Chapter 49: Chapter 49: Not Trialist Anymore I
The email came in before the house had properly woken up.
G11 did not have an office. It had the desk in Garcia’s old bedroom at his parents’ house, the same desk he had done his homework on years ago, with a laptop on it now and a stack of printed scouting notes beside Jamie’s match report from the week.
A coffee was going cold near his elbow.
The G11 logo sat on the front of a cheap cardboard folder that looked newer than everything around it, because everything around it belonged to a younger version of him, and the agency did not.
Garcia did not look like a man who ran an agency. He looked like a man under pressure.
His pale shirt had the sleeves rolled to the forearms, his dark hair was combed back but not perfectly, and his eyes carried the tired focus of someone who had spent two days rereading small print because one missed line could cost a sixteen-year-old his year.
The assessment week had ended on the Friday.
Jamie and Alan had gone home, and the days since had been quiet, the kind of quiet Garcia had told Alan to trust and then failed to trust himself, checking the inbox more often than the work needed.
This morning it was there.
Jamie Holt — Academy Scholarship Pathway Offer.
He set the coffee down and did not open it straight away.
The subject line told him Tranmere had decided something.
It did not tell him whether the something was strong, thin, or full of the small traps clubs left for families who were too happy to read it carefully.
Then he opened it.
He read it slowly, the way he read everything that mattered.
He did not let his eyes jump to the bottom looking for a single word that would settle it, because contracts did not work that way and neither did clubs.
The lines that mattered came one at a time.
Jamie Holt is offered a place on the club’s Under-18 Academy Scholarship Pathway, the first one read, with primary placement in the Under-18 squad.
A few lines down: selected development-group exposure at the discretion of academy and development staff.
Then the parts a father would seize on. A scholarship allowance. Education and welfare obligations the club would carry. And lower still, the line that made him stop and read it twice.
A professional contract framework, to commence upon the player becoming eligible at seventeen, subject to final approval, registration, medical clearance, and continued development.
Garcia let the breath out through his nose.
It was not a vague invitation to come back for another look. It was a pathway, written down, with Jamie’s name at the top of it. But it was not a first-team contract, it was not guaranteed senior football, and it was not professional status today.
His small smile only came after he had seen the whole shape of it.
The system read it with him.
It did not flash or congratulate him. It surfaced the contract the way it surfaced everything, quietly, in a panel that sat over the document while his eyes moved down the page.
[CONTRACT REVIEW — RED FLAGS]
Document: Under-18 Academy Scholarship Pathway Offer Player: Jamie Holt Club: Tranmere Rovers
Flagged Points:
— Scholarship allowance is fixed support, not a professional salary.
— Development-group exposure is discretionary, not guaranteed game time.
— Professional contract framework is conditional, not a binding professional deal.
— Education and welfare obligations require guardian understanding and consent.
— Travel and accommodation support not specified. Clarify before signing.
— Agency commission: none payable on the scholarship element.
Note: Offer is legitimate and standard for the player’s age and level. No predatory clauses detected.
Garcia read the last line about commission and felt nothing drop.
He had expected it. A boy of sixteen on a scholarship did not pay an agent, and an agent who tried to take money from one was the kind of agent Garcia had spent his whole rebuild trying not to be.
The reward here was not in the panel. It was in the subject line. G11 had taken its first client from a released sixteen-year-old at an open camp to a real academy offer at a real club.
That was the thing that mattered, and the system had nothing to do with that part.
He leaned back in the chair and let it settle.
He did not punch the air. There was no one in the room to see it and nothing in the moment that asked for it. He read Jamie’s name again, then the club’s name, then the discretionary line about the development group, the one the development coach had pushed for in a room Jamie would never see.
No payday yet, he thought. But proof.
He had built nothing here by squeezing a family. He had built it by getting a boy into the right rooms and standing over the paperwork when it arrived, and that was a different way to run an agency from the one that had put his name on a blacklist in the first place.
He picked the phone up.
He called Alan instead of typing a message that would only be misread.
Alan answered on the second ring, and his voice came before anything else, rough and tight, the voice of a man who had not slept properly in days and was already braced against hoping.
"Gabriel."
"Alan. It came through this morning."
There was a silence on the line. Garcia could hear him stop moving.
"Is it good?" Alan asked. Two words, and they cost him something.
"It’s good." Garcia kept his voice level, because the wrong amount of excitement now would send Alan somewhere they could not afford yet. "It’s good, but we read it properly before anyone celebrates. There’s nothing wrong in it. There’s just things in it you need to understand before Jamie signs anything."
"Does Jamie need to be there?"
"Yes. He needs to hear what’s being offered to him, in plain words, from me." Garcia looked at the folder on the desk. "I’ll come to you this afternoon. Get Jamie there, sit him down, and we go through the whole thing together."
Alan said the door would be open. He did not say thank you, because his throat clearly would not have managed it, and Garcia did not need it.
He drove over that afternoon.
Alan’s house was small and tidy in the way of a home kept up by a man who did everything himself. He answered the door still in his work jacket, broad through the shoulders and heavy around the eyes, with the look of a working father at the end of a long run of early mornings. His hands were rough, and they kept opening and closing at his sides before Garcia had said a word.
Jamie was already at the kitchen table.
He looked young in the chair, lean and restless, all sharp knees and the muscle of a body still deciding what it would become, in a plain black tracksuit with his hair still slightly damp. His eyes kept dropping to the printed offer in front of him, to the Tranmere badge at the top of the page, then pulling away, then going back to it.
One of them looked like the weight. The other looked like the future, trying not to move too fast.
Garcia pulled out a chair and laid his copy of the offer flat on the table where both of them could see it.
