Graham Potter at Chelsea is lovely PR – but is it misdirection before the big plot twist?

S ix years ago the German military launched Project Cassandra, a programme designed to predict disasters and black swan events by getting novelists, poets and hacks to write stories about them. What could possibly go wrong? After all, everyone knows writers are perfect in a crisis.

Admittedly Cassandra’s operational span has coincided so far with an unforeseen pandemic and an unforeseen war. Although to be fair the ministry’s in-house writers were probably still arguing about tone and leitmotifs and the pacing of the third act while all this was going on. You can’t rush the process.

But Cassandra does sound like an excellent idea, if only as a way of giving poets something to do. Plus I can reveal that a private-sector version of this process has been successfully trialled on the periphery of English football.

A while back I was approached, along with my colleague Jonathan Liew, to write a football TV show. We sold the pilot and four episodes to Netflix, who eventually decided not to make it.

Who knows, it could still end up happening. It is basically just sitting there waiting for Michael Sheen to stumble across a copy, glance at the top page distractedly, pause, frown, then … oh yes … OK GET JEMIMA ON THE PHONE NOW I SAID NOW THIS SHIT JUST GOT REAL.

In the meantime the problem our script faces is that its plot is in the process of being mimicked and surpassed by real-life events. The silly and exaggerated version of the future we created has in many ways come to pass, as expressed in surprisingly precise detail by the current version of Chelsea FC.

Our main character, a year ahead of time, was a Graham Potter-type manager, hired by a Chelsea-type club, taken over by a Todd Boehly-like mercurial billionaire. Our