Chapter 1: Birmingham I

Birmingham is England’s second city, the industrial heart of the Midlands, a place built on canals and factories long before anyone thought to call it a footballing city. But football runs through Birmingham as surely as the waterways once did, and nowhere more than in the shadow of Villa Park.

Birmingham has also, for the better part of a century, been one of the more welcoming cities in England to immigrants from the Far East. Its Chinatown, tucked between the Bullring and the old jewellery quarter, has grown steadily since the 1950s, home now to one of the largest Chinese communities outside London.

It was into this Birmingham that a boy from southern China arrived nearly two decades ago, and it was out of this same Birmingham, years later, that a very different young man would eventually set out to change the course of a football club’s history.

Down near Villa Park on a grey afternoon, there stood a young man in a plain T-shirt, his features and colouring marking him out from most of the passersby. He’d grown up here, but his roots were much further east.

His name was Saint Maddox. Born in March 1985 in a small city in Guangdong province, he’d been ten years old when his parents brought him to Birmingham and opened a restaurant in the heart of Chinatown.

Birmingham’s Chinese food scene had always been competitive; decades of migration meant there was no shortage of good kitchens in the city. The Maddox family restaurant hadn’t been the first, but it had, for a time, been one of the very best.

It’s a pity that restaurant doesn’t exist anymore. It closed for good two years before this story begins.

Saint was eighteen, freshly accepted into the University of Birmingham which was one of England’s great redbrick universities, its clock tower a landmark visible for miles. But that place marred a part of his life when a car accident took both his parents. That same night effectively ended the Maddox family restaurant too, even if it limped on in name for a little while after.

Because here’s the thing: the Saint Maddox walking around today isn’t quite the Saint Maddox who was born in Guangdong in 1985. He still has that boy’s body, still carries that boy’s memories. But there’s another presence in there now, or perhaps it’s more honest to say two lives folded into one.

The crash happened on the drive home from celebrating his university offer. Painfully, almost impossibly, another soul died in a road accident at that exact same moment; which is, perhaps, no coincidence at all, but simply how these things work.

Saint was unconscious for seven days. It took another month in hospital before he was well enough to be discharged. In that time, arrangements were made, and his parents were buried without him ever properly saying goodbye.

His aunt wanted to take him away from Birmingham afterward but he refused. Because the Saint Maddox who refused wasn’t quite the same person who might once have agreed, even though he remembered, clearly, that his parents had always wanted him to finish his degree.

That was the reason he gave, anyway. And it wasn’t entirely a lie as he did enrol at the University of Birmingham, and did, eventually, graduate, a year later than planned.

Truth be told, though, he’d barely set foot on campus for the past six months. Half the time he wasn’t even in the country’s system of term dates at all; he was somewhere else entirely.

Because Saint Maddox had another identity by then. One that had nothing to do with lecture halls: youth team coach at Aston Villa Football Club; a club that had spent the better part of a century as one of the great institutions of the English game, founder members of the Football League, European champions in 1982, and now, embarrassingly, staring down the wrong end of the Championship table.

He owed the position to Derek Sallow, Villa’s director of football. He was a man with genuine weakness for good Chinese cooking, who’d been a regular at the Maddox family restaurant for years before it closed.

Over time, Sallow had become something like family. He’d visited Saint in hospital after the crash and had attended the funeral. And it was in that same numb, grief-thick period that Saint first heard a voice in his head.

⟦Coaching role accepted.⟧

⟦Reward unlocked: Scout’s Eye.⟧

That voice was the real reason Saint never left Birmingham.

"If you can get your UEFA C Licence within six months, I’ll see about getting you into the Villa coaching setup," Sallow had told him, when Saint first put the idea to him.

Saint had always liked football, never obsessively, but enough. As a boy he’d dreamed of playing professionally, the way most boys do, before quietly accepting he’d started too late and had no real talent for it.

In the old days, when Sallow came in to eat, Saint used to sit and talk football with him for hours between serving tables. So the request, when it came, wasn’t exactly a surprise.

What came next was less ordinary. Within two years, Saint Maddox became the youngest holder of a UEFA A Licence in the governing body’s history, at just twenty years old, qualification in hand by that March.

The C Licence itself had taken him barely three months. True to his word, the moment Saint had it, Sallow brought him to Villa Park and made him, officially, a coach in the club’s youth setup.

There was a stroke of luck involved too, one of the existing youth coaches had just aged out of the role, leaving a gap that needed filling fast. Saint didn’t cost the club a penny beyond the symbolic ten-pound, one-year contract he signed to make it official.

Sallow’s word carried weight at Villa, but even he couldn’t hand out real money to a twenty-year-old with no playing career behind him. Villa’s chairman was, first and foremost, a businessman.

For decades before that, the club had belonged to Doug Ellis, also known as "Deadly Doug," as the fans called him. He first took control back in 1968, lost it, then reclaimed it in 1982 and held on for the better part of a quarter-century after that. Villa had eventually passed to the American businessman Randy Lerner in 2006, and it was under Lerner’s ownership that Saint had first arrived at the club as a coach.

That summer Saint’s family first landed in Birmingham was, in its own way, another coincidence of timing; nearly the exact same stretch of years Doug Ellis had spent rebuilding his grip on the club.

Saint had lived in this city ever since. Ten years, technically, though really it should be counted as two separate lives: eight years as one person, and two, now, as someone entirely different.