My attention snaps back to the pitch. Something has changed. There's a new weakness. I jump around, waving my arms, shouting orders. There's no way the players can hear me. It doesn't matter. The change leads to another goal and once again I'm on the big screen. I get the cameraman to stand parallel to the touchline so that he can record me grinning and showing a peace symbol on my fingers while the fight between the ultras and the riot police happens behind me.
One of the riot police sees what I'm doing and switches allegiance. He wants to clobber me with his clobbering stick. His departure from the line lets a couple of ultras through, and they're coming at me. The cameraman wisely backs away but stumbles over something. He rights the camera, which captures the scene that follows, albeit from a low angle.
It's me on the left, with three guys running to get me, including one of the guys who's supposed to be protecting me. There's no escape from this. Everything has gone to shit.
FREEZE FRAME RECORD SCRATCH
"That's me. Max Best, football manager. You're probably wondering how I got here."
***
AN UNKNOWN AMOUNT OF TIME EARLIER
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Tick, tock.
The sound echoed around the space, a windowless room smaller than most prison cells. Emma had once disparagingly called it my 'broom cupboard', but I liked it. My manager's office at the Deva stadium in Chester was a little sanctuary, a place to think. One of the reasons playing away matches was hard was that you didn't get your own space and you had to share the dressing room with your players. Not always ideal, but certainly not a problem for me or for TJ, my rival for this evening. He was just down the corridor in the away dressing room, begging his players to be less shit.
I was alone with just a small table and a laptop for company.
Tick, tock.
Time was weird, wasn't it? It went so slowly but then you woke up one day and three and a half years had passed.
Three and a half years ago, I saved an old dude from a mugging. He wasn't a dude, he was a demonic trickster, and he offered to grant me a wish.
Tick, tock.
I should have wished for something fun, like to have an orange for a head. Instead I told the guy I had been thinking a lot about my favourite sport and how I didn't understand it. He found my memories were full of an old football management game that I had played for thousands of hours, and he made that game the basis of what I called 'the curse'.
The curse gave me the computer game's powers in real life. The game had been renamed Soccer Supremo, and guess who was on the cover of the latest edition?
From call centre drone to being the face of one of the world's best-selling games had taken three-and-a-half years. What could I achieve in the next three-and-a-half?
I dabbed at my hair with a towel, opened my laptop, and entered the password to my most important spreadsheet. It was a list of the men's first team squad, their wages, their contract lengths, and certain ultra-secret numbers that only I knew. These numbers told me how good my players were at football, how good they could one day get, and best of all, the numbers were infallible.
I rubbed the towel behind my ears and wore it like a scarf.
I had assembled an astonishingly good group of players given the financial constraints I was under, and almost all of my squad had room to improve. I was a maniac for making their numbers go up - the entire culture of the club was built around making these numbers go up. Ironically, that improvement came with the seeds of its own destruction.
As players got better they would demand higher wages, wages we couldn't afford without selling other players. Selling squad members simply to fund the pay rises of other players was patently ludicrous.
In addition to keeping our wage bill low, I also desperately needed to raise funds to finish building our training ground. Bumpers Bank had lots of great pitches, a beautiful new gym, and a utility space that included changing rooms, showers, lockers, and a few offices. The rest of the operation was carried out in cold, cheap cabins, and those seemed to be limiting the level to which we could train players. I urgently needed to raise one point seven million pounds in order to fix that issue.
I also needed five million pounds to rebuild one of our stands. That money seemed more distant than ever because unlike most English football teams we were owned by our fans, not some rich arsehole, and I had already asked the fans for enough.
I stared at the spreadsheet; it stared back at me. Other clubs would only buy useful players. If we sold useful players, we would struggle in matches.
The name Lee Contreras jumped out at me. Lee was a midfielder, which meant he played in the middle. He was the only player in my squad who had reached his ceiling; he could get no better. It made sense to sell Lee but I knew for a fact that no-one was currently interested in him. I had to create demand.
I opened a browser and typed 'how to create demand for a product'. The first result went, 'By making guest posts on blogs'. I tutted and slammed the laptop shut.