It is 2:00 AM in Barcelona, a city that smells of overpriced tapas and existential dread. My phone vibrates with the ferocity of a trapped hornet. It’s Issey Nakajima-Farran.

Now, normally, if a man calls me at 2:00 AM, I assume he’s either in jail or has been kicked out of the house by the wife. But Issey sounds like he’s just seen the Burning Bush. He’s breathless. He’s just woken up from a dream on his yacht—a dream where the Terengganu FC board actually did something logical.

“They called me,” he says, his voice crackling over the 6,000 miles of fibre-optics. “They wanted me back on the pitch. I was wearing the black and white. I was eating Nasi Dagang in the dressing room. It was beautiful.”

I check my watch. It’s 9:00 AM in Kemaman. The sun is up, the turtles are presumably doing turtle things, and the Terengganu FC management is likely sat around a table wondering how they can bring in more sponsors to the club.

“Issey,” I say, with the patience of a man who hasn’t had his coffee yet. “You’re forty-one. If you tried to sprint down the wing at the Sultan Mizan Stadium now, your hamstrings would exit your body and seek asylum in Thailand. The dream wasn’t a premonition; it was a warning from your subconscious to stop eating spicy chorizos before bed.”

But once we moved past the ridiculous notion of Issey lacing up his boots to terrorise Malaysian full-backs again, the conversation turned to something far more dangerous: A plan that actually makes sense.

Terengganu is currently hunting for a Technical Director. In the Malaysian League, “Technical Director” is usually the equivalent for “an older gentleman in a tracksuit who looks busy while the club slowly sinks into mid-table obscurity.”

Issey’s proposition is different. It’s a dual-role: Technical and Sporting Director. Now, the skeptics—the “traditionalists” who think football management should be left to people who still use fax machines—will point out that Issey only spent a year with the coaching team at Consadole Sapporo and doesn’t have twenty years of boardroom experience. To those skeptics, I say: Shut up. Issey has played in ten different countries. He has seen the inside of seventeen different professional clubs. That isn’t just a career; it’s a decade-long reconnaissance mission. He has witnessed the cold, clinical commercialism of the American and Canadian sports markets, felt the terrifying, lung-bursting passion of European football, and navigated the murky waters of the Asian market where money is often thrown around with the tactical precision of a blindfolded chimpanzee.

He has seen how the world’s elite academies actually bridge the gap to the first team, rather than just talking about it in PowerPoint presentations. He doesn’t have a “formal resume”? Good. Neither did the people who invented the internet. What he has is a Doctorate in “How Football Actually Works,” earned in the trenches of three different continents. He is, by any sane metric, overqualified.

Issey’s offer is also a bargain. He is offering a “buy-one-get-one-free” deal that would make a hypermarket manager weep with joy. He’s offering to be the Technical Director—bringing in the hyper-disciplined, “don’t-touch-the-ball-until-your-socks-are-straight” philosophy from Japan—while throwing in a world-class Sporting Director role for the price of one.

It’s like going to a showroom for a Proton and being told they’re throwing in a Ferrari engine and a personal chef because they like your vibe. You don’t ask questions. You sign the paper before they realise they’re being robbed.

If Issey is the charismatic frontman of this operation, his brother, Paris Nakajima, is the man in the dark glasses holding the briefcase.

Paris works for K2SM, a sports marketing agency in Japan. For those who don’t speak “Corporate Jargon,” this means Paris has the keys to the kingdom. He lives in a world where Japanese corporations have more money than the state of Terengganu and are looking for somewhere to put it.

By hiring Issey, Terengganu isn’t just getting a guy who knows how to pick a pass; they’re getting a direct umbilical cord to the Japanese economy. Imagine the Sultan Mizan Stadium draped in sponsors that people actually recognise. Imagine a scouting network that doesn’t involve watching YouTube highlights of a “wonderkid” from the Bulgarian second division.

With Paris at K2SM, Terengganu becomes the J-League’s favourite younger brother. It’s a commercial nuclear option.

Is Issey “inexperienced” as a Technical Director? Maybe. But his “Sporting Director” side is the insurance policy. He’s the face of the club, the man who can charm a sponsor into parting with their cash and convince a top-tier Japanese winger that Kuala Terengganu is basically the new Ibiza, but with better seafood.

The Terengganu board has a choice. They can stay on the safe, boring path of mediocrity, or they can hire the man who woke up in Barcelona with a dream and a brother who owns the keys to J-League.

Personally, I’d take the guy with the Ferrari engine. Even if he does call me at 2:00 AM.