CIUDAD de PITXI
Distrito Quezaldad, Tapalupé
The national stadium, the jewel in the crown of Tequilo's 'Football City' development centre of
El Unión (that's the national FA to you and me), opened it's turnstiles for the first time with three 'test matches' against the confederation champions of Ao, Rushmore and Esportiva as part of Tequilo's winning debut in the Eagles Cup. Built over the top of the former 'character' suburb of Quezaldad on the outskirts of the capital city Tapalupé, it had become a complete white elephant as the Unión failed to progress from demolishing a residential zone of some 300,000 people into building the dream centre. After eight years of ruin, new Unión project manager Carolina Ruiz got the whole thing erected inside twelve months and was subsequently voted Unión President for Life. After hosting Cassadaigua in the opening event, followed by ties against The Commonwealth of Baker Park and Nova Anglicana de Esportiva, Ciudad de Pitxi now looks forward to hosting it's first ever NS World Cup fixtures for Los Pitxileros.
The headquarters of the Unión, formerly located in the Museo de Pitxi in the Socrates district, has moved to state of the art facilities in the Ciudad, which includes the national stadium; a second stadium, the Estadio Juvenil with a capacity of 32,300 to host secondary games including the national amateur People's Cup Final, youth internationals and most likely future internationals within hosted tournaments; the national physiotherapy centre; the Escuela Nacional de Pitxi or national football school to help development of Tequilo's youth players; and the commercial headquarters of several sports-related companies including sportswear manufacturers
Natty kit., sports data company XK-OpTeq, Bonesea sports publisher BoldSport and their Tequiloan imprint GOLa (trading as GOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLa!!!), and multiversal scouting group KickAdviser™. It is also expected the famous Museo de Pitxi will eventually move there, or at least open a second facility in 'Football City'. Having won the tenth edition of The Eagle's Cup, a fully-fitted Eagle's Club will be constructed in the district in due course.
To increase revenue, both stadiums have taken on domestic tenant teams with Fábrica Tapalupé, the state of Ocotapa's most successful team with 19 state championships, enthusiastically moving into the national stadium, thus succeeding Real Gardaresso as the domestic team with the largest stadium - by ten seats. Meanwhile Galaxía, without a proper home these last nine years since the demolition of Quezaldad and their ramshackle Domo Galaxía stadium, will be delighted to upgrade as tenants of the Estadio Juvenil.
TEN YEARS IN THE MAKINGTHE WHITE ELEPHANT THAT BECAME THE HOME OF FOOTBALL
A vision of the future of the national team sport made real, 'Football City' was an idea that became a great big hole in the ground; it cost some very senior officials their job, and eventually, made careers for others. Like a phoenix rising out of the detritus, this spectacular and surely the cleanest district of the 'Tapa-sprawl' is a bold statement of intent... but 'bold' and 'intent' are only a part of the story.
If you take the Tonorobos Rápido expressway out toward the suburb of Quezaldad, in the sprawling capital city of Tapalupé, Tequilo, you will eventually come upon the massive construction site of La Ciudad de Pitxi - The City of Football emerging from the mud and rubble of this once poor and crowded district. It is not much of an appealing site right now - but then Quezaldad never was much, and knocking most of it down has certainly been an improvement; but one day, a shining monument to the ambition of the Unión de Pitxi Tequilo - that’s the FA to you and me - will stand proud on this site; 2.5 square kilometres of prime football development location including the brand new national stadium.
SEÑOR LEPE’S PITXI PLAN“It’s quite simple really,” says Señor Lepe, President of the UPT, “we just have to win everthing and dominate everyone.” Well, that’s easy for him to say - it was his philosophy as a player and he did find that quite simple really: in Tequilo, he won everything, beat everyone. But Lepe is talking bigger now. He is talking about The Multiverse. At club level, at international level. And especially, at player level. He wants the best of everything, he’s willing to spend to get it, and he has the backers. To some, maybe, it’s a pact with the devil, or devils: The Oroboros Cooperative, a seemingly limitless resource - the investment arm based in Taxhavn, financiers of the former rise to footballing power of Tamarindia, of Wight, of Bonesea (albeit briefly, and with… uncomfortable… endings: “don’t worry about that,” says Lepe, “we will be different”); and with Satélite Boldsport, some foreign media company with preposterously deep pockets and connections to the underworld. Well, Wight, again. Same same. But more about the complex financial deals Señor Lepe has signed off on another time - with all that cash in their pockets, what are the UPT planning - apart from world domination?
The masterplan is already visibly underway and undeniably promising: unifying the six states of Tequilo to produce a national team for the World Cup and other tournaments? Check. And with a Baptism of Fire semi-final, a top half group finish in WC qualifying, reaching the knockout rounds of their debut Cup of Harmony - initial results are promising. Next - build a commercialised national league for the country that can generate serious revenue as well as getting recognition for Tequiloan club teams on the wider stage? Check. Liga-TQ enters it’s second season already a success in the eyes of the Tequiloa, and what’s more, clubs have not generally made a complete ass of themselves in IFCF and IFF international club competitions this season. In fact, one or two have done remarkably well. Next - concentrate on the kids? Check. Liga-J provided excellent competition for the under-19s, and let’s not forget a very acceptable bronze medal finish in the Under-18 World Championship. The kids are alright. Add in a development under-21 team for the Mike Sarzo Memorial Trophy (oh dear) and under-23 for the Independent Association Championships (gulp), with developmental coaching as part of the package, and you have age pathways for all the best players. Next - start bidding for international hosting duties to further the profile of the domestic game? Check. Voting? Well, let’s not get into that now, it’s mere detail…
All you need now is a unified coaching philosophy taught at a bespoke centre to further advance the quality of football in Tequilo, a place to play and learn, and a national stadium to be proud of. And that is where the City of Football in Quezaldad suburb, Tapalupé comes in. Forty pitches; two junior stadiums; the 100,000-seater national stadium; full training facilities; hotels and admin centres; a host of innovations to assist in the innovation of the game and the grand plan to rule the world. Today it may be a very large hole in the ground. Tomorrow it’s the future… said Señor Lepe at the end of our interview. But who is paying for all this? And what was here before Pitxi? Should we care?
CASH TO BURNIt’s an old saying in Tequilo - understand the sequence of the resplendent jackdaw in flight, and you will come to anticipate the order of movements that divine the hiding place of the secret and elusive rattleworm. Often that is abbreviated to the more pragmatic but less whimsical ‘follow the money’.
Who is funding Señor Lepe’s grand scheme to dominate world football, and why? Answer the first part of that question, and you can pretty quickly surmise the latter. It may surprise, and it may come to worry you, when you know. But you need to know, if you are a good honest Tequiloan with a healthy distrust of the mischievous spirits of Confusiónism. Uncanny business is afoot. At first glance, you may not think so. You’ll be saying, it’s this huge broadcast TV deal, right? Yes. It is partly that - Satélite Boldsport, a foreign media company with preposterously deep pockets, has paid enough money down to invest heavily in the modern commercial enterprise of Liga-TQ, and the rest will follow off the back of that. But wait, Satélite who? Isn’t that name familiar? Boldsport? And no, it’s not another Havynwilde duplication service. Boldsport is the money that funded Bonesea’s rise to (almost) the top of world football. Ok, so that’s no big deal for a big deal is it? Media corporation funds football league?
Well - then there is the contract to build the City of Football. That went to Heavy Products, and they are based in Taxhavn. Which used to be in Rushmore, a hundred years ago, until the nation was forcibly exiled during one of those dubious Maxtopian Z-Day apocalyptic crashes. That happened about the same time as the poor residents of The Septen Islands were forcibly removed from Ao during the same multiversal crisis. And Banque Sept-Nat, which is the principal financial partner in the construction, was of course founded as the national bank of the Septen Islands, with it’s central reserve held in Taxhavn. Then there was a third forced ethnic cleansing during the Z-Day land grab: the Wightlings, forced from Ao along with their Septen neighbours and sent to the Rejected Realms. It was the Wightlings who rose to power in world football funded by their mysterious Oroboros Cooperative, a syndicate of murky finances that had previously been linked to both the rise and fall of our near neighbours and good friends in Tamarindia - a nation that also started to look like it might become a power until… The Fall. Sponsored, allegedly, by the Oroboros Cooperative. And when Wight fell, and Taxhavn, and Bonesea, like dominoes - the OC was there, and remains there.
The Oroboros Cooperative - a shadowy Wightling syndicate funding power surges, collapses and restorations since way back when, and - get this - the majority stakeholders in a wide range of syndicates including, amongst others, Boldsport, Heavy Products, Banque Sept-Nat, and Grupo Taxhavn. At the bottom of all this cash to burn, is a dark, dangerous wight with a match and a can of chlorine trifluoride, The Oroboros Cooperative. What are they up to? Who can understand the Wightling Agenda? But whatever it is, nations that take the Oroboros doubloon tend not to last long enough to find out. Will Tequilo be next to suffer a Catastrophic Termination Event?
THE MAN WITH THE PLANThey call him Dik ten Beuenk, and he comes from Mustardy. Now I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t even heard of Mustardy until two World Cups ago - the small island nation entered for the first and only time, didn’t do very well, didn’t do atrociously badly, and disappeared from view again. A little below par, but certainly in the realm of ordinary and, frankly, easily missed. I bet most people didn’t notice at the time, and have long since forgotten the shock win in South Covello, the highlight of an otherwise dull qualifying campaign. Hardly the stuff of dreams; not somewhere you would look for a mastermind of football. No offence, Mustardos of the world. When Tequilo announced it would send a national team to the last Baptism of Fire tournament to take it’s international bow, the announcement of Dik ten Beuenk as Team Director raised a few eyebrows, but not many. The logic was sound - he had guided a new entrant in the last cycle, picked up a shock win, a few half decent results, and had ensured a very small nation was never humiliated. It didn’t sound very ambitious to get such a man, but at the same time, it sounded unusually pragmatic for the UPT.
Skip forward three years, and Dik ten Beuenk is the mastermind behind a football revolution. How did that happen? He is advising at every level of the game. He designed the new Liga-TQ format. He’s the brains behind the coaching progression that has placed prominent older players in coaching positions with the junior national teams. He’s co-designed a technical and tactical strategy for the national team and is mastermind of the City of Football project, a vast development centre to make Tequilo a dominant force in football over an undisclosed period. This might sound fanciful and maybe it is, but they have not had a bad start. Dik ten Beuenk, it seems, might just be a genius. But a genius from… Mustardy? A small island of hardly any inhabitants, not even enough to fill up the small Socrates district of our own capital here in Tapalupé. Can that be right?
We took a look back at the archives. There is almost nothing on the man - except… one little thing. One tiny throwaway mention in an obscure forum post. A problem with Mustardy passports, just a small incident. They are, apparently, nigh impossible for the international community to verify, and there is often a hint - or worry - of fakery. Mustardy passports might not be what they seem, and Mustardy passport holders may not be who they say they are. So, who exactly is Dik ten Beuenk? Certainly, we cannot argue that he knows his pitxi. He has a background in business too, according to his sketchy bio on the Locked Off professional networking site, where it states his work with the Barque syndicate to a senior level before switching to football… that would be Barque, of Tamarindian origin, who transferred operations to Bonesea after The Fall. He is quite old too - old enough now to have been about the right age to switch from maritime work to football at the time when Bonesea were making waves in the world - led by a genius strategist who had switched from being a sailor to a football coach. We propose that he’s not from Mustardy at all. We propose that was a sham, a cover-up, a diversion: he’s from Bonesea. And there is only one genius football strategist from Bonesea who had once been a sailor, masterminded the rise of the nation to the top of world football, and conceived of ‘World Cup Island’ - an island of stadia, training facilities, rehabilitation, accommodation; an integrated football-based centre not unlike his masterplan for the City of Football. Dik ten Beuenk, we suggest, is he.
Pythagoras Jones, the brains behind Bonesea.
THE DISLOCATEDThe old district of Quetzaldad in Tapalupé had its attractions and a certain charm - kilometres of narrow alleyways and shutts full of traders of dubious wares, intoxicants, and life-affirming (or exterminating) adventures; ‘lively’ markets; rambunctious mariachi and latin shanties; pickpockets, shiners, rum cullies, tricksters, brazen trollops, bold deceivers and sharps; all types of the rodent genus including but not limited to sewer rats, street rats, desert rats, cactus rats, tile rats, strutting rats, dog rats and the famously aggressive alley rats; overcoat confectioners and tobacconists; shamans and brujas and even a few wights-in-residence; all manner of wild tapas, grills and barbecues; beer sloshing everywhere; bent coppers, runaway soldiers and drunk sailors; every girl and/or guy of your dreams shoulder to shoulder with those of your nightmares; shrunken heads and goatballs; wisdom, knowledge, experience, joy, delight, and terror; gold trinkets that cost nowt but spare change and pig nickel chips that would’ve cost you everything… it wasn’t for the faint of heart.
All that is gone now - or going; buried under a thousand tons of rubble. Everything came down.
But where has everyone gone, and what do they think about their former den of a thousand iniquities, cemented now in the foundations of a sporting dream and shiny architectural delights? Rubèn Curto grew up in Quetzaldad’s narrow and lively alleyways, the son of a tanner or hidemonger. We spoke to him about his life in the district, and the time that came for him to be relocated. He went to school in the overcrowded rooms of the institution buildings, and left when he was eleven to collect faeces for the tannery - “five chèlins for a handful” - and under his father’s watchful eye, he refused to join the local gang or cuadrilla, The Many Hands; he spent his youth kicking a can down the alleys or reading second-hand books he bought with his shitmoney or which he stole from outside old bookshops. Later he earned a living selling overpriced trinkets to tourists and lost people - well, mostly lost people - and discovered he had an eye for antiques. His work strayed into valuations for thieves looking to fence stolen goods, he worked the occasional auction and got a stall at one of the famous character night markets. Sometimes he boosted his income as a taxi driver, or rarely, as a tour guide. He settled down with his childhood sweetheart Ginebra Pintà; they were making plans to have a family of their own, right there in the heart of Quetzaldad, although they reserved their most lavish dreams for a win on La Lotería and a fancy beach-house in Antivador. Looking back, Rùben is unequivocal about his life in ‘Queto’ as the locals call it:
“What a shitswamp,” he says, reminiscing. And then one day, the order came from the city planners. Queto was to be razed. Rùben was being moved to Chanco Condor, a village sixty kilometres away. “I mean, this place is no paradise, but Queto was the devil’s own septic tank. Thank the patron wights they are burying it.”
WHAT LIES BENEATHHeavy excavator & crane operator Miguel Costello - known by his workmates as Tío (Uncle) Mík - has seen it all in his time. Well into his 80s, he’s still considered the best in the business and is being paid a handsome fee to work on the City of Football site, pulling down old Quezaldad and putting up a spanking new coaching and development centre for the national teams as well as the much-anticipated national stadium. Tío Mík is also a passionate detectorist and amateur archeologist, and he sees his work using cranes and diggers as an extension of that passion - a continuous treasure hunt. If there is one thing Tío loves almost as much as treasure hunting with his industrial excavator, it’s talking about what he’s found in his day. The man is a storyteller supreme, of the
confusionist tradition much loved in Tequilo. We caught up with him at a cantina on the edge of Quezaldad, and it didn’t take many bottles of wightbeer to get him talking about what he’s seen and found on his latest job.
“General Chukwumeka? The Cannibal Mobster?! What a load of old tripe!’ he says, laughing off one of the more gruesome rumours coming out of the rubble of Quezaldad; “If you ask me, he’s still running the Zenegalese mafia in Valanora. Them pointy-ears is easy pickings. No, he’s not buried under Quetzaldad - although we’ve dug up a fair few concrete coffins.”
What’s that now?
“Round here,” elaborates Tío, “it’s The Many Hands Gang who ran the old town. They didn’t eat their enemies like The General does, but they sure weren’t averse to a concrete burial, when it suited them.” Tío Mík goes on to explain, rather ghoulishly, that he’s found heads severed from their bodies and bodies estranged from their heads, hands without owners and corpses without hands, all stashed within concrete foundations for buildings he’s pulled down. “The foundations of buildings built without planning or permission in the heart of old Quezaldad are the cemeteries of the honoured friends and sworn enemies of The Many Hands. If they liked you, you got buried with full honours underneath a children’s hospital. If they didn’t like you, you were probably still alive when they poured the base of an illegal apartment block into a hole they had kicked you into.”
But what of buried gold and jewels, the rumours of pirate hoards and national treasures?
“Come on,” says Tío, a pragmatist at heart, “this was Quezaldad. Even the fillings in our teeth were pig nickel: treasure! Pah! The closest any of us ever came to treasure was fresh bread without weevils, and no-one was burying fresh food in ‘Quezo’. For sure there were pirates - poor ones - but if Isla Tesoro tells us anything, it’s that they can’t leave their hard-won gains alone for five minutes on a deserted island… what chance it would last the night buried under half a million chancers and rum cullies? No, there was no treasure here, let me tell you. Just a lot of bones and restless spirits.”
Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2020 7:22 am
