Chapter 28: Persistent
Ray Sully found me in the car park afterwards, by the bins, while the players were still inside hugging Maureen and a fan I didn’t know was openly crying into a club scarf.
He didn’t shout. He buttoned his beautiful coat against the wind and looked at me for a while.
"You’ll lose it, you know," he said, and there was no real venom in it, just the flat honesty of a man who’d been doing this a long time.
"Not today. But running a football club is a hole you pour money into for the rest of your life. The covenant that just saved you means you can never sell the one asset that’s worth anything. You’ve handcuffed yourself to a corpse and called it a rescue."
He almost smiled. "I’ll still be here when it folds again, son. Land like that, by the water. I’m a patient man."
"I know you are," I said. "Thing is, Ray, I’m not going to lose it."
"They all say that."
"They don’t have what I’ve got."
He studied me, this skint kid in a hole-y pair of trainers who’d just taken twelve acres out of his hands in front of forty witnesses, and for a moment something almost like curiosity crossed his face. Then he shook his head, got into his beautiful Range Rover, and drove off to be rich somewhere else.
He wasn’t wrong about the money. He was right about nearly all of it, in fact. A football club really is a hole you pour your life into.
He just didn’t know I had a head full of the next sixteen years, and a wallet full of beans about to become a beanstalk, and an eye that could see a hundred-and-sixty-one out of two hundred standing in the mud of a council rec working weekends at a garden centre.
He didn’t know he’d just lost a war he thought was a property deal.
Beep.
The panel, soft and white, in the corner of my eye. And for once it didn’t have a single sarcastic thing to say.
---
[SYSTEM] PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: SAVE TILBROOK TOWN F.C.
[SYSTEM] Reward unlocked: [ A Club Of Your Own ].
[SYSTEM] He kept that scrapbook for something after all, Samuel.
---
I had to lean on the bins for a second. I won’t pretend I didn’t.
"Yeah, Dad," I said quietly, to the grey estuary sky. "We did it. We actually did it."
And then, because the system is the system and a moment of peace was clearly far too much to ask, it pinged again, and the white letters that came up made my heart kick all over again, harder this time, because they weren’t an ending.
They were a kick-off.
---
[SYSTEM] NEW OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.
[SYSTEM] Tilbrook Town F.C. Fifth tier. No manager. No money. No striker worth the name. A squad of part-timers, one club legend with no knees, and one boy worth more than all of them who can’t cross to save his life.
[SYSTEM] The season kicks off in four weeks.
[SYSTEM] Try not to get relegated in your first one, eh?
---
No money. And the system wasn’t being dramatic about that, either.
Let’s do the sums, because God knows I’d done them enough times by now. Nine grand the World Cup had handed me.
Two of that was locked up in Bitcoin I couldn’t really turn into cash, not yet, not for months, not until the spring when I knew it would finally tick past a dollar a coin and start its long climb.
Four of it I’d just pressed into Stan the physio’s hands. Which left me, the proud new owner of a hundred-and-three-year-old football club, with about three thousand pounds in cash to my name and a repayment schedule with four hundred thousand quid of inherited tax-and-trade debt sat at the top of it.
Four hundred grand. The exact number that had killed this club the first time round.
The exact number Ms Adeyemi and I had spent the back end of the meeting turning into monthly instalments small enough not to break me before the spring, but unforgiving enough that one missed payment was going to tip everything I’d just bought straight back over the same cliff edge it had spent today crawling away from.
And Ray Sully, halfway back home in his beautiful Range Rover by now, knew it. I’m a patient man, he’d said in the car park, almost gently, like a vicar at a funeral. That hadn’t been a warning.
That had been a timetable. He was going back to his office to write next month’s payment date down in his diary, and the one after, and the one after that, and the first one I missed; he was going to be at the front of the queue with a fresh bid and a smile.
You cannot run a football club on three grand. You can barely run a raffle on three grand.
But here’s the thing not one of them knew. Not Sully, not the liquidator, not even my own team.
I didn’t have to win this season. I had to survive it. Keep eleven men on a pitch, keep the wonky T over the door, keep the football going, just going, just breathing, through one single winter, on gate money and clubhouse-bar takings and favours and deferred wages and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
Because come February, those magic beans turned into a pound each. Come the summer after, thirty. And somewhere down that road they turned into a number big enough to build this little club a future that nobody in that room would have dared dream out loud.
The money was coming. A tidal wave of it. I just had to keep my head above the water until it got here.
And there was one other small thing nobody had bothered to put on the spreadsheet, either.
Because somewhere up north on this very same warm Friday afternoon, at a non-league ground in a steelworks town just outside Sheffield I’d had to look up on a map the first time round, a twenty-three-year-old lad in a borrowed kit was finishing his second pre-season session of the week for Stocksbridge Park Steels with his hands on his knees, blowing hard, who I happened to know was about to make a career scoring goals at a level nobody in the entire football pyramid would have given him five quid to attempt today.
Whose face was, just at the present moment, the absolute property of no league scout’s interest anywhere in the country, because not one of them had so far been bothered enough to drive up to a steelworks pitch and look at the bloke pulling pints between training sessions and outscoring entire divisions. Yet. Not yet. Not for the small handful of weeks left before a phone call from FC Halifax Town was due to go in.
