COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is not merely historical background in Max Best’s story. It is the period that separates his former life from the strange footballing life that follows, leaving him isolated, wary of crowds, and socially diminished before the curse begins to remake his body and his place among other people. Its aftermath gives football a double meaning: the game becomes a route back into public life, but also a space in which Max’s inherited prejudices and moral failures are exposed.

Isolation, Contagion, and the Return to Crowds

Max had not attended a match, concert, or even a movie for years, having stayed away since before the pandemic. When he approached Old Trafford, the stadium’s seventy-six thousand people appeared to him less as a crowd than as a public-health threat, comparable to “the biggest petri dish in the north of England.” He had to push away the question of what he might catch before he could experience the occasion as football. The pandemic therefore survives in his perception as a bodily reflex: large-scale communal life has become something to fear before it becomes something to enjoy.

That tension is visible in the movement towards Old Trafford. In Firswood, Manchester United supporters waited around a car for team news or gathered outside The Quadrant pub; along Warwick Road, pedestrians thickened from a trickle into a stream and then a river. Liverpool supporters occupied a corner of the ground, singing, filming themselves, and projecting a hint of menace beneath an apparently calm surface. The scene restores the collective rituals that the pandemic interrupted, but Max remains alert to proximity, infection, and the possibility that calm may not last.

The same conflict appears in a student pub near Oxford Road. Max describes the premises as a disease vector, with close contact, unwashed hands, loud music, and sticky floors, even while acknowledging the compensating presence of beer. He is surrounded by football talk, politics, and discussion of the funeral of Elizabeth II, yet he is seated with people who would have appeared only in the final remnant of his former social timeline. The pub is thus both a threat and a test: a contaminated communal space in which Max begins, awkwardly, to re-enter ordinary social life.

A Post-Pandemic Football Life

The pandemic’s more lasting effect is social rather than epidemiological. Max says that he spent it more isolated than most, “Two years of being internal. Two years of growing weird.” Beth is the first woman he has met in a long time, and his first interaction with her is ignorant and borderline offensive. The Met Heads, a group of mostly single women around twenty-two, nevertheless accept him immediately as their coach and repeatedly pull him towards the pub. The women Max encounters while walking Solly also respond to him differently, and he concludes that Solly was not the source of this change: they were reacting to the new footballing Max.

This transformation makes the pandemic a dividing line in his identity. Before it, Max possessed a relatively ordinary social reference point; after it, prolonged inwardness has left him badly equipped to read other people, especially women and football communities. The curse’s physical effects—greater speed and strength, together with newly acquired skill and technique—are inseparable from the social effects he notices. Football does not simply give him a sport to play. It gives him a role that other people recognise, and that recognition begins to reverse the isolation intensified during the pandemic.

The contrast is deliberately uncomfortable. Max experiences renewed attention as evidence that he has become more attractive and socially legible, but his interpretation reduces complex relationships to the appeal of football status. His recollection of Gemma’s increased interest in Ziggy after learning that he was a star striker reinforces the point. The pandemic has made Max hungry for connection, while the footballing identity that supplies it encourages him to explain attraction through status, reputation, and performance.

Football as Reconnection and Community Infrastructure

Max’s return to football is not limited to elite stadiums. When searching for a club willing to give Ziggy a chance, he abandons the assumption that a phone call will suffice and drives to Broadhurst Park to meet people face-to-face. He finds FC United of Manchester, a club formed by former Manchester United supporters who had rejected the conversion of fans into customers and created a new institution through which they could enjoy football again. The club’s position in the Northern Premier League Premier, England’s seventh-highest league, makes it a practical opportunity for Ziggy and a vivid example of football operating below the national spotlight.

The physical ground embodies that communal alternative. Max walks into a small but functioning stadium with concrete stairs, directional signs, separate toilets, a beer-and-pie outlet, red, white, and black backdrops, witty banners, and hyper-local sponsorships. Volunteers carry black bin bags, sweep crisp packets, repair seats, and remove chewing gum; an older man with the profile of an eighteenth-century prime minister scrubs the dugouts. The contrast between apparent nobility and mundane labour moves Max to help. After the pandemic’s isolation, this is a form of contact that does not depend on glamour: the club is sustained by people doing ordinary work together.

The same community logic appears at Chester. The Chester Knights play pan-disability football, bringing together partially sighted players, players with hearing impairments, players with cerebral palsy, and players with Down’s Syndrome. Terry explains that the mixed format creates more competitive fixtures than disability-specific divisions could provide and that games form a pathway towards disability-specific teams and, potentially, the Wales team. The pandemic context makes the value of scheduled games and shared institutions especially legible: football is not only spectacle but a recurring social structure through which players meet, improve, and become visible.

The Pandemic’s Ethical Afterlife

Max initially accepts the legitimacy of five-a-side football and women’s football without serious hesitation, but pan-disability football unsettles him because the players have different strengths and weaknesses. When the curse supplies no experience points for the match, he searches for an explanation, even wondering whether the game might belong to a Welsh league rather than England. His confusion exposes a hierarchy he had not consciously admitted: some forms of football had seemed self-evidently real, while this one required him to defend its status.

A remembered school incident makes the prejudice unmistakable. Max recalls seeing frame football in a sports hall with school friends; they laughed and agreed that it was not football. The memory returns as he watches the Chester Knights, and he imagines the cruelty of disabled people being mocked while attempting to play the sport they love. The pandemic has already made him conscious of contamination and social withdrawal, but this later scene reveals another inheritance of collective life: exclusion is produced not only by physical barriers but by cultural judgments about whose activity counts.

Terry refuses that judgment by directing Max back to the players themselves. When Max asks what he would say to someone who called the match unreal football, Terry answers that the players think it is real football. The Knights tackle, sprint, collide, help one another up, and continue; their commitment supplies the match’s reality more convincingly than any abstract definition. Their performance also challenges the medical or deficit-based view that difference diminishes competition. The mixed rules and organisational pathway do not erase impairment; they create conditions in which players can compete.

Max eventually recognises that the curse has been absorbing his own opinions. Its changing perk prices, renamed achievement, and selective football references reflect his moods, needs, motivation, and assumptions. When it declares disabled football unreal, that verdict is partly his own. The discovery turns the pandemic-era story of isolation into a story of responsibility: Max cannot blame an external supernatural system for every exclusion when the system has been built from his judgments. His social return has brought him into contact with communities that expose what he believed while he was alone.

Consequences for Max and Football

The Chester match becomes an audition for Max’s character as much as a coaching assignment. He makes a damaging decision by removing three of the team’s best players—John, Zoe, and Scrappy—before half-time, while Terry points out the cost of his interference. Yet the Knights recover to win 5–4 through Zoe’s last-second screamer. The victory brings Max one experience point and, more importantly, coach data for Wilson; Max throws down his crutches, lifts Wilson aloft, and celebrates him as though he were three trophies at once. The match converts an abstract lesson about inclusion into a practical relationship with players, coaches, and institutional opportunity.

That lesson extends into Chester’s governance. The club’s community structure cannot absorb Max’s fantasies without limits. He is told that Chester is owned by and operated for the community, cannot casually spend fifty thousand pounds a year on a Director of Football, and cannot risk an eight-thousand-pound sponsor by treating a local youth player as disposable. The pandemic’s disruption of social life has pushed Max towards football, but football’s communities insist that belonging carries obligations. Survival, parents, sponsors, local players, and supporters all impose claims that compete with his personal vision.

The COVID-19 pandemic therefore functions as a state of suspension whose aftermath remains active long after ordinary fixtures, pubs, and stadiums reopen. It explains Max’s fear of crowds, his damaged social instincts, and his intense response to acceptance. It also supplies the historical pressure against which football’s communal forms become newly important. Yet the story refuses to treat reconnection as automatic moral improvement. Max finds people again through clubs, pubs, coaching, and matches, but those encounters force him to confront the prejudices that isolation allowed to remain unexamined. The pandemic ends as a public emergency in the background; in Max’s character, its consequences continue as a test of whether participation can become genuine solidarity.