The Player Manager series continues!

Max Best was a call center drone living in a rough area of Manchester, England, when he defused a potentially dangerous situation in order to help out an old man. The old man 'rewarded' Max by giving him the ability to see football like a top manager, just like in the computer game Soccer Supremo. This curse-as Max calls it-was perplexing. What was he supposed to do with these abilities?

Max became a scout, an agent, an advisor, and after much trial and error, earned a job as a real-life football manager. To help him get there, he signed up as a player, not fully realizing that the curse also gave him the ability to play the sport to an elite level.

As the player-manager of Chester FC, Max finally found his home, overcoming an attempted murder, nefarious agents and billionaires, dinosaur attitudes, and a chronic lack of funding to force his club up, up, up the English football pyramid.

When things got hard, Max worked harder. When things got too easy, he went off on side quests: a month at Tranmere Rovers; an attempt to save Grimsby Town from relegation; a trip to Brazil to learn an entirely new way of playing the sport.

Now Max has ascended. No longer a mere player-manager at a small club, but head of an increasingly large and intertwined international football empire. As a fully-fledged Soccer Supremo, all he has to do is sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labors. Don't poke any bears, keep his mouth shut, and everything will go just fine.

As if.

A continuity note from Ted Steel: Soccer Supremo 1 picks up where Player Manager 14 ended, but I wrote it with the aim that new listeners could start here. Cover Art: Roderick Brydon, KLR Covers