The 2022 Manchester derby is the Manchester City 6–3 Manchester United match that Max Best watches and repeatedly invokes as a benchmark for football’s apparent hierarchy. Its immediate result seems to confirm his belief that Manchester City are an almost flawless machine and that Manchester United cannot realistically close the gap. Yet the match acquires a larger significance as Max’s thinking develops: the score first represents an uncrossable competitive distance, then becomes part of his self-questioning about tactical intelligence, football expertise, disability, and the prejudices encoded by the curse that governs his perception of the game.

Background and Expectations

The derby is due to begin while Max is visiting the Yalley family. Kisi Yalley asks whether he is nervous, but Max says that he is not, because the difference between the teams is enormous and Manchester United have virtually no chance of winning. His judgment is not presented as ordinary match-day nerves or partisan optimism. It is a confident forecast based on resources, squad quality, and the visible power structure of the English game.

Max describes Manchester City as a machine and Erling Haaland as playing like “The Terminator.” In his view, a Manchester City victory is among the most inevitable events in human history. He argues that Manchester United’s new manager may be close to Manchester City’s manager in tactical ability, but lacks the raw materials required to compete. City are too far ahead, possess too many resources, and do not make mistakes. The derby therefore begins in Max’s mind before kick-off as a demonstration of structural inequality rather than an open contest.

The Score as a Competitive Verdict

When Max later looks at the derby score, Manchester City are leading Manchester United 3–0 after roughly half an hour. The result gives concrete form to the gap he had described at the Yalley home: the distance is not merely large but apparently vast and uncrossable. The score turns his prediction into a visible verdict, reinforcing his belief that the strongest club can make victory seem predetermined.

The match continues to function as an intrusive reference point in Max’s day. On another occasion, before answering an incoming call from Ziggy Graves, he checks the latest score and sees that City are winning 6–1. He assumes Ziggy is calling to gloat, declines the call, and switches off his phone because he does not want the result to spoil his improved mood. His decision is an ironic mistake: Ziggy is calling with important and exciting news concerning Max’s progress toward becoming a football insider. The derby thus produces not only a football result but also a small personal misjudgment, as Max allows his anticipation of mockery to shape his response to a friend.

When Ziggy eventually explains the situation, he corrects Max’s casual recollection. The score is 6–3, not 6–1, and the relevant news concerns FC United rather than the derby itself. Sandro’s injury has proved worse than first thought, while Max McCartney has been sent off in another match, leaving Jackie Reaper to ask Ziggy not to play with his friends that week. The correction separates the spectacular derby score from the more immediate injury and disciplinary consequences affecting Max’s football circle, showing how a famous match can dominate attention while other football events carry more direct personal stakes.

Tactics, Expertise, and the Limits of Seeing

The derby also belongs to Max’s broader difficulty in understanding tactical commentary. He watches matches and hears people praise managers for incredible tactical adjustments, but cannot identify what has changed. Frozen images sometimes show precise formations, yet the worst teams can look exactly like the best teams in those moments. The problem is not a lack of interest in football; it is the failure of his visual information to become usable knowledge.

That difficulty is sharpened by the curse’s interface. After completing its tutorial, Max discovers screens in his field of vision that he can summon by thought. A profile for Max Best displays experience points and achievements, while a news feed announces that the Super Scout perk has been unlocked. Later, during a match in which he is recognized as the manager, a tactical interface presents FC United Tactics and AFC Phoenix Tactics alongside the score FC United 3–0 AFC Phoenix. The interface promises mastery by organizing football into menus, tabs, statistics, and reports, but it does not automatically give Max the judgment needed to interpret what he sees.

His understanding grows through comparison and repeated observation. He recalls studying Fabio Cannavaro during the 2006 FIFA World Cup and gradually concluding that elite defending depended on quality of movement, balance, bodily control, and the discipline to perform only actions a player had mastered. He compares centre-backs with Cannavaro, Nemanja Vidic, and Virgil van Dijk, and becomes interested in Lisandro Martinez because a successful short centre-back could challenge assumptions about what the position requires. Watching players so intently makes Max a better player by allowing him to copy movements, but he still struggles to reproduce them consistently. The derby’s score therefore sits within a larger movement from naive visual judgment toward pattern recognition, without granting him instant expertise.

Buying Match Stats 1 becomes another step in this process. Max regards Super Scout as worth its usual 10,000 XP because it might reveal a player worth one hundred million pounds, even if discovering that player required watching 10,000 minutes of poor Sunday League football. Match Stats 1 costs only 100 XP, yet proves transformative. Later, while preparing information for Chester’s manager Ian Evans, Max modifies the match interface so that he can search for keywords or filter incidents by type. Selecting corners makes only corner-kick passages visible, allowing him to look for patterns that would suit an old-school manager focused on defensive shape, set pieces, and the possibility of scoring from a corner. The derby’s apparently simple score thus contrasts with the increasingly elaborate systems through which Max learns to see how football works.

Disability, Prejudice, and the Match’s Afterlife

The derby’s meaning changes most sharply when Max encounters Para football. At a match involving the Chester Knights, he sees partially sighted players, players with hearing impairments, players with cerebral palsy, and players with Down’s Syndrome competing together. Terry explains that pan-disability football is expanding because combining players with different disabilities makes it possible to schedule more competitive games; those games provide a pathway toward growth and can lead talented players into disability-specific teams.

Max initially questions whether the arrangement is unfair and later confronts the idea that such a match might not be “real football.” Terry refuses to engage at length with people who hold that view and directs attention to the players themselves: they believe it is real football. Their commitment is visible in their emotions, effort, tackles, and attempts to advance up the pitch. Max’s response is more difficult because he remembers seeing a similar match as a schoolboy and laughing with friends, deciding that it was funny but not football. The memory forces him to confront the cruelty of having mocked disabled people attempting to play the sport they loved.

This recollection causes Max to reinterpret the curse itself. He notices that its references, renamed achievements, and changing perk prices seem to reflect his own vocabulary, football knowledge, mood, needs, and motivations. He concludes that he influences the curse as much as it influences him: the curse turns his personal football opinions into a foundation for its interaction with him. Its claim that disabled football does not matter and is not real football therefore exposes not an alien judgment but Max’s own ableist assumption. The derby’s earlier lesson about apparently inevitable superiority is displaced by a more unsettling discovery: football’s hierarchies are not only competitive or financial but also cultural, and Max has helped reproduce them.

Consequences and Significance

The derby remains a shorthand for Manchester City’s dominance, especially when Max sees the score at 3–0 and later 6–1 before learning the final figure was 6–3. It gives emotional force to his claim that Manchester United lack the resources to compete and helps explain why he initially treats the result as inevitable. At the same time, the match becomes a recurring contrast to the football Max learns to value elsewhere: games in which players, coaches, and communities must make room for uncertainty, adaptation, injury, limited resources, and imperfect but meaningful competition.

Its narrative function is therefore double. As a match, it confirms Max’s early football mathematics: resources and quality appear to determine the result. As a remembered and repeatedly discussed event, it exposes the insufficiency of that mathematics. Max’s interface can display scores, tactics, statistics, and searchable incidents, but the most important lesson is not contained in the numbers. The derby helps lead him toward the recognition that football also reveals character—including his own—and that the categories through which he judges the game can be shaped by prejudice as powerfully as by evidence.