A Light Idea Hid a Heavy Theme About Organizations Breaking
Up to last time, I kept writing about the process of making the book and about the cover. This time, I want to talk about the story itself. “It seemed like it’d be fun to bring a ‘reborn in another world’ style into football” — that’s the light-hearted idea I started this work with. But as someone who actually runs a team and a company, there were a few themes I absolutely had to include. Two “stories about organizations” that look similar but are actually different things. Both are rooted in my own bitter experiences. (What follows contains spoilers relevant to the main plot.)
First: swayed by the media, the organization cracks from within (Stephen’s story)
The first is a story about an organization cracking from the inside, driven by voices from outside.
Toward the end of his time managing the England national team, an FA analyst named Stephen Wallace joins the staff. He is talented, and he means no harm. But he deeply admires a certain veteran figure (Tom Burns), and his admiration for Tom’s ideas gradually leaks out. Eventually the newspapers start running “inside stories” with headlines like “The Brennan-Burns Partnership” or “Goals Born From Burns’s Instructions,” and small doubts start to sprout in the locker room.
Who is actually making the final tactical decisions? In the middle of a crucial tournament, the captain, Adams, speaks frankly to James.
“Some of the players are confused. They’re saying, ‘I don’t know whose instructions to follow.’”
Here James nearly makes a fatal mistake. Is Stephen the source of the leak? Or could even Tom, his friend of many years, be trying to position himself above me?—he starts to doubt the very person he should trust most. For the first time since the accident, he shouts at Tom. “Are you really on my side?”
The truth is that Stephen was innocent—his admiration had simply leaked out unconsciously—and the real source of the leak was someone else entirely. Of that night when James doubted him and shouted, Tom says: “The day you shouted at me for the first time in a long while—that was proof you finally recognized me as your true friend.”
The lesson James leaves in his notebook is simple. “My weakness—that I couldn’t fully trust the bond between us.” “Even in a battle of politics, in the end, it comes down to trust between people.”
Reputation and reporting from the outside can become a tailwind, but they can also easily break an organization from within. And the scariest thing of all is letting outside voices stir you up until you start doubting your own comrades. This is something that has made me shudder more than once, in the course of running teams and a company.
Second: look at the people, not just the tactics (Stuart’s story)
The other theme looks similar but is actually completely different. It’s a story about the danger of believing that “if you just have the right tactics, people will move.”
In the middle of the story, in order to instill his own complex modern tactics into the team, James appoints a 32-year-old veteran, Stuart Reilly, as captain—as the linchpin for “imprinting” his tactics on the team. But Stuart quietly, and firmly, refuses to accept this.
“You want to use the players as pieces for your own tactics.” “I want the players to fight on the pitch as human beings.” “Have you even looked your players in the eye lately?”
James had been staring only at the tactics board, not at the players’ hearts. The locker room splits into the “Stuart camp” and the “James camp,” and that year the team finishes 14th in the first division, barely avoiding relegation. The “dictatorship” of clinging to tactics clearly fails.
Stuart leaves the club. His parting words pierce James’s chest deeply and become a bitter memory that lingers for a long time.
“A captain isn’t something a manager decides. It’s something that rises up naturally from among the players.” “You’re a tactical genius. But look at people a little more.”
Still, I didn’t want to end this as a complete rupture. A few months later, a letter from Stuart arrives from his new club. “I’m glad you made the decision to let me go, back then”—bitterness, forgiveness, and each of them starting over. So in my own mind, this isn’t a “final” parting—it’s only a parting “for now.” (Though after this, the two of them do end up losing touch for a long time…)
Why I wanted to include these two stories
Both are themes rooted in my own bitter experiences, as someone who has been involved in running a team and a company.
- Letting outside voices—the media, rumors, reputation—stir you up until you let go of internal trust yourself: Stephen’s story.
- Believing that if you optimally place talented people like “pieces,” you’ll win, while leaving their hearts behind: Stuart’s story.
Even in startup support and mentoring, what I keep telling people, in the end, comes down to the flip side of these same two things. What matters isn’t tactics or public opinion, but trust between people. Precisely because I know this so painfully well, I wanted to write that one thing honestly, even inside a lighthearted power-fantasy story.
A light story, with a heavy core
Honestly, this isn’t a work I started with that much weight on my shoulders. But I managed to run a real core through something I started making on a whim, and now that I’ve finished writing it, I’m honestly satisfied with that.
While enjoying the thrill of dominating through tactics, if at some passing moment a reader catches themselves thinking, “wait, this is also a story about people and organizations”—that’s the small wish I’ve tucked into this story.
Next time is finally the final installment. Having spent this whole series writing about where AI works and where it doesn’t, I’ll close it out by writing about how I, as someone in a teaching position, face AI.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/06/1671/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.