July 1997
The call Tommy Svindal Larsen received with an offer to move to Arsenal Football Club was unexpected, and he quickly turned it down. Stabæk wasn’t exactly at the centre of the world of football – it wasn’t even the centre of Norwegian football – but he was happy there. Even with a fax print out in front of him confirming in writing an offer of £1,000 a week – more than twelve thousand Krone per week – he couldn’t believe that this was genuinely a good idea. What could Arsenal want with him? He was going to end up a reserve option at best. He didn’t want to end up coming home with his beard in the letterbox.
August 1997
A week later, Arsenal got in touch again, with an offer of £1,500 a week. Tommy thought of what we could do with that. He signed.
October 1997
Things were going quite well. Not completely for Arsenal, whose season wasn’t quite everything that they hoped for (the 5-0 reverse at Liverpool certainly wasn’t), and that meant not perfectly for Tommy Svindal Larsen either. But just being involved in the 3-3 draw snatched at the last minute at Tottenham had been a privilege. And on a personal level, he was overjoyed with how he was doing so far. He was playing every game, learning from his star team mates and managing to do a job alongside them. The Premiership was his level after all. Back home Egil Olsen, who for years had treated him as suspicious at best, had made him captain. Captain of Norway! And all it had taken, ironically, was moving away.
Something was still bothering him, though. He liked to understand the reasons for things. It probably came from the same analytical part of his mind that powered his passing range, though learning from Dennis Bergkamp was definitely helping there too. The next time the young manager pulled him into his office to chat about the upcoming game at West Ham, Tommy said he had a question to ask too. What made you decide to you bring me here? The response he got was that Svindal Larsen was the first name on the teamsheet and he had complete faith in him to carry on delivering. As a response, it was so reassuring that it was only when Tommy was out of the room he realised he hadn’t actually got an answer to his question. On the way home, his head started hurting.
November 1997
Something was definitely not right. Going from home to training, Tommy started regularly finding himself trying to turn onto roads that didn’t exist, as if he was taking some other memorised route. To some other club, perhaps. He didn’t know the routes to anywhere else in England, though. He tried to think back to his route to Stabæk and if it was similar, and found that he wasn’t really sure. Remembering anything about his life before the 97-98 season he had to wade through a mental fog that only shifted with great concentration. He decided to ask Bernard Diomède, his fellow new signing and the closest he had to a friend on the team, if he had any of the same experiences. Maybe the pressure of the team’s stumbling form was getting to everyone. In response, he got a look that was blank but maybe, just maybe, a little haunted too.
December 1997
It was that damn interview with Garth Crooks that did it. Tommy had got into the flow of talking about his season, and suddenly found himself saying how proud he was of his consistency here at Manchester United. Wrong club, wrong club! Too late. He got mocked on the training ground for weeks after that one.
When the same thing happened again, but with Chelsea, they got worried. Tommy was starting to feel worse and worse, more and more hollow. He felt like he wasn’t living a full life but had it smeared across many different possible histories, and he was seeing through the thin barriers between them. He had vivid dreams of winning the Cup Winners’ Cup from in Division 1 as a Chelsea player. He was starting to picture himself as a player for more and more different teams. Rangers, Ajax… Gillingham? He wasn’t even sure what a Gillingham was. The more he thought about it all the dizzier he got.
He decided that he had to tell his manager. He got himself all worked up to do it. But the clear absurdity of a conversation that would ultimately get to the question “who am i?” proved too much. He went out to practice taking corners some more instead.
January 1998
Tommy was grateful to Arsenal’s manager for giving him a chance. More than a chance. But when the results got worse and the manager was sacked, it felt like a weight lifted in more than one way.
Bobby Robson came in, moved Tommy to the left wing, and kept faith in him. Tommy was a bit sad and awkward about displacing Bernard, but he carried on performing and realised that he had stopped having all of the memory issues that had been bothering him. At times he still felt a bit of an aberration, but he had made a move to the big time so it wasn’t so surprising. The mysterious former manager vanished as quickly as he arrived.
August 2014
Tommy was always still a bit wary of interviews, a hangover from past mistakes. But he had given one to Hamar Arbeiderblad about Martin Ødegaard, Norway’s 15-year-old wunderkind about to make his national debut. Tommy had something to offer on the subject, after all. Some words of warning. He thought fondly back on his own career and the move to Arsenal that came out of nowhere and changed his life. He’d had some weird feelings when he’d first arrived, hadn’t he? But it had all come good.
He was interested in reaction to his interview and whether he could turn this into a regular gig, so he typed some words into the internet. He found he’d been picked up in some papers outside of Norway. And then he found a blog post referencing one of those articles, with an author whose name was very familiar.
“[W]hen I read this article on a hyped Norwegian 15-year-old, complete with quoted words of advice from Tommy Svindal Larsen, I had a moment of dissonance like I was reading an archaeological article which had turned to Lara Croft for analysis or something.”
The truth came in a big rush.
Tommy Svindal Larsen was a collection of stats in a computer game simulation that hadn’t even bothered extending its new career histories feature to him.
Tommy Svindal Larsen was one person’s most reliable route to success across many saved games and now decades, as much cheat code as football player.
Tommy Svindal Larsen was a legend borne of hundreds of thousands of people having slightly different versions of that same experience, his name scattered through time and space.
Tommy Svindal Larsen was somewhere, outside of it all, a real person.
Tommy Svindal Larsen laughed and laughed.
