A Football Manager Career

1: The Job Centre.

My career in football management began bright and early on Monday 7th January 2019. It wasn't perhaps quite as bright and early a start as I was planning, but you can blame the boiler for that as it didn't kick in when I set-it and so I stayed in bed curled up as it was far too cold to get up. But anyway, once the 'office' had warmed up and I loaded up the computer and put on a pot of coffee, my managerial career began.

I was twenty-six and didn't have a single coaching badge to my name and no reputation as a player to call upon. However, I did have over nine-thousand hours of experience in the game, not that the CV generators consider that to be worthwhile, and plenty of ambition/ego. I also had some experience on two continents thanks to a Chinese great-grandfather and my own English upbringing. Due to these footballing roots, I decided to focus my search for a job on the lower tiers of English or Chinese football. Well, I didn't do this personally of course, that would have been far too depressing and time consuming. No, I went on holiday whilst my personal assistant Jordan applied for any and every job in the two countries whilst I busied myself with some breakfast in blissful ignorance of the mountain of rejections.

I won't lie: this did not go quite as well as I had hoped and expected. I ended up in a sort of silent stand-off with my personal assistant: Jordan not talking to me because he had no news, and me not talking to him because I didn't want to be told about all the rejections. Before I knew it I had finished not just my breakfast, but was washing up the plate from my dinner too. When I finally lost patience with it all I returned from my holiday and looked through the many, many rejections to see if there was any glimmer of hope anywhere. There was not and so I went back on holiday and left Jordan to it whilst I headed to the pub to drown my sorrows. After all, applying for jobs is exhausting!

When I got back home in a haze of optimism, it had somehow become the 12th June and my screensaver vanished to reveal my first ever job interview! I decided to put my best foot forward and delay the meeting until the following morning and so headed to bed dreaming of how well my talk with Xu Guosheng was going to go and the subsequent successes I was going to enjoy with SH Shenxin...