Anton Savin is thirty-four. His playing career as a midfielder ended at twenty-seven, and nobody else would take this job: head coach of the Heliopolis Sirens, a women's football club in debt, in a seaside city where it is always summer. He is the only man on the team, and the stands hold about a hundred people. The rulebook lists what the kit has to include. It says nothing about how much of it there has to be.

Over one season of eighteen matches, every step down that ladder is the team's own decision. Earn the trust of five very different players, keep the morale up and the league's patience from running out, and find out how far the Sirens are willing to go to win.