes me feel strong. Being angry makes me feel weak.”

”Would you like advice?”

”Er... yes, please.”

Anna had been alive for a long time, had studied the mundane and the arcane, could do a cold reading or give a hot take. She summoned the accumulated wisdom of the ancients, eyed me, and said, ”Win.”

”Oh. Win. Win the match?”

”Win the match.”

”That will solve all my problems, will it?”

”It will solve one problem. Good. Now take Solly to the place where he goes.”

***

The Bantamweight Podcast, Episode 155 - Max Best Interview 3

- Welcome to an emergency episode of the Bantamweight podcast, your home for all things Bradford City. I’m Jimmy Lockwood and I’m joined today by Chester FC and Bayern Munich’s Max Best. Max, hi.

- Awite.

- We’re recording this on the morning of our home match against the Seals. Is it the Seals or the Blues?

- It’s both depending on what rhyme you need.

- I know we don’t have a ton of time so let’s get straight into it. At the end of last season when we pipped you to the title, you came on this show and you were... I wouldn’t say gracious in defeat but -

- Magnanimous in defeat, is the phrase you need.

- Oh, is it? [He laughs.] You told us that this season Chester would finish 40 points ahead of us.

- You said you would clip it and use it in the podcast intro. Did you?

- Er, no. [Laughs.] I had a feeling that would come back to haunt me. And my instincts were right. You’re more than 40 points ahead and the way you’re powering ahead I wouldn’t bet against it being 60 come the end of the season. So it’s my turn to be, what was it?

- Maxnanimous.

- Ha ha, okay. The first two times we had you on, you wanted to talk about our owners, the Star family. Are you here to gloat and to taunt them into spending more money?

- There’s nothing to gloat about, really. A bunch of players I wanted ended up here and what’s happened to them? Their careers are in the toilet. A couple of lads I wanted from the Exit Trials chose Bradford. Chose Chip. You can’t choose Chip - that’s absurd. Where are they now? Nowhere. Zero minutes, zero prospect of minutes. Look at Chester and I’m literally waging war with the EFL for the right to use more kids in my teams. You get rejected from your academy, you’re one of the very lucky ones who get a second chance, you reject Max Best, a proven developer of young players, and you choose Chip, a renowned clown. I don’t know. I just resent it, to be honest. Everywhere I turn there’s someone at Bradford who pisses me off, but it all stems from the same source. The fish rots from the head.

- You’re talking about the Stars.

- I’m glad you mentioned the 50 points thing because I think it shows that I have some ability to look at a squad, a manager, an owner, and to say well, they will most likely finish in such-and-such a position. Teams can always surprise you, right, and weak teams can go on a run or well-constructed teams can mysteriously implode, but I’m better at predictions than most. Is that fair?

- Right now I can’t disagree.

- I said last time or the time before that all I want is for there to be a Bradford City when I’m old. I used to play as Bradford on Soccer Supremo. My first choice was Carlisle United because they’re the only team for miles and I thought you could build a strong little nation, kind of thing, sort of a proto-Game of Thrones king in the north idea. But I think I used to get frustrated that the board wouldn’t expand the stadium as much as I wanted, and then I’ll load up a new database and play as Bradford because I loved having big crowds from day one. I know it’s not much to build an affection on but it’s a lot more than I had with Chester the day I rocked up there. So yeah, I want there to be a Bradford City long into the future and it’s aggravating that because I’m going to smash you up today, no-one’s gonna actually listen to me.

- Oh, you’re confident about today, are you?

- Mate, I’m going to go apeshit.

- Okay.

- It’s gonna be a punishment beating. I’ve told my players I don’t want goals from open play, just from free kicks.

- What?

- Folke Wester is going to send his players out with orders to kick the shit out of us. We’re going to score from the free kicks we get. That’s justice. Okay but listen, what I was saying is that I’m good at predicting how a club is going to do in the short-term, but I have absolutely no clue what’s going to happen to Bradford City this summer and that worries me.

- What do you mean, exactly? I don’t quite...

- Last season, you won League Two, got promoted, and Gerry Star’s five million quid investment was worth ten million. He should have sold and walked away with his profit.

- But you called him out on this podcast and provoked him into spending more money and having a run at another promotion.

- Ryan Reynolds is as much to blame, surely? Anyway, Chip Star spent millions on players who didn’t improve the squad, and as soon as the club’s forward momentum stopped, Folke Wester reverted to type, meaning brutal, bone-crunching tackles, and you’re sliding down the table. Assuming you stay up, what’s Gerry Star’s next move? He knows his son is an idiot who got lucky one season, so there’s zero prospect of getting a promotion to the Championship, like, ever. With the new money trickling down from the Premier League, the club will be worth more. Maybe he could get 12 million pounds? That’s a small profit but any profit’s a good profit.

Or will Chip be able to persuade his dad that Wester’s the problem, not him? But after another season of Chip, the total spent on Bradford will be, like, thirteen million. Negative equity, no prospect of ever getting your money back. I think Gerry has to sell this summer but my gut is telling me he won’t and it’s just going to get grim around here. Ticket prices up, redundancies, penny-pinching. All that stuff.

- You’d be laughing, right?

- I’ll laugh every time Wester fails or Chip gets fleeced by an agent. Father Chipmas, they call him. But I won’t laugh at fans getting rinsed or people losing their jobs. The only person who should lose his job over Chip’s incompetence is Chip. Look, maybe it’s going to be fine. Maybe they’ll announce a sale to some rich American family whose ancestors came from Yorkshire, something like that.

But what are you going to do if that doesn’t happen and you find that your local community football club is being run like it’s a branch of Gerry’s godawful supermarkets? Your tea lady being timed when she goes to the bathroom and if she takes too long, masked security guards appear and throw her out onto the street. The nice little perks the staff get, like one time a season they can get their niece or nephew to be a match day mascot, they’re all cut. Now it’s 300 quid if you want to go on the pitch with the players, no exceptions unless your name is Star. Do you know what I mean? Think of all the shittest things that could happen and now imagine them being announced day after day, month after month, because that’s where this is going.

- It’s all a bit over the top, don’t you think? They have made a lot of mistakes as owners but they have put their own money into the club.

- Chasing promotion, but that dream is over. It’s time for the dream to become a nightmare. Jimmy, listen, all I’m saying is, your club is owned by a sociopath who has zero feelings towards you, Yorkshire, your history, or anything. If I were you, I would want to be prepared.

- Prepared how?

- [Pause.] I’ve been thinking about this for a while and can’t think of a good way to fix the sport. There are too many rich idiots willing to throw money into a great big pit. The only option that starts to look healthy is a reverse takeover.

- What do you mean by that?

- Start a phoenix club. Bradford Phoenix. It would start low down the pyramid, like in the 8th tier. You get a couple of promotions and you wait. When the main club turns toxic, you stop going to Valley Parade. Don’t buy season tickets, don’t buy merch, give your time and money to the phoenix club. They get promoted a couple more times and when the main club finally implodes from having no fans, you buy the badge, the name, the stadium, and you carry on, but now you own the club and you can run it as it should be run - as the hub of your local community. I’ll help the phoenix club get into League Two. That part’s easy.

The hard part’s persuading fans they don’t need to be owned by a dick. That’s why I’m here. It’s like, you need to start thinking about this. Get your fan groups together, do some networking with clubs like Bury, FC United, AFC Wimbledon, yeah, Chester, to see what you can learn from them. You could agree on a constitution already. You could agree on names and colours and all sorts. Have it all ready to go at a moment’s notice. You’re not powerless. And the more you get behind the project, the more serious you are, the less Gerry Star will be able to gut this place. If every tea lady he sacks costs him 500 season ticket sales, he’ll have to behave. Do you know what I mean? Take back control of your club.

- Max, I’m all for fan ownership, but it only works in Germany because every club is in the same boat. If you’re the only club in League One that’s fan owned, you can’t compete.

- You mean like Chester?

- Come on. Chester have you.

- Are you trying to say... there’s only one Max Best?

- Yes.

- Say it so I can clip it and make it my ring tone.

- Ha ha.

- Yeah being fan-owned is a challenge because you have to have a realistic budget but what do you want? You want two years of an owner spending silly money on garbage players and then five, six, seven years of being at war with him? Look around. That’s how it went with Reading, with Morecambe, with Sheffield Wednesday, with loads of clubs. What if every club in the EFL had a phoenix club bubbling around in the lower tiers, just waiting to be sort of activated, do you know what I mean? In ten years we could have fifteen fan-owned clubs in the top tiers.

The playing field would start to level out, right? You could run a club at break even and not be guaranteed relegation. When there’s enough fan-owned clubs, we could take it from there. You know in baseball there’s a luxury tax? Do that in footy. If you’re a billionaire who wants to buy the title, you can, but you pay a tax on your spending that goes to the fan-owned clubs. I don’t know, it’s just theoretical, and look, Bradford isn’t my club. I just wanted to start that conversation. If you start a new club, I’ll support it.

- What does support it mean, exactly?

- It means one promotion a year whenever you need it. Every other phoenix club has loved those seasons. You win every week and you get to go to random places you’ve never heard of and everyone there’s really friendly and you’re basically the Man United of non-league for a few seasons. It’s fun!

- I’ve heard fans talk like that, yeah.

- Hey, I’ve got a question. Why is Wester using 4-4-1-1 these days?

- Sorry, my head is spinning. Um... At the start of the season we were shipping too many goals, so we went 4-4-2, but we couldn’t get the strikers into the game so we tried having a link man between the midfield and the striker. That’s your old mate Raffi Brown. We’re just doing enough to keep out of trouble - just - but it’s a slog as you can tell by the league table. But Max, I know what some might say. They’ll say you’re trying to divide the fanbase.

- That sort of assumes Bradford City lives rent-free in my head, right? Because you beat me last season. But I’m off to the Championship. I’ll never come up against Chip Star, Folke Wester, or R. Brown ever again. You won the battle, I won the war. Today’s the end of it. What comes next is up to you but I’d like you united behind the principle that if this owner or a future owner takes the piss, you go to plan B.

- Yeah. I can’t see it happening.

- Start the discussion, is all.

- Yeah. What’s mad is that you’re pissing the league but it didn’t feel like that until very recently.

- I know what you mean. To me promotion was always nailed on but to the outside world I can see how it looked tight. Oxford kept within 6 points for the first half of the season and Portsmouth were close for most of the second half. Plus we’ve only had a couple of big wins. There was a 5-1 against Bristol Rovers and a 4-1 against Charlton. Like, top teams normally have a statement win, right? From a storytelling point of view, it’s a shame that our final two games are against Plymouth and Portsmouth because if they had been, say, a month ago, they would have been massive.

- But you were confident from the start?

- Yeah, especially when we did well in that run of away matches we had while the pitch was being relaid. 25 points from 10 games, all away, I mean, it allowed us to shift our resources around and that’s why we’re in the Vans Trophy final.

- Shifting resources is code for sending out weakened teams.

- If our team is weak, why can’t anyone beat it?

- I can’t wait to see what you do against Oxford on Tuesday. It’s going to be a squad of 16-year-olds, isn’t it?

- At Chester, we take it one match at a time. I didn’t even know we were playing Oxford next until you said it just now.

- Sure. You’re going to put out loads of kids because the cup final is a few days later, and you’re going to get a fine. You should be careful, though. If you go too far you could get a points reduction.

- So we’ll only finish 59 points ahead of Bradford. Oh no.

- Savage.

- I don’t see much of Aff and Carl Carlile in your squads these days.

- They’re basically out the door.

- Out the door? I thought they had three year contracts?

- It’s two plus one, as far as I know. The club isn’t going to trigger the final year. Don’t you know all this?

- No. I don’t have big chats with former players about their contracts, you know. It’s awkward. I see Aff now and then but we don’t talk about footy. I text Carl sometimes. He sent me a big message after my Hungary thing. Contracts are running out, huh? So I could run my mouth and goad Chip into extending their deals? I’m not sure they’d thank me for that. The money’s probably good but I reckon they would want to become a free agent and go somewhere they would actually play. Or maybe at this point in their career, they’d prefer the money?

- The fans would like to see them gone. No offence, mind. They’re just costing money and they aren’t up to the level.

- You didn’t get to see the best of them. In my mind’s eye I think they will find... a better place to play.

- I hope so, for their sake. Model professionals, for sure.

- Ah, well. I think I’m gonna shoot off. Sorry about what’s coming in the match today. I’d say it isn’t personal, but it is.

- Max Best, thanks for speaking with us today.

***

League One Match 41 of 46: Bradford City vs Chester

I drove my Mini to a services stop on the M62 and waited for Sealbiscuit to pull in. One of the guys from 3 R Welsh hopped off - he would drive my car back to Bumpers, quick fifty quid for the lad - and I got on. I settled into my seat and went over the plan with Sandra.

”You still want to grind?” she said.

”Yeah. They’ll try to get physical but we can match them. Bring it on, right?”

”I get you want to go smashy-smash but we could do 3-4-3 and pass them to death. Just saying.”

I nodded. ”That would be smart.”

She smiled. ”You’re not feeling smart?”

”Nah. My shelves are full of rage bottles and today’s the day I clean my aura by turning them into Molotovs.”

She took out her notebook. ”Okay. Goalie is still Swanny? Sticky is better on the rough stuff.”

”Swanny can handle himself all right.” I rubbed my forehead. I hadn’t asked Pradeep how his model dealt with goalies, or even if it did. Ah, well. ”Sticky’s had plenty of matches this season, right? Swanny gets today, the cup final, last game of the season, and Sticky can have the rest.” Ian Swan was 111/127, while Sticky had advanced to 106/122. I pulled at my lip, thinking about the four matches that would follow the cup final. They were basically meaningless, except the last one where we would parade our silverware around the Deva Stadium. ”Can we sneak a Banksy in somewhere?”

Sandra pulled a face. ”No. He’s nowhere near ready. You don’t even want to use him in the Cheshire Cup final. How can he play in League One?”

”Yeah,” I said, reluctantly. Banksy needed some action to kick on, otherwise he would be stuck in the slow lane of improvement like most reserve goalies. It was a problem for Future Max, who was someone I trusted implicitly. ”Okay, Folke’s going to get physical, hurl crosses into the box and all that crap. I want 4-1-4-1, mostly beefy boys. Cole left back.” 108/147; a fantastic season of improvement, and with his height and bravery he was perfect for the kind of fight we were going to have today. ”Christian and Zach.” 112/120 and 111/139. ”Magnus.” CA 104, and showing no sign of hitting a ceiling. His time in Gibraltar had slowed him down at first, but he had caught up pretty well. That was good to know because I would be doing something very similar at the start of next season.

Sandra was thinking ahead, too. ”If Helge’s going to be our first-choice right back, that’ll free up Magnus to play DM or midfield.”

”Yep. It’ll be like signing a new player. Okay, Youngster as DM.” 116/181.

”Are you confident he’ll get the better of Brown?”

”Yeah,” I said. ”Brown won’t get a kick, and when we’re defending the box it’s up to Christian and Zach to track him. Cole or Magnus will be coming in from the far side of the cross, so we’ll have three tall guys against the striker and Brown, with Youngster there ready to snap up any loose balls. I mean, if that goes wrong it’s just crazy bad luck. Okay, left midfield is Joel.” Our January signing was 120/138 and racking up high match ratings like you’d expect from one of the best players in the division. He wasn’t as flashy or productive as Charlie Dugdale had been, but he quietly went about winning most of his duels and playing fast, neat passes. Great value for money.

”Then it’s you,” said Sandra. ”You’re not going to get sent off, are you?”

”Me? What a suggestion. I’ll lose position but I won’t lose my temper. Not enough to get a red card, anyway. Andrew will cover me when I drive forward.” The oldest triplet was 100/121, and was well-suited for a role such as today’s. Run, tackle, be an option when we are in possession, cover for me when I went marauding. ”Bark on the right.” Another new member of the triple-digit club. Bark was 100/130, and Bradford’s left back would assume the lad was there to be bullied. He would be mistaken.

Sandra was scribbling notes. ”And Gabby as the lone striker.”

”Yep.” Our record signing - for the moment - had taken advantage of the training cap to (almost) catch up to his mates. He was now 110/161, just one point behind Dazza, who was in Thailand taking care of his brother. Colin Beckton was three points higher but today I didn’t need a skilful striker with clever movement - I needed a large hunk of Brazilian steak that I could slap in Folke Wester’s face.

Excluding me, our average CA would be 109.2. Pretty decent considering Andrew and Bark were relatively weak.

The bench was fantastic, too. As well as Sticky, Adam Summerhays, Omari, and Colin Beckton, I had the option to bring on Peter Bauer (CA 97), Fitzroy Hall (108), or Wibbers (109).

Sandra tapped the page. ”How do we rank on your metals score?”

”Excluding me, six platinum.”

”Seven platinum, then.”

”And four gold.”

”Wow. A first eleven of platinum and gold players? When did Andrew...?” She looked behind her, not wanting to be overheard.

”This week,” I said. ”Bark, too.”

Sandra nodded. ”Seven and four. That’s quite the improvement from the start of the season.”

”Yeah...” I went over something I had calculated hundreds of times. ”I think the mess at Bumpers hasn’t cost us too badly. We maybe lost some fractional improvements but nothing drastic. Wibbers didn’t lose anything. I think we just about got away with it.”

”Max,” said Sandra. She looked away, then back at me. ”Don’t lose your head out there. We need a win today to wrap up promotion so that we can ah, rotate the squad against Oxford and be in top condition for the cup final.”

”What makes you think I’ll lose my head?”

She seemed to be trying to think of something to say, but then gave my arm a shake and left me alone in my spot.

***

In the warm-up, the guy in charge of the music at Valley Parade was playing Oasis noise-walls (i.e. ’songs’), presumably to annoy me. It worked. I was pleased to see that Bradford were just as weak as my estimates. They had improved shockingly little through the season, crawling through glass to reach a whopping CA 92.

Their best player was their striker, who was CA 102. My centre backs would ruin him. Chipper, a firebrand Welsh striker who could have been a good player for Chester, was languishing in the 90s and was on the bench, not for the first time in his career.

The goalie was CA 90, the defenders ranged from 85 to 97, the midfielders 85 to 94, and R. Brown was CA 95. This was a guy who had once been ahead of Youngster. Now he was being left in the dust.

Shame.

***

In the dressing room, I gave a quick pre-match speech. ”Lads,” I said, getting their attention. ”My favourite band is Oasis. Yeah, don’t act surprised, Sandra. I love all their work. My favourite tracks are, let me see, Parklife and Song 2. Yeah, absolute bangers.”

Sandra, who loved Oasis because Oasis loved Man City, shook her head. ”You can’t wind me up that easily, Max.”

”I can’t believe you used the last pay rise I gave you to buy Oasis tickets with dynamic pricing. You really shouldn’t put your life in the hands of a rock ’n’ roll bland, Sandra.”

”Bland? Oh my God.”

”Blur won the Battle of Britpop and Oasis aren’t even one of the top 5 Manchester guitar bands. Okay, but as I was saying, my favourite Oasis song is Look Back In Anger.”

”Don’t,” warned Sandra.

”It’s about how satisfying it is to daydream about destroying your enemies. You all know my beef with these Bradford pricks. I consider this match to be a 90-minute therapy session. Shock therapy, where I fucking electrify this ground. I’ll be shooting from all angles. I’ll be shooting from corners. I’ll be going on mad, impossible dribbles. Okay? Probably a little bit annoying from your POV, tbh, but I need you to do your jobs. Just keep your zones locked down and let me be the wild card. Okay, cool. Sandra, how are you feeling?”

She was rubbing her chin. I had actually annoyed her! Her eyes rolled up to mine. ”I’m feeling supersonic.”

Gabriel shot to his feet with a big grin. He pointed his hand to the ceiling and yelled, ”Give me gin and tonic!”

”No!” I cried. ”No singing Oasis! Veto!”

I was outvoted 30 to 1.

***

The Bradford fans were well up for this one. Noisy as fuck, defiant, giving me dog’s abuse from the very start. The towering Main Stand, combined with the Kop End, made Valley Parade intimidating at times. Behind one of the goals, 1,840 Chester fans were in party mood, ready to celebrate one of the greatest days in the club’s history.

I skipped the pre-match handshakes by pretending to be doing manager things in the dugout until just before kick off. That got me away from R. Brown but put me closer to Folke Wester. How was this prick still in my life? I had to end him today. Up in the Main Stand, I thought I got a glimpse of Chip Star, his latest squeeze, and his moronic frat boy mates.

I strolled to my position in midfield, the match kicked off, and it was immediately a hundred-mile-an-hour affair. Blood and thunder. Wester had told his players to get stuck in - their match instructions were set to ’hard tackling’. Pathetic. We were going to the second tier but eight of our starting lineup had played non-league. We couldn’t be roughed up but desperate managers kept on trying.

I mostly stayed out of it at first, keeping an eye on everything, jogging to cut off a passing lane here, competing for a header there. Bradford tried to kick me, tried to get in a sneaky elbow, but I dodged or gave it back to them tenfold.

Youngster was scampering around like a naked mole rat, chewing up every ball that came near him. Christian Fierce looked in dominant mood. Gabby was patently thrilled to be starting such a crucial match, and he was working hard.

The weak spot? Obviously Bark.

5’

Evergreen controls the ball well and pushes it towards Barkley.

Barkley turns straight into a defender, who comes away with the ball.

Bradford have a chance to build something here.

The left back is winding up to hit a cross...

What a great tackle!

Barkley sprinted back to atone for his mistake.

He has left the left back crumpled in a heap.

The away fans are cheering that to the rafters!

There is some pushing and shoving amongst the players.

Manager Max Best is staying well out of it.

No weak spots then. I had the feel of the pace of the game now.

7’

Harrison jumps for the header, but loses out.

The ball is nudged towards Brown.

The goalscoring midfielder touches the ball and looks for support.

Youngster is on Brown quickly.

Brown cuts to face the other width but Youngster is still with him.

Brown turns again.

And again.

But he can’t shake Youngster loose.

Harrison sprints to nick the ball away from Brown.

It’s with Adams.

He finds Reid on the left, close to the halfway line.

Reid with a simple touch to Best.

Best’s first touch takes Bradford’s number 6 out of the game.

Best keeps going. He’s picking up speed!

He looks to surge into the penalty area...

But shoots left-footed!

It whistles over the bar!

The home fans are jeering that effort. Best is the pantomime villain today.

Fuck! I thought I had hit that one just right. Something about the connection I’d made had given the ball an extra kick and it had started a little too high.

The big screen to the side of the away end showed Chip Star in the VIP box, laughing.

I mean, in normal circumstances that could have been an amazing way to get under my skin.

In normal circumstances. And these circumstances.

9’

Best gathers the ball and gives it to Harrison.

Best points wide. Harrison plays it to Barkley.

He waits for the challenge to come, stands strong, and touches the ball to Best.

Best wants to feed the ball down the line to Barkley but the young winger has been pulled to the turf.

Best complains to the referee. Nothing doing!

Harrison is sprinting to take up the vacant right midfield position. Bradford are having to reorganise on the fly.

Best is moving ever closer to the penalty area. He lines up a delicate through-ball to Harrison...

But instead pings it to Gabriel. The Brazilian striker deflects it out wide to Harrison.

And now Harrison is fouled!

It was great play by Chester and a desperate lunge from the centre back. He is fortunate to escape with just a telling-off from the referee.

Chester will have a great opportunity to send in a cross from the right.

I wanted to give the referee a blast, but skipped it. With the ball in my hands, I used Masterpiece Theatre to position my players. The entire back four went into the box, along with Joel, Bark, and of course Gabby. Andrew was on the edge of the box, with Youngster as the last defender. No fucking about on this one. I used Free Hit to boost our chances of scoring by ten percent. An early goal would demoralise our opponents and I’d be able to run up the score.

I spotted Bradford’s goalie taking up a very aggressive position so I took a couple of steps closer to his goal line and threatened to send the cross left-footed - or even shoot. He took a few steps back. Yeah, stay in your crevice, you worm.

On the Masterpiece Theatre screen, I put everyone right on the penalty spot, and just as I started my crossing motion - moving back onto my right foot - I made everyone run in different directions, like an explosion.

One guy stayed still, though. My actual target.

Best decides to use his right foot.

He speeds to the ball and sends in a vicious, curving cross.

Gabriel rises...

GOOOOAAAALLLL!!!!

An unstoppable cross followed by an unstoppable header!

The away fans are bouncing.

If the score stays like this, Chester will play in the second tier for the first time in the club’s history!

I sprinted towards the home team’s dugout, right in front of Folke Wester, and spread my arms wide. The goal had only made my anger worse; it was boiling over. I raised my hands to shoulder level with all my fingers pressed against my thumbs, and made an explosive flicking motion in Wester’s direction. I couldn’t tell you why I did it; I had never done anything of the sort before.

He fucking got the message though, and it all kicked off. Wester’s assistants came at me. Chipper came at me. Someone in the crowd threw an empty water bottle.

Zach and Magnus pulled me away from the scene and it took a minute for things to settle down. That’s when the Chester guys struck up a chorus of ’You’re getting sacked in the morning’, which the home fans took exception to. Objects were thrown towards the away fans, who, let’s be honest, chucked some stuff back. Much of it hit a plastic windshield. Some police appeared, and tons of guys in hi-vis vests went to that corner.

The referee had checked with his team to find out exactly what I had done. He came over to me. ”Best, did you flick a cigarette at Folke?”

I noted that I got surnamed, while Wester was treated like an old pal. ”Dude, are you high? Cigarette? From where? A fucking kiosk?”

”You flicked something at him.”

”I did not.”

”If I find that you did, you’re for the high jump.”

”But we’re going to the Championship and you don’t ref in the Championship, do you? That’s because you let your mate’s thugs run riot.”

”He’s not my mate.”

”Right.”

I moved away from the guy and spotted that Christian had grabbed our lads and formed a huddle. I wondered what he had said. Probably to keep concentrating, not to let things spiral.

Good advice.

The match resumed and so that I could smash into a variety of opponents, I drifted around midfield, idly adjusting the other players as I did so. When I went left, I slid Joel’s icon into the middle. When I went right, Bark tucked inside. It was showing off, really. Just making us look like the amazingly well-coached team we were.

When things had calmed somewhat, I went back into the middle, played the position with extreme diligence, and slowly nudged our defensive line a little higher, and a little higher, and a little higher, until we were basically playing the entire match in Bradford’s half. To their credit, the home team were defending stoutly. They kept their shape and their distances and it wasn’t easy to progress the ball.

Just as we were suffocating them and their fans were getting restless, I moved our defensive line all the way back causing us to get way too spread out. I played a shit pass and the home team gleefully rushed into the void.

17’

Mistake from Best! That was a lazy pass.

Bradford can counter. They work the ball neatly to their right.

Chester’s players are rushing to regain their defensive shape.

The ball ends up with Brown. He holds off Youngster and plays a pass wide.

It’s a great chance for the right-back to cross, and the home team have numbers forward.

The cross comes in...

It’s a good one!

Green heads clear.

Youngster picks the ball up.

He looks up. Best is unmarked on the left of the halfway line.

Youngster plays the pass. It’s short.

Best’s grunt of frustration is audible. Bradford’s players are streaming back into their positions.

Best dribbles down the left.

He accelerates and looks up. Gabriel is an option in the middle, but there isn’t much else.

Best gets his head down and turns on the afterburners. What speed!

He’s into the penalty area.

What will he do?

He drives ever closer to goal. One defender is between Best and goal. The other is guarding space.

Gabriel makes a nice move, drawing the defender away.

Best shapes to roll the ball towards the far post, moves it onto his left foot, and fires it into the roof of the net!

The keeper had no chance.

The home fans are stunned.

How did he score from that angle?

Best is running towards the home dugout.

His entire team is rushing to intercept him!

It’s a race to see who will get there first.

Barkley shows great strength to hold Best up long enough for support to arrive.

Best claims to be calm!

He demands the others back away. They obey, cautiously.

Best mimes smoking a cigarette...

And mimes flicking it away!

The more I was giving lip to Wester, the more the Chester fans were going bonkers. That stand can’t ever have been louder or more rambunctious than it was today. The Live Table had us on 96 points. Mathematically certain to go up. Almost certain to be the champions. The fact that I was so obviously sticking it to my enemies made everything even sweeter.

My head was pounding, a pure revenge high. Christian Fierce put his arm around me and led me towards the middle of the pitch. ”Do you want me to leave in the summer?”

”What?” I said, confused.

”Do you want me out or is it my choice?”

”Your choice, but...” I had to think about what the choice was. ”The money, mate. I’ll give you a juicy raise but you can do better.”

”I think I want to stay.”

”Oh,” I said. I hadn’t expected that. I brought up the squad list. I had three centre backs around the CA 110 mark, plus Peter Bauer was closing in fast, and Tomzilla was another step behind. Five centre backs seemed about right. ”That should work but you’ll have to leave at the end of next season.”

”Fantastic,” he said.

The match kicked off again. I felt like I had been meaning to do something but had forgotten. I strolled around, taking up my positions, checking the match ratings, tweaking our positions to get more solid or to generate more threat as the situation demanded it. Oh, and getting fouled non-stop while smashing into as many Bradford players as possible. When Brown had the ball, I started in his direction but found it was more satisfying to let Youngster deal with him. One shit pass aside, my loyal friend was playing superbly.

Over the course of ten minutes, I nudged our defensive line higher to really put the squeeze on Bradford. This time, I wouldn’t even give them the illusion of an escape. This time we would keep up the pressure.

There was a break in play while a Bradford guy got treatment, and the idiot in charge of the big screen showed Folke Wester. ”Sacked in the morning!” chanted the Chester fans, and this time there was less dissent from the home fans. The screen cut to Chip Star. ”Who are ya?” yelled the Chester mob. Chip spotted himself and decided to turn the big screen into a kiss cam. His date was comically annoyed, but Chip, having Pradeep levels of self-awareness, didn’t seem to notice.

Fuck all these guys. I had thousands of bottles filled with all the screams I had left unvoiced. Time to use them to power me up.

The match resumed and as promised, I went apeshit.

I dribbled, played one-twos, shot from distance. I dribbled, passed, created small-scale relationist situations, and just when things couldn’t get better, Wester decided to ask R. Brown to man-mark me. Brown came at me while I was playing ten-inch passes with Joel. Brown wasn’t the sort to fly into tackles, but he had learned from Sam Topps how to make it seem as though he would. He came at me, a mass of muscle, and I dabbed the ball between his legs and ran around the other side before hitting a shot just about as hard as I’d ever hit one. It crashed into a defender’s face, which was good news for the goalie, and good news for the defender’s dentist.

”Fuck!” I screamed, because that would have been one of my favourite goals ever. The meg was close enough to the shot that it would appear in all the replays, all the crazy TikTok mashups.

Youngster came over to me and gave me a sort of bashful sideways bump. ”Mr. Landlord, I have a question about my new flat.”

”What? Now?”

”I noticed that it has a low energy efficiency rating. What steps will you be taking to address that?”

”The fuck are you talking about?” I looked from him to Christian. ”Are you trying to distract me from my righteous anger? That’s not going to work, mate. I’m fuming and livid and nothing can stop me.”

”Yes, I quite understand. It did occur to me that you love putting solar panels on things. Why not your flats? I can loan you the money if you need it.”

”You can, can you?”

”Yes.”

”I don’t know why you’re doing this. I’m in complete control. Have you seen me even look like I might kick someone?”

”Yes.”

”Well, I won’t.”

”Please do not get sent off. You will miss the cup final.” He ambled away, looking slightly disappointed. In himself? In me?

The match resumed with us still two goals to the good. We had Bradford penned back and we were cranking up the pressure. Bark was a good outlet on the right, though we lacked some spark on the left.

Since Brown was tailing me, I moved Joel into the middle, instructed Cole to stay back, and went to be a mystery winger on the left. Brown came with me, meaning I had two opponents watching me. Crazy. I switched us to 3-4-3 with Christian and Zach as strikers alongside Gabby, and a back three of Cole, Magnus, and Youngster. I trusted them completely but hit the Seal It Up perk anyway, to give us a little extra security for the next fifteen minutes.

The drastic change in formation caused pandemonium. We were launching long passes into the penalty area, where we had positioned three guys who won most of their aerial duels. The ball spent most of its time pinballing around Bradford’s box, and when they cleared it, they didn’t get very far. There was not much goal threat from Bradford, because I had dragged their most dangerous player over to right back and they didn’t have a speed merchant who could launch deadly counters.

The home fans realised something had gone very badly wrong - the fact that our ’shots’ stat was spinning higher was a clue. There were some scattered boos, followed by a chant of ’We want Wester out, said we want Wester out.’

Swanny was pretty bored, so he came out of his goal towards halfway. He was good at hitting long passes, so for a laugh I made him our playmaker. He launched a bombardment at Bradford’s penalty spot. One of these passes was headed clear by a Bradford player, but Joel was first to the second ball and he did a neat little piece of skill to get past an opponent. I was fascinated to see what would happen next because a right-footer would have shot, but Joel was quite left-footed. I never got to see what happened next because Joel was hauled down.

Foul.

Direct free kick, 30 yards from goal, at a perfect angle for a right footer.

This was it.

This was the moment Folke Wester’s career would end.

While I waited for the ref to sort out the wall and all the other overly-fussy crap they did, I thought about the scurrilous article. I hadn’t memorised the entire thing word for word but I knew huge chunks of it off by heart. It had said horrible things about a local teacher, an innocent young receptionist, Emma, and my mum.

The ref blew his whistle.

Anger for motivation versus control. Find the sweet spot on the ball and in your soul. Three-toed, methinks. The Pirlo method. Quick eyes to the left to mess with the goalie’s balance, hammer it hard, flat, more or less straight ahead, let the ball find its own path.

Anger as fuel.

In my vision, the ball had steam rising off it. It oscillated like a piece of corn in a searing hot pan. I stared at it, kicked through it, and snarled. The bastard thing whooshed over the wall, rose, dipped, slapped into the back of the net. The keeper had barely started to dive.

My players surrounded me, celebrated me towards the far side of the pitch, the one away from the dugouts. Away from trouble.

In the middle of the mess, Zach called out. ”Boss! He’s not worth it. He’ll be fired at half time!”

That was an enticing prospect. Imagine if that happened! I made a special effort to stay out of trouble, resetting our tactics to be more conventional, to focus on short passes and keeping possession. I needed to know what half time would bring.

***

When the whistle went to end the half, my bros once again formed a sort of cocoon around me, escorting me into the dressing room with no new incidents, though there was rather a lot of shouting coming at me from the Main Stand and from Bradford’s coaches and subs. Hi, Chipper!

I sat on the dressing room bench and took on liquids. We had been three-nil up against Bradford once before, and they had played dead so that I would sub myself off. With me off the pitch, they had a right fucking go and ended up getting a draw. That match had cost us the title.

I was fitter now, and could easily play like this for the whole 90. Especially if all I had to do was stand in the corner with two guys watching me.

Sandra surprised me by getting everyone’s attention in the time I liked to keep quiet. ”Guys, listen up.” She made eye contact with some of the starters before landing on me. ”This isn’t how I want today to go. We’ve scored three goals and no-one has gone to our fans. Max, you’ve made your point. You’ve had your revenge. Now we pivot. We get back to pure Chesterness, and that means we’re doing it for the fans and we’re building a squad for next season and all that jazz. We should look to give minutes to Adam and Omari, and we should take our foot off the accelerator. We have a cup final in one week. Let’s calm it down.”

I tutted. ”You know what they did, Sandra.”

”I know what they did, and that’s why we did it your way in the first half. Punishment beating? Er, yeah, tick. Done. You pounded them into the dirt. Now I want to do 3-4-3 and pass them to death. Spread the minutes, let our fans start the party instead of starting a riot.”

I looked down at my boots. The boots my mum had bought me. ”I know you’re right,” I said, softly, ”but I can’t make the switch.”

”I know it’s hard,” said Sandra. ”So I’ve got someone here to help.”

I sat bolt upright, worried, hoping it wasn’t Emma. How humiliating would that be? Ems, can you come into the dressing room and talk to your maniac boyfriend?

The door opened a crack, but not further. Someone must have given Sandra a signal, because she got a big, fake grin and did a weird voice. ”My favourite country,” she declared, ”is Straya.”

The door opened wide, and in strode Darren Smith in one of those Aussie hats with all corks dangling down. He had one for Sandra, too. ”Straya!” he agreed.

I shot to my feet, intending to get over there and hug the guy, but I was pretty much last in the queue. It took a full minute for me to get to him. ”Mate!” I said, finally. ”You should be in Thailand with your bro. What the hell?”

Dazza was tanned, relaxed, and chill. ”Mate,” he said, his arm around me while we faced the rest of the squad. I thought our average Morale had peaked at 5.7 but it blazed past 6. ”I was there with Lachie.” Dazza paused because the corks were bobbing around. He took the hat off and put it on me. ”Suits you, gaffer! Keeps the flies away.”

”And the ladies,” I said, flicking one of the corks.

”Not for me,” said Dazza, smugly. ”So’s I was with Lachie, chilling, getting some sun, feet up, loving life, and he says to me, how long are you gonna be laying about here fer? I said, till you’re better, mate. He goes, well I’m fucking better, champ, so pack yer bags and get to that cup final. I go, boss gave me the season off, no way am I playing the final. He goes, is that the same boss that’s gonna pick up another fine on Tuesday night when he sends out the under twelves? I go, nah, it’ll be the under sixteens, ah reckon. He goes, you’re just gonna let him get in trouble, are you? How about you fucking muck in, mate? Play on Tuesday and get yourself to Wembley whether you play or not. I’ll be just fine without you for a week. Come back after that if you must.” Everyone was smiling, amazed to see our mate back and happy. Some intensity came into Dazza’s expression. ”I wanna play on Tuesday, boss. I need to. They can’t say it’s a weakened team if I’m in it.” This caused a howl of derision from the squad, which made him laugh. ”You know I’m right! Boss, you put me in that team with the up-and-coming players, yeah? With Adam, with Omari... with Zach.”

Absolute howls of laughter from everyone except the Texan, who threw his hands to his head going, ”Bro! What the heck!”

When the laughter died down, I said, ”Dazza, are you serious? You came back to help us avoid getting a fine on Tuesday night?”

He licked his lips. ”Yeah. For you and for the fans who bought tickets before they knew, like, we were gonna bin it off.”

”All right,” I said. I lifted the hat off, peered at it, and with a smile, put it back on. ”It’s likely to be a, ahem, youthful team. You might be the most senior outfield player. You know what? Guys, listen to this. On Tuesday night, Chester FC is going to have its first ever Australian captain.”

Cheers. Hugs. Giant plastic spiders flung to the ceiling like mortar boards at a graduation ceremony.

”Listen up!” cried Sandra. ”Game face on.” We all settled down, sat back on the dressing room bench. Dazza wedged himself between me and Youngster. I took the Aussie hat off and eyed Sandra, who was looking right at me. ”Boss. How are we gonna do the second half?”

I checked the tactics screens. Folke Wester was shifting his guys around into a 5-3-2 shape, one he hoped would stop the score from getting out of hand. He was fucking rubbish. Why was I letting him occupy space in my head? Ditto Chip, Brown, Chipper, the Exit Trials kids. Into the bin with them.

Nah, it wasn’t quite that easy. I couldn’t just push a button and they’d be gone. My shelves were still full of bottles of pent-up anger. Literal fumes.

But Christian wanted to stay more than he wanted money. Dazza had flown six thousand miles to give back to the fans. It felt good to focus on the positives, on the upsides, on the future. I mentally chucked all my rage bottles into a big rocket and fired them into the sun. Bosh, self-therapy, piece of piss. I stood up. ”3-4-3, pass them to death. Energy-saving mode, but I want one more goal so we can celebrate with our fans. Then we get the young guns on.”

Magnus Evergreen was nodding as though he could see that my aura was cleansed. ”Let the past be the past.”

Christian said, ”What’s done is done.”

Sandra beamed at me before tipping her head back and bellowing, ”Don’t look back in anger!”

I smiled. We had nearly two thousand fans out there, witnessing history, creating history. For them and only for them, I would break the habit of a lifetime and sing an Oasis lyric. ”At least not today...”