Xavier rose from his chair and extended his hand across the table.

"Welcome to Wigan," he said. "Properly this time."

He held Leo’s hand for a moment.

"And now the real work starts. More than ever."

Leo nodded before letting go.

After that, Xavier turned to Noah and exhaled through his mouth in the way a person does when he’s decided to find something funny rather than let it bother him.

"You’ve taken years off my life," he said, only for Noah to shake his head.

"You’ll be fine."

Xavier straightened his jacket and looked between the two of them.

"We’ve got cameras waiting outside to mark the occasion properly."

He gestured toward the door. "Shall we?"

"Lead the way," Noah said.

Leo fell into step beside him as they followed Xavier out and leaned slightly toward Noah.

"I’m glad I dressed properly," he said quietly. "I didn’t know if we were getting this done today or not."

Noah glanced at him.

"It was always going to be today. A contract should always be done in one sitting."

"Why?"

"Because the longer it goes, the more things start shifting. Terms get revisited, moods change, people start reconsidering positions they’d already agreed to."

"One sitting and in and out always."

Leo nodded at that before they sped up a bit, trying to catch up to Xavier, who was already a few metres away from the elevator.

As they got near the pitch, Leo found something on it that he hadn’t seen when he was coming in earlier.

A table with the contract, a pen, the club crest visible behind them and a couple of photographers positioned at the right angles.

A well-thought-out setup for a player of Leo’s rising calibre.

They got there a moment later, with Leo being made to sit at the centre while Noah and Xavier sat on either side of him.

He signed where he was asked to sign, and Xavier signed opposite him, all while the cameras captured the moment from several directions at once.

Afterwards, the three of them stood together on the pitch while the photographers finished their work.

It was an important occasion, and the empty stadium made it feel much more important than it would have felt somewhere else.

Xavier looked at the pitch for a moment and then at the two of them.

"To new beginnings," he said.

After everything was set in stone, Wigan didn’t waste any time declaring the current situation with Leo on the club’s website, as did other media houses who covered it.

Leo Calderon Signs New Four-Year Deal

Wigan Athletic are delighted to confirm that Leo Calderon has signed a new long-term contract with the club, keeping him at the DW Stadium until the summer of 2027, with the option of a further year. The Club, the Manager and everyone associated with Wigan Athletic look forward to seeing Leo continue his journey with us into the Premier League and beyond.

Go Latics Go!

The reactions soon followed, with most of them coming out of the Wigan community.

Finally. This should have been done even before the season ended, but I’ll sleep tonight knowing this is done.

Four years. Four years of Leo Calderon in a Wigan shirt. Someone pinch me.

Smart from the club. Lock him down before the big boys start properly circling. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

From further afield, the comments split between people who had been watching and people who were only now catching up.

Who is Leo Calderon? showed up more than once, usually followed by someone else providing a brief and increasingly enthusiastic summary of the season just gone.

The kid who basically won Wigan the playoff on one leg? Yeah, he’s decent.

Pep said he’d want him. That’s all you need to know.

That was how it went for the rest of the day, at least until details of Leo’s contract began to leak.

The source couldn’t be narrowed down, as it always happened in football, but for something that was just being "guessed", the people who had been in the room during the negotiations would say that the estimates were awfully close.

Seventy-five thousand a week was the figure doing the rounds in the Wigan community as well as outside of it, and with it came enquiries from fans who sought to know if that was true.

Still, it was neither confirmed nor denied, and that started a bit of talk.

How was the state of the club going to be if the youngest in the squad for now was the highest earner, and how were the remaining players going to take it?

For context, their highest earner until recently was on thirty-five thousand, and so the gap between the two numbers wasn’t something to laugh at.

The release clause followed not long after, and the 107 million pound figure mentioned felt like a joke to others.

Wigan have protected this kid like he’s already worth double that. Before a single Premier League minute. Make it make sense.

75k a week at 18 playing for a newly promoted club. The audacity. The correct audacity.

As a Wigan fan, I hope Leo backs it up because things could get brutal.

Guys, we have players of the same age as him earning more than that. Lay off of him.

Yes, we do, but do you think Leo is par or close to those players? This kid is just some boy from Wigan who’s made it lucky. The Premier League isn’t a place for luck. We will see how he falters soon!

United fans are going to want to not read this one.

The comments underneath threads about Leo’s contract kept circling back to the same place they always circled back to.

The Manchester United fans in those threads had the specific energy of people who had accepted something painful and were now watching it get more painful in real time.

Many of them hadn’t even known about the kid until he handed them the loss in the FA cup semi-final, and after that splendid display, more and more of them figured out that Leo had been Manchester United’s player until recently.

Jonas had the article open on his phone and had been looking at it for longer than he’d intended to.

He’d been reading it for a while now, and his eyes always seemed to settle on the release clause.

A player who had been let go by his club less than a year and a half ago and was recently being quoted as a 10 million pound player now had his release clause at one hundred and seven million pounds.

A moment later, he turned his phone over and set it on the desk.

"The ship might have sailed," he said with a resigned expression into the empty room.