"Before you read a word of it as good news," he said, "hear what it is and what it isn’t."

He kept it in plain English. No clauses, no terms nobody in the room used out loud.

"This isn’t a first-team contract, and it isn’t professional football starting Monday. It’s an Under-18 academy scholarship pathway. That means Jamie trains and studies inside the academy. He’s paid a scholarship allowance, but that’s support money for being there. It is not a professional wage, and it doesn’t mean he’s made it."

Alan nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he is making himself listen instead of celebrate.

"He’s mainly with the U18s," Garcia went on. "There’s a line in here about selected development-group exposure. That can happen, if their staff decide he’s ready for it. It’s a door, not a promise."

He put one finger on the line near the bottom.

"And this part, the professional framework. That’s the club writing down that they intend to prepare professional terms for when he turns seventeen and becomes eligible. But look at the words after it. Subject to approval, registration, medical clearance, conduct, development." He looked up at both of them. "They’re putting a route in writing. They are not telling you he’s guaranteed to become a pro. Those are two different things, and I won’t let either of you walk out of here mixing them up."

Jamie did not fully feel the gap between the words yet.

He heard scholarship and he heard professional framework, and to a sixteen-year-old who had been released a few weeks ago they both sounded like the same enormous thing. His eyes kept going back to his own name on the paper.

His foot started tapping under the table, fast, without him deciding to.

"Jamie." Alan said it quietly. "Foot."

The tapping stopped. Then Alan noticed his own hand was not steady where it rested on the page, and he said nothing more after that.

Jamie asked his question the simple way.

"So I’m not going back as a trialist?"

"No," Garcia said. "You’re not. They’re offering you a place."

Jamie did not cry, and he did not say anything big. He just looked down at the document and went quiet, because for the first time a club had written his name where it had only ever written a bib number before.

Then Alan asked the questions a father asks, not the ones an agent asks.

"Does he still do his schooling?"

"Yes. The education’s built into it. That’s an obligation on the club, not an afterthought."

"Does he have to move out?"

"Not from what’s here, but that’s one of the things I’m going to make them put in clear language before he signs. Same with travel. Right now this offer doesn’t say who covers getting him there and back, and I’m not letting that stay a guess."

"What if he gets hurt?"

"Injury cover, welfare contact, who’s responsible for what. All of it goes on my list of questions for the meeting." Garcia held his eye. "And yes, before you ask it, the club can still release him. Clubs always protect themselves in the wording. That’s normal, and it’s exactly why we read it properly instead of signing it happy."

Alan turned the page over in his rough hands, then asked the one that clearly sat heaviest.

"And you," he said. "What do you get out of this?"

"From this?" Garcia did not look away from him. "Nothing."

Alan’s face creased, not with suspicion, but with confusion, like the answer did not fit the world he expected.

"He’s sixteen, on a scholarship," Garcia said. "An agent doesn’t earn off that, and any agent who tells you otherwise is one you walk away from. If Jamie develops, and that professional contract at seventeen becomes real, that’s where proper representation matters and that’s where I’d earn. For now, my job is to make sure he doesn’t sign a single thing he’s misunderstood."

He went back to the framework line, because it was the one that needed the most care.

"This is where I’m useful to you," he said. "See these two words. Subject to. The club’s intention is real, I believe that. But subject to means the professional terms depend on paperwork, on registration, on a medical, on his conduct, and on him keeping developing. That protects them."

He tapped the page once.

"It also tells us exactly what we have to nail down before he signs. So I’ve already started the list."

He turned a notepad so they could see it.

Exact scholarship start date. Payment schedule. Travel support. Education arrangement. Injury cover. Welfare contact. And what happens, in writing, if the professional framework is never executed.

"Every one of those gets answered in the meeting," Garcia said, "out loud, before he picks up a pen."

Jamie had one quiet fear, and it came out small.

"Can they still change their mind?"

Garcia did not lie to him, because lying to a player about this was the surest way to lose him later.

"Yes," he said. "Clubs always keep a way to protect themselves. And that’s exactly why you protect yourself too, and why we’re not rushing in with our eyes shut."

The excitement in Jamie’s face met something harder for the first time, and Alan watched his son take it.

Then Garcia pointed back at the truth that mattered.

"But understand this," he said. "Tranmere did not need to send this. If they only wanted another look at you, they’d have offered another trial, or nothing at all. Instead they watched you for a week, sat in a room, argued about you, and still put your name on paper." He let that sit. "Clubs don’t do that for a boy they’re not serious about."

By the time they stood up, something had changed in the room.

Alan had walked in hoping Garcia would simply hand him good news and a pen. He left understanding that Garcia was not only the man who had found his son. He was the man standing between his son and the small print, and that was worth more than a quick yes.

"The next step is the signing meeting," Garcia said. "We go in, we ask every question on that list, and only then does Jamie sign. Not before."

Jamie picked up his copy of the offer and held it like it weighed more than paper.

His eyes went one last time to the line near the top, the one printed in plain black letters above everything else.

Player: Jamie Holt.

Not trialist. Not number forty-seven. Not the released boy from Northgate.

A player a club was willing to build.

Garcia drove back to his parents’ house as the light was going.

The kitchen had his mother in it and the television going low, and his father lifted a hand without looking up from the racing pages. Garcia said the meeting had gone fine, that there was a real offer on the table, and left the detail there, because the detail was for the family it belonged to.

He went up to his old bedroom.

It was the same room it had always been, a single bed against one wall, faded marks on the paint where posters used to hang, and the desk under the window with the laptop on it and the G11 folder beside the cold coffee from the morning. A grown man rebuilding an agency out of the room he had grown up in.

He set Jamie’s file down on the desk and did not feel small about it. It had been a good day. The room could stay borrowed a while longer.

He left the phone face-up beside the laptop and sat down to start writing the questions out properly for the meeting.