Chapter 48: Chapter 48: Not One of Ours II
The development coach looked back at the sheet in front of Pratt, then around the table.
"Then why," he said, quietly, "are we discussing him like a maybe?"
It was not loud and it was not a performance. That was what made it land. He had not raised his voice once.
"He’s a trialist," Doyle said. "We can’t discuss him as anything else until there’s an offer on the table."
"I understand the order of things." The development coach folded his hands. "I’m asking why a player who did what’s on that screen is being weighed up like we’re deciding whether he’s worth a second look. You don’t get many who can be beaten and then take the same player’s game off him by the second half. I’ve watched a lot of them. I don’t see it often."
Mercer did not back off, because backing off was not the point.
"I’m not weighing up whether to keep him," he said. "I want him kept. I’m weighing up how we keep him without wrecking what’s good about him."
"Which is what."
"Which is the U18s, first," Mercer said. "Properly. He needs the structure. He needs to put weight on, he needs his touch to stop betraying him when it gets tight, he needs reps crossing under pressure instead of in space. He gets that with my group. He does not get it by being thrown in with bodies twice his size before he’s ready for them."
The development coach listened to all of it without interrupting, which from him was its own kind of answer.
"I’m not asking you to throw him in," he said. "I’m not asking for a U21 promotion and I’m not asking for him full-time. I’m asking for access. If he signs and he keeps doing what he did yesterday, I want to be able to pull him into selected sessions. The odd match block. Situations where the pressure’s quicker and the men are older, so he keeps meeting the thing that stretches him."
"And if you stretch him too far, too soon," Mercer said, "you put the confidence we just watched grow straight back in the bin."
"Then we manage it." The development coach said it flatly, like it was the obvious half nobody was disagreeing with. "Nobody’s talking about breaking him. We’re talking about not wasting him."
Doyle let the two of them sit with it for a moment, because both were right and he knew it.
One wanted to protect the development. The other wanted to accelerate it. Neither of them was wrong, and the club’s whole job was the space between the two.
"Then it’s the same answer with two halves to it," Doyle said eventually. "He signs into the U18 pathway. That’s the base. He trains with Mercer’s group, he develops there, he builds the body and the security first."
He looked down the table at the development coach.
"And if he keeps progressing, your staff can call him into selected sessions or a match block, by agreement. Not on a whim. Approved, each time, with Mercer in the conversation."
Mercer thought about it and gave a short nod. "I can work with that. The base is mine. The exposure’s managed."
"It’s managed," the development coach agreed. "I get access if he earns it. That’s all I came in for."
It was not a crown handed to a sixteen-year-old. It was a pathway with a ceiling drawn high enough to stretch toward, and a floor solid enough that the stretching would not snap him. That was the most any of them could honestly offer a boy that age.
Doyle put his pen down and brought up the part that had nothing to do with football.
"Before any of this becomes an offer, it has to stand up off the grass," he said. "He’s sixteen. We need guardian consent, and it has to be clean. Education has to be sorted around it. Welfare, travel, the physical load, all of it managed by us, not assumed."
He looked around the table.
"And he’s represented. Garcia. So whatever we put forward has to be clear enough that the family and the agent read exactly what it is, and exactly what it isn’t. No line in it that lets anyone walk out of a room thinking we’ve promised him professional football. We haven’t, and we can’t, and I won’t have it written so it sounds like we have."
Nobody argued with that, because that part was the club, not the coaching, and it was the part that made the offer real instead of a nice idea in a room.
Across the city, Garcia sat at his kitchen table with his laptop open and a coffee he had let go cold beside it.
He had not opened anything useful in twenty minutes. He had checked his inbox, found nothing, and closed it, and then opened it again without deciding to.
His phone rang. Alan.
"Anything?" Alan said, before Garcia had finished saying his name.
"Nothing yet."
"It’s been a day. Is that bad?" There was a sound on the line of Alan moving around a room that did not need him moving around it. "If it was a no, they’d have said no by now, wouldn’t they?"
"No isn’t what takes time," Garcia said. "No is easy and quick. A club only takes its time when there’s something to actually decide. Silence today is a good sign, not a bad one."
"You’re sure."
"I’ve sat on the other side of these," Garcia said. "Stop staring at your phone. It won’t ring faster."
He heard Alan say something that was probably agreement and definitely not action, because the man would be looking at his phone again within the minute. Garcia could hardly blame him.
A notification chimed on his own laptop, and he had the inbox open before he had told his hand to do it.
It was nothing. A newsletter.
He closed it and let out a slow breath, and did not say a word about how fast he had moved for it.
Back in the room, the football conclusion settled into place.
Jamie was worth an offer. The U18 pathway was the base, the development exposure was a staff-managed add-on rather than anything promised to the player, and both coaches had a reason to live with the shape of it. Mercer because the boy would get the environment he needed. The development coach because the door stayed open if Jamie kept knocking on it.
Nobody made a speech about it. The room simply moved past a question it had been holding all morning, the question of whether they wanted him, and arrived at the only one left.
How they offered it.
Doyle closed the football side of it with the page in front of him.
"So we’re agreed. U18 pathway first. Development exposure by staff agreement, nothing automatic. No promise to the player or the family beyond what this club can actually support."
He got nods around the table, and then he looked toward the folder at the end of it, and the administrator sitting quietly behind it who had not needed to say anything until now.
"Right," Doyle said. "Now let’s discuss what type of contract we offer him."
