World War I

World War I is invoked in the book not as a directly narrated historical episode but as Jackie’s battlefield analogy for understanding football. By comparing Max Best’s tactical intelligence with the knowledge required by soldiers in the trenches, Jackie exposes the limits of a purely strategic view of the game: a general may design the plan, but victory also depends on the person beside each player knowing how to survive the immediate danger.

The Battlefield Analogy

Jackie introduces the comparison while addressing the women’s team during their final training session of the season. Max has asked him to run the session even though the team has already won its major match and can finish level on points with Manchester City if it wins its last game. Jackie says that Max is excellent at strategy, plans, and schemes, likening him to the general one would want in a war. The comparison immediately establishes World War I as a language for separating large-scale command from frontline competence.

Jackie then turns from the general to the ordinary soldier. In the trenches, he explains, survival would depend on practical knowledge: keeping matchsticks dry, recognising whether a bomb was falling nearby or passing overhead, and knowing when to wash socks. The details are deliberately mundane. They replace the glamour of command with the material routine of endurance, making the analogy useful precisely because it descends from abstract strategy to the small actions that determine whether a person can function under pressure.

Duels Instead of Manoeuvres

The analogy becomes sharper when Jackie argues that football is not always decided by feints and pincer movements. Sometimes, he says, it is about stabbing an opponent in the neck. The violent image is not presented as a literal instruction but as an exaggerated description of the game’s confrontational core: striker against defender and winger against full-back. He calls these encounters duels, shifting attention from the arrangement of the whole team to the one-against-one contests through which space is actually won or lost.

Jackie’s practical exercise follows that principle. One player is to dribble from left to right while a defender attempts to stop the run, after which the direction is reversed. Ziggy is placed on the left and Kisi Yalley on the right, with each expected to confront the opposing player directly. The exercise translates the World War I metaphor into movement: football’s wider system is tested through repeated local collisions, where an individual cannot rely solely on a diagram or passing routine.

A Critique of Max’s Management

Jackie applies the lesson directly to Max’s recent management. Max had two defenders who were winning all their duels, yet he had adjusted them so that they would support each other more closely. Jackie accepts that the change was not wrong and recognises the broader value of teamwork, but he would have left the defenders alone. If players are already dominating their individual contests, additional tactical refinement may interfere with an existing strength rather than improve it.

World War I therefore gives Jackie a vocabulary for challenging Max’s instinct to manage football from above. Max sees systems, passing routines, and openings that can be attacked; Jackie insists that a team also consists of bodies making decisions in hostile space. The battlefield comparison does not reject organisation. Instead, it places organisation under pressure, asking whether a plan remains useful when a player must win the immediate contest in front of him.

Historical Knowledge and Comic Deflation

The exchange also produces a generational and educational joke. When Jackie refers to what the players learned about the trenches at school, Kisi responds that her class studied the Suffragettes rather than World War I. Jackie replies that it should not be one or the other. The interruption punctures his grand historical analogy, reminding the audience that his attempt to turn football training into a lesson in military history is being delivered to teenagers whose education does not match his assumptions.

That comic correction keeps World War I from becoming solemn background. The period is filtered through Jackie’s improvised speech, football jargon, and the awkward mechanics of a training exercise. Its function is rhetorical rather than historical: the trenches become a compact image of danger, fatigue, preparation, and close combat, while the players’ responses prevent the metaphor from hardening into official doctrine.

Narrative Significance

Within the novel’s wider account of Max Best’s development, the World War I analogy marks a lesson in professional socialisation. Max is learning to move beyond the identity of an outsider who treats football as a system of numbers, roles, and plans. Jackie’s intervention teaches him that management must also account for the lived demands placed on players during a match: duels, pressure, timing, and the ability to cope without elaborate support.

The reference consequently links football’s strategic and physical dimensions without resolving the tension between them. Max’s strength is the overview; Jackie’s corrective is the trench. The game needs both, but the analogy insists that no general wins a war through maps alone, just as no football manager can guarantee success through tactics if the players cannot prevail in the contests where the match is actually being played.