Glory Of The Football Manager System

Jessica had texted me the address that morning and nothing else, which is how she sends an address. I knew the street.

Everyone who grew up round here knows the Northern Quarter the way you know a place that was rough when you were a kid and then got coffee shops, the bones still there under the new paint, the old rag-trade signs ghosting through above the doors.

I left the car in a multi-storey that used to be a market and walked the last bit, down off the main drag where the foot traffic thins out and the brick goes darker, past a record shop and a tattoo place and a barber with a queue out the door, looking for a frontage small enough to be the one Jessica would choose.

She had picked a small place in the Northern Quarter, the kind with four tables and a bloke doing something serious to coffee with a set of scales, the kind nobody who would recognise me would ever be caught in, tucked down a side street off the main drag where the brick still has the old mill soot in it.

Two students in the window arguing about a band. A girl behind the counter who did not look up from her book.

Jessica was at the back with her coat still on and a flat white going cold in front of her because she never drinks the thing; she just needs something to hold, and a slim folder on the table she had her hand flat on top of.

She had got the first flight up that morning. Out of bed in London at five, a six-forty out of Heathrow, at the back of a Manchester coffee shop with her coat still on by half nine, the last flight south to catch tonight.

All of it to turn a folder round on a table and watch my face while I read it. The big ones she does in person, looked in the eye. She does not trust a screen with the sound dropping out.

She did not say hello. Jessica has never said hello to me in twelve months.

”You look well,” she said. ”Manchester suits you. Sit down.”

I sat down.

”Palace and the federation have been on the phone since nine this morning,” she said.

”I have two of my people in the room with each side so nobody says anything clever they cannot take back. It is going. It is hard, and the board have made it harder, which is right, and it is going. They want a complete answer by tomorrow, because their first game is in eighteen days and they cannot walk into it without a manager a day longer than they have to.”

”Tomorrow.”

”Tomorrow. Which is why you are going to listen to me and then make a phone call, but the listening first.” She turned the folder round and slid it across with two fingers and lifted her hand off it.

”There. That’s who wants you.”

I opened it.

I looked at the crest on the first page for a second before it went in. Red. The green star. The script I had seen on a shirt a hundred times in a tournament I had watched in a freezing flat with my dad’s old scarf round my neck.

I did not say anything.

”There it is,” Jessica said quietly. ”I told you you’d go quiet.”

Morocco.

”Jess,” I said, and then nothing, because she was right, she had read my mind, and the only thing to do was sit there and let it land.

Of all the jobs that could have rung this week, the big tired ones, the rich panicked ones, this was the one. A young side.

Quick, technical, hungry, drilled into something and then left three weeks out with all that ability and nobody to point it. No chequebook needed, no name. Just somebody to walk in, see what they already had, and make them believe it in eighteen days.

”You see it,” Jessica said, watching my face. ”I knew you’d see it the second you saw the squad.”

”Turn the page,” I said, because I had already half guessed, and I turned it myself, and there he was, third name down the team sheet, the lad I had a folder on at Palace three inches thick.

Hakimi.

”Aye,” Jessica said. ”That’s the other thing, isn’t it?”

A right-back I had been chasing all spring. Nineteen.

The best young full-back in Europe and barely anyone had worked it out yet, and one of the ones who had was me, and now the federation that owned his international future wanted me stood in a dressing room with him for six weeks at a World Cup.

I should have been thinking what it did to the Palace deal. I was thinking about a back four I could build out of that squad before the coffee went cold.

”You’ve gone somewhere,” Jessica said.

”I’m picking the team.”

”I know you are. That is how I knew it was the right one.” She took the folder back, calm, and closed it.

”I know you are. That is how I knew it was the right one.” She took the folder back, calm, and closed it.

”Now. The conditions, because there are a lot of them and they are the reason this is real and not a daydream. The board did not say yes. The board said yes if. You are theirs, start to finish. It is a secondment with a hard return date. The day Morocco are out, win it or lose it, group stage or the final itself, you are on the next plane back to Beckenham. No tournament holiday, no lingering, no extensions. The club controls every word that goes out so no one in that Holmesdale thinks you’re leaving them. And the big one, the one Parish put down last and hardest.”

Then she looked at me as she sipped her coffee.