The new lines finished assembling on the panel, and Garcia read them without moving his lips.

The system had not handed him a shortcut.

It had handed him a problem.

Registering as an independent agent was not one action. It was two. He needed a legal company first, then football authority approval. One without the other meant nothing.

As he read, the mission text itself shifted. The objective rewrote in front of him, and the clock changed with it.

[Main Mission Updated]

Mission: Create a football agency.

Objective: Legally register a football agency and receive football authority approval.

Time Limit: 30 days.

Reward:

— Skill Points +100

— Scouting SP +10

— Network SP +5

Failure Penalty: Main Mission chain delayed by 30 days.

Thirty days.

The first mission had given him seventy-two hours, but that had been before he understood the full process. No football authority was approving a brand-new agency in three days. The system had recalculated once he asked the right question.

Garcia did not say any of this out loud.

The lesson from an hour ago was still fresh, and his mother’s crying was still too close behind him.

No talking. No pointing. Not in this house.

He read the mission again, took it in, and reached for his laptop. The system could show him the route, but it could not tell him what the route cost.

And it definitely could not pay for it.

It was past midnight by the time he understood the shape of the problem.

Garcia researched it the way he used to research a club before a negotiation.

He did not stop until the whole process was clear.

Vantage had handled this part for him before. The lawyers, the administrators, the company shell — all of it had existed underneath him while he focused on players, contracts, and careers.

Now there was no company underneath him.

If he wanted back into football, he had to build one himself.

He pulled the notebook out of his bag, clicked a pen, and wrote the steps down, the scratch of the nib the only sound in the dark living room.

Create football agency:

Register legal company.Secure registered office address.Submit ownership and director details.Pay filing and review fees.Update agent profile.Submit documents for football authority approval.Wait for decision.

Then he opened a fresh page and wrote the costs underneath.

Company registration fee: £80Virtual office address: £45/monthFootball authority review fee: £350Document processing and certification: £120Basic website and email domain: £60Emergency working capital: £500

Total needed: £1,155

Garcia stared at the number.

It was not a fortune. That almost made it worse.

A year ago, he would have spent more than that on a flight and hotel for a player meeting without thinking twice. Now the number sat in front of him like a locked gate.

He opened his banking app and checked his balance.

Available balance: £214.38

The two figures did not come close.

Garcia looked at the notebook again.

£1,155 needed. £214.38 available.

Short by £940.62.

He sat there for a while, the pen still in his hand.

Then he shut the laptop with a quiet snap.

He did not go to his parents the next morning.

Pride would not let him. Not yet.

Over the next few days, Garcia tried to solve the money himself, because asking his father felt like the final admission that he had nothing left.

He went through his account a second time, slower now, as if a closer look might reveal money the first search had missed.

It did not.

Then he looked around the bedroom at what he still owned.

There was almost nothing of value left. Most of it had already gone in the three months after Vantage. The suits were gone. The car was gone. The apartment was gone. What remained fit into drawers, bags, and the corners of his old childhood room.

His eyes settled on the laptop.

For a moment, he weighed it.

Selling it would cover the fees easily.

Then he stopped.

Without the laptop, he could not register the agency. He could not search for players. He could not prepare documents, track trial notices, email clubs, or do any part of the job he was trying to return to.

Selling it would solve the fee problem and create a bigger one.

So he made calls instead.

The first went to an old contact from his early years, a man he had shared hotel bars and long airport delays with.

The conversation started warm and turned careful the second Garcia mentioned money.

The man talked about a tight month, a renovation, a wife who watched the accounts, and Garcia recognised the shape of the refusal before the excuses had even finished.

"It’s fine," he said, before the man had to keep going. "Forget I asked."

The second call rang out to voicemail.

Garcia listened to the tone until it ended, then lowered the phone without leaving a message.

The third was a younger agent who owed him a favour from years back. The man listened, made the right sympathetic sounds, and then said the line Garcia had heard a hundred times from clubs that did not want to refuse him to his face.

"Let me check a few things and get back to you."

"Sure," Garcia said.

He already knew what that meant.

Three calls.

Three closed doors.

His network was not damaged only because the system said so. It was damaged in people’s voices.

He thought about Torres for a second, the junior who had texted him on the day it ended. But Torres still worked at Vantage, inside Holt’s reach, and a loan from him would leave a trail running straight back to the kid.

Garcia put the phone down without dialling.

By the end of the week, he had run out of people to call who were not his parents.

Since the money would not come, Garcia set it aside and worked on the parts he could control.

If the agency could not be paid for yet, it could at least be ready the moment the money arrived.

He dug through the duffel bag first, then the two suitcases, then the old folders his mother had stacked in the wardrobe after he moved back home. The documents he needed were not dramatic. Government ID. Proof of address. His agent licence record. Compliance forms. Conflict of interest and non-solicitation declarations. Proof that his previous agency affiliation had ended.

That was all the football authority would care about.

Not old emails, not call logs, not stories about the players he had once found before anyone else bothered to look. None of that mattered on an application form.

Garcia understood that better than anyone.

Football did not reward effort that could not be documented. It rewarded clean paperwork, valid licences, signed contracts, and names entered correctly into the right system.

So he made the folder simple.

Agency Setup

He stared at the name for a moment.

Too plain.

Too temporary.

It sounded like a man preparing paperwork, not a man building a company.

Garcia opened a fresh page and started testing names. He wrote down anything that came to mind, then searched each one against the company register. Several of the clean names were already taken. A few available ones sounded cheap, the kind of names that belonged on flimsy business cards and dead websites no one visited twice.

He crossed those out.

The name mattered. It would be the first thing a parent saw before trusting him with a son’s future, the first thing a club read before deciding whether to answer his email, and the first thing football saw before deciding whether Gabriel Garcia was still a ruined agent or something else.

He kept narrowing the list until one name stayed.

G11 Sports Management Ltd

The G was for Garcia, and the eleven was for the eleven players on a pitch. It was simple enough to remember, professional enough to put in front of a parent or a club, and personal enough to feel like it belonged to him.

There was no senior partner above it, no old company name protecting it, and no borrowed reputation for him to hide behind.

By the end of that work, he had the name, the documents, the process broken into steps, and a clear plan.

He still did not have the money.