A Football Revolution The First Season

When Nigeria announces the Nigerian International Super League - twenty clubs, twenty cities, each paired with a foreign partner nation - the football world doesn't know whether to laugh or pay attention. The UK gets Lagos. And Lagos gets James Parker: a thirty-eight-year-old retail manager from Manchester who won a television competition to become the most unlikely football manager on earth.

Parker arrives in the world's most intense city with a pub landlord as his assistant, a newly qualified physio, a twenty-two-year-old data analyst, and absolutely no professional coaching experience. What he finds in Lagos is a training ground with a flooded pitch, a squad assembled from open trials in three days, and a city of twenty million people who are already making up their minds about him.

What he doesn't expect is Tunde Babalola - a seventeen-year-old from Surulere who came to the trials in borrowed boots, was released by two academies, and is the most talented player Parker has ever seen. Or Chinedu Okoro, the captain who leads without speaking. Or the community that grows up around the club - the matchday market, the families, the groundskeeper who walks the newly drained pitch alone before dawn.

A Football Revolution: The First Season is a novel about what football is really for. About a city that doesn't do things by half. About borrowed boots and open gates and the specific, stubborn belief that if you do the work properly, something real can be built from nothing.