The finishing drill brought the noise.

A striker called Dylan O’Connor had taken over the channel, and he was loud about it. He bullied the smaller defenders off the ball, leaned into every duel, and put two clean finishes past the keeper in the first set. A father two spots along said his name to the man beside him, and one of the organizers glanced over more than once.

Garcia watched him with more interest than he expected to feel.

Dylan was strong and certain, and at this age strength and certainty looked a lot like talent. He had scored. People had noticed. That was usually enough to start a conversation by a fence.

Garcia waited until Dylan jogged back toward the cones, well inside thirty metres, and confirmed the scan.

[GOLDEN EYE: PROSPECT APPRAISAL — SCAN 1 / 3]

Name: Dylan O’Connor Age: 17 Position: Striker

Current Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1.8) Potential Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2.5)

Key Strength: Physical aggression in duels Key Weakness: Poor movement when marked tightly Recommended Training Focus: Off-ball separation runs

[Weekly Uses Remaining: 2 / 3]

Garcia read it once and felt the first small drop.

Two and a half stars. A useful player. The kind who would score against soft defending and disappear against good defending, who would bully a trial and struggle in a league. Worth a place at the camp. Not worth being G11’s first serious gamble.

He let the panel close and watched Dylan win another duel by sheer weight, and this time he saw the cost of it. The moment a defender refused to wrestle and simply stood off him, Dylan had nowhere to go. He did not know how to lose a marker who would not be shoved.

The system had seen that before Dylan had touched the ball twice.

The session moved into position-specific work after the testing, and Jamie had a mixed hour of it.

He blocked one cross cleanly, getting his body across the line before the winger’s foot came through — THUD, and the ball skidded into touch. Then he misplaced a forward pass into nobody, two yards short and behind the run, and a coach told him to look up sooner. Minutes later Malik Johnson turned him with a sharp change of direction and got half a yard, and Jamie recovered, closed the gap in two strides, and forced the cross backward instead of letting it come in.

The coaches did not praise him out loud. But one of them wrote 47 down twice in the same five minutes, and Garcia noticed which actions earned the pen.

He also noticed Oliver.

Crownbridge had set up further along the rope, Oliver at ease with a coffee, Charlotte beside him with a notebook open. Reece was the reason they were there, and Oliver spent most of the hour watching his own player.

But every time Garcia wrote something after one of Jamie’s actions, Oliver’s eyes drifted from Reece to Jamie and back.

He was not interested in Jamie yet.

He was interested in why Garcia was.

That is the dangerous one, Garcia thought, and made himself write less while Oliver could see him do it.

The possession block came after the water break, six against six in a square that punished anything slow.

A technical kid called Bilal Haddad ran most of it. He took the ball in tight spaces and kept it, beat one boy with a quick drag-back that drew a sound from the rope — "oh," from a mother two spots along — and slid a pass through a gap that should not have been there. He looked like the kind of player people enjoyed watching, which was its own kind of warning sign.

Garcia waited for a reset near the sideline and scanned him.

[GOLDEN EYE: PROSPECT APPRAISAL — SCAN 2 / 3]

Name: Bilal Haddad Age: 17 Position: Attacking Midfielder

Current Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1.6) Potential Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2.8)

Key Strength: Close control in tight spaces Key Weakness: Low defensive work rate Recommended Training Focus: Pressing triggers and transition recovery

[Weekly Uses Remaining: 1 / 3]

Garcia closed it slower this time.

Not useless. Never useless. Bilal had flair, and a club somewhere would take a chance on flair. But the ceiling was the ceiling, and the weakness was written plainly underneath it. The moment the ball turned over, Bilal stopped, and at the levels that mattered, the boys who stopped got found out fast.

Two scans. Two ordinary ceilings. A camp full of decent players who would never be anything more than decent.

Garcia looked across the pitch at number forty-seven, jogging back into shape after a recovery, and Jamie’s five-star result sat heavier in his chest than it had all week.

One of him. The rest of the country sends me twos.

That evening Garcia sat on the edge of a hard hotel bed two miles from the camp, folder open, notebook beside it.

He was sharing the room with Rafi to keep the cost down, and Rafi had already complained about the mattress, the lift, and the price of a sandwich in Salford, and was now lying on the other bed scrolling through clips of full-backs Garcia had not asked about.

Garcia went back through the day in order. Jamie’s strengths showed in narrow windows — a recovery, a block, one good forward pass after defending. Reece was simply the better player right now, and pretending otherwise would only set Alan up for a disappointment on Friday. Oliver was too close, and getting closer.

His phone buzzed. Alan.

Is he improving enough?

Garcia looked at it for a moment. The easy reply was yes, and the easy reply was the kind agents used right up until the day a parent stopped believing anything they said.

He typed the true one instead.

He’s improving in the right areas. Recovery’s sharp, composure’s better than it was at Croydon. But none of it counts until he does it in a match, and that’s Friday. I’ll know more then.

Three dots, then: Fair enough.

A second message came in from Rafi’s side of the room before Garcia could put the phone down. Rafi had texted instead of speaking, which meant it was the kind of thing he did not want to say to Garcia’s face.

Tell the boy to stop checking where Reece is every five minutes. He’s playing the camp instead of playing football. It’s slowing him down.

Garcia read it and looked across the gap between the beds.

Rafi did not look up from his phone. "I’m right," he said.

"I know you’re right."

"Then tell him."

"I’ll tell him tomorrow."

Day Three changed the shape of the week.

The coaches moved off isolated stations and onto tactical work — group games, shape, pressing as a unit, defending as a line. The testing was over. Now they were watching how a player thought inside a moving picture instead of a marked square, and that was harder, because there was no cone telling you where to stand.

It made Jamie’s job worse before it made it better.

He had to defend, receive, recover, and choose, all of it at once, inside a structure that kept shifting around him. Early on a turnover put him under pressure with a midfielder closing fast, and the old habit won — the safe pass came out quick, square and backward, before the forward option had a chance to exist.

Rafi exhaled through his nose at the rope but did not shout.

Garcia watched what came next more carefully than the mistake itself. Two weeks ago, an error like that had stayed with Jamie for three actions. He had carried it, played the next ball worse for it, shrunk a little. Now he reset inside a few seconds, found his shape, and was ready when the ball came again.

That’s the part that doesn’t show up on a highlight, Garcia thought, and wrote the minute down.

The better moment came later.

A midfield turnover sent a winger sprinting into the space behind Jamie. Jamie was half a step the wrong way when it started. He turned, closed it in two strides — THUD — blocked the cross, and kept the ball in play off his shin instead of belting it into touch.

Then, instead of clearing blind, he took a touch, looked up, and slid a short pass into a midfielder who had peeled into space.

It was not spectacular. Nobody on the rope reacted. But it connected everything Rafi had spent two weeks beating into him — recover, settle, play forward — in one sequence, under pressure, inside a real shape.

One of the coaches pointed straight at him.

"Forty-seven. That. Again. All week."

Jamie nodded and got back to his line, and Garcia saw him fight the urge to look toward the rope, and not look.

Better, he thought. Rafi was right about that too.

Malik Johnson had spent the camp making full-backs look slow, so Garcia kept the last scan for him.

He was quick and direct, and he had beaten Jamie once and two other defenders more than that. Parents said his name. The coaches kept feeding him into one-against-one drills because he made them look lively.

Garcia waited for a reset near the touchline and confirmed.

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

Name: Malik Johnson Age: 16 Position: Winger

Current Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1.4) Potential Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2.7)

Key Strength: Straight-line acceleration Key Weakness: Predictable one-direction dribbling Recommended Training Focus: Change of direction and weak-foot delivery

[Weekly Uses Remaining: 0 / 3]

Garcia let out a slow breath through his nose.

Three scans. Three ordinary ceilings. All three good enough to be at this camp, and not one of them worth chasing as the player a ruined agency rebuilt itself on.

He should have been more disappointed than he was.

Instead he found a strange kind of relief underneath the frustration. Golden Eye was not handing him hidden monsters every time he turned his head. It had shown him the truth of a whole camp, and the truth was that real ceilings were rare. Jamie was rare. The system had not made him look better than he was — it had only let Garcia see him when nobody else could.

Which meant that if Garcia lost him to Crownbridge, he would not stumble onto another like him in a hurry.

He closed the panel and watched Malik beat his man again, the exact same way, off the same foot, into the same channel — and this time a defender who had seen it twice already simply stood him up and showed him inside, where Malik did not want to go.

The system had written that down before the boy had taken a touch.

Charlotte saw it before Oliver said anything.

She had been keeping half her notes on Reece and half her attention on the man with the folder, the one Oliver had pointed out at Croydon, the one who had found Mendes before anyone. She watched him write after the small right-back recovered a cross and played forward instead of hoofing it clear.

"You want notes on forty-seven?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

Oliver did not answer at once.

He was watching the boy too now, watching him get half-beaten by the winger, close the gap, and force the play backward without a foul. He watched him reset after a bad pass without dropping his head.

"He’s raw," Oliver said. "Two-footed but tight. He’ll get bullied off the ball on Friday at least twice."

"Probably," Charlotte said.

"But he doesn’t stay beaten." Oliver tilted his head. "And Garcia’s been writing after every recovery the boy makes. Not after the goals. Not after Mallory." He paused. "He’s not watching the camp. He’s watching one player, and he’s barely hiding it."

"Garcia’s obviously handling him," Charlotte said.

"Handling isn’t representation." Oliver said it without heat, the way he said most things. "There’s no contract until there’s a contract." He turned to her. "Find out whether the boy’s signed anything. Who’s actually on the paperwork. And whether the father’s the kind who can be talked to."

Charlotte was already writing.

"And Charlotte." Oliver looked back toward the pitch. "Quietly. There’s no rush. The boy hasn’t shown anyone anything yet."

She nodded and put the surname down.

The day ended with tired boys and a quieter pitch.

The group came off slower than they had on the first morning, shirts heavy, legs gone, the noise of arrival day worn out of them. Jamie walked with Miles toward the block, soaked through, and Garcia watched him from the rope.

He was still behind Reece in everything you could measure with your eyes. He still had not done a single thing worth a name.

But he was not folded anymore. His shoulders sat where they belonged, and twice on the way off he had looked a coach in the eye instead of the grass.

Less invisible, Garcia thought. That’s the whole of today. He’s less invisible.

He gathered the folder and turned to find Alan, and that was when he saw them.

Oliver and Charlotte, near the reception building, standing close and speaking low. Charlotte looked toward the players walking off — toward number forty-seven — held it for a second, then turned and looked along the rope toward Alan. Then she looked down and typed something into her phone.

Oliver caught Garcia watching.

He did not look away. He held it, the way a man holds a hand he is comfortable with, and gave the smallest smile.

Garcia held it back and let his face show nothing.

He did not need the system to tell him what had changed, and the system did not appear. It did not need to.

Oliver had started looking at Jamie.