Chapter 16: Magic Internet Money I
Monday morning. The morning after the morning after Iniesta. A Sports Direct bag-for-life still warm under my bed with the better part of nine thousand pounds in it. A sky outside my window the colour of a fresh shirt. And me, twenty-four years old, broke a week back, ahead of the entire world by exactly one move.
I had a plan, and that plan was a great deal bigger than a good morning. But first, a small bit of personal admin.
I walked into Sportskit ten minutes late on purpose, and Dean was on me before the security tag scanner had even stopped beeping.
"Mercer! That’s a verbal warning! Ten minutes! On a trading day! The guests don’t wait, Mercer, the guests do not..."
"Dean," I said.
"...What?"
I took the polo off. Right there. Over my head, whump, SPORTSKIT: ASK ME ABOUT OUR LOYALTY CARD and all, and I folded it, nice and neat, the way I’d folded ten thousand of the things, and I placed it gently in his arms.
"Ask me about our loyalty card," I said.
"Mercer, what are you..."
"No, go on. Ask me."
He didn’t. He just stood there holding my warm polo with his little mouth opening and closing.
"I quit, Dean," I said, and I swear to you I felt six months and one entire previous lifetime lift straight off my shoulders.
"I’m going to go and do something mad. And in about five years, when you’re area manager and you think you’ve made it, I want you to remember the morning a shelf-stacker handed you his shirt and walked off to do something great and maybe buy a football club. All right? Look after yourself. You’re not a bad lad, Dean. You’re just a bit of a knob."
And I walked out into the car park, into the sun, twenty-four years old and free, and I did not look back once.
Beep. My phone went. Not a text. The other thing. The white panel, bottom corner of my eye, the way it did now.
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[SYSTEM] Seed capital secured. Employment terminated with maximum theatre.
[SYSTEM] I’ll be honest, Samuel. I had my doubts. Six weeks ago you woke up sobbing on a bedsit floor with forty quid and a dead man’s club to your name.
[SYSTEM] Objective progress: SAVE TILBROOK TOWN... 4%.
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"Four percent?!" I said out loud to the empty car park. "I just won nine grand!"
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[SYSTEM] The club owes four hundred thousand pounds. You have nine. Welcome to the gap between dreaming and doing. Mind it doesn’t bite you.
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Cheeky sod. But it had a point, and the point sat heavy in my chest the whole bus ride home. Nine grand was a tool, yeah. But it was a screwdriver, and I was trying to demolish a mountain.
Which is exactly why I did the maddest thing I have ever done in two whole lifetimes.
I went home, I got the laptop, the chugging old beige laptop that took four minutes to turn on, whirr, click, whirr, and I found a clunky little website that about nine people on Earth had heard of in July 2010, and I started buying Bitcoin.
Now. You have to understand what that felt like at the time, before you know how the story ends. Because I knew. But knowing a number on a graph in your head and actually wiring real, hard-won, World-Cup-sweated cash into magic invisible internet coins that some bloke had literally just used to buy two pizzas, ten thousand of them, for two Domino’s, that is a very, very different thing.
I sat there with the cursor hovering. Two grand. I was going to put two thousand pounds, nearly a quarter of everything I had on this earth, into a thing with no building, no boss, no phone number, no nothing. At about six cents a coin.
My hand was sweating on the mouse.
"This is insane," I whispered. "This is genuinely insane behaviour."
Watch the space, son.
And I clicked buy.
The screen thought about it for an agonising age, whirr, whirr, and then it just went, done.
And there it was. A number in a wallet.
Tens of thousands of coins, glowing on a beige laptop in a bedsit above a kebab shop, worthless magic beans that I, and only I, out of every single living soul on this whole planet, knew for a stone-cold fact were going to be worth more money than I could properly hold in my head.
And let me not be shy about it, because there’s no point being shy when you’re the only man on Earth holding the winning ticket.
I knew exactly where this went. I’d watched it go there, in another life, from the wrong side of the glass, skint and sick with regret, reading about the lads who’d bought in early and never once having the nerve myself.
A dollar by next February. Thirty by the summer after. Over a thousand before three more years were out, and that was barely the foothills, that was nothing, that was the warm-up. The two grand I’d just spent was going to swell into a number with so many noughts on the end that saying it out loud in this damp little room would’ve sounded like a lunatic’s joke.
So no. I wasn’t the most reckless idiot in London. That was the old story, the one they’d been telling me for forty years and the one I’d been daft enough to believe. The dreamer. The waster. The not-a-winner. All of it, a lie, start to finish.
I was the best-informed man alive. And for the first time in two lifetimes, instead of weeping about what I knew, I was going to spend it.
I sat back in the wonky chair, creak, and I let myself feel it. Properly feel it. The size of the thing I’d just set rolling. Not nerves. Not this time. Something colder and steadier and a lot more dangerous than nerves.
Then I shut the laptop, click, and I went for a run, because a fortune you can’t cash for years is no excuse whatsoever to sit about going soft.
Except this run was different. Because now, with the best part of seven grand left from the World Cup sat in a bag-for-life under my bed, money wasn’t the excuse any more, and the self-care stopped being half a mile and a guilty bag of chips off Erol.
I’d been thinking about it, see, the bloke in the mirror, the promise I’d made him. We are not wasting you this time. And a promise you only keep when it’s free and easy isn’t really a promise at all.
So that week I joined the proper gym, the grotty one over the launderette, twenty quid a month, free weights and a boxing bag and a bloke called Big Stavros.
Stavros looked like a fridge with a moustache and hands like coal shovels, and the first morning I turned up and started flailing at the heavy bag he watched me for about a minute, sighed down his nose, and rumbled, "No. No, no, no. You hit like your dad owes you money. Come here."
Then his eyes dropped, very deliberately, to my left leg, which he had clearly clocked the second I’d walked in. "And the knee, son. Don’t pretend. I see it in the walk. We work around the knee. We do not push the knee. Yes?"
I nodded, surprised that he’d named it before I had. "Good," he said, satisfied, as if a problem had been correctly named and was therefore already half-solved.
Turned out he’d boxed for Cyprus, a lifetime ago, before the knees went and the divorce and the long slow drift to a damp room above a launderette in Essex, and these days he poured every bit of whatever he had left into the half-dozen lost causes who washed up at his door, of which I was very much the newest.
He gave me a programme for a tenner and a diagnosis for nothing: "You. Skinny. Angry about something underneath. Good. Angry, we can use. Sad we cannot use. Angry is fuel."
I started eating like an athlete instead of a student, chicken and rice and the veg I used to scrape off the side of a kebab.
I stopped the energy drinks dead. I went before the sun was up, four mornings out of seven, thud of the bag, clank of the iron, hiss of my own breath, Stavros bellowing "AGAIN" from across the room, and it hurt, God it hurt, but it was the good hurt, the kind that means tomorrow you’re a fraction harder to break than you were today.
Old Sam started looking after himself at thirty-six, to win back a woman, and it didn’t save the marriage. New Sam started at twenty-four, with the first spare money he’d ever had, for nobody but himself. Not for Karen. Not for a chairman. For the bloke in the mirror, and the long, brutal, beautiful war I knew was coming.
Because a man who’s about to drag a dead club up the entire English football pyramid had better be able to drag himself up off the canvas first.
Oh, and she was there. Of course she was.
About my fourth morning, I was having a go at a deadlift, back bent into the shape of a question mark, doing my absolute best to fold my own spine in half, when a sweet voice behind me said, "You’re going to put your back through the ceiling, doing it like that."
I knew the voice before I turned round.
