Player Manager 3: A Sports Progression Fantasy, page 1
PLAYER
MANAGER
3
TED STEEL
To my Royal Road fans and Patreon supporters, who really did provide the assist when it mattered. Please note both groups include my wife, Loretta, whose appetite for having books dedicated to her appears insatiable.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Ted Steel
Cover design by Damonza
ISBN: 978-1-0394-5450-7
Published in 2024 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumaudio.com
CONTENTS
1 CRACKERS
2 SEALS LIVE
3 SEVEN FUNERALS AND A WEDDING
4 FLAMINGO LAND
5 HE BANGS THE DRUMS
6 MARATHON NOT A SPRINT
7 JANUARY SALES
8 SPACE INVADERS
9 GOALS
10 SCENARIO B
11 NOTHING ODD WILL DO LONG
12 WISH LIST
13 FOOD CHAIN
14 ROOT AND BRANCH
15 A GLIMPSE OF THE BELOVED
16 INVERTING THE PYRAMID
17 CULTURE
18 AS IT WAS
19 PLAYDAR
20 DAS TOURNAMENT
21 WE’RE OFF TO SEE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE STORY SO FAR
SEASON 2022/23 - THE THIRD HALF
Max Best has been cursed with the abilities of a top football manager. Thanks to the curse-giver’s sloppiness, there was an unexpected side effect: he is also a fantastic player. As he was about to apply for the player-manager role at bottom-of-the-table Telford, he was offered the position of director of football at Chester Football Club—but first he must convince its fans he’s the right man for the job.
What is a club in any case?
Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes.
It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city.
It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.
—Sir Bobby Robson, Newcastle: My Kind of Toon
1
CRACKERS
Monday, December 26, 2022.
The day after Christmas is Boxing Day. It’s called Boxing Day because there’s no boxing but there’s loads of football.
Football?
While the sensible German leagues have a lovely old winter break and those footballers spend Christmas wrapped up warm and snug with their loved ones, the British play—get this—even more football! Christmas Eve! Boxing Day! New Year’s Eve! New Year’s Day! Did you enjoy your day off? Great! Get back on the pitch; we’re playing Stoke at 8. Wait, that’s on Wednesday. Today it’s Oxford at 3. What do you mean you’re tired and you want to see your kids? Shut your gob and get warmed up!
Eight days ago, after the immortal World Cup final between France and Argentina, the managing director of Chester Football Club, Mike Dean, offered me a job. A job that didn’t exist yet and showed no signs of existing. It was my opinion as a professional ghoster that he was dragging his heels. Did he have cold feet? Or was he simply waiting until the January transfer window opened?
MD was strangely sensitive to the outside world’s opinion of him. Chester signing a twenty-two-year-old director of football (me) would have been the only topic of conversation in the boardrooms of England’s sixth tier. An obvious source of mockery. What are they smoking over there at the Deva Stadium? On the other hand, Chester signing the league’s best player (also me) by giving him a meaningless job title—yeah, MD would have pulled off quite the coup.
Whatever the root cause was, the delay in finding a path forward had been doing my head in. I decided to give MD what professional football players call “a kick up the arse.” Chester’s next league game could not have been more perfect for my purposes.
Me: Are you going to the Boxing Day match?
MD: Yes.
Me: See you there! Winky face emoji.
“Oh!” said Emma, my blonde bombshell girlfriend, who had forgiven me for a minor Christmas meal falling-out with her father.
“What?”
“This stadium. It’s really nice!”
“Yeah,” I agreed, peering out of the passenger window. The New Bucks Head was the home of AFC Telford United, yet another phoenix club, risen from the ashes of its former ownership. “That is nice. Looks like a real stadium.”
“Maybe you should have taken this job.”
“It’s still available,” I mused. Telford were bottom of the league by a considerable distance. Everyone thought they were finished, but I knew I could save them. There was only one fly in the ointment—I wanted to save Chester; I had friends there.
Emma wound down her window and spoke to a man in a luminous orange coat. A blast of cold air hit me like a forearm smash. “Max Best plus one,” she said.
He looked down at a clipboard. “Ah yes,” he said. “The guest of honour. Go right to the front. Roll up to the Chester team bus there, then go a little farther. The spot says Home Manager. Can’t miss it.” He lowered himself so he could get a better look at us. No, not at us. At me. Imagine wanting to look at me when Emma was right there. I couldn’t read his expression. He stood straight and gestured for us to drive on.
“The manager’s spot,” said Emma, with a wry smile. “What did you tell them?”
I tried to hide a smirk. “Just said I was coming. No reason they’d roll out the red carpet for little old me.”
“Yeah?” She turned into our spot. “Just to be clear today, Max Best, if you tell another person I was on Geordie Shore I’ll do something that one of us will regret.”
“Huh?” I said. “I only said that once. With Mike Dean. Ha! Reminds me. I got a text from him last week asking which season you were in. I think he’s watching it from the start, just in case he can catch you in a tight dress.”
“I don’t mean Mike. I mean your mum.” We got out of the car and looked left and right. I pointed to a series of big glass doors that looked like a main reception. Emma headed that way. “I see you forgot already. You were trying to change the topic from that phone game that your mum and Anna were playing. What was it called?”
“Soccer Supremo,” I said, shuddering at the memory. I’d recently asked my mother’s friend Anna for help understanding my curse. That involved making her explore my old copy of Champion Manager—the game Soccer Supremo had ripped off. After I left she had spent ten pounds—exorbitant—buying the latest mobile version. She was utterly addicted; managing Blackpool Football Club had taken over her life. Anna knew better than to ask me about the game because even looking at a static image made me feel sick, but mum had asked me what the latest killer formations were and who were the cheapest wonderkids. I’d tried to deflect in small ways before going nuclear by mentioning mum’s passion: reality TV.
Emma nodded. “Soccer Supremo, right. Your mum was asking how many seasons it took before the game would start producing ‘regens,’ and that’s when you said I was on Geordie Shore. That distracted her until I said you were joking.”
“Remind me to teach you the ‘Yes, and …’ rule.”
“Then you said I was on Love Island and she said ‘pah’ because she would have remembered. Then you asked her to tell Anna what happened in the Love Island ‘movie night’ scandal and your mum went on a big rant and the game was forgotten. Why would you rather talk about reality TV than football?”
“I want to be a soccer supremo,” I said. “Not pretend. And I don’t want to talk about football twenty-four seven. All right. On the other side of this door is a little place I like to call The Future. Have you been practising your WAG face like I told you?” WAG means Wives and Girlfriends. It’s tabloid newspaper shorthand for talking about the partners of football stars.
She laughed. “You don’t get to tell me what I do with my face. What’s WAG face anyway?”
“I’ll show you.” I took her arm, turned her towards me, and asked her to close her eyes. I imagined I was married to Jack Grealish. What face would I have? “Okay, open.”
She was still wiping the tears away when we were met by Telford’s most senior hospitality volunteer. She would have smiled at us anyway, but seeing the huge grins on our faces brought one to hers.
She introduced herself, apologised for how cold it was, then got down to business. “Right, then. You said you’d like to wander around. By all means, have a gander. We’re proud of this old place, so we are. Let me get you your tickets. Just in case anyone stops you when you move from section to section. Oh. Now, that’s odd.”
“What is?”
“I’ve got two envelopes for you. Let me check this.” She pulled the first one open and nodded. “Yes, these are from us. That’s our VIP sec
“That’s all right.”
She offered both envelopes. “So, which do you want?”
I smiled at her. “I’ll take both. If I don’t like the company in one place, I’ll try the other.” She gave me a wobbly smile like I was making a joke she didn’t understand. I gently gripped the envelopes between my thumbs and index fingers until she let go. “Lovely stuff,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
She scratched the back of her head. “I thought you were a player.”
“Can you keep a secret?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Perfect. Chester might be offering me a job. The board that represents the fans have to meet and approve it. But if they don’t hurry up, I’ll apply for the Telford position.”
“You don’t mean manager?”
“Player-manager.” I smiled.
“You’re very young,” she said, full of doubt.
“I might have the body of a twenty-two-year-old, and the emotional maturity of a …” I turned to Emma. “What did we agree?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen-year-old. But I’ve got the … Huh. I don’t know how to finish that sentence.”
“Parking space.”
“Yes! I’ve got the parking space of a fifty-year-old football manager. And all my own hair. If anything, I’m overqualified.”
The hospitality lady gave me the warmest smile she could generate. “Enjoy the match, Mr. and Mrs. Best.”
“That’s an encounter she’ll never forget,” Emma said.
“That’s what I do best.”
“Which seats first? Telford or Chester?”
“Telford.”
“Oh! Plot twist.”
A steward told me where to go. I went at one mile an hour up the stairs, taking in the stadium. From inside it was even more impressive. It was a real football stadium, four-sided, well thought out. Great disabled access. It had been built with care and with the fan experience in mind. I wanted it. I wanted it a lot.
Another reason to walk slowly was to try to catch sight of Mike Dean. I spotted him gladhanding some bigwigs. Presumably his Telford equivalents.
I paused.
“What vibe do you want?” said Emma. She enjoyed my little games. Most of her life involved being a lawyer, looking through fine print, cross-referencing documents. Utter tedium. Sometimes she threw herself into my role plays with an enthusiasm I found disquieting. When I’d pretended she was my deranged stalker she was all too believable.
“Hmm,” I said. “How about … one of us offers blistering football analysis while the other looks like sex on legs and gets some old white men thinking of long, debauched nights in tawdry hotels?”
She nodded. “Football analysis. Got it.” She rubbed her nostrils while sniffing, and said in a pastiche of Chester’s awful manager, Ian Evans: “Four-four-two, get up their arse, keep it tight first fifteen.” I bit my lip. The football dinosaur persona slipped off her face and she flushed. “What?”
I jerked my head towards the gathering. “You’re fantastic. Let’s go before icicles start forming on me.”
“Mike!” I said, barging into the group. “Nice to see you. I thought you were on holiday. You didn’t reply to my last eighteen or nineteen phone calls.”
He rolled his eyes slightly and introduced me to the Telford lot. “Everyone, this is Max Best. Darlington’s mystery winger. Nine goals in five starts. Max. Glad you got my tickets.”
“What? No, MD. I’m here by invitation of Telford. They haven’t said it out loud, but I think they’d like me to apply for the manager’s job. They must have heard about me heroically beating Man City’s under-sixteens with a team of much older, more experienced players.”
There were some awkward smiles from everyone except MD. He said, “Can I speak to you privately for a moment?”
“You’re always asking to speak to me privately! Weird habit. You know I long to save a club from relegation. Isn’t it funny that two relegation-threatened clubs should be playing each other just as I’m scratching around for an opportunity? So convenient! But while I always liked the abstract idea of saving Telford, now that I’m here I find myself enchanted. Look at it! Guys, I love your stadium. I love the area. I love my parking space.” To MD I added, “They gave me the manager’s spot.” Then to the dudes, “It’s good you haven’t chosen one yet. The chosen one, AKA the frozen one, may be closer than you think.”
“Well, it’s Christmas. Hard time to arrange meetings and such,” said one Telford dude. “And with all the postponements recently, we haven’t really missed out on having a manager, if you see what I mean.”
I nodded rapidly. “Yep yep yep. Thing is, if I’m running a football club, I’m going to use the January transfer window to find new players, aren’t I? Beef up the squad. It’s no good me getting a job mid-January, is it Mike? Need it now, don’t I? To hit the ground running. Get stuck in,” I said, giving him a gentle little punch to the belly.
He inhaled and put his hand to his forehead. “I’m going as fast as I can, Max. It would help enormously if you sat in the seat I organised.”
“Enormously?” I said, whipping out the Chester tickets.
“Enormously.”
“Then I shall so do.”
I took a step away, and one back again. I lowered my voice in the pretence that MD wouldn’t be able to hear me. “But just in case, do you guys have an application form or something like that?”
The main Telford dude seemed confused. “For the manager position? Are you serious?” Three faces showed that I was: mine, Emma’s, and MD’s. The man continued. “There isn’t a form as such. We’ll take applications and conduct interviews. It’s clear you’re a special player, but do you have any qualifications? Experience? It’s a tough job.”
I waved his worries away. “If I came for an interview you would literally be spellbound. Don’t worry about that. As for qualifications, how about this?” I half-turned and pointed to spots on the pitch that would soon be filled with players. “If I know your caretaker manager, and I think I do, he’ll send out a solid four-four-two. Solid being a polite way of saying ultra-defensive.” I proceeded to name the starting lineup, who would take the corners, the left and right set pieces, penalties, and captain. The tactics screen told me all this. It also showed me that one player’s stamina was written in red. “Huh. That second striker looks injured to me. Either he’s been rushed back from injury or he’s done it in the warmup and not told anyone. Naughty boy! I’d soon stamp that out. That’s team spirit cancer, that sort of thing. But you’re probably more interested in what Chester will get up to.” I did the same thing with the away team, but slowed down near the end to look at individual instructions. “Aff, that’s what they call the Irish guy playing left-mid, is Chester’s most dangerous player. So Ian Evans has instructed him … hold on, let me double-check this … has told him not to attack. What the fuck? Mike! We need three points today! Telford are bottom of the fucking league! If Evans plays for a draw today I’m going to spontaneously combust.”
He was giving me a strange look. “Ian Evans is a very experienced manager. I’m sure he has a plan he thinks will win us the match.”
I found myself trying to loosen my jaw. “Riiight.”
We went to the Chester seats. I was fuming—not enough to warm me up—and through a shimmer of frustration I realised Emma was chanting something. “What?”
“Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”
It calmed me all the way down. I gave her a lopsided smile. “You know I’m good at this here football malarkey. Why’s it so weird I’d know the teams?”
“Not so long ago, you told me you didn’t know anything about Telford. A week ago you didn’t know what colours they played in. Now you know their tactical plans down to the subatomic level.”
