VOLUME 1: NODODY

2026

"You’re a good coach, Sam. You’re just not... a winner."

Click. Click click click.

The chairman kept doing that thing with his pen, thumbing the little button on the top like he was defusing a bomb, and I sat there in a plastic chair about two sizes too small for a grown man and thought the same thing over and over.

Forty years old.

Forty years old, and I was getting binned by a bloke whose single biggest tactical insight all season had been leaning over the dugout and bellowing, "CAN’T WE JUST GET IT FORWARD TO THE BIG LAD?"

"Right," I said.

"It’s nothing personal."

"No. Course it isn’t."

"The lads love you. The fans love you. But results are results, Sam, and the board feels we need a, you know..." He waved his pen in a little circle, like the word he wanted was floating somewhere near the ceiling tiles. "A fresh voice. A different energy."

A different energy.

I’d taken this lot off the bottom of the Isthmian Premier with a budget you could lose down the back of a sofa, and I was being replaced by energy.

Outside the office, which had been my office until roughly ninety seconds ago, somebody dropped a crate of Lucozade.

It went clatter, crash, roll across the corridor, bottles spinning off in nine directions, and one of the youth-team lads yelled "MY BAD!" at a volume you could probably hear in the next postcode.

And honestly? That was the most articulate thing anyone at Bromley Vale Football Club had said to me all season.

I didn’t argue. What was the point?

Ninth in the league. A playing budget held together with cable ties and a sponsorship deal off a vape shop on the high street.

I’d walked in eighteen months ago with the team rock bottom, dead and buried, ten points adrift at the foot of the table, the fans ringing the local radio phone-in every Saturday night to demand somebody, anybody, be sacked.

And I’d hauled them up. Mid-table. Safe with games to spare.

On fresh air and a back four I’d basically built out of lads I found playing on a Sunday morning. One of them, Tunde, used to be a roofer.

Genuinely. I turned a roofer into a ball-playing centre-half because I watched him head a bag of cement off a scaffold and thought, there’s a leap on him.

And how had the board backed all that? Let me think.

They’d sold my best midfielder in January, behind my back, while I was at a funeral, to plug a hole in the cash flow.

They’d knocked back every single loan signing I’d begged them for. They’d binned the analyst, slashed the youth budget to nothing, and told me to "make do." So I made do. I made do all the way from nearly-relegated to comfortably safe with one hand tied behind my back and the other holding a bucket under a leaking roof.

And the word the chairman picked, sat there clicking his little pen, was winner. As in, I wasn’t one.

That was the bit that got me. Not the sacking. The word.

Because if dragging a dead club off the bottom of the table, on no money, with no backing, the board actively selling players out from under you, if that isn’t winning, then I honestly do not know what the word is supposed to mean.

A "winner," in this game, is just a fella who got handed a chequebook and managed not to drop it. Give me what they gave the names, the budget, the time, ten minutes of actual faith, and I’d have shown every last one of them exactly what winning looked like.

But nobody ever hands the eye a chequebook.

And it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

Not a winner.

I stood up. Shook his clammy little hand, squelch, and walked out.

The dressing room had gone dead quiet, which with this lot never happens, so I knew they’d already heard. Eighteen blokes in various states of undress, towels and shin pads and the smell of Lynx Africa thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and not one of them saying a word.

Then it all came at once, bang, the whole room.

"They’ve sacked you? They’ve actually sacked you?!"

"That’s bang out of order, that is!"

"Ninth, we are! Ninth! We were at the bottom of the pile when he came in!"

Tunde, my centre-half, the roofer I’d turned into a footballer, was up on his feet with one boot still in his hand. "Who’s coming in, gaffer? Tell me it’s not that muppet from Hayes. I’m not playing for that muppet from Hayes."

Davey, my keeper, the lad I’d talked off the ledge twice this season, didn’t shout. He just looked up at me with these big wet spaniel eyes and went, dead quiet, "Gaffer? That true?"

"Afraid so, son."

"That’s a joke. You made us, you did. You made all of us."

"Oi. None of that." I went round the room, shook every hand, clapped a few shoulders, thump, thump.

"You’re a good group. Best I’ve had, and I mean that. Tunde, stop diving into tackles, you’re a roofer, not a kamikaze pilot. Davey, you flap at corners like a wet flag on a windy day, sort it out before the new fella sees. And whoever comes in, you give him everything. Every single one of you. Yeah?"

Mumbles.

A few nods.

A couple of them were looking at their boots, properly gutted.

And do you know what? That nearly finished me off more than the sacking had, because that room, those eighteen knackered semi-pros who’d run through a brick wall for me on ninety quid a week and a packet of Hobnobs, that was the closest thing to a trophy I’d ever won.

I got in my car. A fourteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra, chug, chug, cough, VROOM, the exhaust held on with a coat hanger and a prayer. And then I just sat there, in the empty car park, both hands on the wheel, and I didn’t go anywhere for about twenty minutes.

Here’s the thing nobody ever tells you about me.

I was brilliant.

I mean it.

In my head?

On the screen?

I was one of the best football minds on the planet, and that’s not a brag, because being the best in the world at something that nobody will ever pay you for is not a brag. It’s a tragedy with the lights left on.

I dug my phone out of my pocket. Bzzt.

The screen had a crack across the corner shaped like a spider’s web, and behind the crack, paused exactly where I’d left it at four o’clock that morning, sat the only place I had ever truly belonged.

Football Manager.

My Wrexham save. Tenth season in. I’d taken them out of the National League and dragged them all the way up, and that year we were in the Champions League final, and the spine of the whole thing was a free transfer I’d plucked from the Bosnian second division.

A defensive midfielder everybody else in the game ignored, who I’d retrained into a deep-lying playmaker because his Vision and his Composure were absurd and not one other manager in the entire database had spotted it.

Months, that took. Specific drills. Mentoring him with a wise old pro. A lot of shouting at a monitor at three in the morning while the kebab shop downstairs shut up for the night.

In the game, I had a nickname. El Magnífico.

The Magnificent.

***

Thank you for Reading.