Hugh Frederick was living the dream, even if he wasn’t feeling it. It was Boxing Day in the King’s Ale, the festive clatter wafting into the back room where he huddled with his top lieutenants after yet another win that placed them a step closer to the Premier League. Patrons buzzed with tired, relaxed pleasure; happy for the Wickers’ win against their Huddersfield rivals (after a pint or two, it sounded like they were all calling themselves “vicars”), and grateful to be out of their homes, mingling with friends after the obligatory Christmas lockdown with family.

The KA, as locals called their wood-paneled establishment, was cheerfully decorated for the holidays, as if it were a setting in a Victorian novel or one of those increasingly peripatetic Hallmark holiday movies. Merry Olde England and all that, although no one would’ve confused the fading industrial town of Wickersham in South Yorkshire with any of the more bucolic spots on Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle.”

“Wait, is that Nico’s jacket?” Hugh asked, noticing the blue Wickersham Town FC jacket draped over one of the chairs. To his delight, his 10-year-old son had come over from the States for the holidays this year. Father and son had watched the game in Hugh’s owner’s box at Wagamama Stadium (invariably called the Waga, except by some older fans who still insisted on “Frampton Road”) and then hit the pub for celebratory pints (Coke for Nico), burgers, and the customary match postmortem with Conrad Betts, the club’s president; Sebastian Bergkamp, its sporting director; and Olivia Madison, who oversaw communications.

“Kid keeps leaving it behind, thinks he’s visiting Florida or something.” Nico had departed 20 minutes earlier with Sally, the university-aged daughter of the KA’s proprietor who’d agreed to pitch in as babysitter during Nico’s weeklong visit. The two had gone off to the latest Bond movie at the nearby VR ImmersUplex.

Olivia caught Conrad’s eye for a second, an unspoken query. Conrad nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Listen, Hugh,” Olivia said, in that deliberate tone she usually reserved for addressing supporter-group representatives disgruntled by rising ticket prices, or for assembled media on days when news was of such import she relieved her understudies of the microphone, “you should know that Nico is reluctant to be seen about town wearing that jacket because, as I overheard him telling Sally and her mom, he doesn’t like ‘the way we win.’” She added air quotes for those last four words, making them linger an extra beat.

Hugh’s shoulders sagged. He bit his lip, looking deflated. The room turned quiet, an incongruous contrast to the merriment in the pub’s main room up front.

Robotic Shithousery. The term had laid siege on Hugh’s mind since he’d heard it on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast a couple weeks back, and it was all he could think about as he sat there digesting Olivia’s words. Hugh used to find it relaxing to listen to the banter between host Max Rushden, his sidekick Barry Glendenning, and the other correspondents on the pod. Now, other listeners got to chuckle and relax while Max and Barry relentlessly mocked his Wickersham project. Nico was probably one of those listeners; Hugh had encouraged him to listen to the podcast, and they’d often text about it. Such remotely shared experiences were crucial, and precious few, to maintain the transatlantic father-son bond.

Alas, it wasn’t just The Guardian. Social media was merciless; opposing club fans had taken to chanting, “You’ve won the game, but lost your soul.” The BBC had been withering in their feigned highbrow, detached manner, and the lead football writer for The Times had just sold a book on the club, promising risibly that Winning at All Costs: Wickersham’s Cautionary AI Tale for Us All would be “an open-minded, even-handed inquiry.” Conrad had heard grumbling about values and sportsmanship from some sponsors, most ominously the ubiquitous noodle purveyor Wagamama, which had paid handsomely for the stadium naming rights, betting that Hugh and his resources would take the club all the way to the Premier League.  

Conrad examined his shoes intently as the boss brooded. He’d worked with Hugh building out JustLaw back in Kansas City and was his alter ego running the club’s day-to-day business operations. Sebastian, the genius Dutch tactician who still pretended to fully oversee the footballing side of things, stared into the distance, impressed by Conrad’s knack for ceding the burden of leveling with Hugh to Olivia. He supposed it made sense. She didn’t really need any of this, having joined her hometown club on something of a lark after a meteoric run as a strategist and spin doctor for the reenergized Labour Party—which itself had been a bit of a lark after she’d walked away from a tenured professorship in modern European history at Durham. Sebastian found her judgment as impeccable as her knowledge of the game. Hugh clearly was in awe of her, amazed she’d taken the job. 

Wickers defended their club with the self-knowing, caustic humor that made English football so irresistible to foreigners. “Our hallucinations still beat your crap,” was one of the more popular chants at the Waga. Other favorites when opposing sides were losing: “AI, AI, AI, AI,” pronounced ay, ay, ay, ay, alluding to the song Mexican fans had popularized at World Cups, “You must be human,” and, when other teams committed fouls, “We take orders from a robot, what’s your excuse?”

Hugh had eagerly awaited Nico’s visit for weeks. Transatlantic video chatting only got you so far. Now Nico was here, but he couldn’t bear to wear the jacket of their team. Hugh had sensed Nico’s lack of excitement at the stadium; to be fair, he’d been feeling a bit hollow himself as criticism mounted.

“So, what do you propose we do?” Hugh finally asked.

“Sack the manager,” Olivia replied, almost too quickly.

“You want me to wave a white flag and give up on my entire business? Never mind, all you Luddite haters were right all along, so sorry. And screw our fans just as their club is on the verge of winning promotion to the Premier League?” Hugh shook his head, more at himself than anyone else.

Wasn’t owning a sports team supposed to be fun, like owning a yacht or dating a model (neither of which Hugh had much appetite for)? And the story was meant to be inspiring: Tech entrepreneur—“bro,” inevitably—who built the world’s most successful AI-powered legal arbitration and adjudication business brings the same incisive decisionmaking to rescue the beloved but beleaguered club of a proud but beleaguered city in the shadows of Sheffield and Leeds.

And so, Wickersham, of all places, had been the first team in any major sport to truly dispense with a human manager (“gaffer,” in the patois of English footballing slang) and entrust its fortunes to the wisdom of artificial general intelligence. JustLaw removed unacceptable margins of error and arbitrariness in legal disputes; now Hugh was removing human fallibility from football coaching. To those who accused him of excising the human element from the sport, he countered that on the contrary, this was about maximizing human achievement, the potential of players on the pitch, by perfecting their coaching. All clubs already used data-crunching AI agents to inform many aspects of their operations, from player recruitment and conditioning to ticket pricing and merchandise sales. But Wickersham was the first to fully empower an autonomous manager AI to process the data from previously compartmentalized mission-specific AI agents to make decisions for the club in real time, especially during games, without the clumsiness of human intermediation.

Things had started off well enough. Hugh and Conrad had been welcomed with open arms when they acquired the club nearly two years earlier. They were white knights come to restore the Wickers to their former glory after years of languishing in yo-yo purgatory between Leagues One and Two, as the third and fourth divisions of English football are confusingly known. Local supporters embraced Hugh’s revolutionary if cringey “G²OAT” (the trademarked “Greatest Gaffer of All Time”). Whatever it took to get an eccentric American billionaire to invest a fortune into their club was fine by them. Plus, if they were honest, most of their human gaffers in recent memory had been utter crap, so what’d they have to lose? 

The fact that fans elsewhere in the country absolutely hated what Wickersham was up to helped circle the wagons. The bigger clubs of London and Manchester and their allies in media couldn’t stand the thought of sleepy old Wickersham suddenly outsmarting them. Hugh loved this subversive aspect of the challenge. He’d faced similar hostility and incredulity when JustLaw, founded out of a loft in KC’s Crossroads Arts District, began outperforming America’s most prestigious white-shoe firms.

Wickersham had been stuck in League Two’s mid-table when Hugh and Conrad had arrived and handed the keys over to the G²OAT, along with assistant coach Pedro, a taciturn Spaniard  who’d gone off to study computer science when his promising playing career was cut short by a fractured ankle that refused to heal. The media loved calling Pedro the “AI whisperer.” His surname, which he’d shed early in his playing career, was a mostly forgotten trivia nugget.

Hugh and Conrad had lured Sebastian away from one of the top Dutch clubs to give their project a patina of footballing legitimacy. They doubled his salary and promised him he’d play a key role in a historic project, though it had since dawned on Sebastian that part of what made this project so historic was how much it diminished his agency as the human sporting director. The crack team of data and computer scientists Hugh parachuted in from JustLaw had optimized G²OAT for one clear and simple objective: winning. Winning promotion to League One by the conclusion of the season that following May, and then onto the Championship (the second division of England’s footballing pyramid) the following season. Pedro ran training sessions and conveyed G²OAT’s ever-evolving tactical commands to the squad, both in preparation for upcoming matches and during actual matches from the touchline.

Despite cartoonists’ insistence to the contrary, G²OAT was not a physical robot occupying space on the Wickers’ bench, but rather a set of proprietary dashboards—one for players, others for staff—with Pedro and Sebastian acting as domain hosts. Everyone was under strict orders to follow G²OAT’s commands unquestioningly, no matter how perplexing they may seem. Players who quibbled were transferred to other clubs; or, failing that, frozen out of the active squad, left to practice on their own and live out the remainder of their contracts in a state of semi-mothballed exile. Hugh and Conrad had a larger point to prove.

And sure enough, Wickersham only dropped six points in the business end of G²OAT’s first season, earning the club a place in the playoffs and a win at Wembley that got them promoted to League One. From there, fortified by some spectacular young prospects G²OAT had unearthed in England’s northeast, Wales, Ecuador, and Moldova, Wickersham won League One the following season, with a month to spare.

Now, as they sat sullenly in the KA’s back room, Hugh staring at Nico’s abandoned jacket, the club was five points clear atop the Championship. A promotion to the Premier League would match Wrexham’s historic run of three promotions in a row and swell the club’s revenue by more than £100 million a year.  

So much winning. And yet.

“Hugh, I don’t think most fans want to get there like this,” Conrad said, finally weighing in. “I’m afraid Olivia’s right.”

“You’re always talking about the importance of ‘principled innovation,’ but we’ve sort of lost sight of the principles here,” Olivia added, warming up the spiel she’d been practicing in her head for weeks. “We’ve just got innovation for the sake of innovation; tech for the sake of tech; winning for the sake of winning. For fuck’s sake, our club was founded by St. Paul’s Church down the road a century and a half ago. The club motto on our crest, right there on the jerseys and etched on the players’ tunnel, are Paul’s own words: Certa Bonum Certamen. We’re the ones supposed to be fighting the good fight, keeping the faith.”

“Well, that’s helpful, I guess we should just shut down G²OAT and appoint the current pastor of St. Paul’s as our manager,” Hugh said sarcastically, thinking of his dad as he said it.

Initially, G²OAT’s tactical acumen and versatility had been widely praised. Depending on the situation, within the span of a single match, you could be watching a team that resembled disciples of Rinus Michels’ and Johan Cruyff’s totaalvoetbal, or the famed Italian catenaccio (also known as  “park the bus”), or the tiki-taka of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. 

G²OAT had managed to finally achieve that elusive goal every data analyst in the fluid sport of football had been striving to achieve for a generation: infinite periodization, the ability to treat each and every one of the 90 minutes of play, and every second within each minute, as a discrete event. It had been no accident that AI-deploying data geeks, after revolutionizing recruitment, had first made an impact on what transpired during matches by determining how to handle set pieces, such as the early Deep Mind–Liverpool corner kick simulations. But G²OAT read the entirety of a game in progress as a series of discrete set pieces, as if the referee constantly blew the whistle to halt the action to allow managers to reset their pieces for the next sequence—a bit like what happens in American football. And while the first stage of AI disruption in English football enabled clubs to mine and analyze once-unimaginable amounts of historical data (including from a match played hours earlier) to adjust and inform future plans, G²OAT did it all in real time.

Wickersham’s players were hardly the world’s ablest when G²OAT took over; this was, after all, League Two football. But they learned quickly how to adapt to different styles, thanks in part to the shocking clarity of G²OAT’s video- and data-rich tactical sessions. The club started recruiting for smarts and malleability. Not everyone could, or wanted, to play up to a half-dozen systems in the same match.

An endearing staple of the Wickersham adventure was the bench’s deployment of colorful signal flags to instruct the team on shifting tactics. Hugh found this irritating even if fans loved it: Here he had unleashed the world’s most technologically sophisticated sports management, but it relied on the same communication system Admiral Nelson’s ships of the line used at fucking Trafalgar. And this would remain the case so long as the English Football League refused to approve Wickersham’s proposal to allow players to wear earpieces or smart watches during matches.

Wickersham, under G²OAT’s guidance, was as versatile ethically as it was tactically. Just like no one had previously witnessed the dexterity of a “manager” lacking any human attachment to a preferred footballing philosophy, no one had previously seen a manager that lacked any human attachment to norms of sportsmanship and behavior that were easy to take for granted because they were so ingrained. A couple of players had walked rather than be a part of Wickersham’s approach, but most others understood that they needed to obey G²OAT to collect their generous paychecks and to prove whatever grander point the club’s leadership was trying to make. And so they took part in the rotational tactical fouling that was meant to manage the game’s flow. They targeted the physical vulnerabilities of opponents, took time-wasting to new extremes when ahead in games, and engaged in plenty of other innovative and extreme forms of what pundits refer to as shithousery. Occasionally they would unveil signal flags featuring opponent players’ faces for no other purpose than to unnerve them. They might delay coming out of the locker room at home games to start the second half, leaving visiting teams to awkwardly stand around waiting, taking abuse from the crowd. G²OAT loved to order the strategic deployment of sprinklers at halftime to make it more difficult to control play in certain areas of the pitch. Once Wickersham even feigned a fight within its own squad to break up an opponent’s momentum. Visiting teams often arrived in a frazzled state of anticipation for what might befall them. Over time, Wickersham’s tactical and ethical versatility each reinforced the mounting criticisms leveled against the club—that it was one devoid of principles, purpose, and soul.

“No one is suggesting we scrap our reliance on AI to manage the team,” Olivia continued. “What I am saying is that we sack this AI manager and hire a new one. We’ll get huge accolades and defy prevailing media narratives if we sack G²OAT while we’re in first place. Let’s lean into the conventions: Announce we’re parting ways with G²OAT to go in a different direction, thank it for its contributions to the club, and wish it all the best with its future endeavors. And then we welcome our new AI manager to the club.” 

This got a wry smile from Hugh. “You’re so heartless, firing someone during the holidays.”

“May I say something?” Sebastian asked.

“I should think this is a good time, you being our sporting director and all,” Conrad said.

“Over in Leeds they still have murals of Marcelo Bielsa painted all over the city, even though he only managed them for a few seasons, quite a while ago. He got them promoted, sure, but he’s mostly revered for his philosophy, how he connected with the community and imbued the club with a sense of meaning. G²OAT’s football education was value-neutral, optimized for efficiency in pursuit of victory, that’s it. We should give its replacement more context about the club’s history, its founding values that Olivia is pointing to, the community, and general sportsmanship.”

“Okay, good. Let’s do it,” Hugh said. Let’s change the narrative, though not the results.”

Snow was falling as Hugh walked out into the crisp night to meet Nico. On the lit-up pedestrianized High Street, he passed the Christmas market where he and Nico had feasted on Yorkshire pudding and mince pies, gotten lost in the Christmas tree maze, and sang along with strolling Victorian carolers. That afternoon, on Nico’s first full day on this side of the Atlantic, had brought forth a rush of memories of Hugh’s own childhood in Prairie Village. His dad had been an Episcopalian minister in the Kansas City suburb and had always ensured that their church’s Christmas festival boasted its own sheep and donkeys. Hugh had played a shepherd abiding in the fields for a few years; just as he thought he was getting too old for such things, he was promoted to one of the three magi. Memories of those snowy childhood Christmases—of cozy time spent together, the cats obsessing over the tree, Mom perpetually baking for extended family and congregants—had been more insistent and vivid since he crossed the Atlantic. Something about Wickersham’s scale and simplicity, more like cohesion, took him back.

Three months later, shortly before Easter, Wickersham was no longer atop the division. Lacking its former determination to cut every corner, the club had slipped to sixth place. They did play with more consistency and fluidity; you could see more of a “Wicker style” emerging. But games that would’ve been wins under G²OAT often ended in draws. Still, the grumbling from sponsors had quieted down, the players appeared more relaxed, and even Pedro was occasionally seen smiling. But not for too long, as Pedro (and Wicker supporters) soon began worrying that this kinder, gentler regime would fail to win promotion to the Premier League.

Marcelo, as the new AI manager was called, had quickly changed the locker room culture, even instituting some of his Argentine namesake’s quirks. Recreating one of Bielsa’s famous episodes as Leeds manager, he made Wickersham’s players do a few hours of hard landscaping work at a public park, and then had Pedro inform them that was how long an average Wicker fan had to work in order to afford a ticket to watch them.

Hugh had been distracted Stateside, overseeing a JustLaw merger, so he welcomed the opportunity to visit the state-of-the-art training facility he’d built on the edge of town and catch up on how things were going. He ate in the canteen with the players, then met with Conrad, Sebastian, and Olivia in what was ostensibly Marcelo’s office. Wickersham’s footballing hierarchy had bright, Scandinavian-furnished offices and meeting rooms lining a corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Academy’s cozy stadium. Staff from across the organization would often use the gorgeous grass pitch to have a kick about over their lunch break.

“The results aren’t where we would like them to be, not yet,” Sebastian acknowledged as his boss stood by the window, looking out. “But I feel we are building a more sustainable, respectable project. It’s understandable it’s taking our players some time to adjust to a more consistent style of play and to sort through all the, um, new demands.”

The Dutchman’s tone was defensive, as if worried Hugh might be upset that promotion could be slipping away.

“I understand, Bas,” Hugh said. “We absolutely need to make it to the Premier League soon to justify all this investment, but we all knew this transition would take a minute. By the way, what’s this I keep hearing about bookstores?”

“Ah, yes, that relates to the new demands I just mentioned. You know the Waterstones over on Exeter Street, with the café on the second floor?”

Hugh knew it; the place was a sure hit with Nico, old school with wooden beams and creaking floors.

“Well, Marcelo instituted a weekly meeting there on Wednesday evenings for the entire first team. He—I mean it—assigns readings on local, British, and sports history, and we discuss them, following a guide Marcelo prepares.”

“Every week?”

“Yes,” Olivia chimed in. “I’ve been tagging along, helping to get discussion going, and it’s inspiring to see some of the players respond as they have. Not to mention the baristas and the other patrons; it’s become quite a sensation.” As she spoke, she realized how ludicrous this must all sound to Hugh. Had they all gone mad since last seeing the boss?

Hugh looked from Olivia to Sebastian, then shrugged. “Great, whatever it takes. A little reflection about how we got here won’t hurt anyone.”

“Although, as you might have heard,” Sebastian added, “not all our players agree. Caceres, Milosevich, and Ryan refuse to go to Waterstones, or the nursery home visits, saying they didn’t sign up for this bullshit. Marcelo wants them gone.”

“Hmm … trust the process, I guess,” Hugh said, trying not to dwell on those players’ high salaries or transfer fees.

“Speaking of which,” Sebastian asked, “is it normal for bouts of endless curiosity to be part of an AI’s process?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when we ditched G²OAT you’ll recall we scrambled around the clock for a couple of weeks to get Marcelo up to speed. We wanted him—I mean ‘it,’ sorry, I keep doing that—to have a more expansive worldview and philosophy. Win, yes, get us promoted, but not at the expense of our values and broader sportsmanship principles. We continuously reinforced the merits of clean and constructive possession-based football, of exalting the collective over the individual, of Bielsa’s philosophy and approach to conditioning, and of a deep appreciation for the history of our community and club, including its church origin story and motto. All the context we had discussed.”

“And?” Hugh wasn’t hearing a problem.

“Well, because we were scrambling during the transition, we were slow to install some of the guardrails we now have in place. So, for a time Marcelo had a tendency to wander or stray, or whatever the right technical term is, beyond any footballing remit—beyond the data sets of matchday stats, tactical setups, player performance, recruitment profiles—and into the club’s finances, marketing, and branding, which we normally keep separated by a firewall from our sporting databases.”

“Then there were all those deep dives into Yorkshire’s economy and demographics, regional culture, and theology of course,” Olivia added. “Remember how, in the Watford post-match press conference, Marcelo urged everyone in the room to appreciate the meaning of St. Paul writing his Certa bonum certamen pastoral letter, and of having kept the faith, to his acolyte Timothy from his cell in Rome, shortly before being martyred?”  

Hugh chuckled at the memory of all those journalists shifting uncomfortably in their seats, boggled by the theological aside. His dad would’ve appreciated that. It all sounded a bit odd, though as Sebastian had noted, they’d since put guardrails in place. And considering the universe of things Marcelo could get distracted by, this all sounded tame, maybe even healthy, as signs of engagement and emotional investment.

Well, maybe not “emotional.”

“We experienced something similar a while back at JustLaw, when we transitioned from an agentic approach to general intelligence. You’re granting the AI autonomy and full intentionality to pursue the goals you’ve specified,” Hugh said. “Much like it won’t hurt our players to be more aware of the context that gives meaning to what we’re doing, it won’t hurt to have their manager more aware of it as well.

“Though, of course, we’ll keep an eye on it.”

Six weeks and eight matches later, Wickersham was playing better. They’d locked up fourth place, and with it a spot in the playoffs to determine the winner of the third and final ticket to get promoted to the Premier League.

Wickersham was the talk of the four-team tournament, given their season’s dramatic narrative arc from ruthless sure-things to this reformed-but-more-imperfect side. At the press conference in the week leading up to the semifinal against Southampton, Marcelo had instructed Pedro to ask for a moment of silence for the assembled journalists and both teams’ players and staff to reflect on how fortunate they all were to be able to work in and around the sport they loved, “on this blessed and prosperous island.”

“Spare me,” Barry Glendenning griped on the next day’s episode of The Guardian Football Weekly, “all this saccharine, Ted Lasso-ish mumbo jumbo, the performative community service and Waterstones outings. It’s a pathetic attempt at damage control. Wickersham gave us a look at the unvarnished rapaciousness of life under a techno-dictatorship and it wasn’t pretty, and now they’re trying to make us forget what we witnessed with this fairy tale. I ain’t buying it.”

“C’mon Barry, don’t be such a grouch. I am here for this redemption story,” his cohost Max goaded. “I believe all footballers should care about their communities, and if robots can learn to be better robots, why maybe there’s hope even for a pair of old grouchy podcasters to become better humans.”

“Of course you’d fall for it,” Barry replied. “You’re still a Coldplay fan, too.”

Wickersham demolished Southampton in the away leg, then drew them at home, to move onto the final at Wembley against West Bromwich Albion FC.

Fans from Yorkshire poured into the nation’s cathedral of football in London, the stadium reserved for the national team and domestic finals like this. For supporters of many clubs, their visit to Wembley became a family heirloom, a story to be cherished and recounted across the generations. And this of all matches, the showdown to determine the final promotion spot from the Championship to the Premier League, was known as the highest-stakes contest in all of sport.

Economists debated the exact stakes, with a consensus number in the half-billion-pound ballpark. Win over the 90 minutes, and your TV plus commercial revenues for the next season go up by more than £200 million. Then you had to calculate the increased revenues beyond that, for as long as a promoted club could hang on in the top division, and the value of any subsequent “parachute” or consolation payments it received upon being relegated back down to the Championship.

This was something American sports lacked: a direct correlation between a team’s sporting and financial performance. It’s one of the reasons hypercompetitive Wall Street and tech bros were so drawn to European football.

Conrad was a nervous wreck when he took his place in the Wembley box assigned to the Wickers’ ownership. Hugh couldn’t blame him; the numbers involved were daunting. Sebastian and Olivia, who’d come over from hosting a pregame reception for Wickersham sponsors and Yorkshire notables in the capital for the big occasion, appeared more relaxed.

Nico was streaming the game from home; his mother had insisted the boy couldn’t miss school. Hugh texted him video of the crowds filling the stadium, throngs of Wickers and Baggies (as West Brom supporters are known) divided by a phalanx of security guards in fluorescent coats. It was breathtaking to see the “#COYW” (“Come on You Wickers”) and “Be a Wicker” banners unfurled at Wembley.

Marcelo had Wickersham line up in their customary 4-3-3. The one notable absence was Bryce Adams, Wickersham’s striker and leading goal-scorer. Marcelo started Chris Boyle, the promising teenager from the academy, to play more of a false 9. Otherwise, the team was the same core of starters that had gelled together in recent months, on and off the pitch.  

The Wickers dominated the first 20 minutes but failed to convert any of their three shots on target. If only Adams had been there, the broadcasters intoned. Not clear he would’ve made a difference, but TV needs a narrative.

Then disaster struck. Entirely against the run of play, a West Brom counterattack on the left produced an incisive cross to the club’s record signing, the Peruvian right-back Estevez, who volleyed the ball into Wicker’s top left corner. Smith-Atkins, the goalkeeper, dove for it, knowing full well it was a hopeless exercise.

For the rest of the half, West Brom parked the proverbial bus, playing a tenacious defense, all 11 of their players staying goalside of the ball whenever Wickersham was in possession. Unlike G²OAT, Marcelo sought to preserve more tactical stability throughout matches, but in response to the real-time heat map produced by the sensors inside the ball and built into players’ boots and other data uploaded by staff, the colorful flags on the Wickersham sideline started waving avidly. Marcelo was giving license to his fullbacks to invert into midfield and venture forward at will, and instructing the Wicker’s captain, center-back Will Sampson, to hand off his defensive duties and think of himself as a joker, an additional number 10 who might create spaces in the tight confines of West Brom’s defense.

Wickersham went into halftime still down 0–1. The atmosphere among the Wickers in the crowd was nervy, though not panicked. 

“It’s coming soon, I can feel it,” Nico texted.

He wasn’t wrong. Twelve minutes into the second half, Sampson dribbled past two defenders and took a low shot from just outside the box. The ball sailed past the outstretched hand of the keeper, only to clang off the post and back onto the field of play. Luckily, it headed straight to Boyle, who tapped it in for his first senior team goal ever, from about five feet out.

Pandemonium. 1–1. Wicker joy erupted in Wembley and South Yorkshire. Hugh was confident. They had this. West Brom seemed to have no ideas or intentions beyond making a last-ditch stand on their own goal line, and they had dug their trenches far too early. But they surprised Hugh, making two offensive substitutions, then managing to move up their lines and regain some possession of the ball—and of the game—now that it was required. Things balanced out. Worse, in the 80th minute, in response to a long ball into the box that didn’t seem too threatening, Adams lost his footing for a moment as he tried to shepherd the ball out for a goal kick, shielding it from a West Brom attacker. Flummoxed, he planted his foot in the path of the attacker, conceding an obvious, and totally unnecessary, penalty kick.

West Brom converted it and went ahead 2–1, with only 10 minutes remaining.

Marcelo ordered the Wickers’ final two substitutions and the flags waved frantically, unleashing patterns of attack West Brom had never witnessed before. One goal would send the match into overtime, two would send the Wickers into the Premier League; none would send them home, still in the Championship, with a world of financial uncertainties surrounding their future.

Then it happened: The moment, with only two minutes of regulation remaining, that Wickers would talk about for generations to come, without agreeing on its particulars. Some supporters swore Sampson’s elbow never actually made contact with the West Brom attacker in the center circle; others grudgingly conceded that yeah, he sort of took him out when they both went up for an aerial duel, though there was no intentional foul.

In either case, the West Brom attacker went to the ground after Sampson prevailed in heading the ball forward, and play proceeded. Wickers would also debate for years whether there was a second or two delay before the fallen West Brom attacker grabbed his head with his hands while moaning on the ground. In any case, Wickersham’s veteran left midfielder Martin Ayres sent a perfectly weighted curler behind Estevez. Boyle timed his run perfectly to get to the ball first, while staying onside, and beat the keeper with a poised finish to near post.

2–2.

All hell broke loose. Wickers screamed, sang, embraced; Baggies gesticulated wildly in the direction of their prostrated player, now sitting upright, a hand held demonstratively to his head. Accounts would also differ as to how many of West Brom’s players had actually stopped playing in the expectation of a ref’s whistle; the answer varied depending on which side of the Yorkshire-Midlands border you asked the question. There clearly had been no foul, and teams aren’t obligated to stop playing if someone on the opposing team falls injured, though refs are supposed to stop play in case of a possible head injury.

“Play the whistle, you wankers,” some of the more combative Wickers shouted at the complaining West Brom players, while the officials merely shrugged, as if to convey the same message.

Hugh was ecstatic. Overtime beckoned, with momentum on the Wickers’ side. He didn’t see that amid all the frantic West Brom complaints, Pedro had sprung from the bench and beckoned Sampson to approach the sideline. He had an urgent instruction from Marcelo—one for which there was no flag signal.

Eventually, after quite a few yellow cards issued for unsportsmanlike dissent, West Brom resumed play at the center circle. Much to their shock, the Wickersham players stood still in their starting positions, as if frozen by a video game glitch that allows only one team’s controller to function.

Except for Sampson’s young center back partner, Clive Rouse, who instinctively stuck his foot out and took the ball away from the approaching Baggie attacker. Both players stopped, surprised at this turn of events that saw a defender deign to defend. Rouse’s expression was one of horror, realizing his insubordination, which fans weren’t sure whether to cheer or boo (most cheered). Desperate to realign himself with his mates and Marcelo’s larger design, Rouse returned the ball to the West Brom attacker, mumbling a sort of apology. West Brom walked the ball into the net, and into the coveted Premier League, with their 3–2 win.

When something traumatic occurs, the human brain processes time at a slower rate, and latches onto the most immediately available concrete thought to navigate incomprehensible chaos. In Hugh’s case, as all this transpired, all he could think about was how odd the guttural Dutch language sounds. Hadn’t he read someone compare it to “drunk English?”

Hugh had never heard Sebastian swear before—not that he could understand what the Dutchman was saying (something to the effect of “Shit, not this again Marcelo, this is not what we had in mind”), nor would he have known what his sporting director was referring to: In a legendary incident in 2020, to the world’s astonishment, Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds had allowed Aston Villa to walk in a goal under similar circumstances. Bielsa had taken sportsmanship and fair play to biblical extremes, and the Wickers’ AI had learned those lessons all too well.

Tragically so, it seemed. Olivia sat behind the men, deflated. She was already thinking of how this would make a great story, though at their expense, when she glanced down at her phone and realized she had just received a WhatsApp from a new contact. Marcelo had messaged her directly, somehow, bypassing Pedro and Sebastian. The AI’s missive read: “On Wicker redemption + some thoughts on marketing. Bonum certamen!” A detailed set of plans was attached.

Hugh’s phone, meanwhile, started pinging like crazy. As his Wickers slowly walked back toward the center circle to play out the remaining minutes before their loss was official, he looked down to see a text from Nico:

Dad, that was awesome.

Nearly seven months later, on the following Boxing Day, father and son made their way from Hugh’s loft in Wickersham’s converted wharves district to the department store in the center of town. Nico loved to eat in its café, deliberating over which cake to choose a piece from. The streets and shops were packed with holiday shoppers and gameday crowds who’d eventually make it to the Waga for the three o’clock kickoff.

Hugh relished the walk across town, past Wickersham’s guildhall, the library, the imposing Corn Exchange, and the meadowy parklands between the center of town and the stadium, along the river. He loved being part of that stream of people heading to home matches, feeling connected to a timeless pilgrimage. Wearing a hat and team scarf, his jacket lapels upturned to offer protection against the bracing winds, Hugh went largely unrecognized.

Hugh had launched his Wickersham adventure to prove the wisdom of trusting a technologically enhanced form of decisionmaking, even in something as emotionally fraught as football. But the project had also offered a way to become reconnected to community, to a tangible, human-scaled geography. He loved getting to know this town, committing to spending spells of time within its confines, among its people. It was somewhat contrived, of course, because he could jet away at any time, and often had to. But while in Wickersham, he tried to live like his club’s supporters. After too many years of eating meals curated by world-class chefs in exclusive sanctuaries, he could once again delight in things like treating himself to a Côte Brasserie steak frites dinner, surrounded by diners who appreciated that the meat and ambience were slightly better than anything else the center of town could offer, and that the bread was always served warm. He loved the banter at the KA, standing at the bar watching your pint being poured from the tap. Having Nico around also helped him to reconnect with ordinary pleasures—at the moment, the boy was admiring the department store café’s gingerbread house.

As a teenager and a young adult, Hugh had loved malls, airports, and other places that served up masses of people going about their lives. Unimaginable wealth had divorced him from the friction of crowds; people of his stature and resources were expected to secede from society and navigate the world in their own private bubbles. But why, exactly? It wasn’t like people of all sorts had become less interesting solely because his bank account balances now boasted a few more zeroes. As for the few souls he encountered in manicured spaces reserved for those who’d supposedly won at life, Hugh was struck by how many of them exuded a sense of ennui. If you try to erase all ordinary experience from your daily life, how could anything ever feel truly extraordinary?

The Waga was buzzing, the mood jovial, when Hugh and Nico arrived. The club was in third place in the Championship, aiming once again for promotion, and had played a pleasing brand of offensive football all season. The Wickers had gone from hoarding yellow cards like they were gold to being the least penalized team in the division. And Marcelo still had the players out visiting schools and nursing homes and discussing history at Waterstones.

But there was much more than that. Within hours of the playoff loss at Wembley the previous May, Wickersham had become a global phenomenon. Marcelo had orchestrated a marketing campaign whose virality had few analogs in the history of sport—or of any other type of branding. Even before that match’s final whistle, Marcelo had prepared packages for leading influencers in 20 languages, splicing together “highlights” of Wickersham allowing West Brom to score with inspirational messages from scripture and history about doing the right thing.

The day after the game, Pedro’s celebrated command to his team’s captain, “Let ’em Score,” for which there had been no flag signal, made it into the Pope’s sermon, followed by the punchline “Be a Wicker.” Other celebrities rushed to create content about how they had, and you should, “Let ’em Score,” under the #BonumCertamen hashtag. T-shirts with “Let ’em Score” on the front and “Be a Wicker” under a caricature of a mortified Rouse on the back had become a must-have for young people around the world, licensed by Uniqlo to benefit UNICEF and other charities.

Wickersham jerseys also flew off the shelves, outselling those of the biggest clubs in the world. Within 48 hours of the playoff’s final whistle, Marcelo had triggered a bidding war for a documentary about the club, another for naming rights for a new stand on the west end of the stadium, and another for their next jersey sponsor.

Hugh tried to take it all in stride. He said at an investment conference that he’d acquired the club to prove a point about the wisdom of relying on superior intelligence to guide our decisions, and that he didn’t want to read too much into the rest of it. Marcelo, less prone to straying off topic since his Wembley coup, made an exception shortly thereafter, instructing Pedro to say at one of their routine press conferences that Hugh hadn’t been entirely correct about the point his Wickers had proven, and that the boss knew this.

During the first half, with Wickersham up 1–0, Nico looked over and asked: “Dad, are we going to have time to go to the club shop after the game? I want to get stuff for a couple of friends back home.”

Hugh smiled. “It’ll be closed by then, but I think we can find someone to let us in.”