Just Be Frank
A manager, two players, and a lack of communication
Sorry to premium subscribers for the double-send. This was meant to go out to everyone. Thanks to a generous third-tier donation, Drew was able to assign me whatever idea he wanted. And, uh, here’s Drew:
“My weird idea is around seeing you could create a funny fan fiction of sorts around European soccer. I don’t have really many parameters other than we fell in love with Christian Pulisic early in his rise and my buddy is obsessed (as he should be) with Sadio Mane, so I’d love for them to be the heroes of the story. We both absolutely fucking hate frank Lampard for what he’s done to captain America, so a constant joke we make is going to burn down Frank’s house. I’d love for that to somehow be a part of the story.”
And so, here is a fictional story involving Christian Pulisic, Sadio Mane, Frank Lampard, and a plot to burn down Frank Lampard’s house.
He knew something was off. He knew it from the first time they spoke.
“Christian, lad, good to hear from ya. Sorry if my voice is a bit scrambled. I use something called a Nokia.” He stretched out that last word like an indestructible piece of taffy, each letter so clearly enunciated and then held onto. It was like he thought he was speaking to a barely-functional automated voice-recognition service for an airline.
“You know snake? Perhaps you’re a bit too young for that, yeah? You Zoomers -- that’s your gen, right? You and your Instagram and MyFace and all that. Anyway, you follow a snake around, eating up little square bits across the screen, as the snake gets bigger and bigger.”
What the fuck was this guy talking about?
“It’s sort of a mind control-type thing, you see? Both for me and the snake, I guess. I control the snake, eating and eating until the squirmy lad obliterates himself. Kind of dark, yeah; never really thought about it that way, huh. But I’m also controlling myself. It’s the only way I can shut it off.”
“There’s no power switch?” Christian asked.
“That’s a good one, lad. Don’t we all wish?”
***
Despite what everyone said about him, Sadio only cared about one thing: being straightforward.
He never forgot the comments after the Tottenham game in the fall of 2018: how he was wasteful, over-elaborate, always took the extra touch, didn’t care about scoring since his team was already winning. He knew some of this was because of where he came from -- cultural stereotypes still persisted around players from Africa, even though Africa is a continent, not a country. You wouldn’t compare a Portuguese winger to a Scottish one, would you? Robertao Snodgras, pronounced “Schnodgrash? Chris Ronald. Shit like that, he never understood. And yet, African players -- north, south, east, west, anywhere in between -- were supposedly “unrefined”, liable to be inefficient.
But who was more efficient than him? There was no one better with both feet, and just look at his career path: first to Red Bull Salzburg before it was cool, then to Southampton before it stopped being cool, and then to Liverpool right when it got cool. He jumped from launching pad to launching pad with visionary efficiency.
In order to stay on path, he tried to remove all emotion from his play; you played to score because scoring won games and winning games was the point. The point, in other words, was the point. Petty squabbles, selfishness, anger, frustration -- none of that served the point, so none of it served Sadio either.
The only time he ever allowed himself to tick into the red was when someone else lost sight of the point. Usually it was Mo; he always had the ball and he always wanted to shoot. Those were the two things that made him great, and the two things that made him such an ideal partner for Sadio, who worked better in more space and had no real interest in the low-probabilities of unlikely long-range shooting. Someone had to do it to keep the defense honest, though, and Sadio respected Mo for it.
This disconnect in responsibility would sometimes bubble up in the box, when Mo shot from a tight angle rather than passing to Sadio in the center of the box. Sadio would lose his temper for a moment; how else could you react if your deeply-held ethic were so flagrantly violated from just a few yards away? And he always allowed himself this brief moment of practical indiscretion because of its efficacy. Outsiders saw it as potential cracks in the team’s foundational unity, but Sadio knew the truth: it always got them back on track.
***
Christian just wanted a straightforward answer. He never got one. Not in the first week, not in the sixth month.
Every time he talked to his manager, there was a pattern to it. There’d be a greeting, then he’d address his point, then he’d make a joke, and then he’d negate the joke with a serious point that stated the opposite.
Why am I not playing more?
“Well, every manager has his reasons. Though it would certainly help if you were English, wouldn’t it? But seriously, you haven’t played up to your price-tag.”
Three goals today, not bad, huh?
“It’s a decent start. But if you wanna keep your place, I’m expecting at least that many every weekend! Jokes aside, this game doesn’t guarantee you anything.”
The quality of his play was undeniable. Goals, dribbles, assists, shots, chances created -- it was all there whenever he was out there. But his head was constantly spinning, the ground felt like it was always moving. He couldn’t have a conversation with his coach without it devolving into the same absurd patter.
***
Sadio heard what the other manager said about him. It was after the latest flare-up with Mo, against Burnley. A reporter asked him if he’d ever gotten into it with a teammate back in his playing days. He compared himself to Mo -- the one who got yelled at for shooting. Then he made a joke. Then he made a serious point.
Sadio hated this way of speaking — it “triggered” him, if you will. Why not just say what you mean? Sadio loved jokes, but jokes existed to stand alone, to make people laugh, to make people feel better. The purpose of the joke was the joke. The point, again, was the point. Why the need to first coat your true feelings with something absurd that you clearly don’t believe?
Did he always speak like this? He couldn’t ... could he? Just the slightest bit of Internet-sleuthing turned up the answer:
He could.
***
Christian needed to do something. He’d been hurt, but he disagreed with the club’s public assessment of his injury. Who knows, maybe they’d soon start issuing press-releases in that same infuriating, OK-here's-a-ridiculous-thing-just-kidding-time-for-the-real-thing style. Even worse, maybe he would start talking that way, too.
***
Sadio needed to do something. He couldn’t let this man -- one of the most recognizable faces in British soccer, the coach of one of the richest football-playing institutions on the planet -- go on like this, flagrantly disavowing Sadio’s one core belief. The normalization of this style of speaking would be the normalization of a new kind of society. A society that, by definition, would be the final society. A society in which the point was no longer the point.
***
Christian decided how he’d do it: He knew the manager was on vacation. He’d drive over and prop up his phone on the manager’s front lawn. His beautiful, smooth, shining, stimulating iPhone, a necessity of modern technology that provided access to whatever you wanted, let you play FIFA with your finger tips, and sometimes even made your voice sound clearer than it would during in-person conversation. He’d never seen a Nokia, and he’d never played snake, but he’d grown to hate them by association. So, what better way to prove his displeasure and his fitness than to film himself juggling a ball on his coach’s front lawn, and to do it with his iPhone.
***
Sadio decided how he’d do it: He’d burn his house down. It seemed drastic, freakish, like starting a third World War over an argument about a sunroof. But to Sadio, it was the least drastic option available. No one was home, so no one would get hurt. The family had more than enough money -- two generations of professionals -- and their insurance surely covered it. Plus, there was no more efficient way to do it. Light one spark in the right spot, and the house would be gone for good in just about 17 minutes. You only needed one person to do it, and the result would be something equally harmless and Earth-shattering: Once your house burns down, your perspective radically changes. You stop making jokes before you make your point.
***
As Sadio pulled up to the house, he ... wait ... what? There wasn’t just someone else there already. There was another professional soccer player there already. He’d played against Christian a few times and knew him well because of the constant rumors that he’d be joining Sadio’s team, which was coached by one of Christian’s former coaches.
Sadio got close enough to see what was going on, but stayed far enough away so that Christian couldn’t see him -- that satisfying perfect angle of mixed perceptions. He looked up at the house, and thought to himself that this was one of those houses that you don’t even need to walk into. The outside tells you everything you need to know about the inside. Everything inside -- the floor, the toilet handles, the countertops, and somehow even the air -- was cold, even when the heat was turned all the way up or all of the multiple fireplaces were lit. There were painted portraits of dead and living family members -- sometimes within the same frame, sometimes re-positioned in time so a grandmother and granddaughter sat next two each other at the same age -- in every room in the house. And there was at least one bronzed sea creature -- most likely a mammal, most likely a walrus -- needing to be buffed, sitting in the foyer.
As he looked back down to the lawn, Sadio saw Christian lean down and look at his phone, which was perched on the grass via a tiny easel-like stand. As he looked at the phone, Christian stuck both his pinky and pointer fingers into his mouth, removed them, and then spread the fingers across his eye brows. A punk-rock reset. Then he began to juggle. The running shoes made it hard to control the ball, but for a professional soccer player that just meant each touch was off by an inch or two. Once, twice, Christian whipped his leg around the ball like Mercury around the sun and then kept it up before it hit the ground. He tried it a third time, but couldn’t get his leg high enough, and so the ball got caught under his foot as it arced up and then back down toward the ground. The ball landed on the grass, and his foot almost instantaneously landed on the ball with all the force of his body weight. His knee buckled backwards, and then so did the rest of his body. He laid there, not moving.
The lawn hadn’t been mowed in weeks. All Sadio could see was the phone, and the reflection of the sun, gleaming off its face.
***
The hospital-room phone rang. Christian was fine -- it initially seemed like something had ruptured but it ended up as just a minor hyperextension, nothing that would cause him to miss any game time since the season was on break. But he was still talking to the doctor -- would he sign an autograph for his daughter? -- so Sadio answered the call.
“Hey, who’s this?”
“It’s Sadio.”
“Lovely mate, lovely. Are you trying to recruit my player? I could report you to the FA! On a serious note, let me have a word with Christian. Not happy with him.”
He couldn’t shut it off.
Ryan O'Master of his craft