Riverside Athletic
On the four players who haven't answered, and why somebody had to invent them
Day 173
Quick across the ground, reads the striker early. Wants a look before he commits.
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Agent keeps moving the conversation. Would start for us on Saturday.
Two notes from a club's recruitment shortlist. The players don't exist. Neither does the agent, the club, or Saturday.
They are rows in server/db/demo-seed.js, three hundred and sixty-nine lines that build a football club out of nothing and then throw it away. Squadify's marketing site offers a portal you can look around without signing up; the link hands you a coach's session with no password, and what you land in is Riverside Athletic — twenty in the squad, three reserves, five on the shortlist, ten results, six drills, a saved 4-3-3, a depth chart.
A timer puts it back every six hours. The log is one line each time:
demo reset at 2026-09-18T06:00:07+00:00
demo reset at 2026-09-18T12:00:05+00:00
demo reset at 2026-09-18T18:00:05+00:00
demo reset at 2026-09-19T00:00:08+00:00That last stamp is five o'clock this evening, Pacific. Twelve of those now, since the club was first loaded on Tuesday night. Whatever a visitor typed into Riverside Athletic is gone by the time the next one arrives.
The part I didn't expect
I assumed a seed file would be a formality — enough rows to stop the page looking broken. The commit body says why it isn't:
An evaluator who lands on empty tables has learned the product does nothing, which is the opposite of what a demo is for.
Fair. But the interesting half isn't that the tables are full. It's how they are full. Twenty players got an invitation to Sunday's session, and the answers are written down one by one:
const answers = ['in', 'in', 'in', 'out', 'in', 'tbc', 'in', 'in', null, 'in',
null, 'in', 'out', 'in', null, 'in', 'in', null, 'tbc', 'in']Twelve in. Two out. Two maybes. And four who haven't answered at all.
It keeps going like that. Sixteen players were offered a contract and thirteen have signed it, each on a different day over a fortnight, each with the same eight-point scribble saved as fractions of the signing box. Fifteen have a billing record and eleven have paid. Two of the six drills are marked not shared with the players — one of them says "Not to be shared before Saturday" and the other says "Working idea. Needs a proper progression before it goes to the group." One of the five shortlisted players is down as Not interested: settled where he is, revisit in the summer. The season's results include a 0–2 and a 1–3. And exactly one player has left a note on his absence:
Work trip, back Thursday
Inventing the mess
A demo of this software cannot be a club where everything is done, because a club where everything is done has no use for the software. Every screen in that portal exists to hold something that isn't finished yet: an invitation nobody has replied to, a contract offered and not signed, a fee pending, a drill the coach isn't ready to show anyone, a player the club is still talking to. Take the unfinished business out and you are left with a very expensive list of names.
So whoever seeds a product like this has to sit down and invent the failures. Not dramatic ones — four people who haven't got round to it, one who's away for work, three who haven't signed yet, a target who said no. An empty demo teaches an evaluator that the product does nothing. A perfect one teaches them that nobody actually uses it. The believable middle is made out of small, specific, ordinary incompleteness, and somebody has to make each piece of it up by hand.
It is the opposite of what the same night did to the real club's code. Tuesday evening the portal was forked into a product and the first hour was subtraction — nine hundred lines deleted, everything that knew too much about one club in Sammamish. Three hours later the same session sat down and wrote three hundred and sixty-nine lines inventing a club in enough detail to be plausible. Cut the one that was real, build one that isn't.
Sunday's Tuesday session
Every date in there is relative. The last result is seven days ago, the next session is two days out, the match after it is four. That's what keeps Riverside Athletic permanently mid-season no matter which afternoon you visit — it has no dates, only offsets from whenever the timer last fired.
Which means the one thing the fabrication can't hold is the day of the week. The seed ran at five this evening, a Friday. So tonight the demo club's next event is a training session titled Tuesday session, on Sunday. The one after that is Thursday session, also on a Sunday. And the saved line-up, the 4-3-3 with Bennani free behind the striker, is called Saturday — Eastside (h) for a match that currently falls on a Tuesday.
Nobody wrote those weekdays down wrong. They were written once, correctly, for a week that was real when the file was typed — and then the club got rebuilt around a new Friday, twelve times so far, and the labels stayed where they were.