Player Manager 2: A Sports Progression Fantasy, page 1
PLAYER MANAGER
BOOK 2
TED STEEL
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 © 2023 by Ted Steel
Cover design by Damonza
ISBN: 978-1-0394-4585-7
Published in 2023 by Podium Publishing, ULC
www.podiumaudio.com
CONTENTS
THE STORY SO FAR
1 SCOUTING MAX BEST
2 IAN EVANS
3 MAX’S MISFITS
4 TWO TOUCH
5 DIAMOND GEEZER
6 AND AGAIN
7 BETAMAX
8 A PRISONER’S DILEMMA
9 CHANGE
10 CHAT SHIT GET BANGED
11 TRANSITIONS
12 CHALLENGE
13 COMPLAINTS
14 PIECES OF SILVER
15 THE FAST TRACK
16 DIGS
17 TOP GEAR
18 WHITBY TOWN
19 JAM TOMORROW
20 MANAGING EXPECTATIONS
21 A NEW LIGHT
22 NO BACKSIES
23 WHOEVER HAS WILL BE GIVEN MORE
24 TIMING
25 COPA MUNDIAL
26 HOLY MOSES
27 MONKEY ISLAND
28 ALL-OUT ATTACK
29 POKING THE BEAR
30 YELLOW CARDS
31 HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
32 KETTERING TOWN
33 GO FOR THE CORNER
34 THE MAX BEST MANIFESTO
35 DO BETTER
36 SIDE TO SIDE
37 DOUBLE DRIBBLE
38 THE ATTENTION GAME
39 THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL
40 PLAY ON
41 THE KARMA BEFORE THE STORM
42 MAX BEST WINS IT ALL (PART 1 OF 1,000)
43 MAX BEST WINS IT ALL (PART 2 OF 20)
44 MAX LOSES BIG (PART 3 OF 3)
45 EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE STORY SO FAR
Max Best has been cursed with the ability to see the attributes of football players and to manage football matches. He gains experience points by watching live games and can spend XP to upgrade his skills. He has had enough minor success as an amateur manager and scout to impress a handful of football insiders. But he still works in a call centre and has turned months of grinding into exactly one hundred pounds.
“In order to write about life,
first you must live it.”
—Ernest Hemingway
1
SCOUTING MAX BEST
After watching sixth-tier Chester compete like tigers against fifth-tier Oldham in a VIP box where two former players were the kings of the jungle, I made a decision. The fastest, surest way to get what I wanted—financial security and a job as a football manager—was to become a player. Once inside a football club, I’d be able to take over. I’d be a parasite, but one of those benevolent ones, like the one that makes you find cats amazing.
Footballers train, what, ten minutes a day? So I could still be a scout. I could still be an agent. There would still be opportunities to manage youth teams and the like.
My days of working in the call centre were numbered.
The next few days were a blast. A riot. Mike Dean and I, partners in crime, called and texted each other like lovestruck teenagers. We cooked up a heist plot that could easily have been turned into a three-part BBC special.
The intended victim, I suppose, was Ian Evans, the Chester FC manager. The loot? His approval for the signing of a certain Max Best.
In a couple of weeks, once my ankle was more or less fully healed, I would turn up for my trial, impress Evans, sign for Chester, and get paid at least 350 pounds a week. The exact number of pounds was the cause of rather a lot of bickering, but MD and I both agreed that 350 was the absolute floor. Once I was a Chester player, I’d be able to start sticking my nose into everyone’s business. Start rebuilding the club in my own image, from the inside. Not powerful, exactly, but not powerless.
The one possible flaw in the plan was what if I turned up to the trial and was shit?
So that’s what we were on the phone for: scheming and plotting ways to make sure my trial was plain sailing. And mate, we spent more time laughing at our solutions than we did thinking of problems. Because for once in my life, the solutions were undeniably perfect.
You might be thinking, But bro. We’ve seen you play. Jackie has seen you play. We know you’re good enough for Chester.
Well, maybe. I’d only played about twenty minutes of football since being cursed, and that was five-a-side against some CA 1 guys. (CA, I believed, stood for Current Ability, measured out of 200.) And if we want to get paranoid, most of my good play said as much about Raffi Brown, my footballing soulmate, as it did about me.
Being cautious—and this was my one shot at getting a playing contract at Chester until Evans was gone—I couldn’t assume that the curse had turned me into Soccer-Man. Sure, I was objectively stronger than before, but I’d also felt really weird when I’d taken to the pitch. Acing the test wasn’t a sure thing.
So. I went through my known strengths and weaknesses and thought about what drills that ruled in or out. We’d try to show my good qualities in the trial and hide the bad ones.
At the very start of the process, I took a piece of paper and created a player profile. At the top I wrote Max Best. I focused on the attributes I’d unlocked, since those were what I had the most points of comparison for.
Acceleration and Pace
I was never very fast, but I wasn’t slow, either. Obviously most professional athletes would absolutely bang me in any kind of race. But I allowed myself to imagine I was faster than Ziggy, so I gave myself a 5 in both the speed attributes.
Bravery
Absolutely a 1. I didn’t think of myself as a coward. I would definitely probably maybe run into a burning house to save a supermodel. It wasn’t about being a coward, it was about priorities. Have you seen these defenders who do a tackle and the ball bounces towards a striker and the defender sort of wriggles like a worm to do a header? With his head two inches above the ground and a boot flying towards both ball and head at speed? It’s fucking mental. You really have to be tonto to do that. Me? Forget it. I liked having my nose on the front of my face.
Dribbling and Finishing
I wasn’t sure how to rate these. Obviously, both should have been 1. But James Yalley had a 6 in dribbling, and if he was better at running with the ball than me then I’d honestly just quit my job in the call centre and try to get a worse job in a worse call centre. I mean, seriously, that’s how low I would feel. And finishing? I was feeling pretty sharp in the five-a-side match. I dared to dream and gave myself a 5.
Handling
What am I, a goalkeeper? Next!
Jumping
What am I, a flea? Next!
But seriously. This was one of my absolute, most critical flaws as a player. For a start, ninety-nine percent of the football I’d ever played was indoor football, futsal, or five-a-side, and you just don’t do many headers in those games. In some matches, headers are banned! Plus, why are you jumping? Because someone sent you a bad pass, basically. If you have to jump, someone’s made a mistake. And that’s always annoyed me. Plus, I didn’t like it. What can I say? I didn’t like jumping. I just didn’t. Jump for a header? No. Jump out of a plane? Veto. Jump for joy? No. One hundred percent of the world’s joy is on ground level. I hated jumping so much I didn’t even wear jumpers.
Heading
Weirdly, I was always quite good at headers. I wouldn’t jump for a header, but if the ball was kicked right onto my forehead, I would redirect the shit out of it. Put me up against a real defender, though, and I wouldn’t even bother competing. So I could give myself a heading rating of 10 knowing it would never actually come into play.
Passing
With this one I got a bit arrogant. A bit uppity. Because if you asked me, I was an unbelievable passer of a football. The more the trial was based around passing, the better. In my mind, I was already the best at passing in the entire sixth-tier of English football. 15 out of 20, yo. Nuff said.
Stamina, Strength, Tackling, and Teamwork
1, 1, 1, 1. You might be thinking, But you can lift weights, bro, and yeah, maybe the curse had beefed my rating there. And maybe it had also given me mad stamina. But was I going to let that come into the trial? Fat chance. I had spent most of my life as weak as a baby.
But teamwork, bro. You’re all about teamwork. You had a whole arc where you ruined your career for the sake of teamwork. Yeah, I believed in teamwork. For other people.
Technique
My general level here was pretty high. Above average. Controlling a pass, hitting a volley or half-volley. Yep. I was pretty confident about it. But also, Supercoach Jackie had done that drill where he’d smacked balls at me and I’d dealt with everything. My skill was kind of undeniable. I gave myself a 10, though I suspected it might have been higher.
Other Att
What other things had the curse mentioned? Influence. Not relevant to the trial. There was OFF, which I still thought was something about offside. Again, that was unlikely to come up. Especially if I was designing the drills! Flair, creativity. Yep, I’d score well there. But Ian Evans didn’t want such players, so there was no point showing that.
And set pieces. That was the ace I was keeping up my sleeve. I used to be able to take a good corner, but I hadn’t taken one for at least five years. If things were going badly, I’d try to whip in some dead balls. If I could hit a good corner, Ian Evans might want me around. But again, it had been so long since I’d taken one, I couldn’t be sure I still had it.
So this was me:
MAX BEST
Born MYOB
(Age 22)
English
Acceleration 5
Handling 1
Stamina 1
Heading 10
Strength 1
Tackling 1
Jumping 1
Teamwork 1
Bravery 1
Technique 10
Pace 5
preferred foot R
Passing 15
Dribbling 6
Finishing 5
CA 1
PA 1
Player/Manager
And now, my absolute priority in life was to let my ankle heal. Keeping still, foot raised. No six-hour drives. No walking dogs.
I imagined my ankle as having its own health bar, like in a video game. In the days after the injury, it would have been fully red. Danger! Zero percent! After getting it checked by Livia, there would have been a few pixels of green. Now I had to get it to at least seventy percent health.
Why the rush? Because Raffi was waiting for his trial, and even worse, his wife Shona was waiting. And because Henri Lyons was waiting—he wanted a deal in place for January 1st so he could escape his purgatory in Darlington. And because I wanted to get out of the call centre racket.
So I didn’t do any scouting for Chester. I didn’t go to Hough End on a Sunday morning. I postponed the double date, but I did do one Culture Club session with Emma. (I chose the movie Knives Out. She liked Captain America’s sweater and wondered if the writer had mixed up two subgenres in order to disguise his lack of mastery of either.)
I worked. I went home. I rested. I didn’t hoard my money to get my agent license—I used my spare hundred pounds to eat healthier. Blueberries. Kale. Broccoli. My Nutribullet got used! I was thankful I hadn’t sold it.
And while I ate anti-inflammatory foods, I devoured content: Welcome to Wrexham, All or Nothing, a bunch of YouTube channels. MD sent me a few books he owned that were on my list, including Moneyball and Inverting the Pyramid.
And I stayed home some more. And I rested some more.
Quick detour to tell you about Ziggy. Ryan Ziggs, as no one was calling him.
After scoring his wondergoal (which video replays showed he’d sliced, sideways, onto a defender’s head) Ziggy had played the first half of the next match but was replaced by one of the strikers back from suspension. The next match, he’d been on the bench. The match after that, he hadn’t been in the squad. He was now FC United’s fifth-choice striker.
Ziggy was depressed, but I wasn’t worried—as his CA kept improving, he’d start to get named in squads and then start getting minutes again. Also, he was paying me! Thirty-five pounds every week. Cash!
And finally, a quick word about the curse. After a week of aggressive rest, I’d started to pop to Platt Lane and Hough End to do some light experience point accumulation. Just a bit here and there, using the crutches all the time even if I didn’t really really need them.
By the time of my trial, I’d collected 360 XP, which was pretty feeble, but in my head I was grinding by not grinding. When the calendar hit November 1, I’d been expecting a new perk to be available. Shocktober finally left the store, but it wasn’t replaced. That wasn’t unusual—sometimes the perks only appeared halfway through the month. Maybe there wouldn’t even be one in November because I was carrying a debt. Or maybe the curse was waiting to see how my trial went. Maybe if I got a pro contract it would start giving me playing perks. That’d be fun. Anyway, the World Cup was due to kick off on November 20, and I would have been astonished if that wasn’t the theme for November’s perk.
Regardless, I had no plans to spend any XP until I saw what the monthly perk was. So really, all my focus was on impressing Ian Evans.
XP balance: 946
Debt repaid: 106/3,000
Sunday, November 6.
The day of my trial. Raffi Brown’s, too. Shona was pleased that I wasn’t full of shit, but incredibly apprehensive for her family’s future.
Henri Lyons was coming “to watch,” though of course the real reason was to let him meet Ian Evans. If they hit it off, I could help Henri escape his ordeal at Darlington. He hadn’t played a single minute of football since I’d met him, and since Darlington were doing well in the league without him, the situation wasn’t likely to change.
After losing in the FA Cup, still high on adrenaline, Chester had won their next league game, but came crashing down, losing their match the day before my trial. 3–0. At home. Bad news for me—Evans was likely to be in a grumpy mood. Or maybe it was good news. Perhaps he’d be more interested in freshening up the team. MD had told me that the best thing about Evans was that he liked a smaller squad, so there was budget to bring in a few free transfers.
Okay. I’ve set the scene. The criminals have arranged the heist. They’ve got men on the inside. They’ve synchronized their watches. Nothing can possibly go wrong!
2
IAN EVANS
Raffi picked me up and we drove to Chester. He was excited; I was nervous. I was a bag of nerves. There was so much riding on this one morning!
We arrived at Chester’s training ground—a business park owned by a credit card company—and I got changed. Raffi hadn’t been joking about his boxing training—when he took his shirt off, I saw a phenomenal set of abs. Way to make a dude feel puny, bro.
The place was so strange. It was soulless. Even the shittest football ground had a kind of residual life force to it. This … thing … was a wide, flat, two-story building full of offices, and out the back a couple of grass pitches and a couple of low-quality artificial ones. The pitches were obviously intended for use by the staff of the credit card company. I wondered if any of those guys had talent. If I ended up signing for Chester, it’d be easy to go and scout them. Maybe I could get a fancy credit card, too. I bet credit card companies had really attractive receptionists.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Max! Thinking about the prize was fruitless. I had to focus on the process.
And the process was do things you know you’re good at, and nothing else.
I took one deep breath, left the building, and listened as my boots clattered—stupendous volume—across the concrete paving stones. As soon as my studs sank into the grass, all my nerves evaporated. I knew everything would be okay. MD was already in place, and he threw a ball towards me. I let it roll onto my right foot and did a couple of kick-ups. Absolutely no pain. Green green green! As long as I avoided really hard shots, I’d be laughing.
I jogged around a bit, getting closer to the halfway line as I did. There was already a little gaggle of people there. My ankle felt fine; all that resting had paid off.
The first thing I did was introduce myself to Ian Evans. I’d only ever seen him from far away, so he always had quite an insubstantial quality. He was abstract. He was the notion of Ian Evans. But up close, he was substantial. Concrete. Formidable. He was the same height as me, but broader, chunkier, more powerful, more menacing. His features were bigger than normal, like a CGI artist’s vision of an orc, or one of the blue people from Avatar. The nose was broad. The cheeks and mouth hewn by years of football management into a permanent grimace. The eyes blue, watchful, sharp. His hair had started to recede, but at some point it had screamed “No surrender!” and where it remained, it was magnificent.
