Saturday, September 9, 2023

Wembley Stadium — England Recovery Area

Post-Match

The recovery room moved around Demien while he sat still with his phone in his hand, the heat of the Ukraine match still in his legs, and the room’s noise rolled past him — players lowering themselves into ice baths with sharp hisses of breath, staff calling names off a clipboard, physios working down a line of legs, someone already pinning the Scotland schedule to the corkboard by the door.

He’d assumed the buzzing was match reaction at first, but the same phrase kept surfacing from different people in different threads — France Football list — and the more messages stacked up, the further the room’s noise seemed to pull away from him.

He opened the article properly because he didn’t believe the screenshots.

The official Ballon d’Or nominee list for 2023. Thirty names. The footballers he’d grown up watching from a sofa in another life, the names that belonged to posters and award stages and arguments in barbershops.

His own sat among them.

He went still. Not up out of his seat, not loud — still, because scoring at Tottenham was one thing and hearing Old Trafford roar was another, but seeing his name printed in a column beside the best players in the world was a size of thing his chest didn’t have a shape for yet.

Rice noticed first from the next bench, leaning across with a towel round his neck. "You alright? You look like someone’s stolen your car."

Demien turned the phone toward him without a word.

Rice read it, blinked, then his head came up. "Oh, you’re joking." He twisted round to the room. "Lads. Lads — Walter’s only on the Ballon d’Or list."

The reaction rippled outward — a couple of shouts, a low whistle from the ice baths, someone’s "shut UP" carrying over the physio table.

Saka came over first, grabbing his hand and pulling him into a half-hug, his grin wide. "That’s massive, man. Genuinely. Congratulations."

Kane crossed from the far side and shook his hand properly, his grip steady and his voice level. "That’s a serious achievement. Don’t let anyone make it smaller than it is — there are players with ten great years who never make that list."

Bellingham gave him a nod from where he sat unwrapping the tape from his ankles, composed, the look of someone who knew exactly what that kind of spotlight weighed at this age. "Deserved," he said simply. "Enjoy it tonight. It gets loud from here."

Rice was already grinning again. "So do we bow now, or is a handshake still acceptable? I want to get the protocol right before the Kopa lot show up."

The laugh that went round loosened something in Demien’s chest, and he shook his head while the room’s teasing folded over him, because the joke gave him somewhere to put the air he’d been holding.

"Handshake’s fine," he managed.

"Generous," Rice said. "Very humble. They’ll love that at the ceremony."

Saturday, September 9, 2023

Wembley Stadium — Corridor Outside Recovery

Late Evening

Demien stepped out into the corridor where the noise thinned and called Marco, who answered before the second ring as though he’d been holding the phone.

The conversation ran long, and Marco moved through it the way he moved through everything — confirmation first, then control. The nomination was real, built off the season that had ended in May: the forty goal contributions, the Coppa run, the Capocannoniere shared with Osimhen, the England breakthrough, then the United move stacking visibility on top of all of it. The voters had seen a nineteen-year-old produce numbers from midfield that didn’t make sense, and the list reflected it.

Then came the warnings, delivered in Marco’s flattest register. A nomination was not a trophy, and the gap between the two was where young players embarrassed themselves. No jokes online. No answering bait about where he ranked. No comparisons — not with Bellingham, not with Musiala or Pedri, not with Haaland or Mbappé, no matter how cleverly a journalist dressed the question. When asked, he would thank Atalanta, thank United, thank England, thank his teammates and coaches and family, and redirect to Scotland. Every time. Without variation.

Demien took it all in, agreeing where agreement was needed, and the call was nearly done when Marco’s voice changed — the professional flatness slipping for the first time Demien could remember since the Atalanta trial.

"Demien. Listen to me for one second, not as your agent." A pause travelled down the line. "Three years ago you could not get a club to look at you. Tonight you are on that list. This is not normal. Whatever happens with the award — this is not normal. I wanted you to hear that from me before the noise tells you everything else."

The line sat quiet for a moment, and that landed harder than any headline had, because Marco never allowed himself to sound like that.

"Thank you," Demien said. "For all of it."

"Sleep. Scotland in three days." And Marco was back, and gone.

Saturday, September 9, 2023

England Team Hotel

Night

Back at the hotel he finally worked through the personal messages properly, starting with the voice note from Isabella because her name had been sitting at the top of the stack for an hour.

Her voice came through thick, starting twice before the words held. She didn’t talk about France Football or voting or what the list meant in football terms, because she didn’t fully know and didn’t need to — she talked about watching his name appear on the television under the word nominee, about sitting down on the kitchen chair because her legs went, about his father, about the boy who used to sleep in his boots before academy trials. By the end she was laughing at herself for crying, telling him to eat and sleep and call her tomorrow, and Demien sat on the edge of the hotel bed listening to all of it twice through, his thumb hovering over the replay button, the distance between that kitchen in Settignano and this hotel room measuring everything that had happened in between.

Sophia called as the second listen ended.

"I leave you alone for one week," she said by way of hello. "One week. And you end up on the Ballon d’Or list. What happens if I leave you for a month?"

"Probably relegation."

She laughed, warm down the line. "There he is. I was worried you’d gone all important on me." Then her voice settled into something gentler underneath the teasing. "I’m proud of you. You know that. Properly proud — not the polite kind."

"I know."

"Good. Now eat something, breathe, and don’t read the comments. Scotland won’t care about lists and neither should you until after." A beat. "But tonight you’re allowed to care. Just tonight."

Luca rang twenty minutes later, and there was nothing composed about him at all.

"You absolute — do you know what you’ve done to our dressing room?" His voice was half a shout over background noise that sounded like he was still at the training ground. "The list drops and Scalvini starts screaming. Actually screaming. Koopmeiners is arguing with the physio about where you should rank — the physio, Demien. Someone put your old goals on the big screen in the players’ lounge. The Empoli one. The bicycle thing against Verona. Pasalic watched it and just walked out shaking his head."

Demien was laughing properly now, the first full laugh since the list dropped.

"I’m serious," Luca went on, and then his voice dropped a register, the joking thinning out of it. "You know what it’s like here right now? It feels like ours. Everyone here remembers you arriving with one bag. So it doesn’t feel like watching a star get nominated. It feels like — closer. Like the thing is real and one of us touched it." He cleared his throat, the moment clearly costing him. "Anyway. You’re still annoying. Don’t win anything else this month, I can’t take it."

"No promises."

"Disrespectful to the end. Goodnight, fratello."