Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

9.

I fumed and scowled pretty much all the way to Bologna’s airport, ignoring the rapidly-growing number of texts, emails, and voice messages popping up on my phone.

Brooke: Well done!

Jackie Reaper: Amazing!

Gemma: Want me to sue UEFA over that yellow card? I was fuming, Max. Fuming! You know what? I still am. I’m going to re-read the competition handbook to see what we can get them on.

Ryan Reynolds: Late Champions League away win while down to ten men? Who writes your scripts?

The only person who got an immediate response was Emma.

She wrote: Aw, babes, you looked so miserable in that interview. You okay?

I tapped out a flat reply. I’m fine and I’m delighted.

That was quickly deleted; I didn’t want to get into the habit of lying to my fiancée.

Me: It was draining and my head is mush. Also, I’m in a funk. It was harder than it needed to be and Evaristo turned out to be awful. Briggy’s looking after me.

Emma: Poor Max, being driven to his private jet while his highly-trained bodyguard sources exotic fruits for him on his way to his 700-Euro a night five-star hotel.

Me: You make it sound a lot cooler than it is. Got to go. We’re arriving at our private VIP lounge at the airport.

Emma: Is Dieter there?

Me: No just the players and coaches and that. The other 300 (!) are travelling separately. I’m not looking forward to seeing Dieter and Paul again. I kind of maybe lost my temper a bit. Told the players off. I’ll probably get told off myself and I am not going to take that very well.

We got to our lounge - where every knife and fork had been carefully positioned by airport employees and carefully repositioned by members of Bayern’s advanced team - and I asked Briggy to keep everyone away from me for their protection.

They were dotted around the lounge in their little cliques. The coaches and analysts there. The French players there. The grizzled veterans there. I was torn between wanting to let them do their own thing and wanting to shake them up and force them to talk to someone new for a fucking change.

Tomorrow I’d have to talk to the media again. More on Friday. A fuckton more on Saturday. I was doing a decent job of avoiding controversy even as my team selection surprises compounded on top of one another. The trick was to give the same answer to the same question across six different post-match interviews, but repetition didn’t come easily to me.

In an attempt to speak in simple terms that Briggy and the media could understand, I was leaning on the same old similes. A football team is like an army. Football is like chess. So boring but what was worse, I was boring myself.

What if instead of a general I was a movie director? Diane Berger would be the key grip. The triumvirate would be the producers. The physios were the make-up artists. The players would be the actors, the sort of twats who chewed on garlic just before the big kissing scene.

I steamed as I paced up and down the side of the lounge. You work for years to get your big break, you’re standing in the exact spot millions of young hopefuls can only dream of, you’re about to film the moment the audience has been waiting for, the first kiss, and you chew garlic to make the scene unpleasant for your co-star. Fuck the scene, fuck the movie, fuck doing my job to the best of my ability. My grievance is all that matters.

The thing about movies is that if you’ve shot half of one it’s easy to change the director but almost impossible to recast the actors.

”That’s where the metaphor fails,” I said, bringing up my squad list. I was getting rid of stars at an impressive rate, but there were always more in the squad. There were guys like Parnell Gourlay who could do a job for me, and the reserve team was bursting with talent. If you sacked an actor half-way through a play you’d turn to his understudy. ”I’ve got fucking millions of understudies. The fuck are these pricks thinking?”

Briggy came up to me, maybe because my chuntering had grown too loud. ”Max.”

I eyed her. ”It’s not common in movies because of the expense but TV shows change actors all the time. Game of Thrones. The Witcher. Dr. Who can’t keep a lead actor for love nor money.” Briggy wasn’t interested in my train of thought; she had her own stuff going on. Rude when people do that. ”What?”

”Why is Bayern called FC Hollywood?”