The squad screen loaded with a dull blue glow, and I sat back in my chair to take in the full, ugly picture of how far Hallowfield Town had fallen.
Three divisions. That was the distance between the League One side I’d played for and the non-league scrap heap sitting on my laptop screen.
When I got banned seven years ago, Beck Road was pulling six thousand supporters on a cold Tuesday night.
Now? The league table under the crest showed them sitting seventeenth in the National League North, drowning in debt, playing in front of eight hundred blokes in woolly hats drinking lukewarm Bovril.
Most of the names on the roster meant nothing to me.
Standard non-league journeymen.
Lads on one-year part-time contracts, eighteen-year-old loan kids sent down from Championship academies to get their shins kicked, and a thirty-one-year-old goalkeeper who had bounced through six different clubs in five seasons.
But as I scrolled through the squad list, a few names jumped straight off the screen.
Touchline Manager bought its data directly from the official league stats feeds, right down to Tier 6. The players on the screen were real. And a couple of them were lads I actually knew.
Gav Pollard was still there.
When I was banned, Gav was a seventeen-year-old youth-team kid who cleaned my boots on Friday afternoons and called me Mr Kershaw until I told him to shut his mouth and call me Matt.
The lads in the dressing room called him The Fridge partly because he was built like a brick lavatory, and partly because he never moved faster than a brisk walk.
Now Gav was twenty-four, playing in central midfield, and wearing the captain’s armband. I clicked on his profile card.
The game rated his Determination and Work Rate right at the top of the league 168 out of 200.
But everything else?
His Pace was a miserable 72, his Agility was 65, and his Passing was average at best.
Gav had always cared more than anyone else on the pitch, God bless him, but all the heart in the world couldn’t make his heavy boots turn any faster when a nimble number ten ran at him.
Then there was Dion Latchford up front.
Dion had been in the development squad during my final season at Hallowfield a skinny, rangy winger who could run forty yards in five seconds flat, but who flinched every time a full-back rattled his studs against his shin-guards.
I clicked his attribute page and let out a dry laugh. His Acceleration was 162, but right underneath his tactical traits was a line in bold text: Avoids Physical Contact.
Whoever scouted Hallowfield for the game’s database had watched Dion play. The soft lad still hated getting hit.
The rest of the squad was an absolute disaster. I went through the team sheet one player at a time click, click, click and felt my shoulders tightening up toward my ears.
The previous manager had been running a ludicrous 4-2-4 system.
Both central defenders had attacking instructions set, meaning every time Hallowfield won the ball in their own half, the two centre-backs galloped forward like bloody wingers, leaving thirty yards of open grass behind them.
The two central midfielders had zero defensive responsibility, meaning neither of them had tracked a runner since November.
And the main striker? His Finishing attribute was sitting at 63. In Touchline Manager’s coding, 63 meant the bloke couldn’t hit a barn door with a bass drum from six yards out.
"Jesus," I muttered, rubbing the back of my neck. "Who set this up? A child?"
I opened the tactics board and started dragging positions around.
First I tried a standard 4-4-2, because that’s what every old-school English manager defaults to when the ship is sinking.
I ran the assistant manager’s simulation report. Red warning icons flashed down both flanks. The full-backs were too slow to cover the wide areas on their own.
Next I tried a 3-5-2. The report came back worse. The wing-backs didn’t have the Stamina to run the touchlines for ninety minutes; they’d be gassed by the sixty-minute mark and walking on their knees.
I tried a 4-3-3 with a high press. The front three had such poor Defensive Work Rate that opposing centre-backs would walk the ball straight through our midfield without sweating.
In the end, only one formation made any actual sense. It was the exact shape I would have built with my own hands if I were standing in the home dressing room at Beck Road on a wet Saturday afternoon.
A narrow, flat back three.
Three central defenders who stayed home, kept their shape, and didn’t wander off looking for glory.
Two wing-backs dropping deep when we lost the ball to make it a five-man wall.
Two holding midfielders sitting right in front of the back line with Gav Pollard as one of them, given explicit instructions to tackle anything that moved, win the ball, and immediately lay it off to someone who could actually kick it.
In front of Gav, a single playmaker to dictate tempo, flanked by an attacking midfielder who possessed the only decent long-range shot in the squad.
And up top? A big, ugly target man whose only job in life was to win headers, hold off defenders, and lay the ball off for runners coming from deep.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t modern ’total football’. But it was solid, hard to beat, and perfectly tailored for the mud and blood of Tier 6.
Now I needed the players to execute it.
I clicked over to the Transfer and Finance tab.
The club’s bank account showed a grand total of ￡15,200. The weekly wage budget was over by ￡340. I couldn’t buy a hot dog from the snack bar, let alone buy a proven player.
"Right," I said to the screen. "Time to do this the hard way."
I opened the free-agent database and set the filters: central midfielder, age thirty or older, contract expired, willingness to play in National League North.
A list of fifty names popped up. I sorted them by Work Rate and Tackling. Near the top was a bloke named Aaron Sayce.
Sayce was thirty-three.
He’d played two hundred games in League Two before getting released by Accrington Stanley the previous summer.
He’d been sitting without a club for nine months.
His Pace was down to 85, but his Tackling was 128, his Stamina was 145, and his Aggression was sitting at a massive 162. He was a ruthless, nasty bastard who lived to disrupt opposition play. For Tier 6, he was an absolute monster.
I opened contract negotiations.
There’s a specific science to dealing with veteran free agents in Touchline Manager, and I’d done it so many times over seven years that my fingers moved on instinct.
You don’t offer high wages; Hallowfield couldn’t afford them anyway. You offer ￡180 a week, but you bundle it with a modest appearance bonus and a two-year contract.
A thirty-three-year-old footballer sitting at home on his couch in September, watching his career rot away while his phone stays dead, doesn’t care about a high basic wage.
He wants security. He wants to know he has a job for twenty-four months. You give an old player that piece of paper, and he’ll run through a brick wall for you.
I submitted the offer. Sayce’s agent accepted within ten virtual minutes.
Next, I opened Hallowfield’s Under-21 development squad. Most of the kids were useless padding, but one eighteen-year-old right-back caught my eye: Ellis Brandwood.
Brandwood’s physical attributes were completely average Pace 102, Stamina 105. But right beside his name were two personality traits highlighted in green: Professional and Willing to Learn.
In Touchline Manager, those two traits were worth more than twenty points of raw athleticism.
An eighteen-year-old kid with high professionalism doesn’t complain when you drill him on positioning for three hours in the freezing rain. He listens. He absorbs. He builds into whatever you need him to be.
I promoted Brandwood to the senior squad on the spot, set his individual training to Wing-Back Duties, and assigned Gav Pollard as his team mentor.
To balance the wage bill, I found a lazy twenty-two-year-old striker in the reserves who was pulling down ￡250 a week while complaining about his playing time.
I listed him for ￡3,000, knocked his price down to zero for a quick sale, and unloaded him onto a club in the Northern Premier. That freed up enough wage room to pay Sayce through October.
By the time I finished tweaking the squad roster, two hours had flown by. I’d brought in two free transfers, promoted three youth kids, cleared the wage deficit, and locked down a tactical shape that gave Hallowfield a puncher’s chance.
I hovered my mouse cursor over the ’Continue’ button in the top-right corner.
Underneath the fixture list, a small contact card popped up on the side banner.
Craig Lomax Head of Coaching Development, Ellerby Bridge Town FC.
I stared at his name for a long time.
My mind drifted back to what Josh had said over the barbecue earlier that evening. Lommo wants you in. Assistant coach. Head of defence.
In Touchline Manager, Aaron Sayce was just a string of digital code and integer values. If I benched him or yelled at him after a bad performance, his morale meter dropped from green to orange, he sulked for a week, and then his algorithm reset.
Real non-league footballers didn’t work like that.
Real lads had egos, mortgages, screaming infants keeping them awake at 3:00 AM, second jobs on construction sites, and dads standing behind the pitch fence shouting abuse at the manager.
Real eighteen-year-olds didn’t just passively absorb mentoring from Gav Pollard; they got distracted by nightclubs, social media, and bad advice from dodgy agents.
And if I walked into Ellerby Bridge Town’s dressing room as an assistant coach, how long before one of those lads looked me in the eye and brought up the ban?
How long before some cocky twenty-one-year-old winger getting subbed off at half-time spat on the touchline and called me a match-fixing cheat?