The panel sharpened.

[GOLDEN EYE: PROSPECT APPRAISAL — SCAN 3 / 3]

Name: Jamie Holt

Age: 16

Position: Right Back

Current Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (0.4)

Potential Rating: ★★★★★ (5.0)

Key Strength: Explosive recovery speed

Key Weakness: Confidence under possession pressure

Recommended Training Focus: First-touch passing after defensive recovery

[Weekly Uses Remaining: 0 / 3]

Garcia read it once.

Then he read the potential rating again.

Five stars.

He stayed completely still. The pen was on the notebook page where he had drawn the line. The match was still going around him. A man two yards along was still watching the pitch.

Five stars at right-back. Sixteen years old. Standing near the touchline with a water bottle in his hand.

He thought about the numbers he had seen so far. Price at three stars was a career, useful but replaceable. Ward at four stars had stopped him cold. And he had sat with both of those results and found them significant.

Five stars was not significant. Five stars was a different category entirely.

In six years of professional scouting, Garcia had seen two players he would have privately rated at that ceiling — one of them was Paulo, and Paulo had gone to Lyon at twenty-two.

And the system had found this one because he shouted at the wrong moment.

He had shouted at the air in front of twenty people, burned his final scan on an accident, and the accident had come back as the highest potential rating the system had shown him all morning.

Garcia drew a slow breath through his nose and said nothing.

The substitution board went up three minutes later.

Number seven off for Blue, and Jamie Holt pulled the yellow bib over his head and handed it to the fourth official. He jogged onto the pitch and tucked himself into the right-back position without pointing at teammates or calling for the ball.

Garcia watched every movement now.

Nothing about the boy looked special. He was sixteen and looked it — not yet grown into whatever height he might become, narrow across the shoulders, carrying himself with the quiet focus of someone who understood their role and was not going to demand more from it than it naturally gave him.

He was not announcing himself. That was part of why nobody had noticed him.

Before his first touch arrived, Jamie wiped his hands on the front of his shorts.

Garcia wrote it down. It was nerves and nerves were not disqualifying. They were information.

The first pass came to Jamie from the centre-back — safe, unhurried, no pressure. He received it and played it straight back.

A man behind Garcia muttered, "That lad looks frightened."

Garcia said nothing and kept the pen moving.

The system already gave him the truth. Now he needed the match to show him why.

Callum Price got the ball wide left in the sixty-ninth minute and turned.

He saw a sixteen-year-old right-back who had touched the ball once and sent it backwards, and he did exactly what a direct winger with that pace profile would do in that situation.

He ran at him.

Garcia watched carefully. He already knew both sides of this. Price was 1.2 current, 3.0 ceiling, acceleration over short distance his entire threat. Jamie was 0.4 current, 5.0 ceiling, recovery speed listed as the key strength. This was the first real test, and it was also the first proof.

Price drove hard off his left foot and got half a step on Jamie, turning the full-back’s hips the wrong way. For a moment it looked like the obvious outcome — a beaten defender, a cross driven low into the box, Red getting in behind.

Then Jamie turned.

Not a lunge, not a desperate foul. A tight, explosive recovery that closed the gap in two strides and cut the angle before Price could set his foot for the delivery.

THUD. The block was clean. The ball bounced into touch.

The referee pointed for a corner.

Nobody on the fence reacted. Price shook his head and jogged back. The game moved on.

There it is, Garcia thought.

The recovery had taken less than two seconds from the moment Jamie’s hips went the wrong way to the moment he closed the space. Most people watching it registered only the final result: the cross was blocked. Garcia had watched the engine that drove the recovery — the foot speed, the hip rotation, the decision to go tight rather than force a foul.

He wrote the minute down and underlined it.

The next moment was quieter still. A Red midfielder shaped to slip a through ball into the channel two minutes later, and Jamie moved before the foot came through the ball. Not after the pass was played. Before. He stepped across the run cleanly, collected it, and laid it back to his centre-back in one touch.

No one clapped. No one shifted along the fence. The attack simply ceased to exist before most people had registered it as a threat.

Garcia kept writing.

Defensive anticipation at sixteen. That was not something a full-back coach drilled into a boy in two weeks. That was reading.

Jamie made an overlap down the right side shortly after, timing the run correctly and showing for the pass. The Blue midfielder had three other options and used one of them. Jamie slowed, checked his shoulder, and tracked back without any visible reaction to being ignored.

Garcia noted it.

He was not asking for attention. That was both the problem and the whole point.

In the seventy-third minute, Callum Price pressed the Blue defensive line from the front and the ball arrived at Jamie near the touchline with Price already closing fast from eight yards.

Jamie had a yard to open his body, shift his weight, and find the midfielder in space.

He did not use it.

Instead he took the safe option — the ball went back to the goalkeeper before the press arrived. Clean, simple, and entirely wrong.

There it is on the other side, Garcia thought. The scan was right. Possession pressure. He does not trust himself on the ball yet when someone is coming.

Charlotte, two yards along, glanced toward Jamie briefly and said something to Oliver.

Oliver shook his head. "Basic right-back. Nothing to see." He turned back toward the other end of the pitch, where Tyler Grant was still moving between the lines with the kind of easy intelligence that full touchlines understood immediately.

Charlotte closed her notebook.

Garcia kept his face forward and said nothing.

TWEET.

The referee held the whistle and waved both arms wide.