The Greatest Manager of All time

On the drive back to Swansea, Mo Yuan called Lynn and said only one brief sentence:

"Something important came up. We need to talk in person."

Lynn arranged for them to meet at the seaside resort manor. It was the most discreet place for a conversation, since it was Mo Yuan's private property.

At 8:30 that evening, Mo Yuan drove into his own resort manor. When he entered the south-facing suite on the second floor and saw Lynn, the latter was sitting on the balcony, enjoying the sea breeze while eating barbecue delivered from a nearby restaurant.

Wearing beach shorts and a casual T-shirt, Lynn tossed a can of beer to Mo Yuan, who had just walked in and taken off his fitted suit jacket.

Mo Yuan casually dropped the suitcase and briefcase in his hands, caught the beer, then walked out onto the balcony. Sitting down at the small table, he unceremoniously stabbed a piece of barbecue with a fork and stuffed it into his mouth. Then he opened the beer. Foam immediately spilled out, and he quickly leaned down to suck it into his mouth before the beer could splash onto the floor.

He drank half the can in one go and immediately felt refreshed. After eating two more bites of barbecue, he finally noticed the white T-shirt Lynn was wearing as he lounged back on the chair with his feet propped on the balcony railing.

Mo Yuan could not help teasing him.

"Aren't you the one most afraid of wearing the same clothes as other people? Why are you still wearing that shirt? I thought you'd never touch it again."

The T-shirt itself was originally plain white, without any print or design.

But Kate Carter had painted a slogan across the front:

I love Swansea!

The "love" was represented by a red heart.

I — heart — Swansea.

Lynn had worn it once at the end of last month while shopping. After the paparazzi photographed him, local clothing sellers in Swansea immediately copied the design, mass-producing the same style of T-shirt and selling it under the slogan:

Lynn's style — I love Swansea!

The moment it hit the shelves, sales exploded.

Now, almost everywhere in Swansea, young men and women could be seen wearing that same T-shirt. Their versions were the same style, just different sizes. The original was still the one Lynn had.

Lynn glanced down at his shirt and casually smiled.

"I used to hate matching clothes because it felt like I was following a trend. Now I'm the original, and everyone else is following me. What do I have to worry about?"

"Hahaha, fair enough. By the way, seeing how hot this T-shirt has been selling recently gave me a new idea. We can expand the club's product range and build Swansea as a brand. We can sell casual clothing, using the clothes you and the star players wear as models. Let designers create fresh printed casualwear for the players. That way, fans won't just buy our kits. They can buy our casualwear too."

Lynn thought about it and said, "No problem. If you want to do it, go ahead. I have no objection. Right, you said something important came up. What is it?"

At that, Mo Yuan raised his hand, signaling Lynn to wait.

He finished the remaining two-thirds of the barbecue platter in one go, wiped his mouth with a napkin, drained the rest of the beer, then got up and brought the suitcase over.

Lynn turned his head and watched as Mo Yuan placed the suitcase on his lap, opened it, and displayed its contents toward him.

Seeing the case filled with British pounds, Lynn was slightly surprised.

"Where did this come from?"

Mo Yuan seriously told Lynn everything about his meeting with Martin Nally that day.

He did not hide a single thing, describing everything in detail, including every word of the phone call with Rod, the BETFRED manager.

"On the way back, I kept wondering if I did something wrong. If I'd asked Rod clearly about the background of the person I was meeting, and the purpose of the meeting, then if Rod refused to tell me or gave vague answers, I could have legitimately refused the meeting. Then none of what followed would have happened."

Lynn frowned and shook his head.

"No. It would've been the same. What should happen would still happen. They would just change the target. Maybe next time, they would try to contact Tony, Emlyn, or even directly approach the players in private. Losing a football match is too easy. On the pitch, those accidents that look perfectly natural happen all the time. Nobody knows how many of them are real, and how many are carefully staged performances. Thankfully, it was you. That gives us a chance to prepare."

Mo Yuan felt slightly more at ease after hearing that. He asked, "Then what do we do now?"

Lynn raised a hand, signaling for him to let him think.

In truth, for ordinary people, European and American society might not seem all that complicated. Differences in welfare, basic protections, and other everyday matters were what most people cared about.

But from the perspective of crime, Britain was not necessarily cleaner than anywhere else.

As early as six years ago, documents disclosed by the British intelligence services had shown that London and northern England had already been infiltrated by the Russian mafia. Some people in the judiciary had even warned that the mafia had made its new home in Britain's heart.

There had long been precedents for transnational criminal groups infiltrating Britain. With the integration of the world economy, globalization, and the growing homogenization of the world, this phenomenon would not disappear. On the contrary, it would only grow more intense.

So Britain was not heaven.

It had not been heaven in the past.

It was not heaven now.

And it would not become heaven in the future.

The most common crimes committed here by transnational and local criminal groups were organized prostitution, arms smuggling, drug trafficking, and other criminal activities that no longer sounded particularly shocking to ordinary people.

But there was a saying:

Behind staggering wealth, there is always monstrous crime.

Europe's betting industry was prosperous and highly developed. Britain also had giants and industry leaders such as William Hill and Ladbrokes. The entire European betting industry generated tens of billions in annual revenue!

Behind such an enormous chain of profit, how could everything possibly be peaceful, clean, and aboveboard?

Africa, with its relatively chaotic management and poverty, had basically long since been controlled by transnational gambling syndicates.

South American football leagues, where corruption and disorder went hand in hand, also hid countless dirty secrets.

Southeast Asia was even more notorious for match-fixing, something everyone tacitly understood.

And Europe, where the football industry was the most developed?

Could it truly remain untouched?

Only the most naive idealists would believe European football was clean.

Serie A was currently known as the world's number one league, but how much money did its clubs actually make?

Were their broadcasting revenues higher than the Premier League's?

How much commercial income did their markets actually support?

Yet they could buy world-class stars for astronomical prices. Even mid- and lower-table clubs could bring in players of real weight. Serie A's current golden age, with a hundred flowers in bloom, was built in large part on the accumulation of stars.

But where did the money come from?

Where?

Where?

Most fans were too busy enjoying the world's best league to care about the cost and income behind clubs. After a season, did the clubs make money or lose money?

In the public image, it always seemed as if the families behind those clubs could endlessly pour money into them.

But if a club lost forty or fifty million euros in a single year, that was hundreds of millions, even over a billion in RMB!

Who could bear that?

And those clubs that cried poverty every day and claimed they were on the brink of bankruptcy—why could they still spend several million euros on grand celebrations during their centenary events?

Fix a few matches, of course.

And why did betting sponsors plaster advertisements everywhere and hand clubs injections of several million euros a year as if delivering money to their doorstep? Why did the bigger companies cast their nets everywhere, with advertisements visible wherever one looked?

The countless hidden ties behind all this were things ordinary fans would not think about, and did not want to think about. Who would willingly slap dirty suspicion and labels onto something they loved?

Britain did crack down severely on match-fixing and match manipulation, but that was similar to how the FA managed the entire industry.

It was difficult to bribe Premier League clubs. Like the appearance fee of a superstar, Manchester United paid over a million pounds in wages every week. Their seasonal revenue exceeded one hundred million pounds. How much money would it take to bribe Manchester United into fixing a match and risking their reputation?

Risk and profit were often proportional. Only when that balance existed would clear-headed people become reckless.

But below the Premier League, things were different.

First Division. Second Division. Third Division. Even the Conference, regional leagues, and lower divisions.

The income of clubs and players was relatively low. The lower the level, the lower the income.

The difficulty and cost of bribery dropped accordingly. Meanwhile, English football was a major focus of the betting industry, and that was thanks to Fleet Street. The media center of Europe was in London. Among the football news Fleet Street spread across the world, there was no doubt that English football received the largest volume of coverage.

That was also why other leagues would later be unable to compete with the Premier League in brand influence.

English was one of the world's common languages. News written by Fleet Street was naturally in English, and the difficulty of translation and reposting across other regions was almost nonexistent. But Italian? German? Spanish? Translation difficulty and the availability of media platforms meant that as media became increasingly developed and influential, the Premier League would gain more and more advantages, naturally leaving other leagues behind in the speed of brand promotion.

From time to time, football would produce cases of crackdowns on match-fixing. But what was made public was always only the tip of the iceberg.

Because every crow under the sky was black.

Every league's football association protected these dark secrets from being exposed to the public.

If every truth were revealed, institutions like the FA would have long since been overthrown. Football associations were unique in that they existed in a nearly untouchable zone. From the football associations of individual countries and regions to UEFA and FIFA, all of them treated "family shame must not be aired outside" as gospel.

Only when a scandal became impossible to cover up would they bite the bullet and make it public. Then they would put on the posture of cleaning house while presenting themselves as victims to the outside world.

They needed authority.

They needed public trust.

Scandals, even when everyone on the inside tacitly understood them, would only be swept into the corner and ignored, because the damage caused by exposure would be borne by most people in the entire industry together.

Credibility would vanish. Morality would collapse. Nobody wanted to face the end of the world, and nobody dared rebuild on the ruins, because everyone knew that even if everything were torn down and started over, behind the sunlight, darkness would still surge without end.

Since Swansea were part of English football, they had no choice but to breathe under the sun while enduring the invasion of darkness.

Lynn thought for a long time and thought about many things. He had his own stance and ideas.

The first point was that he absolutely could not become complicit in football crime.

Second, he could not tolerate anyone inside the club taking dirty money and being manipulated.

What they had to do now was prevent problems before they spread.

As for ripping everything out by the roots?

Forget it.

That was not his job.

He lowered his feet from the balcony railing, sat up, and said to Mo Yuan, "Bring me my phone. I'll call Erin and ask her to come over and help think this through."

Mo Yuan got up and went into the room to find Lynn's phone. Lynn looked toward the beach in the distance, watching the tide rise and fall. The rhythmic sound of the waves seemed to hint at hidden currents surging beneath the surface. The dim night carried a gloomy, terrifying air.

Lynn suddenly laughed at himself.

Sure enough, when your mood changed, the scenery in your eyes changed too.

A moment ago, he had still felt that this place was refreshing and peaceful, quiet and almost like a whole new world.

In the blink of an eye, the complicated thoughts brought by his worries had turned everything upside down.

After Mo Yuan brought him the phone, Lynn called Erin and asked her to come here for a meeting.

While waiting for Erin, Mo Yuan asked curiously, "Why call Erin?"

Lynn sighed softly and said, "Sometimes this is a crazy society. Once you've seen enough people willing to risk everything for money, you'll understand. Money that seems insignificant to us, not worth gambling everything on, may be more precious than life itself in someone else's eyes. So even when we think we're doing the right thing, we still need to be prepared for other people's madness.

"Right now, we don't even know who Martin Nally really is, who stands behind him, whether they're just a group of gamblers, or whether they're an organized criminal syndicate."

Mo Yuan nodded solemnly.

He truly did not know who was behind Martin Nally. He understood the meaning behind Lynn's words: Swansea would definitely not collude with the other party.

That did not surprise Mo Yuan at all. Otherwise, there would have been no need to ask Erin to come over.

Twenty minutes later, Erin arrived in a rush. She was wearing a cool black off-shoulder dress, styled like an innocent young girl.

Watching her walk over with graceful steps, Lynn teased, "Our young lady changed her style today?"

Erin brushed the hair by her ear behind her shoulder and smiled sweetly.

"Occasionally, I should show off a little clean and innocent charm too. What a pity it can't charm the two handsome men here."

Mo Yuan immediately raised both hands in surrender.

"Please, the first moment I saw you, I was willing to become your slave. Unfortunately, you wouldn't even give me the qualification."

Lynn laughed. "See? Your charm is off the charts."

Erin rolled her eyes at Lynn, then walked onto the balcony and lightly kicked Mo Yuan's calf, threatening him.

"If you talk nonsense and joke with me like that again, I'll make you truly become my slave!"

Mo Yuan pretended to be wounded.

"My lady, I'm your loyal supporter. I've stopped Lynn from sneaking off to have fun countless times!"

Erin snorted. "You'd better not let me find out that you and he have been going out to fool around together. Otherwise, hmph."

Lynn patted his thigh and said to Erin, "The balcony's a little small, so make do. We have serious business to discuss."

Erin walked over naturally, smoothing the hem of her dress between her legs to avoid flashing anything, then sat on Lynn's lap. Her expression clearly carried displeasure.

"You never come to me unless there's serious business. Go on."

Lynn and Mo Yuan looked at each other and smiled.

Never try to reason with a woman.