Chapter 14: Chapter 14: Ten Minutes I
The ground was still busy behind them.
Coaches were calling the last players off the far pitch while parents found each other in the car park, some already moving toward the exit with children in tow and folding chairs tucked under their arms. Somewhere along the fence to the left, an agent was already talking to a family, his hand out and his voice low and warm. The whole scene was folding up around Garcia like a market packing away at the end of the day.
This was his first real conversation as G11, with one guarded father, one sixteen-year-old who had already been told he was not good enough, and no room to get it wrong.
He opened his mouth to speak, and the system appeared.
[SIDE MISSION GENERATED]
Mission: Convince Jamie Holt’s Guardian.
Objective: Secure a follow-up meeting with Jamie Holt and his guardian.
Reward:
— Negotiation SP +10
— Client Management SP +10
Failure Penalty: None.
Garcia read it in one pass without letting his face move.
Read once, react to nothing, and move.
He put his eyes back on the father.
"So," the father said. "Ten minutes."
Garcia did not launch into it.
He had spent six years watching agents rush into pitches the second they had an opening, only to lose rooms they should have owned because they moved too fast and left the other person standing outside a conversation they had not joined yet.
He kept his voice level and started with the simplest thing.
"My name is Gabriel Garcia. I run G11 Sports Management — independent, licensed, no club affiliation. I’m not here to tell you your son is the next world star, and I’m not here to ask him to sign anything today. I watched his twenty minutes at right-back, and I wanted to speak to you about what I saw in those twenty minutes specifically."
The father listened with his arms at his sides. "You said most of that already."
"I know," Garcia said. "I’m saying it again because I want to be clear about what I am before I say anything else. I’m not a club scout. I’m an agent with my own company, and I’m here because of what your son did on that pitch."
The father shifted the bag on his shoulder. "Right. And what is it you think you saw?"
Garcia had already decided how to answer. It was the same answer he would have given with or without the system behind it. He talked about the sixty-ninth minute, when the winger drove at Jamie on the outside and got half a step. Jamie’s hips had turned the wrong way, but his recovery in the next two strides cut the angle before the cross could come.
The father listened without moving.
"I’m Alan, by the way," he said when Garcia paused. "Alan Holt."
"Mr. Holt." Garcia nodded.
"Then the through ball two minutes later," Garcia said. "Jamie moved before the pass was played, not after. Before the foot came through the ball. He stepped across the run, cut it out, and laid it back in one touch. The attack was already dead before most people on the fence knew it had started."
Jamie had been looking at the ground since Garcia started, but he looked up at that.
"And the overlap on the right side," Garcia went on. "He timed it correctly, showed for the ball, and the Blue midfielder ignored him completely. Most players that age react to being ignored. They drop their shoulders, or they stop making the run the next time. Jamie tracked back and got on with it."
The father stayed quiet for a moment.
"Coaches have said he’s got pace," he said. "Different coaches, different places. They always say that first."
"He has pace," Garcia said. "That is not what made me walk over here."
The father looked at Garcia more directly than before.
"Why you, though?" he said. "You said nobody else came over. So either everyone else missed something, or they saw something you didn’t."
Garcia took the question without flinching.
"Both," he said. "The players most people were tracking today were obvious. They were good in ways that are simple to notice, like a goal, a direct run, something you can point at." He paused. "Right-back is a difficult position to scout because most of what a good right-back does well disappears. The cross gets blocked, the channel gets covered, and the danger stops before it arrives, so nobody claps for it."
Alan Holt glanced at his son, then looked back at Garcia.
"Most people watch the ball first," Garcia said. "I was watching what happened before the ball arrived. Jamie’s game lives in those moments."
"That sounds like something people say," the father said, careful rather than hostile.
"I know it does," Garcia said. "That is why I gave you the specific minutes. The sixty-ninth, the seventy-first, and the seventy-third. That is not something you say. That is something you watched."
The father did not answer, but he did not look away either.
Then he asked, "And what’s wrong with him?"
Garcia had been waiting for that question.
"He doesn’t trust himself on the ball when someone is closing him down," Garcia said. "The backward pass in the seventy-third minute was the clearest example. He had a yard on the winger and the space to play forward, but he took the safe option before he had finished deciding. His body went backward while his brain was still working out whether to go forward."
Jamie’s jaw tightened.
"That is fixable," Garcia said. "It is a confidence problem, not a technical one. But it is real, and I would rather say it plainly than pretend it is not there."
"They said that at Millwall."
Jamie said it quietly, not quite looking at Garcia and not quite looking at his father. His eyes stayed somewhere between them, and his free hand had moved to the strap of his bag without him seeming to notice.
"That I was too safe," he said. His voice had gone flat in the way a voice does when something has been said often enough that there is no fresh reaction left for it. "That I had the pace and the reading, but I kept going backward."
He stopped there, and the look on his face said he had already said more than he meant to.
Garcia did not rush to fill the silence.
"The criticism is not wrong," he said. "But it is not the complete picture either."
Jamie looked up.
"A coach who tells you that you play too safe is describing the symptom," Garcia said. "That does not mean they are wrong about the symptom. But recovery speed from a standing start, defensive reading before the ball is played, and the timing on that overlap today are not things you can drill into a player from the outside. You either have those instincts or you do not." He paused. "The ball work can be trained. The other things are harder to create."
Jamie said nothing, though something in the way he stood had changed.
His father noticed it too.
"So what can you actually do?" Alan asked.
