The Football Agent System

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: An Old Rival

His father was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee when Garcia came downstairs at half seven.

The car key was already on the surface in front of him.

Garcia picked it up. "Thank you."

His father took a slow drink. "Bring it back with the same petrol it left with. And no scratches."

"Understood," Garcia said.

His father nodded once and went back to his cup, and that was the whole conversation.

Garcia drove out of the suburb at a quarter to eight with the trial notice open on his phone in the holder. Three scans. No contacts who would return his calls. No room to waste the morning on the wrong player.

He had been to dozens of trial sessions exactly like this one before, and every time he had arrived knowing who he was and what he represented. Today he was arriving as a name on a blacklist with a borrowed car and a skill nobody else on the touchline had ever heard of.

That would have to be enough.

The drive to Croydon took just under thirty minutes and the radio stayed off.

He parked at the far end of the car park, away from the vehicles clustered nearest the gate.

The trial ground was already live. Parents lined the fence with coffee cups and phones raised. Players stretched on the near pitch in loose groups. Three coaches stood near the halfway line with clipboards, and two scouts were positioned separately along the touchline, not speaking to each other.

The near pitch had a rut in front of both goals where the grass had given up. The second pitch was in better shape and that was where the match would be played.

The match was a proper 11 vs 11. Red bibs against blue bibs, a full referee, and two assistants.

Garcia paid his observer fee at the gate and found a position along the roped-off touchline with a clear line of sight to both pitches.

He did not introduce himself to anyone.

He took out his notebook and waited.

Around him, the other observers were already talking. A father two spots along was explaining something to the man beside him, one hand moving with the authority of someone who had been coming to these things for years. One of the scouts stood with his arms folded and his eyes on the warm-up and said nothing to anyone.

Garcia looked at the pitch.

Some of the players were burning energy in the warm-up, moving too hard and too fast. Others had already gone quiet and drawn inward.

A striker in red near the centre circle stood bouncing on his heels, staring at nothing in particular.

Garcia made a note of the number.

TWEET.

The match began.

Red pressed high from the first minute. Blue tried to play out and found early space, so the game opened up quickly rather than tightening.

Garcia watched the shape before he watched individual players. He needed to know who functioned inside the structure and who only looked useful when the game broke open and handed them room. Those were two different problems.

Callum Price registered first.

He played on Red’s right wing and was not subtle about his ability. In the fourth minute he took a throw-in on the touchline, set his feet, and drove past his full-back with a single step to force a corner.

"Yes!" The woman two spots along slapped the fence rail with her palm.

The scout nearest Garcia uncrossed his arms and reached for his notebook.

Price had pace and directness, and Garcia could see the logic in both reactions.

But his head dropped every time he entered the final third.

Twice he looked down at the ball when he should have been looking at the options in front of him, and twice the moment closed before he could act on it.

Garcia wrote the name down and drew a question mark alongside it.

Harry Cole was the Blue centre-back on the far side. He won his headers cleanly, stepped into tackles ahead of the striker, and coached his back four loud enough that coaches on the near side turned to look.

In the eighteenth minute, Elliot Ward dragged him away from the channel with a wide run, and Cole turned stiffly to recover and left a gap in the centre that Ward’s teammates failed to find.

That stiffness had a ceiling.

Noah Bennett, Blue’s central midfielder, kept possession and stayed tidy. He pressed in the right moments and lost the ball once in twenty minutes.

He also had a forward pass available in the thirty-third minute that would have split Red’s midfield, and he chose the sideways option instead.

A midfielder who avoided risk at an open trial had already decided what mattered more to him.

Garcia crossed him off.

Mason Clarke, the Red left-back, ran harder than anyone on the pitch. His crossing was poor and his positioning took two adjustments to fix each time, but he covered the ground a second time without being asked and did not sulk about either correction.

That mattered. But it was not enough on its own.

Then there was Elliot Ward.

Ward was having a bad half on paper.

His first touch got away from him in the third minute and cost Red a counter. Cole bullied him off the ball twice. In the twenty-seventh minute a half-chance fell his way and he snatched at it and sent it wide.

"Oh." The man to Garcia’s right turned his back to the pitch for a second.

But Garcia kept watching him.

His movement was separate from his results.

Ward checked his shoulder before every ball was played into the area, not after it arrived.

He slipped between the two Blue centre-backs in the spaces that were about to become dangerous, not the spaces where the ball was already going.

In the thirty-eighth minute he came short to receive and immediately laid it off, then turned and ran into the channel behind Cole before the midfielder had even looked up. The ball never came. But the run was already there, already correct, while everyone else on the pitch was still working out where to be.

Three times in the first half he arrived early into a position that should have hurt Blue’s defence, and three times the pass did not find him because the Red midfielders were not reading the same picture he was.

His body was not ready for the level his football brain was working at. That gap between the two things was either the whole problem or the whole opportunity.

Garcia drew a circle around Ward’s name and put the pen down.

TWEET.

Five names. No clean answers.

The players went to their benches.

A woman two yards to Garcia’s left was pointing toward the pitch and speaking quickly. The man beside her was Oliver Whitmore.

They had crossed paths at agents’ events and club visits more times than Garcia could place.

Oliver saw him and the smile appeared at once.

"Garcia." He said the name at a volume that carried a few yards in both directions. He came over with his hand out. "How long has it been?"