The morning after the evaluation, Garcia was at his desk before the house woke up.

The curtains were half open, and grey light lay flat across the laptop screen.

Jay’s clip was paused where it always seemed to pause. A tired final ball, dragging wide of the post, the sixth rep of a drill that had started so well.

Rafi’s notes sat beside a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.

The room was the same cramped, practical space it had always been. The cheap folder. The phone charging badly off a loose cable. Tabs open across the screen, lower-league squads, one after another.

The old pressure of it had not changed either. A real client. No real money.

Garcia was not excited. He had seen the talent, and he had seen the thing underneath it.

Jay was twenty-one, outside the clean youth route, and no senior club was going to care about a sad story if the fourth and fifth actions died under fatigue.

That was the whole problem in one line.

He had a player worth saving, and nobody had a reason to risk him.

He started where he had to start. England.

He sent Jay’s profile and the rough clip out to the contacts who still answered him, the ones the blacklist had not scared off completely.

He worked down the ladder. A couple of League Two names first. Then National League. Then further down, toward the serious Step 2 sides where a good free agent could still matter.

The replies came back over the next two days, and none of them insulted the player.

That was the hard part. If they had called Jay rubbish, Garcia could have argued. They did not.

They gave him football reasons.

Trial groups are done for pre-season. Squad’s set. Can’t take an unknown wide man with no recent senior minutes this late. Anyone coming in now has to be ready to play Saturday, mate. No time to bed anyone in.

He read them at the pitch fence, between Rafi’s drills, thumb moving down the screen while Jay sprinted somewhere behind him.

He wrote one word in his notebook and kept underlining it until the pen went through the page.

Risky.

Not bad. Not finished. Risky.

Jay was not being rejected because he could not play. He was being rejected because the timing made him dangerous to trust.

While the doors closed on the phone, Rafi went to work on the reason they were closing.

The drill looked like nothing from the outside. Receive wide. Attack the full-back. Deliver. Sprint back. Reset. Go again.

TWEET.

The first rep was sharp enough to remind Garcia why he was doing any of this.

Jay took it wide, stood the defender up, waited for the weight to shift, and slid inside. The cutback was clean and hard across the six-yard line.

THWACK.

The second still carried a threat. A shade slower off the turn, but the ball was on the money.

By the fourth, his body started stealing from him.

The recovery sprint got heavier. His first touch came a fraction long, and he had to stretch for it instead of gliding onto it.

By the fifth, the final ball lost its weight. The cutback came underhit, and the decision to play it arrived a beat late, after the runner had already gone.

Jay stood with his hands on his knees, chest heaving, sweat running off his jaw onto the grass.

His face was not the face of a man who had been beaten by a better player.

It was the face of a man being taken apart by the same task done too many times, and knowing it, and hating it.

Garcia said nothing.

The old version of him would have called something encouraging across the pitch, to feel useful. He had learned better. The hard part belonged to the coach, and Rafi did not deal in comfort.

"Again," Rafi said. "You don’t get to breathe on a Saturday."

Jay swore under his breath, and went again.

By the end of the first week, Garcia understood the market better than he wanted to.

It was not one club being difficult. It was all of them saying versions of the same thing.

One asked for recent match footage, and Garcia did not have any worth sending.

One asked who Jay had played against lately, and the honest answer was nobody a scout would recognise.

One said their only trial week had already come and gone.

And one put it more plainly than the rest. Free agents are everywhere this time of year. Useful ones aren’t. Prove he’s the second kind and we’ll talk.

That was the whole of it. Senior football did not pay for potential. It paid for proof.

Garcia watched Jay reset for another rep and let himself compare the two clients for a moment.

Jamie had time. Jamie was sixteen, walking into a pathway with a floor built under him, where the club expected him to be raw and planned to fix it slowly.

Jay had no floor. Jay had a gap, and he had to clear it in one jump, with a body that already needed to survive the level he was aiming at.

Nobody was going to lower the bar for a story.

Ben called near the end of that first week, when Garcia had spent days staring at closed English doors.

He did not sound like a man about to save anyone. He sounded tired of watching Garcia stare at the same wall.

"You still only phoning English numbers?"

"They’re the ones who know me."

"They’re the ones who blacklisted you," Ben said. "Half of them, anyway." He let that land. "You used to have a map bigger than one island, Gabriel. You forget that, or you just scared to use it?"

Garcia did not answer straight away.

"France," Ben said. "You still had a name there once. Start there before you convince yourself the whole world’s shut."

France, for half a scene, felt like something.

Garcia sent the profile to two old contacts, and one of them replied faster than he expected. The other asked to see the clip.