Garcia walked away from the pitch with Rafi’s voice still going behind him.

"Gabriel. The session." Rafi did not stop coaching to say it, which made it worse. "He’s got Tranmere on Monday, in case you’ve forgotten."

"I haven’t. Keep him going. I’ll be back."

He did not run. Chasing a stranger across a pitch was the fastest way to look like a desperate man, and a desperate man got nothing, so he kept a steady distance and let the gap stay where it was.

Ahead of him, the young man was already leaving. His work clothes were marked from the game, his phone was back in his hand, and he moved like someone who had no intention of standing around to talk football with anyone.

Garcia closed the distance just enough, stopped, and confirmed the scan before he said a word.

He needed to know whether this was real or only the shine street football puts on a good player in a small space. Golden Eye answered, and the fact that it answered at all told him something before he had even read it. The skill only worked on active footballers or registered prospects. If it opened, the man was not a random face from the cage.

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

Name: Jayden "Jay" Cole

Age: 21

Position: Left Winger

Current Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2.5)

Potential Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5)

Key Strength: Tempo control in wide isolation

Key Weakness: Low professional training consistency

Recommended Training Focus: End-product repetition after inside movement

[Weekly Uses Remaining: 2 / 3]

Garcia held still for a second.

It was not Jamie’s ceiling. Nobody was. But a current rating of two and a half meant this was not a raw kid he would have to build from nothing. Jay was already a serious player, today, right now.

A four-and-a-half-potential winger in work clothes, playing one game in a cage on his break, was not something a sane agent walked away from.

Jay did not hang around with the others.

One of them shouted after him to stay for another, and Jay raised a hand without slowing and said something about work. Then he turned out of the pitch area entirely.

Garcia watched the direction he took. It was not toward the car park, the way a man heading home would go. It was toward the row of shops and cafés along the front of the facility.

He did not call out in the open walkway. He waited until Jay turned into a small coffee shop, gave it a short pause so he was not walking in on the man’s heels, and then followed.

The shop was busy, and the noise of it helped.

There was nothing mysterious about the place. Jay was not a hidden footballer sitting in an empty room waiting for the right person to find him. He was already behind the counter, tying an apron back on, and a colleague was calling his name because there were orders building.

The contrast did the work on its own.

Five minutes ago he had owned the tempo of an entire game with a touch and a shift of his weight. Now he was wiping his hands and lining cups along a counter while a queue of people who would never know his name waited for their drinks.

Garcia waited for a small gap in the queue before he stepped up, and he ordered something simple first, so he did not look like a man ambushing a worker mid-shift.

Jay recognised him from the pitch straight away, and the guard came up behind his eyes.

"I watched the game outside," Garcia said. "I liked what I saw."

"I only played because they were short." Jay said it flat, already reaching for a cup.

"That’s exactly why it interested me." Garcia kept his voice level. "A player who comes in cold, no warm-up, and controls the game with his first few touches isn’t normal."

Jay didn’t answer that. He started the order instead, and the machine hissed under his hands.

"It was street ball," he said after a moment. "Five-a-side, basically. Everyone looks good when nobody’s defending."

"Most players do," Garcia agreed. "Because in small games they can hide. Behind the noise, behind a couple of touches, behind a trick." He waited until Jay glanced up. "You didn’t hide. You slowed it down, you picked when to go, and you made everyone else react half a second late. That’s a different thing."

Jay kept working, because the job gave his hands somewhere to be, but he was listening now. Garcia could tell from the way he had stopped trying to end the conversation.

"Where do you play?" Garcia asked.

That was the first thing that made Jay hesitate.

He clearly did not want to answer, and he just as clearly knew that lying was pointless after what Garcia had watched in the cage.

"Semi-pro," he said eventually. "Bit of non-league. Southmere Athletic, last couple of seasons."

Garcia did not let it show on his face, but inside it settled the last question for him. That was why Golden Eye had worked. Jay was registered. He was not a stranger off the street. He was someone the game had already touched once and then left exactly where he was.

"You can play a lot higher than Southmere," Garcia said.

Jay laughed, short, but not all the way. "Right."

"I’m not guessing." Garcia leaned a little closer to the counter, lowering his voice under the queue noise. "That goal at the end. You took it on the left, froze the defender by doing nothing for half a second, came inside off one touch, and rolled it across the keeper before he’d set his feet. That wasn’t flair. That was a winger controlling the tempo and finishing when he decided to."

Jay’s hands slowed on the cup.

He looked at Garcia differently then, because Garcia had named his position, his actual position, without ever being told it.

"Let me talk to you properly," Garcia said. "After your shift, or another day. Twenty minutes."

"No."

It was not an angry no, and that was what made Garcia keep looking at him. It was a tired no, the no of a man who had heard things before and decided the safest answer was always the same one.

"Why not?"

"I’m busy." Jay set the finished drink on the counter and called the order out without looking at him.

"Busy isn’t the reason," Garcia said.

Jay was quiet for a second. Then he looked at him properly, just once.

"Football’s not the problem," he said.

And he left it there.

Garcia tried once more, and only once, because he knew the difference between interest and pressure, and he knew which one closed doors.

"I’m not asking you to sign anything," he said. "I’m not asking you to quit your job, and I’m not asking you to trust a stranger off one conversation. Twenty minutes to talk football. That’s all."

"I already said no."

So Garcia stopped. Pushing harder would only turn the thing he wanted into the thing Jay was bracing against.

He took a card out instead and set it on the counter, near Jay’s hand but not in it.

"I said no," Jay said.

"I heard you." Garcia did not pick it back up. "This isn’t a contract. It’s just a way back, if the answer ever changes." He held the man’s eye. "After what I watched out there, I’d be stupid to walk off without leaving you a way to reach me."

Then he said the one honest thing he had been holding.

"With the right route and the right training, you’re wasting yourself where you are."

Jay didn’t answer. But he didn’t sweep the card off the counter either.

Garcia left without turning back too fast.

Outside, he stopped only long enough to read the name on the shop sign and write it down, along with the club. He did not know the rest of it yet. He did not know why a winger with that ceiling was pulling shifts and playing non-league football on the weekend.

But the refusal had not sounded like a man without ambition. It had sounded like a man protecting something.

He put the notebook away and walked back toward the pitch, where Jamie and Rafi were still working.

Inside the shop, Jay looked at the card on the counter.

Gabriel Garcia Founder / Licensed Football Agent G11 Sports Management Ltd

For a second his thumb pressed against the edge of it, like he was about to tear it in half.

Then a voice came across the counter.

"Jay, I need that coffee, please."

He looked up, folded the card once between his fingers, and slid it into his pocket before he turned back to the machine.