Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

11.

Friday, April 2

The NEC Arena, Birmingham

”Please welcome to the stage our special guest, the League One Manager of the Month for March, the former Bayern Munich trainer, the face of Soccer Supremo... Max Best!”

There was very generous applause as I strode past the sofas and hopped up onto the platform. While the clapping continued, I took in my surroundings. It was the kind of space where TED Talks happened - bare black walls, industrial-looking lighting frame attached to the ceiling, willowy curtains hanging down to soften the vibe and to make the exits a little less noticeable. Did I mention the sofas? Instead of the harsh conference chairs you might expect at such a venue, in this room the attendees were on plush couches in red, pink, black, or white.

The sofas were somewhat more diverse than the attendees. There were a few women, a few south Asian guys, but it was overwhelmingly white men in varying states of unfitness. All 7 of the abs in the room could be found on the stage under my third-nicest hoodie. Almost everyone else was wearing t-shirts with slogans such as ’Let’s Get Warhammered’, ’Live Love Slay’, or ’My Brain Has Way Too Many Tabs Open’.

Let’s be frank, it was a room full of nerds.

I had a lapel mic attached to me, which meant I could use my arms fairly freely. ”Thanks, Jacob. Quick correction: Co-manager of the Month.”

”Of course.” The man on the stage with me was Jacob Childs, one of the bosses at the company that created Soccer Supremo. I had met him in Canada when I was doing World Cup analysis and that chance meeting led to me trousering a hundred thousand pounds to have my face on the cover. As part of the deal, I had to do a couple of events, so here I was in Birmingham at the UK Games Expo. I was motivated to put on a good show because I wanted to extend and improve my contract; I planned to blow everyone’s socks off. Jacob said, ”I’m sure we will have questions about that arrangement later. It could be something we include in future versions. Asynchronous co-play. Intriguing! Would you join me in the comfy chairs?” I eased myself into a massive, cosy armchair. On the arm rest was a remote control paired to a laptop that was virtually invisible from the front; I would need that later. Jacob sank into his chair with a little grunt. ”What do you think of the Expo so far?”

”It’s bewildering,” I said, which got some laughs. ”It looks big in the photos but it’s ten times bigger than I would have thought. And it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. Is this the right audience for a Dr. Who joke?” Whoops and cheers told me it was. ”Heh. I have a question, though. The Expo is all board games and miniature armies and that sort of thing. Not much in the way of computer games.”

”No,” said Jacob. ”Normally we wouldn’t be here, that’s true, but we are experimenting with Soccer Supremo spin-offs.” What follows is what he said, but he might as well have slipped into Greek for all I understood him. ”We created a two-person deck builder with a focus on deck balance and synergies. You might sub in a target man and a full back with elite crossing, but focus too much on your attacking output and you could be caught out if your rival has enough counter-attacking points. One of our designers created a timed deck builder where you exchange resources - cash and squad slots - for new signings. The aim is to maximise your haul, with bonus points if you fill secretly-assigned holes in your squad. We have a ready-to-play demo of that one; we’re calling it Win The Window.”

So far I was pretty bemused, but the audience was getting giddy with excitement. The Venn diagram of Soccer Supremo player to board game nerd probably wasn’t a perfect circle, but there would be soooo much overlap. And the more footy became data-driven, the more the thousands of people exploring the stands in the Expo would be attracted to games set in that world.

Jacob seemed to read my mind. ”We have some ideas that are less centred around numbers and conventional mechanics and are more about wit and persuasion. Imagine there are four decks. From the first two, we draw a card each. I draw Sir Alex Ferguson from the managers pile and Tottenham from the club pile. You draw Pep Guardiola and Chelsea. The third deck decides the stadium and we pull Wembley. The fourth is a circumstance. It’s raining heavily. Now you and I must explain why our cards would win.”