WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?

I stared at the words.

Well. I didn’t stare, exactly, because I didn’t have eyes. I didn’t have a face, or hands, or a screaming migraine, or a fourteen-year-old Astra folded around the front of a Tesco lorry. I just was, floating in this warm, total, velvet black, and the three glowing words floated there with me, calm as you like, waiting.

"Am I dead?" I said. To nobody.

No answer. Bit rude, that.

"Right. Okay. I’m dead. I’m dead and this is the, what do you call it, the tunnel, the white light, my whole life flashing before my..."

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?

[ YES ] [ NO ]

"Continue what, mate?!"

And then, fwip, the dark just unfolded. Like a pop-up book.

Panels of soft white light bloomed open all around me, dozens of them, scrolling text and little grey progress bars and numbers out of two hundred, and I knew that layout. God help me, I knew it better than I knew my own face in the mirror.

The fonts.

The columns.

The shape of it.

It was Football Manager.

It was Football Manager, except this time it was about me.

---

THE DYNASTY SYSTEM Host Evaluation Complete.

Name: Samuel Mercer

Age at Termination: 40

Final Reputation: Local (Tier 9 football)

Lifetime Honours: None

Lifetime Earnings: £0 (net)

---

Managerial Attributes

Tactical Knowledge: 18 / 20

Judging Player Ability: 19 / 20

Judging Player Potential: 20 / 20

Working With Youth: 17 / 20

Man Management: 9 / 20

Negotiating: 6 / 20

Luck: 2 / 20

---

I read it once.

I read it twice.

And then I laughed, this horrible wet barking laugh that made no sound at all, because I didn’t have a mouth to make it with.

Twenty out of twenty for judging potential.

The maximum.

The actual ceiling.

The best a living human being is allowed to be at the one thing I’d spent my whole life being. And sat right next to it, like a punchline, Luck: 2. And under that, Lifetime Honours: None. And under that, Lifetime Earnings: zero quid.

There it was.

My entire existence, rendered down into a stat line. The finest eye in the country, bolted onto the worst luck in the country, with the dial for Man Management and Negotiating snapped off somewhere down near the bottom, switched off forever at forty before any of it ever got to do a single thing.

"Yeah," I whispered into the dark. "Sounds about right, that."

---

[SYSTEM] A waste, Samuel. A genuine, miserable, top-to-bottom waste.

---

"Oi! Cheers for that!"

---

[SYSTEM] I don’t say it to wound you. I say it because, unlike most wasted things, you are correctable.

---

The voice, if you could call it a voice, was dry. Patient. A bit like a headmaster who actually liked you but was disappointed all the same.

---

[SYSTEM] You died holding the rarest gift in the sport and not one single thing to spend it on. No badge would have you. No name. No money. The world looked at the best eye it ever produced and it shrugged, and it put a man with a nice surname in the job instead.

---

[SYSTEM] I am offering you the only thing you were never given. Time. And a head start.

---

The black peeled back a little further, and an image swam up out of the dark, slow, the way a photograph used to come up in one of those developing trays, and my heart, the heart I didn’t currently have, just clenched.

Marsh Road.

My Marsh Road. The old Main Stand with the rust streaks bleeding down the corrugated roof.

The wonky T in the TILBROOK sign that had been wonky since before I was even born; nobody ever fixed it; it was practically the club crest at this point. The floodlights humming away in the dusk, mmmmmmmm, four great pylons leaning in over the pitch like nosey neighbours.

And on the terrace. Flat cap. Big quiet hands. A cup of something steaming in the cold.

I couldn’t even think the word. I wouldn’t let myself.

---

[SYSTEM] Your father kept a record of everything he loved. Ticket stubs. Line-ups. A boy who scored a goal once and made him proud as owt.

---

[SYSTEM] So do I.

---

"Don’t," I said. My voice cracked on the one word. "Don’t you dare use him."

---

[SYSTEM] I’m not using him, Samuel. I’m telling you the truth. Tilbrook Town will die in the High Court. It happens in your timeline whatever you do, because in your timeline you are forty, finished, and three hours too late.

---

[SYSTEM] Unless a man with a perfect eye, a long memory, and absolutely nothing left to lose gets there first.

---

And the two buttons came back. Bigger now. Brighter.

----

YES.

NO.

---

"What’s the catch?" I said. Because there is always a catch. If forty years had taught me one single thing, it was that.

"Go on then. What do you want for it? My soul? My firstborn? Joke’s on you, the divorce sorted the firstborn out. And Karen’s already got the good telly, so you’re too late there an’ all."

And just like that, I was thinking about Karen again.

Daft, isn’t it?

Floating in the actual afterlife, biggest moment of my entire existence, two glowing buttons sat there deciding whether I get to carry on living or just stay dead, and my soft idiot brain pipes up with, I wonder what she’s doing right now.

Whether she ever thinks about me.

Whether she went and married some fella with a proper name and a proper chequebook and a sensible job in insurance, one who comes home at six on the dot and doesn’t argue with a referee through the telly.

Probably has.

Good luck to her, honestly, I mean that.

She used to nick the entire duvet in her sleep with her ass and then deny it in the morning with a dead straight face, brazen as you like, and I’d lie there freezing at four in the morning grinning like an absolute div because I was so stupidly, hopelessly in lo...