Chapter 425: The Eye of the Storm II

By Thursday, the reality of my new life had caught up with me. The paparazzi had been lingering at the end of my street since the City match. I was recognised in supermarkets, in restaurants, and at petrol stations.

A teenager in a Palace shirt approached me at a Tesco Express in Dulwich and asked for a selfie while I was buying milk.

I obliged, because you always oblige… these are the people who buy the shirts, who fill the seats, who sing your name. But as I drove away, I thought about how strange it was that a kid I’d never met knew my name, my face, my car, and probably my shoe size.

Jessica Finch called at noon. She had been fielding enquiries all week, and the list was staggering.

“Danny,” she said, her voice crisp and professional, London traffic in the background.

“Your inbox is a warzone. Three luxury watch brands want meetings. Hugo Boss wants you for their autumn campaign; they’re talking a six-figure deal for a print ad and a short film. TAG Heuer wants you as a brand ambassador. A high-end menswear label I won’t name yet is offering a long-term partnership. And Audi, which is ironic, given you’ve just bought an Aston Martin, wants to talk.”

She paused. “Oh, and Netflix have been in touch. They want to do a documentary.”

“Netflix?”

“A behind-the-scenes documentary series. Following you through the season. Training, matchdays, the lot. They’re calling it the next ’All or Nothing,’ but with a manager who actually wins games.”

I laughed. “Tell Netflix I’ll think about it. Filter out the rest of the rubbish. I don’t want to be selling shampoo on television.”

“Leave it to me. But you need to understand something, Danny.” Her voice dropped, more serious now.

“You’re not just a football manager anymore. You’re a brand. The youngest manager in the history of English football, unbeaten in twelve, building a project that has the whole of Europe paying attention. The story is captivating to these companies. You’re being treated as an A-list commodity. That’s not going to stop. It’s going to accelerate.”

“I just want to manage football, Jess.”

“And you will. But the world wants more than that from you now. My job is to make sure you benefit from the attention without it consuming you.”

She was right. She usually was.

Later that evening, in a moment of profound boredom Emma was out with friends, the apartment too quiet, the tactical laptop closed for once I decided to learn how to bake. I found a recipe for a multi-layered chocolate cake online, bought the ingredients from the Sainsbury’s on Lordship Lane, and went to war with my kitchen.

It was a catastrophe of historic proportions. Flour coated every surface like fresh snowfall. The batter had the consistency of wallpaper paste.

The icing split into a grim, oily puddle. The final product looked like a geological disaster three uneven layers sagging at different angles, covered in a substance that was technically chocolate but looked like it had been applied by a toddler with a grudge.

I found the whole thing hilarious. I filmed a short video of the chaotic kitchen, the ruined cake, and my flour-covered face, added a self-deprecating caption “Tactical masterclass: 0. Chocolate cake: 1. Sticking to the day job.” and posted it on my Instagram story.

My phone rang less than three minutes later. Jessica.

“Danny. What. Is. That.”

“It’s a cake, Jess. Or what’s left of one.”

“It’s not on brand! You are the cold, calculating architect of Walshball. You do not post videos of yourself covered in flour looking like a confused baker’s apprentice!”

I laughed. “Jess, I’m a human being. I’m allowed to be terrible at baking.”

A long pause. “Actually…” she said slowly.

“Actually, hold on. The engagement is already through the roof. Forty thousand views in three minutes. People are sharing it. They’re calling it ’relatable.’” Another pause, the sound of her tapping on her phone.

“The top comment says: ’He can’t bake but he can cook up a 3-3 at the Etihad.’ That’s got twelve thousand likes.” She sighed. “You know what? It works. The ruthless genius on the pitch, the hopeless disaster off it. It humanises you. People love it. Keep it up. But maybe buy a pre-made cake next time.”

[Social Media Update: Instagram story baking video. Views: 620,000 in 12 hours. Shares: 34,000. Comments: 8,400. Engagement rate: 22.7% highest single post since contract announcement.]

[Jessica Finch has reluctantly approved the “human Danny” content strategy. Recommendation: Occasional behind-the-scenes personal content increases public affinity by an estimated 15%. The data supports being human.]

Emma came home at eleven, slightly tipsy, and found me cleaning flour off the ceiling. She laughed until she cried, ate a slice of the ruined cake, and declared it “actually not terrible, in a structurally unsound kind of way.”

We stayed up until two in the morning talking about nothing important her friends, a documentary she’d watched, whether we should get a dog, the merits of sourdough versus soda bread. No football. Not once. It was the most normal evening I’d had in months.

On Saturday, we went to the cinema in Leicester Square. A valiant attempt at a normal date night. It lasted approximately seven minutes before the first fan recognised me in the lobby. We spent half the evening navigating selfie requests.

Emma took it in stride, smiling patiently as I posed with teenagers in Palace shirts, with a middle-aged man who told me he’d been a fan for forty years and had never been prouder, with a group of Spanish tourists who had no idea who I was but saw the crowd and assumed I must be famous.

One of them Googled me, saw the Wikipedia page, and gasped. “You are the manager? Twenty-eight years? Dios mío!” She wanted a photo too.

“You know,” Emma whispered as we finally found our seats, “when I started dating you, the most exciting thing about your life was a buy-one-get-one-free pizza deal. Now you can’t buy milk without a security detail.”

“It was a good pizza deal, to be fair.”

“It was Domino’s, Danny.”

“Still counts.”

She leaned against my shoulder in the dark. “I miss the Domino’s days sometimes,” she said quietly. And I knew what she meant. Not the poverty. Not the struggle. Just the anonymity.

The ability to walk through a city and be nobody. That was gone now, and it wasn’t coming back.

On Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the balcony with the tactical laptop open, the System running a full season review. The break from football had lasted four days. I was not built for longer.

[Season Review 12 matches played. W11 D1 L0. GF: 41. GA: 6. GD: +33.]

[Premier League: P3 W2 D1 L0. 7 pts. Position: 2nd (GD +10). Top scorers: Rodríguez 3, Zaha 2, Pato 2.]

[Europa League: Qualified for Group Stage. P4 W4 L0. GF: 11. GA: 0. Clean sheets in all 4 European matches.]

[System Fit Analysis: The 4-2-3-1 gegenpress is functioning at 91% tactical efficiency. The squad rotation model is exceeding projections 28 players used, zero drop-off in system execution between “first choice” and “rotation” XIs. Key risk: December congestion. 13 matches scheduled between Dec 2 and Jan 3. This will be the ultimate test of the squad depth model.]

[Upcoming: Europa League Group H Marseille (H) Sep 14, Lazio (A) Sep 28, Vitória (A) Oct 19, Vitória (H) Nov 2, Marseille (A) Nov 23, Lazio (H) Dec 7. Premier League resumes Sep 10th vs Brighton (H). The second phase begins.]

I stared at the December schedule. Thirteen matches in thirty-two days. Christmas football. The graveyard of ambition, the place where thin squads collapsed, and deep squads separated themselves. We would need everyone. Every single one of the twenty-eight.

But my eyes kept drifting back to one line in the System’s upcoming fixture list. September 10th. Brighton at home. The Premier League’s newest arrivals, promoted from the Championship last season, are coming to Selhurst Park for their first ever visit as a top-flight club.

A routine home fixture on paper. Except that nothing about it was routine for me. Because Brighton had someone I knew. Someone I had found, signed, developed, and then let go. Someone whose name still carried a weight in my chest that had nothing to do with tactics.

JJ Johnson.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the constant support and the super gift.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep