Their leader was a phantom known only as “The Kicker.” He wore a leather mask stitched with offside lines and wielded a modified rivet gun that fired corrupted code-cogs. His manifesto, scrawled on match programmes and nailed to the doors of every league office, was simple: True football is chaos. We will break the clock.

In the vault, The Kicker watched the chaos on a grainy vid-screen. He smiled. The clock was broken. The game was free.

Free4 glanced at his brass-and-glass terminal. The upload progress bar glowed green: 92%.

But in the tenement, Free4 leaned back, his work done. Then a new message appeared on his terminal. Not from FIFA. From somewhere deeper. A single line of code he hadn’t written.