Player Manager

As of writing this, I’ve read the first two books.

Blurb

Could a seemingly average Premier League fan oversee a football club better than a top manager? Max is starting to think so.

Max Best is not living his — ahem — best life. His job’s a drag, his home’s a shooting gallery, his hopes are nil, and lately, even his beloved game of football has devolved from a chaotic, ecstatic delight into a cold, calculating equation of stats, tech terms, and mindless lingo.

Then Max rescues a mysterious old man from a mugging. “Nick” seems friendly enough until he innocently asks his savior, “Would you sell your soul to be a top football manager?” Naturally, Max says yes, and in that instant, everything changes. Suddenly, whenever he watches a match, the skills and attributes of every player are laid out in front of him in an eyes-only display.

Big deal. But will Max ever realise he’s holding a winning lottery ticket? And is this ability a super power… or a curse?

Player Manager is a progression fantasy set in the modern world. It’s perfect for fans of Football Manager, the FIFA games, and last-minute disallowed goals.

Thoughts

I picked this up because people kept recommending it to me, and I’ll be upfront: I don’t think I’m the target audience. I don’t play soccer, or at least I haven’t in more than a decade. I don’t watch it. I don’t know the teams or the leagues or much of anything. I read the first two books to get a proper feel for it, and my honest takeaway is that if you are a football fan, you’ll almost certainly love this. Plenty of reviewers who came in cold say it converted them, which is a real credit to the writing.

The caveat worth flagging up front is that this is litrpg-lite, or maybe litrpg without the progression you’d expect. Max unlocks the Championship Manager interface in real life and earns XP by watching and managing games. He spends that XP to unlock hidden parts of the interface, like a new stat when he inspects a player, rather than the usual litrpg loop of becoming a better footballer or a better manager. That side of things he has to actually work for. It’s a different flavour to the genre, and I liked that it commits to it.

Don’t expect the protagonist-always-wins vibe either. Despite his gift, Max’s start is slow and often painful, because the gift doesn’t come with the clout and connections that actually make the football world turn. The first two books are a run of struggles as he tries to find a place, whether as a player, a manager, or a director of football, and there’s a lot of rejection, personal conflict, and Max putting his foot squarely in his mouth. If powerloss arcs aren’t your thing, I have some bad news for you.

What I liked most, past the writing quality and Max Best’s narrative voice, was how grounded it all is. I spent more time than I’d like to admit pulling up Google Maps to find the towns Max travels to and their real stadiums, and it made the whole thing feel more poignant than most litrpg manages. The themes land too, especially the look at where football is heading as it gets more corporate and FIFA more corrupt. In the end the only reason I set the series down after book two is the plain fact that I’m not much of a football fan. That’s on me, not the book.