The Football Agent System

Garcia finished the registration just before midnight. The confirmation page loaded, and he read it twice before letting himself believe it.

Registration Confirmed — J. Holt — Northgate Performance Centre, Salford. Programme begins Monday, 3 August.

The access problem was solved. What remained was the harder one.

Preparation.

The two weeks did not pass like a montage. They passed like work.

Jamie trained every day, and most of the days looked the same from the outside. Receiving drills with Rafi pressing him from behind. Body shape corrections, repeated until the opening of the hips before the pass stopped being a thought and started becoming a habit. Forward passing after recovery, with Rafi shouting every time the automatic backward ball appeared.

"Forward! The forward pass was on! Why are we going backward?"

"I didn’t see it—"

"You didn’t look. Seeing comes after looking. Again."

Some days were bad. There was a Wednesday in the first week where nothing worked, where Jamie’s touch betrayed him from the first drill to the last, and he ended the session with his hands on his knees staring at the grass while Rafi packed the cones without a word. Garcia watched Alan watching his son that day and said nothing to either of them, because nothing useful existed to say.

But the work accumulated the way work does — invisibly, then suddenly.

The safe pass stopped coming as quickly. The first touch started going into space instead of underneath his own feet. In the second week there was a moment in a recovery drill where Jamie won the ball wide, and instead of the automatic lay-off he opened up and hit a forward pass through the channel that Rafi had to jog to collect.

Rafi said nothing about it.

But he reset the drill faster than usual, and Garcia, watching from the side, wrote the date next to the note.

Garcia attended every session he could. He took notes, sent Alan short, clear updates every two days, booked the pitch slots, handled the water and the timing, and watched the money drain out of an account that had little in it to begin with. Alan came to most sessions and stood at the side, and over the two weeks something in the way he stood changed. He did not relax, exactly. He stopped bracing.

At the end of the first week, the system spoke for the first time in days.

[SIDE MISSION PROGRESS UPDATED]

Mission: Prepare Jamie Holt.

Progress: 7 / 14 Days

Development Notes: — Recovery speed remains strongest trait. — First touch under pressure improving. — Forward passing after recovery still inconsistent.

Garcia read it after a session while Jamie collected cones and Rafi argued with him about a lazy pass from ten minutes earlier. The panel was telling him what his own notebook already said.

Improving. Not fixed.

He closed the panel and went to help with the cones.

The final session before the trip was the sharpest one.

Rafi pushed the tempo from the start — speed work, decision-making under fatigue, wide recovery runs stacked one after another until Jamie’s shirt was soaked through and his breathing came in pulls. The mistakes still happened. A touch got away from him in the first twenty minutes. The safe pass appeared twice when the forward option was on.

But the mistakes were smaller now, and the recovery from them was faster. He no longer carried an error into the next three actions. He made it, absorbed it, and went again.

Rafi ended the session by calling him over.

"You’re still rough," he said. "I want to be clear about that, because someone at that camp is going to make you look silly at least once, and I don’t want it to surprise you."

Jamie nodded, still catching his breath.

"But you’re not walking in there as the same boy," Rafi said. "Whatever happens up there, you’ve earned that much."

Jamie did not smile, not properly. But he stood differently for the rest of the evening.

Alan came over while Jamie packed his bag and offered Rafi his hand. "Thank you," he said. "Whatever happens."

Rafi shook it and shrugged. "The boy did the work. I just shouted at him."

Garcia confirmed the travel plans before they left the pitch. The programme began Monday morning at Northgate Performance Centre in Salford, Greater Manchester. Alan would drive. They would leave early.

Training was finished. What remained could not be coached.

The drive north started before seven.

Alan drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio low. Jamie sat in the back with his bag beside him, watching the motorway slide past the window and saying almost nothing. Rafi was in the back too, half-asleep against the other door, having spent the first twenty minutes complaining about the hour and the next twenty unconscious.

Garcia sat in the front passenger seat with the folder open on his lap, going through the trial documents again even though he had checked them three times the night before. Registration confirmation. Medical declaration. Guardian consent copy. Programme schedule. Five days — training sessions Monday to Thursday, trial match Friday.

Five days. Then the match. Then we find out what two weeks actually bought.

The closer they got to Salford, the more the world outside the windows turned into football. Pitches behind fences. A pair of boys with kit bags waiting at a bus stop. A sign for a soccer centre, then another. Jamie sat up straighter somewhere around the last junction, and Garcia watched him do it in the wing mirror.

Nobody in the car said anything about it.

Northgate Performance Centre announced itself with a long fence and a row of flags that had seen weather.

The facility was serious without being flashy. Fenced pitches stretching back from the road, a changing block, a reception building with glass doors, and a car park already half full. Parents stood near their cars. Boys moved toward the entrance carrying boots and bags, some walking quickly, some pretending not to hurry. Two staff members with clipboards checked names near the gate.

Alan parked, and for a moment nobody moved.

Jamie got out first. He stood beside the car and looked at the other players crossing the car park — and Garcia, getting out on the far side, watched him take them in. Some of them were bigger than Jamie. Some were louder, calling to each other across the tarmac like they had been here before. One or two moved with the loose, unbothered ease of boys who expected places like this to want them.

Jamie’s shoulders started to climb toward his ears.

It was the trial ground all over again — the boy shrinking before the ball had even arrived.

Garcia walked around the car and stopped next to him. He did not give him a speech, because a speech would have confirmed that there was something to be afraid of.

"Have you got everything?" he asked.

Jamie blinked, looked down at his bag, and checked it. Boots. Kit. Water.

"Yeah," he said. He gripped the strap. "Yeah, I’ve got everything."

The system appeared.

[SIDE MISSION PROGRESS UPDATED]

Mission: Prepare Jamie Holt.

Progress: 14 / 14 Days

Preparation Phase: Complete

Final Evaluation: Pending

Pending, Garcia thought. Of course it is. The two weeks were never the test. They were the ticket.

He let the panel close and looked at the gates, where the queue of players was moving slowly past the staff with the clipboards.

Rafi climbed out of the car, stretched his back with a crack, and looked at the facility like a man checking the quality of someone else’s work. Alan locked the car and came around to stand with them.

"Ready?" Garcia asked Jamie.

"No," Jamie said.

He tightened his grip on the bag.

"But I’m here."

They walked toward registration.