Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

7.

It was gloomy, overcast skies, and a light drizzle as Briggy drove me to the Allianz Arena. She leaned forward and looked up. ”You brought the English weather with you.”

”Congratulations on being the thousandth person to say that today. You win a prize, which is to punch yourself in the face.”

She glanced at me even though I had ordered her to keep her eyes on the road at all times. ”Are you feeling the strain? Do you want to take a break in a sensory room?”

Bayern had several rooms in their stadium designed to help people with special needs calm down. The idea was that fans of all kinds should be able to enjoy a match day experience and if they got overstimulated, there was a place they could chillax for a minute surrounded by lights and noises they could control, and - my favourite - the softest bean bags known to man. It was very inclusive, very cool, and we would do something very much like it in the Deva. ”Are you making fun of sensory rooms?” I said, ready to vent.

”I’m making fun of you.”

”Neurodivergent people catching strays,” I said. ”Top finesse. Great.”

She drove on, in what I thought was a foul mood. I was wrong. ”I apologise.”

”What? What for?”

”I wanted to punch up but I punched down. I punched up and down at the same time, which, by the way, is something I can actually do.”

”Can you keep your hands on the wheel when you’re driving? That’s something I’d pay to see.”

She made a noise that I chose to interpret as enthusiastic agreement.

We moved past a long row of apartment blocks and suddenly, there it was. The Allianz Arena itself. 75,000 capacity, enormous, intimidating. The overall appearance was that of a futuristic tyre laid on its side, modern and curving and beautiful. The facade was made of plastic air pockets, sort of like bubble wrap, and each pocket could be lit in a different colour.

Tonight it was all red.

”It looks like something from Mass Effect,” I said.

”What’s that?”

”It’s a video game set in the far future. All the buildings are massive, curved, brightly lit.”

”I lurve hearing boys talk about video games,” said Briggy. ”All I know is they used to have the colours change but there were crashes for miles because drivers got distracted. Great idea, right? Having the world’s biggest stop sign flash on and off in view of some of Europe’s busiest roads. The police put a halt to it.”

”I’ve been before,” I said, as the thing got bigger and bigger. ”I was an analyst. It was my job to stand at the side and bitch about what the managers were doing.”

”Now you’re on the receiving end.”

”Yeah.” I licked my lips. ”It’ll be fine. Nothing can go wrong.” My stomach did a forward roll. ”Maybe I will pop into the sensory room. I hear the bean bags are world class.”

***

We parked in Bastian’s spot, walked to the entrance, and I took a look at the stadium from below. It was very much like an airport car park with huge columns and concrete as far as the eye could see. Unimaginable amounts of concrete had been poured to build this thing. Maybe that’s what you had to do to get a 75,000 mega-stadium but I did wonder about the environmental impact. My new Deva stadium would be built from wood.

”The Deva’s atmosphere comes from the fans,” I said. ”If they’re up for it, they generate a sort of force.” I put my hand on a concrete pillar and looked around, taking it all in. ”This is so massive it comes with an instant aura. You’re on the Bayern bus, you come here, it’s vibrating with power, right? We did this, we built this. You’re on the away bus and my God, it’s so imposing. The buses have to go a long way around, slowly, until they get to here. I’m not sure if it’s an accident or by design but the away players are dragged around the stadium. They really get their noses rubbed in it, you know? We’re big, you’re small. We’re the rekordmeister, you’re not.” Rekordmeister meant ’record champions’, a term used to describe the club which had most often won a country’s top division. I had only been in Munich for a few days but had heard it, with no exaggeration, 75,000 times. ”Everything here is designed to show that you’ve come to the lion’s den. If you play for one of the smaller teams you’re half-beaten already.”

We went through the doorway into another location straight out of Mass Effect. A long white corridor with curving walls and symmetrical routes to the left and right. Sponsors’ boards had been erected at regular intervals because this was the ’mixed zone’, where media types hung out hoping to get a quote or a quick interview. When they saw me, the piranhas frenzied, but Briggy dealt with the sitch until a few security guards came and formed a pocket for me to travel through.

The home dressing room was to the right, along a corridor with large posters of the first-team squad. The first ones on the left were the goalies. The first on the right was Rui Santos, who would start at left back. Next on the left came the impressive centre back, Viera, which meant that the posters were organised according to squad number. Next to Viera, in equally epic pose, was a poster of Berni, the big teddy bear mascot. Pretty funny, though I expected to enjoy it a lot more on my next trip to the stadium.

”Max,” said Briggy, as we went past poster after poster. ”What’s it like, walking down here as a player?”

I stopped and looked behind me. ”I can only give you my first impressions but it hypes you up, for sure. First, it’s so red. The recessed lighting is red so it’s a different vibe to outside, right? That’s all neutral, white, hints of red but mostly it’s bland, then you come down here and your body reacts. Red for danger. Fight or flight? You won’t last long here if you don’t react well.”

”How are you reacting?”

”I want to punch someone in the face.”

”I take it that’s good?”

”I suppose. Did you notice the tunnel for the away team?”

”No. You won’t be going that way so I didn’t check it.”

”All white. Nothing on the walls. It’s boring. Looks like any corridor in the world. It’s clever, really, because if they did it all in black or something designed to intimidate or provoke a negative reaction, it’d get on social media like hey look at this small-time club trying to annoy their guests. Also, it wouldn’t go down well with UEFA and you might not get picked to host big finals and so on. Bland and boring is perfect. If it’s five percent harder to motivate the away team, bosh.”

”You think a lot about such details.”

”Yeah. I think a lot of clubs go overboard on the marginal gains stuff, trying to find every little one percent of improvement. What does it matter if your marketing team designs a logo that appeals one percent more to fan categories B and F if you then sign a fifty million pound striker who can’t stay onside? Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to go crazy on it but it’s really interesting to see how Bayern handle all these things because you can pretty much guarantee some very, very smart people have thought about every single aspect of everything that goes on.”

Briggy nodded, thoughtfully. ”They plan everything to the last detail. It’s very serious. You’re not a good fit.”

”See,” I said, ”that’s good banter. But they didn’t choose me to come and fit in. They chose me to be me.”

”Mia san mia,” she said. It was something I’d seen at the training ground, but learning what it meant could wait.

I tapped the last poster. ”Notice that not every player is here? It’s the goalies and the stars.”

”And a teddy bear.”

”I think he represents the fans,” I said. ”I don’t mind it. But what I’m saying is that there’s no poster of Beat Ritter.”

”He’s one of the young ones? Tall?”

”Yeah.” Bayern had snatched Ritter from a rival team by ’encouraging’ him to let his contract run down. As far as I knew, Bayern hadn’t paid a pfennig in compensation. They had simply whispered a few sweet nothings in his ear, waited, and here he was. A Rolls Royce of a midfielder, CA 150, PA 190. One hundred million pounds of box-to-box talent, signed for free. As a show of power, good. As a cost-effective way of ensuring your hegemony, understandable. But the effect on the club that found Ritter and nurtured him? The wider effect on German football? Massively negative. This wasn’t my fight, but it stank. ”He’s going to be one of the best players in the world but even he has to earn his spot in this gallery. There are problems here but they get most things right.”

We turned again and emerged into the dressing rooms. There was activity already - the captain’s armbands were on the central table, the shirts were being hung up. Three walls were devoted to booths, one per player, above which was a photo of the booth’s current occupant.

The kit man gave me a strange look before continuing with his work. A physio poked his head around a doorway and pulled it straight back in. A couple of analysts were coming through a doorway, laughing and joking. They stopped abruptly when they saw me.

The tension was building.

***

I brought the team sheet to the referee, who was surprised I would do that in person. ”It’s my first day!” I said, in a child-like tone.

The ref and his assistants didn’t know how to take that, but they smiled when they saw that’s what Briggy was doing. ”You brought the English weather with you.”

”Yes, I did, didn’t I?” I said, with a chuckle, because I wanted the ref to like me. One of Briggy’s eyebrows lifted an inch and her lips twitched.

The ref was in a good mood. ”I hope you enjoy it.” The main man checked the sheet. ”What is this formation?”

A strange thing Bayern expected me to do was to let the broadcasters know which formation I would be playing. There was a place on the form to scribble the circles. Normally, Diane Berger would have taken my eleven and printed it off all nice, but I hadn’t told her the team so I’d done it myself, by hand. ”I call it Connect Four.”

”Vier Gewinnt,” said Briggy.

The ref frowned. ”I do not believe this is the formation you will actually use.”

I had divided the space into four columns, and drawn one circle at the bottom of the first, two circles in the next, three in the third, four in the fourth. ”Really?” I said. ”It’s all the rage in England. It wins diagonally and vertically, see?”

”You will not play a right back, a right wing back, a right midfielder, and a right winger at the same time.”

”I might. Anyway, there’s nothing in the rules that says this has to match what I actually do. I checked.”

”I checked,” said Briggy. ”It was really boring.”

”Ref,” I said, with a charming smile. ”Don’t you want to see if the TV company puts this graphic up?”

He sighed. ”No. I want to perform my tasks well and achieve a good mark from the observer so that I can continue to referee at the highest level.”

I gave him a friendly finger gun as I stepped towards the door. ”If you get stuck, ask me what decision to give. I referee at ninety-nine percent accuracy.”

”That low?” said Briggy.

I smiled. ”I use my own interpretation of the handball law. Playground rules, you know. Rule number one, contact has to be intentional for it to be a free kick. Rule number two, stop whining and get on with the game, we’ve only got a ten-minute break before Maths.”

The ref had a big smile. ”We had similar rules, Herr Best, but sadly we will be using the official laws of the game this evening.”

”Let me double check,” I said. ”I’ve got nine subs and can use five but only in three windows plus the half-time break.”

”That’s correct.”

Briggy said, ”What does that mean?”

I said, ”Some managers use their substitutions to waste time or to disrupt the flow of the game so they invented substitution windows to make sure there was a limit. Half-time doesn’t count because that doesn’t slow the game down.”

”The change was made during Covid,” said the ref. ”When the number of substitutes was increased to five.”

”Oh, that’s right, I forgot that. You don’t want five stoppages per team but having five subs is good for the players because there’s more chance to rotate them, give them breaks, plus there should be more opportunities for young players. Like almost every change, it favours the rich clubs because they have deeper squads, but for today I don’t mind. My bench is terrifying.” My nine subs had an average CA of 156, which was better than the Notts Forest eleven I had seen in the Champions League recently. ”All right, ref, fellas, see you later. Oh! I mean, servus.”

***

That interaction calmed me down, but as we strolled back to the changing room, the butterflies returned.

When we got there, a fuming Diane Berger opened her mouth to demand to know the line up. I wordlessly handed her one of two copies I had made. She glanced at it, her eyes widened, and she ran off.

”The starting eleven,” I said, and about thirty people in the dressing room shut up. ”In goal, Kaspar.”

Big buzz. I had told Kaspar, of course, but it seemed that neither he nor Torben had let the news slip.

Average CA so far: 140.

I named four defenders next. ”Rui Santos, Kumba Viera, Pak Young, Dumitru Demetrescu.”

The last name was the one that got the most attention. Why the shit was he in the team?

Average CA so far: 157.4.

I called out three midfielders next, as though the plan was to use 4-3-3. ”Diogo, Jost, Henno.”

Average CA so far: 160.9.

Three forwards. ”Adam, Danny, Zoran.”

Average CA for the starting eleven: 166.

”Subs are on the sheet,” I said, placing it face down on the table. ”Basically it’s business as usual,” I said. ”Walk around the pitch like you always do, warm up like you always do, then when we come back here around twenty minutes before kick off, I’ll discuss the tactics. That’s it.” I turned the sheet the other way around so that the players could find out if they were on it. I noticed Fabian Fromm eyeing it, faux-casually, from the back of the room. Still holding out hope I would cave.

Riley couldn’t believe his ears. ”That’s it?”

I didn’t reply; I had to do yet more media crap.

***

Briggy led me along a corridor that came out next to the famous pitchside tunnel. I took a moment to savour the feeling. These were the wide stairs you saw on epic Champions League nights. The players would emerge to a wall of noise, amble through a big hoop thing, and go through the final pre-match rituals.

Tonight wasn’t quite so epic, but it would still be noisy, still be a full house. Loud, upbeat pop music was blasting around the stadium and even if you had no clue what awaited you at the top of the stairs, you would have a sense that something monumental lay in store.

There were people everywhere, of course. So many people. Security, organisers, people to organise the organisers. I frowned when I realised there was a flap that closed over the tunnel just before the players emerged. The players would have to wait like gladiators, the flap would open, and their hearts would beat faster as they realised social death or eternal glory was mere moments away.

”That’s why they call it an arena,” I mumbled.

I tried to shut it out. What I couldn’t shut out was the feeling when I got to the top of the stairs and emerged onto the side of the pitch.

Stupefaction.

I was a worm who had poked its head above the soil for the first time and realised the world was bigger than it had ever known. More or less 25,000 fans per tier. One level, two, three, each with a larger capacity than the Deva in its final form, with the roof defying gravity as it climbed to the sky, elegantly twisting your sense of perception like an optical illusion.

”Fuck me,” I said.

We took a few steps to the right and I practised sitting in my spot in the dugout. It was recessed into the ground and had a sort of canopy on the top that made it feel cosy and exclusive. Super premium.

”That works.”

I got up and spent a few minutes getting used to the dimensions of my technical area. As you might expect, it was big. Plenty of space to prowl around, to go into full panther mode, to scream and berate and demand more. There wouldn’t be any of that brute force crap tonight, though; this was an evening for finesse.

I had to go further to the right of the tunnel, towards the corner flags, to speak to a TV camera crew. I wanted to avoid saying anything interesting, because being provocative wouldn’t help me get through the first matches. Also, it wouldn’t do me any good to do anything that could detract from the transfer values of Bayern’s players. Yeah, I could drop a guy, sub him off if he was playing badly, and so on. That was normal football life. But to say that player X had a bad attitude or that player Y wasn’t committed to the club could lower their value. And, yeah, potentially the amount they could get in future wages. I had no personal beef with any of these guys - there was no need for me to ruin their careers.

At the same time as I wanted to be boring and corporate, I did want to be somewhat interesting. I would need the media with me for the final part of my heist the way Hans Gruber needed the FBI to come and turn the electricity off in the greatest ever German-language movie, Die Hard.

The interviewer’s name was Kathy. ”You brought the English weather with you, Max.”

I tried to smile, but I’m not sure one came out. ”Actually, this type of rain is more in the Welsh tradition.”

She didn’t know what to do with that so she moved on. ”You have chosen a surprising eleven. There is a lot of shock that you have excluded Torben Ulrich and Fabian Fromm.”

”Okay.”

”Why have you excluded Torben Ulrich and Fabian Fromm?”

”Pardon me, I’m smiling because in England we say excluded when we keep a child from going to school. You know, when he is very naughty. I think the idea that Torbs and Fabs have been naughty is quite amusing, don’t you? They’re incredible professionals. I have only worked with them for a short time but sometimes it’s possible to tell very quickly. No, I haven’t excluded them. They’re absolutely key to this season. If they have a successful season, Bayern Munich will have a successful season.”

”Have you left them out because you expect an easy win against SV Elversberg?”

”I don’t expect an easy win. Elversberg are really good; I like what they do and how they play. They’re a great team, they have great togetherness. Their manager, ah, their trainer, is doing a wonderful job. Really high level. Okay, they’re bottom of the league but most of their matches are very close. They make you work hard to beat them and they are very smart. If we are complacent we will lose. It’s that simple.”

As I spoke to the interviewer, I realised two things.

One, that I could be as boring as I wanted because even that was fresh and exciting new content.

Two, that phrase mia san mia was ’handwritten’ across the entire length of the stadium by means of colourful seats. The rest of the stadium was fairly conventional in this regard. Behind one goal were the words Bayern Munich, while behind the other was a massive logo. But here, mia san mia. What was that, seventy metres long? It wasn’t just some text I had seen a few times. It was important enough to carve into the stadium.

The reporter had asked me something about the grass. ”I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

”Will you be going onto the grass before the game? Perhaps to show us your free kick technique?”

It was a crazy comment to lose my temper over, but that’s what I did. ”No, I’m not going on the pitch. I haven’t earned it. If you want to go on this pitch you need to earn it. One thing Bayern and Chester FC have in common? There are no freebies. You want to get on the pitch, you earn it through years of dedication, blood, toil, tears, and sweat. You put the maximum into training. Champion mentality day in, day out, then you get to go on the grass. You said I don’t respect Elversberg but they’re here on merit. They fought against the odds, they scrapped, they grafted, they are badass and I love it. As a manager I’m here on merit but not as a player. I’m not a YouTuber and I didn’t win a raffle to get here. Yes, I want to get out there, same as everyone, but I’ll earn the right to play here, same as everyone.”

My outburst had sent her to content heaven. ”In a Bayern Munich shirt?”

”Bayern can’t afford Max Best, the player.” Oh, fuck. Did I really just say that?

”One last try, Max. Why did you leave out the two German players?”

I gave her a pitying little half-smile. ”To give you something to talk about during the long video referee breaks. Hey, Kathy?” I twinkled at her. ”You’re welcome.”

***

As I strode back towards the tunnel, feeling pretty bosh, I noted that the stadium had filled up a fair amount even in the short time I had been out there.

”Christ, what’s that? Another five thousand people in ten minutes?”

”Big, isn’t it? Think you can handle it?”

”No,” I said, as I let my gaze drift around. ”I’m bricking it.”

”What does that mean?”

”Um, really scared. What does mia san mia mean?”

She tutted. ”I told you four times!”

”Got quite a lot going on, mate.”

”It means we are who we are.”

”We are who we are. Beautifully meaningless.”

”It’s very meaningful here. It means we have our core beliefs and our identity. It means that we’re not arrogant, we’re just better than everyone else and we don’t apologise for that. It means we don’t care what outsiders think about us.” She jabbed me in the ribs because I wasn’t liking what I was hearing. ”It means we’re just like you, you prick.” She nodded, satisfied. Point well made. ”In this world, it’s just us.”

She was referencing a lyric from a Harry Styles song, one that I had used to convince Dani to join the women’s team. ”We are who we are,” I said. It didn’t resonate. ”We are who we are,” I repeated. Still nothing. ”You should ask Harry Styles to come and give that a punch-up. I’m not sure how good his Latin is, though.”

”It isn’t Latin. It’s Bayrisch.”

”Baywatch? Is David Hasselhoff from here?”

Briggy sighed and checked the time. ”Peter wanted to know how long it would be until you mentioned the Hoff. I hope you’re not going to be this predictable in the match.”

I shrugged. ”We are what we are.”

Briggy looked away and bit her bottom lip. ”You’re so annoying. I hate this gig.”

***

Time crawled. This wriggling worm resented going back down the tunnel. I wanted to stay up there, in the arena, wanted the fight to start, wanted to get stuck in.

I had Elversberg’s lineup on my tactics screens. 4-4-2, average CA 122 (gold star for Bayern’s iPad army!), no surprises.

In the dressing room, I detected that my team and subs bench had caused some anger, some resentment, some disbelief. I felt really, really, really sorry for the unhappy millionaire superstars. My heart broke for them, it really did. Especially the ones who drove Lambos and Ferraris to training.

While they went out to do the last warm-up, I stayed behind and wept liberal tears - with my feet up on a desk while flicking through the match programme. They returned.

With twenty minutes to go, I asked the eleven starters to come into the coach’s office. The coaches tried to come in, which was rude. ”Torben,” I said, waving the CA 170 goalie over. ”You come in for this.” He had proven his loyalty was to the team first and he hadn’t leaked that he had been dropped. As far as I was concerned, he was an insider.

I closed the door behind him while in the main dressing room a lot of grown men pulled sour, sulky faces. Elite mentality in action!

”All right,” I said. The room was designed for five or six, so the thirteen of us made it feel crowded and guys were having to lean on tables, get up close and personal. Just like non-league. The thought of shoving these pampered princes into the pea-sized changing rooms at Tamworth or Banbury got me hot and bothered in the best possible way. ”All right,” I repeated, with more of a grin. I had a tactics board and some magnets. That’s all you fucking needed to run a football team. I popped the magnets on as I spoke. ”Elversberg are doing 4-4-2. We’re going to match them to start with. Kaspar in goal. You’ve spent your entire career playing short passes from the back. That’s what the Elves want you to do.” I popped the striker magnet on next. ”Zoran. Six foot five. Shit, you don’t say it like that here. What’s that in metres?”

Zoran Bratko was a Slovenian superstar who was tall, powerful, and fast. His movement was great and he had been working on his technique and all-round game for years. When Bayern paid a hundred million Euros for him, no-one in the world of football batted an eyelid. Zoran was as close to a sure thing as it got in football. Of course, the move had bombed. He had got off to a bad start and hadn’t recovered.

”One point nine seven metres,” said Zoran, in a thick accent.

He got jeered by a few mates. ”Fuck off,” said Adam Adebayo. ”It’s one nine four.”

”One nine seven!” yelled Zoran, which prompted sniggers from the others.

Dumitru, the guy I had picked at right back, said, ”One nine five point five eight.” I was ready to continue but he ploughed on in a tedious monotone. ”I have visited the original metre bar at the Musée des Arts et Métiers and both of the marble metre blocks that were embedded into buildings around the city of Paris. There were sixteen originally. They served their purpose, which was to promote the metric system. Only three countries refuse to use the system. Two are Liberia and Myanmar. You know the third.”

The hell was that? I stared at him but feared that if I left much of a gap, he would start talking again. I wiggled the striker magnet around. ”From goal kicks and deep build-up, I want Zoran to move wide or drop short. Kaspar will ping passes to him and we’ll bypass the oppo press.”

Adam Adebayo’s eyes were popping out. ”You want us to play long ball?”

”Long ball is where you mindlessly hoof the ball as far as you can kick it. This isn’t mindless, is it? This is doing what the oppo doesn’t want you to do. We’ve got one of the world’s most physically gifted guys. Two metres tall he is, if you include his hair.” Zoran grinned and rubbed his trim. I continued. ”Look, I know Basti has his philosophies and that’s why he got the job but my philosophy is you fucking win. My opposite number, Ulf Graber, has come up with all kinds of pressing patterns, triggers, counter-triggers, blah blah blah. Who gives a shit? We’re going over the top. Buh-bye.”

I placed four magnets in a defensive line.

”You have been playing with a back four all season so let’s start with that. Rui Santos on the left, Dumi on the right. To start with, both of you will stay back, and we’ll get more adventurous as the game develops.”

Rui Santos was 144/148 and Dumitru was 151/159. Not exactly my fantasy full-backs, and both were getting old fast. The Portuguese guy was 32, the Romanian 34.

”Excuse me,” said Diogo, another Portuguese guy. He had played in the Premier League and his English was good. ”You don’t want the full backs to attack?”

”Not at first, no. We’re going to keep it tight first eighty and see what we can do in the last ten minutes.” He didn’t smile, so I added, ”That was a joke. But we’re not going to give them a free goal in the first ten minutes.”

I tapped the two central defenders. ”Kumba Viera, Pak Young, one of the best combos in world football. Do what you normally do.”

I spread four magnets to represent four midfielders.

”Adam Adebayo left, Jost right. Jost, you will also start cautiously. In the middle, Diogo and Henno.”

Diogo was tall and powerful, and with 180/187, he was one of the best defensive midfielders in the world. He was a little slow to be the perfect central midfielder but he had great positioning and technical skills and he had played there many times in the past. He was an aggressive little so-and-so who lost his head a couple of times per season, but he brought some alpha male presence to the middle. Or since this was Bayern Munich, I should say he brought some more alpha male presence.

Next to him was another such character. Henno Wald, 170/181. A German international player with over 100 caps. One of the most famous players in the world, brilliant, a serial winner. If you’re annoyed because I already said all this - no, mate. This is a different guy. Bayern had ALL THE PLAYERS. Unlike Fabian Fromm, Henno wasn’t injured and I was excited to use him. It was rare that I had such a great central midfielder. I actually worried about him more than most of the others - I had no experience of this type of player apart from being one.

”Alongside Zoran, Danny.”

Danny Kowalski was 25, a year younger than Adam Adebayo, but was almost identical to him. They both had PA 193, though Adam, being a year older, was closer to his peak (187 versus 185). It was hilarious to be able to deploy two guys so fast, so skilful, so exciting.

I rubbed my hands together, showing how excited I felt. Not long to go. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since Dieter Bauer pitched the idea of me stepping in for a few weeks. The first game would decide almost everything. Either I was a bald fraud who needed to go back to my crevice and work my way up, or I had gathered the skills needed to at least compete at this level.

This level, I thought. The oppo were CA 122. All I needed to do to get a first win in a country’s top flight, a first win in one of the top five leagues, was pick a coherent team.

I had absolutely smashed it.

”Is this a joke?” Diogo didn’t think I had smashed it.

”What’s the problem?”

”Four-four-two? Full backs defend. Right mid defends. Against the worst team in the league?”

”First of all, you’re wrong there. They are the worst players in the league but they are the best team.” I got closer to him. ”Have you seen them play? They’re fucking fierce. They go for everything, work for everything, back each other up like nobody’s business. Here’s the kicker. Losing makes them tougher, harder. They’ve had the international break to recharge. While you lot have been jetting around the world, they’ve had perfect preparation.”

Henno Wald chimed up in German, and what he said caused a fair amount of mirth. I asked him to say it again. To be fair, he translated it right into my face. ”I said at least one of us has.”

I nodded a few times. ”Oh, you mean the thing where I didn’t tell you the team? Yeah, what a big crisis that was.” I backed away, grinning. I was fucking this up in every way imaginable and I loved it! Why? No clue!

I went to the tactics board and slid magnets around, one by one. ”Danny will drop deep when we’re building up to make a 4-4-1-1. Diogo will drop to make it 4-1-4-1, which obviously has Jost moving into the middle while Danny goes right mid. We can do 4-3-3 but there’s no point because we won’t win this one by getting narrow. We can do 4-5-1 or 4-2-4 with no issues. The big switch will be when we go to 3-4-3. Rui Santos goes to left mid, Dumi slips into centre back, and we get rotations going with Adam and Danny in the front three. Sometimes dropping deeper, sometimes going even wider, mixing up the personnel, all the time looking for Zoran as the out ball and getting close to him for the second balls and knockdowns to bypass the press.”

Henno had opinions. ”We have not practised those rotations!”

I pointed at him. ”There’s that famous elite mentality I keep hearing about!” The magnets were arrayed in a 3-4-3 shape. I touched one and said, ”Adam.” I touched another and said, ”Danny.” I switched them round, moved one down, one wide, back to default. ”Adam, Danny. Danny, Adam. Are you seriously telling me this is above your skill level, Henno?”

His cheeks turned red. ”Of course not! But if this is the plan, we should have practised. This plan has not been discussed with the coaching staff. I know because I asked. You have kept them in the dark.”

”Like mushrooms,” I said, which someone thought was funny. ”Henno,” I said, in a more conciliatory tone. ”The plan is simple so that you can focus on working hard, competing, winning your duels. You are a world class player. Win your duels and you will see that the plan mysteriously works. Of course it’s fucking annoying that I am behaving this way but some of you are leaking information to the media, to your friends, to gambling syndicates, to whoever the fuck, and I don’t like it. If you didn’t want me to do this you should have got together and put a stop to the leaks. This is the plan, this is what we’re doing. If you don’t want to be part of it, Henno, it’s not too late for me to replace you in the starting eleven and you can sit next to Fabian Fromm up in the luxury boxes with the supermodels and the champagne and everyone kissing your arse.”

His fury reached a new height but he said, ”No.”

”I like the plan,” said Dumitru.

”Of course you do,” said Adam. ”You can play two positions so you get a game. Max is the only manager in Europe who doesn’t realise your legs have gone.” He looked at me, worried he’d gone too far. ”Sorry.”

I said, ”I can take some banter, bro, as long as we are aligned. I don’t want to overplay the emotion card but remember, we’re doing this for Basti. We get a win and he sleeps well tonight, do you know what I mean?” That landed well, but especially with Henno. I clapped Dumitru on the shoulder. ”And by the way, I do know your legs have gone. That’s why I don’t want you to go forward. I was trying to be polite about it. Thanks, Adam.”

This was a hit, even with Dumi. I’d landed more misses than hits, I reckoned, but that was all right. I wasn’t trying to be popular.

Danny Kowalski, a German international spieler, had actually gone to school in London, as had the French international, Adam. Both tended towards the shy and introverted - off the pitch, at least. ”Gaffer,” said Danny, softly, because he had spent enough time in English changing rooms to pick up the lingo. ”What about me? I mean, special instructions.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

”Me too, boss,” said Adam.

I nearly burst out laughing. Two mystery wingers who had already achieved more than I ever would were asking me what to do. For some reason I thought about the words mia san mia. Not because of what they meant, but because they would soon disappear as fans took their seats. ”Okay, look, I’m being sensible with this match just to get us over the line so we can all relax. I’m not really looking to have thirty shots or anything like that. I hope it’s a clean, professional kill, right?”

I got wistful.

”But you two are the dreamweavers. There are little kids coming to this stadium for the first time tonight. I know it could be a little girl but in my head it’s always a boy because it’s a self insert. I’m that little boy coming for the first time and what do I see? That bald fucking fraud Max Best playing the percentages, keeping things tight, and it’s like, daddy, why are we here? This is dogshit. But then Adam does a skill, feet moving faster than the eye can see, and he flicks it to Danny and the return pass and the keeper comes and boop, little dink over the top and the crowd goes nuts and everyone’s bouncing and that’s it. I love football, I love Bayern, inject it into my veins. Follow the Brandon Sanderson rule. When in doubt, err on the side of awesome. Fuck someone up at least once per half. Weave dreams, make memories. Those are my tactical instructions.”

Adam and Danny’s eyes sparkled as I spoke, and a couple of the others sat up straighter. A few others seemed to find my words cringe.

”Let’s go,” I said. ”Captain, lead them out.”

Henno looked around. ”Who is the captain?”

He was next in line after Fabian, which made sense based on his Influence score. ”It’s you, isn’t it?”

”In a rational world.”

I got up to him, as close as the logistics of the room would allow. I glared at him. ”In Germany you work hard to be made the captain for a season. In my world, you work hard to be captain for one fucking match at a time.” While he blazed absolute fury, I pointed to the door. ”I said lead them out.”

”Los geht’s!” he yelled, storming out. The group followed. Henno’s visible anger parted the waves of players and staff who had been kept out of the meeting.

All part of the legend. They would ask what had happened. They would ask 7 people and get 8 different answers.

***

We walked up the stairs and waited by the tunnel flap. Noise and excitement awaited us. Gladiators? Ready. Randos from the other side of Germany? Ready. Floating megabrains? I swallowed.

The flap opened and there was a shock of light and booming music.

This was it. I had been working for three and a half years towards this moment. I could hack it. I was ready.

The arena was plunged into darkness, leaving only red neon and thousands of flashes from cameras. The music became colossal, vibrating through my bones. The stadium announcer was yelling. He would shout Kaspar and 70,000 home fans would reply, Benn!

”Rui!”

”Santos!”

”Kumba!”

”Viera!”

On it went, through the starting eleven. Even in my overwhelmed state - lights everywhere, noise, sinister movement all around - I wondered what would happen when he got to a player with a single name.

”Dio...”

”GO!”

Through the lineup, through the subs, and then, a moment that I would never forget.

The announcer yelled, ”And our manager. Max...”

Seventy thousand Bavarians yelled, ”BEST!”

My body reacted on its own. Fingers and lips curled with savage determination. I started prowling my technical area. Paul Braun could have handed me a five-year contract and I would have signed it. I wanted to smash something. I paced around, snorting like a bull.

When I came somewhat to my senses, I realised the floodlights were fully on, the players were lined up, the ref was counting the players. The anticipation from the fans was intoxicating. I was ready to switch to a 0-0-10 formation. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

Crazily, I had a vision of poor Bastian, a massive scar across his chest, on a soft bed, too many pillows under his head, listening to Bayern’s equivalent of Boggy on the radio.

I went into the screens and did what I had planned to do. One of the most out-of-character moments in my life as a football manager. I switched us to 4-5-1, men behind ball.

No way were Elversberg getting an early goal. That would have set up the perfect script for a neutral. The cocky Manc twat rushes out all guns blazing and goes a goal behind.

I cricked my neck.

I write my own scripts, bro.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of talent fell into an ultra-defensive stance, crowding around their own penalty area.

I glanced to my left, where Ulf Graber couldn’t believe his eyes. He turned and looked at me, really stared at me.

I knew his plan was to blitz us at the start and get something to hold onto.

Now he knew that I knew.

It clicked. This wasn’t business as usual. The manager of Bayern Munich had gone rogue.

Ulf Graber, silver hair, approaching sixty, ran away from me, summoning his assistants. They fell into a huddle, clarified that yes, we had started ultra-defensive, it wasn’t an illusion. Soon after, three of them stood on the touchline, shouting instructions, reorganising, moving men around.

He went to a very interesting 4-2-4 variant, with wing backs instead of full backs. I grinned. Bro really wanted that early goal!

The pity was that there were so many cameras on me I couldn’t do everything telepathically. I made huge gestures, drawing a semi-circle, pointing in two directions, and every manager’s favourite: raising two index fingers and swapping their positions.

Any second now, we would burst into a 4-2-4 of our own, with the Austrian midfielder Jost Benn the only player who wasn’t a natural fit.

3’

This has been a highly cagey start from the home team.

Elversberg play it back to their goalkeeper. He moves the ball to the right back.

He glides forward, unopposed.

They pass the ball across to the left.

Still no pressure from Bayern.

The clipped pass into the middle is overhit. Viera wins the header.

Now the home team spread out.

Wald surges through the middle. He plays it wide.

Adebayo offers an option. Wald threads the pass ahead of him.

Adebayo beats his man for pace and continues ahead.

He shapes to shoot with his left, cuts back onto his right, passes square...

Here comes Bratko...

But he blazes it over the bar!

That was a sensational counter-attack from Bayern Munich!

The Slovenian striker had to score! His goal drought continues.

***

The noise!

The noise, mate.

It was Chester times twenty.

I was grinning like the cat that got the cream when I realised my face was being broadcast on the big screens. I shook my head, pointed to the pitch, and covered myself with my hood.

I crouched and thought about my next move. Honestly, I couldn’t see past keep it tight first ten. Ten minutes without conceding a goal would do everyone the world of good. Especially Bastian.

I switched us from 4-2-4 to 4-4-1-1 defensive and tweaked the defensive positioning based on our skills and what I was seeing from the oppo. Where they had a good passing lane, I tried to block it. Where they were trying to find overloads, I shifted our guys to be in that area as a counter-balance. What I wanted, generally speaking, was to match them and let our superior quality tell.

The home fans didn’t grumble, exactly, but after that single burst of excitement there was some confusion. Of our players, Diogo looked the least happy. He was striding around with a face like a slapped arse, shaking his head.

Ulf Graber knew, though. He could feel it. I was doing to him what I feared managers of elite teams doing to Chester. Grinding him down, minute by minute, knowing that one of his players would crack under the growing pressure, or that his guys would have to work so hard just to stay in the match for 80 minutes there would be nothing left in the tank at the end.

Every few minutes I would switch things up so that we put on a burst of acceleration. I focused on our attacking positioning to create the spaces that let us move the ball from our defensive third to the attacking third as smoothly as poss.

Those moments were pure ecstasy. The curse had once given me a taste of an addictive Candy Crush-style game, and this was similar. Watching elite players evade pressure, play three passes to get through six players like they were doing a Sunday newspaper logic puzzle, watching the sheer speed and skill as it was unleashed, it was next level. Truly next level.

I glanced to my left again.

I wasn’t sure I belonged at this level, but it really fucking looked like Ulf Graber thought I did.

Win your duels, lads. Turn the screw. Turn the bloody screw.

As for the goal kicks, well, that was a lot of fun. The first time Kaspar put the ball down on the six-yard line to take a goal kick, Elversberg pushed forwards twenty yards - the entire team. I could do that now! I had spent 7,500 XP to be able to do things like that! I hadn’t used it yet because I didn’t want to add too many variables, but I hoped to be able to test it safely in the second half.

Elversberg were expecting us to play short from the back, like Bayern always did, like every elite team in the world always did. I picked their shortest midfielder and used the curse screen to put our giant striker next to him. I set Zoran to be our playmaker so that the goalie would be more likely to ping the ball to him, and I moved Adam and Danny to take up the nearest positions, since they were fast, smart, and seemed to have good anticipation skills.

Kaspar hit a long pass towards Zoran, who bullied his opponent, caught the ball on his chest, and touched it to Danny, who passed first time to Adam, and we were away, with almost all of the away team’s players behind the ball, utterly helpless.

Again the move came to nothing, but again Ulf Graber reacted with total dismay. I was hitting him where it hurt and he had no answer.

I was grinning hard, and even the hoodie couldn’t hide it. 14 experience points per minute flowing into me. Four hundred million pounds of talent at my command. This was for me.

A player got a knock and as the physios rushed on, I pulled my hood back and tried to calm down. I was sweating and had a slight headache. I was making dozens of tiny adjustments per minute and it was taking its toll. I realised that in all the mayhem I hadn’t noticed the option to activate Bench Boost or Triple Captain. I wouldn’t have done so anyway. Honestly, if I couldn’t handle this game on my own, the only decent thing would have been to confess as much to Dieter, Paul, and Karl. I wouldn’t use those perks in Bologna, either. I wanted to take on Evaristo on my own. My mind had built him up as football’s final boss. It was okay to lose now as motivation for the next three years, until I fought him again having learned all the lessons I needed to learn.

While I was talking shit to myself, I saw something that pushed my head backwards, made my eyes bulge, turned my fingers into claws. Diogo was talking to his Portuguese teammate, Rui Santos, and as they chatted, both of them developed thick white lines around their player icons.

They were rewriting their individual instructions.

I nearly gasped as I saw a gigantic white arrow emerge from Rui Santos, leading his icon all the way down the pitch. The prick thought he was Robert Carlos, the legendary Brazilian player!

Mutiny.

Diogo was leading a mutiny.

I thundered along the edge of my technical area, teeth clenched, gums showing. My bench had star players for days. Rui Santos wasn’t even good, and Diogo was disposable. The fuck were they thinking?

My vicious grin froze. I pulled my hood down to cover my face somewhat. What if the mutiny spread? Henno would tumble next. Kaspar, Jost, and Dumi were being given minutes by me they wouldn’t get from other trainers. Zoran had his own problems. Adam and Danny? Who knew, but them turning against me would fucking hurt. The centre backs? I didn’t know them very well.

The brute force solution was simple - sub off the mutineers.

What would finesse look like? What would George Clooney do?

”He’d wait,” I mumbled. ”See how it played out.”

That took balls. That took nerve. If Henno went against me, the pool of players I could draw from against Bologna would suddenly be hugely depleted. That really, really wasn’t the point of coming to a megaclub.

The first thing I noticed about the mutiny was that Rui Santos followed the arrow he had awarded himself. He abandoned his defensive duties time and time again, running beyond Adam on the left wing. It didn’t lead to anything because I had no choice but to shift players around to cover for him. Typically when he went AWOL I would set him as a striker and move Adam to left back and Danny to left mid. Absolutely insane to use two premium attacking players to cover for one shitty defender, but that’s what I had to do. It made me so angry that I flipped all the way to utterly calm. I would deal with this later.

The second thing was that Diogo was stat padding.

That nearly made me laugh, which cheered me up, which reminded me of how furious I was at Rui Santos. It was funny because Diogo, a world-class player earning two hundred thousand Euros a week, was playing safe sideways passes exactly like Chester FC’s Lee Contreras, CA 100, one-hundredth of the wages, for exactly the same reason.

He was inflating his numbers, getting himself noticed by the data nerds, creating demand for his services.

I dived into his Contract page and sure enough, his deal would end the following season. Time to start angling for a new, long-term deal, or for one last big-money move to some suckers with more money than sense.

Part of me wished I had brought Luisa with me. Who better than her to shout at a couple of Portuguese wastrels? I was on my own, though. Waiting for the next domino to fall, while noting that our goal threat had dropped to practically zero.

Time passed with me trying to focus on keeping the defence in order while looking for a chance to break, to control, to dominate. To the outside world, to the viewers at home, it must have been a pretty drab match, scrappy and seemingly bogged down in useless attrition, but I was dripping with sweat from concentrating so hard. We found it hard to break down Elversberg’s defensive structures, so well-drilled were they. But I’d learned a thing or two from Peter Bauer and I knew how to create similar structures, only I had incredible players to work with. Kumba Viera was the very concept of Christian Fierce taken to its logical conclusion.

Then the moment. The decisive moment, perhaps. At another break, Diogo - match rating six out of ten and Condition 98%, showing that he had barely broken into a sweat, the worthless prick - casually wandered over to Henno. If he could get Henno...

I crouched as the match resumed. I was not interested in the ball but only watched the midfield with the tactics screen partially overlaid in my vision. Rui Santos, thick white line around his icon, dramatic arrow. Disobedient. Diogo, thick white line. Playing for himself. A trickle of sweat rolled down my back. Henno Wald. CA 170 central midfielder. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Thin white line. Thin white line.

I waited a full minute. Thin white line.

I got up and paced along the touchline. Up and down, blood pumping, deafened by my own pulse. Snarls, hood up, hood down, grimaces. It was my first day in Chester all over again. Shitheads playing their own game. That day, I’d got rid of them almost immediately.

Stunned, I stopped pacing and asked myself a simple question.

Why hadn’t I done the same thing here?

I walked slower.

Because I was very slightly more mature. I would fuck these guys off at half time, in the privacy of the dressing room. I would tell the media they had bad backs. I closed my eyes, trying to remember if the personal booths in the changing rooms had name plates I could slide out and throw into the bin... No, it was just the player photos that identified the occupants, right?

Fuck them off at half time, that was the ticket. A little demon landed on my shoulder. Why, though? Just do it now. Bin them off. Make it public. Show them who’s in charge around here.

I took a breath. We had better player ratings. Our Condition scores - a measure of our fitness - were mostly over 95%. Elversberg were running hard, fighting hard, burning energy just to stay with us. Three of their players had dipped below 90% already. By the end of the match, they would be fucked. We would get them if we were patient.

And patience had told me one thing - Henno Wald was a team player. Even if he thought I was a bald fraud, a hack, a moron, he was first and foremost a team player.

”I can work with that,” I said.

Rui Santos and Diogo, the absolute pricks, would go to their graves being able to say they played 45 minutes for Max Best.

I would be able to say I hadn’t wrecked their transfer values.

Who said I couldn’t do finesse?

***

It was nil-nil at half-time. We’d had four shots, all off target, but our opponents had none.

I wondered if Peter would be proud of me.

My head was pounding so when I got to the changing rooms, I grabbed a bunch of marathon paste packs and chose a booth at random to sit on.

I opened a pack and started sucking the gooey stuff into me. It was basically a healing potion, wasn’t it? They restored your health, and if your screen was full of jagged blood lines, the lines became fewer, shorter, and you could concentrate.

Okay, so my fears about being totally out of place were unfounded. I could do the tactics. Sure, Evaristo would be a completely different level of challenge but the 18th best manager in the Bundesliga? I could compete. I wasn’t totally out of my depth.

Apart from tactics, what else did top managers need? They needed to be able to ignore the noise. I was good at that because once the game started I barely heard anything. Had our fans booed us off? Had they groaned when we refused to commit bodies forward? I would only find out later and if we won, no-one would remember.

Man management, though. That had been the big fear. Two guys had turned on me in the first half alone, but honestly? That was better than I expected. The other nine had done all right. The goalie had shanked a couple of kicks but he was under scrutiny, he was nervous, and he didn’t have anything to do. Goalies played better when they were busy. The defence - apart from the guy who had gone AWOL - was rock solid. Kumba Viera was on 9 out of 10 and Pak Young was on 8. They were eating their opponents alive and loving every second of it. Dumi was on 7 out of 10, carrying out his instructions to a tee. At the other end of the pitch, Zoran had missed a couple of chances, including one decent one, but that was normal.

I opened the second pack of paste. Yeah, that had gone pretty well. I thought I had shown a decent amount of finesse. As I munched on the stuff, the throbbing in my head eased off a little.

”Kaspar,” I said. The goalie came over. ”You’re trying to make things happen,” I said. ”Relax, if you can. Let it happen. There’s a thing we do in England, it’s really great. It’s called breathing.”

He smiled. ”I have been breathing.”

”I watched you in training. You take a pass, you set your feet, you release the ball. Take, set, release. It’s very smooth, looks great. You could put it in a coaching manual. Tonight you’re doing takesetrelease.”

He closed his eyes and dipped his head. ”Yeah.”

”No biggie, mate. My head’s pounding out there, too. It’s immense. Do your thing but breathe. It’s just like training, isn’t it? Same mates, same ball. It’s actually easier than training if you think about it. I want to see you take a breath at least, what can we say, once every ten minutes?”

He laughed. ”Yes, Max.”

His Morale went up a notch. Fineeeessse!

”Mister,” said someone.

I looked up and saw the only guy stupid and servile enough to join Diogo’s mutiny. Rui shittin’ Santos. CA 144. Surely one of the most overrated Portuguese internationals in years, and one of the most under-qualified Bayern Munich regulars in decades. I stared at him, blankly, with my head resting against the hard wood panels behind me.

”Mister, is mine.”

”Say what?” I said, munching on the paste sachet like I was Bugs Bunny eating a carrot.

He turned for help. Diogo was watching from his booth, but he didn’t get up to help his mate, which summed him up. Edgar Wilde, the Englishman who had grown up in Portugal, didn’t realise he was aiding a mutineer. ”Gaffer, you’re sitting in Rui’s spot.”

Mia san mia. We are what we are.

I’m Max Best and I’m a dick. I decided to admit to myself I hadn’t chosen this spot by accident.

”No,” I said, softly. Every single person, from the players to the coaches to the physios, was riveted. ”No, I’m in my spot. Rui can take his shower while the team are battling hard to get the three points we promised Basti. When he’s done, he will clear his locker out. He can get it back when I fly back to England, sort of like a Christmas present. Edgar, mate, tell Rui I’m going to tell the media he picked up a calf strain so I subbed him off. Tell him I’ll defend him in the media one hundred percent as long as I’m here, but that if he fucking opens his gob against me, I will fucking destroy him, from here until eternity.”

Edgar realised he had somehow walked into the middle of a gunfight, and he swallowed. He looked around for guidance, but while he seemed timid, he hadn’t got to the top of the sport by being soft. ”Sorry gaffer, Max, but what happened?”

I pointed. ”He knows. Tell him what I said.”

I went back to munching while Edgar translated. Rui Santos did something hilarious, which was to look back at Diogo. Just in case I didn’t know who the instigator was!

Santos was getting no help from anyone, so he made to grab something from behind me. Before he could get close, I was up on my feet, looming down at him, pushing him backwards. ”Wait outside,” I growled. He mumbled something about getting a bag. ”Wait the fuck outside!” I yelled. For the first time, I wondered if the ’mad dog’ nickname might help me.

We watched him go.

Ten seconds after the door closed, I said, in the soft voice that grabbed everyone’s attention, ”Hands up everyone who signed a contract with FC Diogo.”

Hearing that, Diogo put down the stuff he was eating and fell into a very obvious state of calculation. He scanned for allies and put everything he knew about me onto an abacus. In my favour - my relationship with the triumvirate. On the other side of the ledger - the many easy ways to make me seem foolish and amateur in the press. He could sway the leadership by leading the masses. Piece of piss.

”You get the same deal,” I told him. ”I don’t savage you in the media. I don’t tell Paul Braun he’d be a fucking idiot to give you a new contract. Couple of weeks, I’m going to the Paris Transfer Room. You know what that is, right? Me in a ballroom with every major director of football in the world. All of them begging to have the first dance with me. Give me a fucking excuse and I’ll go to the front, grab the mic, and shout, anyone thinking about signing Diogo come talk to me first. You don’t respect me, mate, but they do. You know why? Because I make money and football clubs are run by people who like money. You and I are finished, but it’s not personal. Leave now and it will stay that way. You’ll get your cushy contract.” I was getting closer to him. The guy was tall, strong, and hot-headed, but I wasn’t scared of him in the slightest. ”Or you can take a shot and we’ll see how that ends.”

He got to his feet, his eyes blazed, and suddenly, crazily, I was ready to go. Ready to crash my fist into his mutinous gob.

”You talk too much,” he said, and barged into me on his way out.

He had been trying to provoke me into throwing the first punch. I was amazed to find Henno Wald holding me back. I smiled at him, prised his hands from my chest, and caught up with Diogo before he reached the door. ”Mate,” I said, eyes shining. ”Any time. You hear me? Any time.”

The dressing room stayed dead silent apart from the sound of his boots clip-clopping away before the door swished shut.

I walked back into the centre, alternately licking my lips and chuckling. ”I know what you’re thinking,” I said. I made eye contact with a few people, trying not to grin too hard. ”You’re thinking I should ruin him at the Transfer Room anyway.”

”Oh my God,” said Jost Benn, my 6 out of 10 right mid. ”You’re crazy.”

”Seriously, though,” I said, louder, as I glared at anyone who would dare look at me. ”Is this FC Diogo or what? Learn this, now, fast. We’re a team. If you play for the team, I’ve got your back, one million percent. You play for yourself, I will ruin the rest of your year, minimum. Any questions?”

There were no questions.

”Henno,” I said, striding into the coach’s room, waving that he should follow. ”Let’s sprachen.”

***

Time was running out in the break, so I had to hurry. I closed the door behind him and led him over to the tactics board. I took the left back and a central midfielder off, and said, ”What do you think?”

Henno’s jaw dropped open. ”You should discuss with the coaches!”

I shook my head. ”No. I trust you, Torben, and Fabian. Not the coaches. Not yet.”

”You trust Fabian? But you excluded him.”

I nearly said ’I don’t play injured players’ but stopped myself just in time. ”We had a disagreement but I respect how he handled it.”

”He tried to make the leaders change you.”

”Yeah, well, that’s all right, isn’t it? From his point of view I’m clearly insane. I’d do the same in his shoes.” I plucked Henno’s magnet and gave it a wipe before putting it back on the board. ”Henno, mate. We both want the same thing. We both want to win today for Bastian, and we both want me to fuck off home to England.” I laughed at myself because he wasn’t going to. ”I really like Petar Gutić but he’s a DM and we need a goal so I’m thinking I bring on Beat Ritter. He can make late runs into the box, score headers, cause chaos. What do you think?”

Henno looked with distaste at the board. ”Are you planning to stick to 4-4-2?”

”Mate,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. ”We were crushing this game until Diogo launched his mutiny.” When I said that, Henno’s eyes flashed but a shield came down quickly. I pictured him thirty years in the future, running this club. ”4-4-2 is only the base from which we, like, morph into the most relevant setup.” I rubbed my forehead. ”I’ve got the Japanese lad who can play left back but he’s more of a central defender, isn’t he?” Henno nodded. ”Yeah,” I said. ”So we stick to 3-4-3. I’ve got three guys on the bench who can play as a forward. From the three, I’d go for Didier.”

Didier Cartier was one of the endless supply of attacking midfielders. He was a year younger than the other two options at a sprightly 30. He was 166/178 and had made a habit of scoring important goals. One that kept me in this job seemed pretty fucking important to me.

Henno pointed to the board. ”You want someone to play in the front three? Drissa or Claude would be more suited.”

I wasn’t a huge fan of either player. They were talented, sure enough, but they were pretty brainless. I had always thought so when watching on TV and up close my instincts had been proven right. Both had low Decisions scores but Henno knew the three options a lot better than I did. He had played with them for years; trained with them. Claude Sonko was 31 years old, 166/183. Not exactly a hardship to use him, was it? He was listed as AM FR, attacking midfielder or forward, right. Drissa was the same but on the left. ”Okay. Claude is better on the right and we could use some threat on that side. Let me check something.” With those two changes, our average CA would drop the merest fraction to 165.3. ”Can Adam Adebayo play left mid like this? Will he do his defensive work?”

”Put me on the left side,” said Henno, meaning the left of the two central midfielders. ”I will cover.”

”Bosh,” I said. I grabbed one of the chairs, flung the door open and carried my trophy to the central desk. I hopped from the chair and onto the table, as graceful as a cat. ”Beat, Claude,” I called out. ”You have ascended.” I was about to launch into an improvised speech when Diane Berger, the team manager who wasn’t a manager, came in. She was clearly disturbed by what the mutineers had told her and wanted to check on the sitch. I changed tack, went to a more carrot and stick approach. ”Lads”, I said. ”In the next 45 minutes you get the chance to make history. You get the chance to send 75,000 people home very happy. You get the chance to look Basti in the eye and tell him you worked your fucking arses off for him. Diane Berger,” I said, surprising her and making every head turn. ”Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I want every reserve team player at Säbener Strasse so I can assess them.”

”Excuse me?” I didn’t repeat myself, so she went on, ”It’s not possible! It’s too short notice. Why so early?”

”Send out the message. Two of those guys will be coming to Italy with us and may very well get minutes. Write that in the chat and see how many of them think it’s too short notice, too early. And who knows? Depending on how this second half goes, we might need more fresh meat. Oh, and I want it early because immediately after that I’ll be driving to Stuttgart to scout a future opponent. Because that’s what I do. I grind. Every single day.

”That’s why I’m here now, standing on a table in the Allianz Arena, looking down on a load of superstars who have forgotten what hard work looks like. There are twenty-five kids waiting to take your place in the squad, wanting to rip your poster down from the gladiator’s corridor up there, who’d love nothing more than to paste their face over where yours used to be. There’s a manager standing on this table who loves giving minutes to kids. Sounds like a win-win... for those kids.

”You’re not hungry? Get hungry. Win for the fans, win for Basti, keep your place in the squad. That’s the challenge. Mia san mia. We are what we are. I’m a maniac. I’m relentless. I’m a team player. What are you?” I let the words hang. I’d timed this to perfection. BZZ! The buzzer sounded. ”Captain, take them out.”

***

The rain was coming down a little harder, which was nice. My head was heating up from needing to concentrate so hard but the weather was helping to cool me off. I stood on the side of the pitch, head exposed to the elements like a totem pole, making note of Ulf Graber’s half-time tweaks.

The first was obvious - from goal kicks he asked his team to sit deeper so that we wouldn’t have such an easy long pass to Zoran. Yeah, okay, made sense. I counter-tweaked, making us revert to short passes, building up from the goalie. Now, though, the oppo wasn’t up in our grille and it was virtually risk-free to work the ball up towards midfield.

The first time we did it, Ulf reacted by looking up to the night sky. What had he done to deserve this? He called out to his players to react to their new circumstances, but I could make Zoran pop up anywhere on the pitch; it was impossible to cover everywhere. I created hot keys so that I could send Zoran to left midfield, draw the oppo to that zone, and then play a short pass to any centre back who wasn’t covered. Once I pinged a long pass to Claude Sonko, just to give Elversberg another thing to worry about. It worked better than expected.

51’

Goal kick for Bayern.

A gaggle of their players shuffle to the left.

Kaspar Benn signals, but hits to the right instead.

Sonko wins the header and chases after his own flick.

He’s zooming down the touchline, but cuts back onto his favoured left foot.

His pass is underhit, though, and the chance is gone.

Yeah, that was the problem with playing left-footed guys on the right. Okay, if they were in or around the box they could move the ball onto their left foot and have a great shooting opportunity, but what I personally wanted from a winger was for them to go to the goal line and fire a low, hard cross square across the goal. That caused mayhem but Sonko didn’t want to do it in case he made shit contact when kicking with his right foot. Better, in his mind, to waste the opportunity with an attractive left-footed pass than to remind the world your right foot is shit.

Poor decision-making, poor team work.

With 55 minutes on the clock, I noted that we had taken almost complete control of the match. I tried my new toy, the thing I had prioritised instead of adding a useful formation. The tactics screen showed a summary of where my players were supposed to be, but it was based on two other screens. With Ball told the players where to be when we had possession. Without Ball told them where to go when we were defending.

I opened the Without Ball screen and dragged a dotted white line onto the pitch. This one set a boundary for the defenders. I placed the line slightly higher than the defenders were currently standing. On the pitch, Kumba Viera took a couple of strides forward and stretched his arms, ordering his mates to copy him.

One thing I remembered from school was that pressure was caused when atoms smashed into the sides of a container. The more smashes, the more pressure. Moving this line up would make the playing area smaller. Smaller playing area equals more pressure.

I monitored the results for a couple of minutes. It felt to me like Elversberg were losing the ball even faster than before.

I nudged the line even closer to half way.

This new toy was dangerous. The three centre backs on the pitch had great positioning skills but weren’t the fastest. If I put too much distance between them and the goalie, the pressure would increase but so would the risk of a fast counter-attack.

60’

Ritter loses the ball in midfield.

Elversberg’s number 8 passes ahead.

Number 9 races onto the ball.

He’s one-on-one with the keeper!

Great save by Kaspar Benn!

He timed that to perfection.

The striker didn’t, though. The flag has gone up for offside.

I ran my fingers through my hair, which was like fondling a sexy mop. My pulse must have hit max. 75,000 hearts in mouths. My defenders had moved at the exact right time, in unison, and the idiot striker had got too excited. Everything had gone well but there’s something visceral about seeing a team carve through your defence like butter. You can know on a logical level that nothing had actually happened, that no shot would be recorded in the stats, that Kaspar, according to the records, had not yet made a save. But you couldn’t tell your eyes they hadn’t seen what they had seen. You couldn’t tell your stomach to untwist itself.

Guess who was put on the big screen just then? I found the camera and gave it a little wink.

I moved the defensive line back a little bit, remembered that I was always banging on about Fearless Football, and nudged it ahead again. There wasn’t much risk to what I was doing, whatever my idiot stomach thought, and it came with good rewards.

The game took on a slightly new shape. We had fantastic threat down the left, where Adam (left-mid) and Danny (left-forward) were miles too good for their oppo. We had decent quality on the right, where Claude Sonko was getting the ball, cutting inside, and smashing shots towards goal. He’d had three already, and eventually one would go in.

We had potential in the middle. Zoran was battling, and Beat Ritter had goals in him if I wanted to let him loose. Had it been Chester, we would have been attacking from all sides.

Me asking Ritter to hold his position for now, while asking Jost to stay disciplined on the right, was my idea of being professional.

66’

Elversberg are making their first changes.

Ulf Graber was aware that his players were being made to work hard and he changed three midfielders in one go. That took their overall quality down but he was no longer looking to snatch a win. This was all about hanging on for a draw, which would have been a top result for them.

”Edgar,” I called out.

”Boss?” he said, coming over to me.

The Englishman was a centre back who could play DM. He was physical but had decent technical skills. He could play a pass, that was for sure. ”I’m putting you on for Dumi. You’re going to step out from the back three and be a DM. We’re going to work the ball through you. Get it to Henno and Beat nice and quick, keep us moving up the pitch. Fast fast fast, you get me? Don’t let them take breathers. This is all about upping the pressure. When you’re settled I’m going to let Beat loose so you’ll be in the rest defence.” That meant that if we lost the ball, Edgar would always be in a defensive spot. ”Except for set pieces. Get your head on a corner for me.”

”For Basti.”

”That’s what I said.”

”So,” he said, thinking about it. ”We’ll be 2-1-4-3? With Beat going forward to be, like, 2-1-3-4?”

”Yeah.”

”I thought we were being conservative, gaffer.”

I frowned at him. ”That is conservative. Tell the fourth official, yeah?”

He took a couple of beats. ”Are you okay, Max?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. ”Yeah. Tired. It’s already hard enough but then I can’t scream and shout because it goes up on the big screen doesn’t it? Just, ah, yeah. Go and dominate your zone. Cheers.”

71’

Bayern are parked in Elversberg’s half. Non-stop pressure from the home team.

That looked like a foul on the left. Yes, the referee has given it.

Adebayo and Sonko are standing over the ball, discussing who will take it.

Sonko swings in a left-footed cross.

Header from Bratko...

Saved!

The rebound falls to Wald. He must score...

But he blazes the ball over the bar!

He holds his head in his hands.

No-one can believe it.

It felt like it was going to be one of those games. Our shot count was ticking up pretty fast but guys were losing their heads, panicking, worrying. I’d been in this position plenty of times with Chester. I had plenty of experience of being on top, peppering an opponent with shots, and nine times out of ten someone popped up with a bit of quality, bit of magic, and when the first goal went in it was like the floodgates had been opened.

On the rare occasions we couldn’t get a goal, Chester fans shrugged and said ’that’s life’. Here, it wouldn’t be disappointment but disaster. Disaster for my reputation. Disaster for Basti’s recovery. Disaster for my heist, too.

I looked at my bench. There were two wingers I could send on to replace Jost as a right midfielder. The Austrian was doing fine and he had plenty in the tank. I worried that if we put yet another forward on we would suddenly find that we didn’t have enough structure. You didn’t win games by mindlessly throwing on strikers.

I got Jost’s attention in a break. He raced over. ”You’re doing well,” I said. ”Be patient, choose your moment, but I want you to get up to support the attacks. Let’s say one attack in three you get up there, yeah? Tell Zoran to attack the near post so that you can pop up on the far post. If you’re patient, you won’t have any defenders near you. Do you get me? Patience.”

He nodded and rushed back onto the pitch. I threw out a random gesture while looking in the direction of Beat Ritter, the box-to-box midfielder. I set him to ’make forward runs’, ’run with ball’, but ’long shots no’. In fact, I disabled long shots for everyone. When those shots went behind for a goal kick, Elversberg took a minute off the clock. Time was getting precious.

My head was absolutely pounding. Sandra Lane would have taken a lot of the pressure off me. Pascal would have confirmed whether my ideas were crazy or not crazy enough.

I crouched and looked at the white line in front of me. The action was nowhere near it but because the curse had been designed by simpletons, I still got experience points so long as I looked at the pitch. Risk versus reward? The current balance was solid, surely? Fitness? We looked good. The oppo were floundering. What did I have to do?

I triggered a couple of perks. One tightened up our defence. Not really needed at this point, but there was no cost to using it and anything could happen in the last ten minutes. Another perk made the link between two players stronger. My instinct was to do it between Adam and Danny, but they were already combining great. Which combination was most likely to lead to a goal? Adam to Zoran, maybe. Winger to striker.

We got a corner. Our tall players jogged forward and I smashed the Free Hit button. It increased the chance of us scoring from about 3% to about 13%. The cross was good but a defender cleared.

I looked up at the enormous screen. 82 minutes gone. My heart nearly fired itself out of my chest like a bloody cannonball. Where had the second half gone? 8 minutes to get a goal. A scrappy one would do. In off the shin. A miskick. An own goal. Times were getting desperate. Was I desperate? It felt pretty fucking desperate.

To my left, our goalie was moving further and further out of his goal. He was thinking what I was thinking - would I send him up for a corner kick? Risk defeat to get a win? My heart said yes, my head said no, but Basti’s heart was screaming do that and I’ll batter you!

I waved at Kaspar to go back ten yards. He licked his lips but obeyed.

As a compromise, I slid the defensive line all the way to halfway. If Elversberg could put together a few passes and break when they were under this kind of pressure, good luck to them. From what I could see, they didn’t have the tools. Too many of their players had put in too much effort. They looked how I felt.

They were trying to run the clock down at every opportunity. I had our Game Speed slider maxed. We were rushing to take throw-ins, corners, set pieces. Pressure pressure pressure.

85’

Offside!

Pak Young touches the free kick quickly. Viera moves it to Wilde.

He finds Wald, who moves forward, urged on by the home crowd.

Wald to Adebayo. He lends the ball to Danny Kowalski, who has two markers near him.

There is plenty of movement in the box. Will Kowalski try to shoot?

Adebayo sprints past on the overlap. Kowalski plays a clever ball in behind the defence.

Adebayo clips the ball high towards the far post.

Sonko is there!

But he hits the post!

The angle was tight and a defender was rushing to block the shot but Sonko might have done better with that chance.

The defenders celebrate.

On the big screen, Max Best is impassive.

86’

Jost Benn on the right. The Austrian finds Ritter.

Ritter drives ahead but is tackled.

Wald is first to the loose ball. He finds Sonko on the right.

Sonko brings the ball onto his left foot and crosses deep.

Bratko, the powerhouse striker, leaps and heads square.

Right into the path of Ritter!

The German youth international slides and volleys...

But it’s blocked!

Fantastic defending.

The ball goes wide left. Adebayo sends it back in, but it sails over everyone’s head.

Goal kick to Elversberg.

Adebayo looks dismayed. Max Best asks for calm.

87’

Kaspar Benn gathers the clearance and feeds the ball wide to his Austrian namesake, Jost Benn.

Jost Benn plays it inside to Wilde.

Wilde to Wald to Adebayo.

Adebayo once more combines with Kowalski. Wald runs ahead, bringing defenders with him.

Kowalski dribbles past one defender and looks for a runner.

He plays a one-two with Adebayo and shapes to cross left-footed.

Bratko runs to the near post. Danger for Elversberg!

Kowalski checks back onto his right. Sonko is surging into the centre. Ritter is arriving, too! Defenders hurry to get into position.

But Kowalski plays a slow, simple ball...

To Jost Benn! He’s unmarked on the far post! The keeper scrambles to get across the line...

GOOOOAAAALLLL!!!!

Pandemonium in the Allianz Arena! The home team have finally got the goal their play deserved!

The noise is incredible. The fans are bouncing. The away team slump to the turf.

The home players are celebrating in front of the Südkurve.

Benn and Kowalski combined for the goal and now they are combining to hold up a Bayern Munich shirt with the name Basti on the back.

A nice touch from the players.

About two minutes after the ball slapped into the back of the net, I remembered what I had told Kaspar.

I breathed.

When the players were on their way back to our half, I cupped my hand around my mouth and shouted some gibberish. I moved Edgar back to his default position. I turned Beat Ritter back into a normal central midfielder and removed the dotted white line. The defenders could stand on our goal line for all I cared.

How could I get us looking even more solid?

I switched to 3-5-2, which put Danny Kowalski into midfield. Then I moved Claude Sonko one zone back. 3-5-1-1, defensive mentality, looking to counter-attack. If Elversberg came at us, threw bodies forward, we would rip them a new one.

They didn’t. They had given it everything and holding onto that nil-nil had become their entire mission. When we scored, they deflated. I watched Ulf Graber to see if he would try to pump them up for one last assault, but he had nothing left in the tank, either.

We passed the ball around until the clock hit 90, and in injury time we made a few token attacks while keeping plenty of players back, and very professionally saw out the win.

The big screen cut to some rando. He was good-looking, if a little damp. He was standing quite still, looking cool, calm, and collected. Ulf Graber appeared on the screen next to him, which was weird because Ulf was right next to me.

He offered a handshake. ”Well done, Herr Best.”

I gripped his hand. ”Well done, Herr Graber. Fantastic team. Brilliant.”

”Ugh,” he said. ”Not so brilliant at the end.”

”How far is Elversberg, anyway?”

”Not far. Only four and a half hours.”

”What do I do now?”

”Now?” he said, surprised. He looked around the arena. The gladiators had fought. One had won, one had lost with dignity. The audience was satisfied. ”Now you enjoy it.”

He slapped me on the back and we shook hands again.

Briggy appeared next to me. ”You have to talk to the TV again, then more media, then the post-match meal will be in the banquet hall.”

”Banquet hall? What?”

”It’s not just the players eating together like in England. Here, it’s friends, family, the coaches, the admin team. I’ve been to recon the room. It’s like a wedding.”

”Jesus Christ,” I said. ”That’s moronic. I don’t want to go and talk to a hundred people. My head is actual jelly.”

”That’s the tradition here.”

”Don’t give a fuck,” I said, looking around. They were blasting music too loud and my head was throbbing. ”Mia san mia. I’ll do things my way. I’ll talk to the media and then...”

”Yes?”

”Then I want to lie down in a sensory room.”