The Football Agent System
Chapter 56: The Sixth Action.
Morning came grey through the thin curtains of Garcia’s old bedroom.
He had been up before it.
Jamie’s signed pathway notes sat squared on the desk, the Tranmere badge printed at the top of the first sheet. Beside them lay the cheap G11 folder, and above the desk were the same faded marks where his teenage posters used to hang.
The win was four days old, and it had put nothing in his pocket.
That was the shape of it now. A real client at a real club, and a bank balance that did not know the difference.
He had told Alan the truth about commission. The truth had a cost, and he was the one paying it.
His laptop was open to a different page this morning.
Trial dates. Free-agent notes. Lower-league squads with a gap out wide. The beginnings of a map for a twenty-one-year-old who had spent years being nobody’s problem.
But he could not call a single club yet.
Before he sold anyone on Jay Cole, he had to know Jay Cole could still train at a level worth selling.
Then the panel opened on its own.
[SIDE MISSION GENERATED]
Mission: Test Jay Cole’s Way Back
Objective: Complete Jay Cole’s first structured evaluation session and determine whether he is ready for a trial pathway.
Conditions:
— Jay Cole must attend the session.
— A qualified coach must evaluate him.
— Current sharpness, training rhythm, repeated action quality, and end product must be assessed.
— Do not approach clubs before the evaluation is complete.
Reward:
— Skill Points +250
— Scouting SP +15
— Client Management SP +15
— Network SP +5
Failure Penalty:
— Jay Cole’s trust decreases.
— Jay Cole’s return window narrows.
Garcia read it once and almost smiled.
The system was telling him to do the exact thing his own judgment already wanted. Do not run at clubs with a player he had not seen train. Do not sell a version of Jay that might not exist anymore.
Test him first.
He closed the panel and reached for his phone.
Rafi answered on the fourth ring, already suspicious.
"It’s early."
"I need a pitch and an hour of your eyes," Garcia said. "One evaluation. Twenty-one-year-old winger, free agent."
There was a pause on the line, the kind Rafi used when he was reading between the words.
"You never call me early unless something’s wrong."
"Nothing’s wrong. I just want him looked at properly before I do anything with him."
"Looked at for what?"
"I’ll tell you at the pitch." Garcia kept it flat. "Not on the phone."
Rafi made a sound that was half a laugh and half a complaint.
"Course you will," he said. "It’s always at the pitch with you."
He named a time and hung up.
Garcia looked at the dead screen for a second.
Serious football did not get discussed over a phone if you could help it. Rafi knew that as well as he did. That was half of why he trusted the man.
The pitch was nothing to look at, which suited the budget.
Early light, damp grass, a bag of cones, a metal fence with tired nets sagging behind the goals. A small car park with two cars in it.
Garcia had paid for the hour out of money he did not really have, the same way he had paid for everything since G11 started.
Another player. Another pitch. Another gamble with his own name on it.
He was getting used to the feeling. He was not sure that was a good thing.
Rafi was already there when Garcia arrived.
He was shorter than Garcia but built heavier through the shoulders, with close-cropped hair and a trimmed beard going grey at the edges. He had the permanent squint of a man who had spent twenty years judging players under bad training-ground light.
Black tracksuit. Old trainers. A whistle on a cord around his neck, and a cone bag already in one hand.
He looked like a coach before he said a word. Practical, mildly irritated, and ready.
"Go on then," Rafi said, dropping the bag. "What’s wrong with him."
"Morning to you too."
"Morning. What’s wrong with him."
Garcia started to answer, but Rafi held up a hand.
"Before any of that," Rafi said. "The Holt boy. All those weeks. The pitches, the sessions, the reports I wrote up for you at night." He tapped his own chest. "You still owe me for that. And now you’re stood here with another one."
"I know."
"You know." Rafi shook his head. "He knows, he says, and turns up with a second project."
"Add it together," Garcia said. "The Jamie fee and this. Put it on one bill. I’ll clear it soon."
"Soon." Rafi said the word like it tasted bad. "You know what soon’s worth to a man paying a mortgage?"
Garcia did not argue. There was nothing to argue with. Rafi’s time had a value, and Garcia had been spending it on credit.
But the history between them was long enough that the complaint was not a no. It was Rafi making him feel it first.
"He signed," Garcia said.
Rafi stopped.
"Who signed."
"Jamie. Tranmere. Four days ago." Garcia let it sit. "Scholarship pathway. U18s as his base. Selected development-group work when the staff decide he’s ready. Professional framework written in for when he turns seventeen, subject to all the usual conditions."
Rafi looked away toward the empty pitch, and something moved in his face that he did not bother to hide.
"Bloody hell," he said quietly.
He had put real work into that boy. He had watched him arrive unable to hold his line under pressure and leave able to read a whole flank. Part of that was on the sheet at Tranmere now, even if his name would never be.
Then he turned back.
"You still owe me," he said.
"I still owe you."
"Right." Rafi picked the cone bag back up. "As long as we’re clear. Now tell me about this winger."
Garcia gave him the football.
"He’s not inactive, and he’s not washed," he said. "He was playing until recently. Just not inside anything that would sharpen him."
"So what’s the good part."
"The isolation. He controls it. He slows the defender down, waits for the weight to shift onto the wrong foot, and only then does he go inside. He’s not quick out of a trick. He’s clever out of stillness." Garcia nodded toward the line. "That kind of wide-duel brain, you can’t fake it and you can’t coach it into someone who hasn’t got it."
"And the bad part, since you called me at dawn."
"Repeatability," Garcia said. "Whether he can put the final action on the end of it again and again. First rep, third rep, fine. It’s the fourth and fifth I don’t trust yet."
Rafi narrowed the squint further.
"You saw all that where?"
"Around."
"Around." Rafi was not a stupid man, and he did not pretend to be. "You’ve watched him once. In a cage, you said. And you can give me his weight-shift reading and his rep tolerance off one look?"
Garcia shrugged.
"Agents have analysis eyes," he said. "Watching football’s about the only thing I’m still good at."
Rafi snorted. But he let it go, because the description was too specific to laugh off, and because Garcia had been right about Jamie.
Golden Eye had handed him the weakness weeks ago, Garcia thought. Recommended focus. End product after the inside movement.
He kept his face still and said none of it.
Jay arrived ten minutes later.
He came in a fitted dark training top, black shorts, white socks pulled high, and boots that had been cleaned with care even though the leather was creased and old.
Tall, low-cut hair, the long-legged frame of a winger. His eyes were tired in the way Garcia had seen at the café, but he did not carry himself like a beaten man.
He did not look fresh. He did not look finished either.
He looked like someone who still respected the game, even after the game had stopped respecting him.
Rafi did not offer a warm hello.
He looked Jay over the way he looked at every player he had not decided about yet, from the boots up, reading the body before the ball.
Jay held the look. He did not puff his chest and he did not shrink.
He was twenty-one, not sixteen. There was none of Jamie’s open nerves in him, just a guarded, grown quiet.
"Jay, this is Rafi," Garcia said. "He’s running you today. Do what he says."
Then Garcia stepped back to the fence.
This part was not his. It belonged to the coach and the player now.
Rafi started him easy, and easy told him plenty.
Jay warmed up clean. He moved without stiffness, rolled his ankles out, jogged the width, and came back breathing steady.
Then the ball.
Rafi rolled the first ones in firm, and Jay took them like they were nothing. He opened his hips before the ball arrived, took it across his body, and hid where it was going with a drop of the shoulder.
He carried it with his head up, the ball tied to his laces, that balance Garcia had clocked in the cage still sitting in his feet.
Rafi looked twice. He did not mean to, but he did.
The player was still in there. This was not a rebuild from zero.