Chapter 74: Chapter 73: The File
(Garcia POV)
The house was still asleep when Garcia sat down at the desk.
Grey light came through the gap in the curtains, thin and cold, the kind that told him autumn had settled in properly. He left the main light off.
The desk lamp was enough, angled down over a mess he had built without ever quite clearing it.
On the left side, Jamie’s folder sat closed and squared off, corners lined up with the edge of the desk. It had not moved in three days.
On the right, Jay’s file was the opposite of closed.
Passport scans lay printed and curling slightly at the edges. A club invitation letter sat under the stapler, one staple already through the corner because he had run out of paperclips two weeks ago.
The flight confirmation was folded into thirds from being carried in his pocket to check against the accommodation email, which sat beside it with three lines highlighted in yellow.
A note from Rafi, torn off a pad: still owed for Aug + Sept. not chasing you. just so it’s written somewhere.
He had not thrown it away.
He turned to the notebook last, open to a page he had been avoiding for two days.
He picked up the pen and wrote a single figure at the top.
£3,000.
He looked at it longer than he wanted to.
Then he broke it down, because a number on its own was just a number, and he needed to know what it was made of before he decided what to do about it.
Registration and setup, back in spring, when his father had wired the first amount without being asked twice.
Pitch hire for Jay’s early sessions, before Rafi cut his rate to something closer to nothing.
Petrol and train fares to Tranmere, to Preston, to every ground where Jamie had needed someone at the barrier.
Printing — folders, contracts, four drafts of a representation agreement before Theo signed off on the wording.
Admin costs, the small ones that added up without announcing themselves: notarised copies, courier fees, an accreditation form that had cost money nobody warned him about.
And now Jay’s prep. Flights. A month of accommodation. None of it had come from G11.
All of it had come from two people who had never once asked when it was coming back.
He capped the pen and slid the notebook half an inch to the side. Not away. Just far enough that he could reach past it for Jamie’s folder.
G11 had something now that it had not had in April. Proof.
A signed client on an academy pathway, minutes in his legs, a name coaches used without being reminded who he was. But proof did not pay for stamps.
Jamie’s representation agreement covered the scholarship, and the scholarship carried no commission, exactly the way the system had told him the day he first read the offer through — a boy on a pathway, not yet a transaction.
There would be money on the other side of seventeen, if Jamie made it that far. Not before.
Rafi had worked through all of it on credit, more or less because Garcia had asked him to without ever using those exact words. Rafi had never once made him say them out loud.
He opened Jamie’s folder flat on the desk.
Nothing dramatic sat inside it. That was the point of a folder like this — dates, not verdicts.
A column of fixtures with scorelines pencilled beside them. Minutes played, written in his own shorthand.
A line from Mercer, relayed through Alan after a call Garcia had not sat in on: keep doing what he’s doing.
His own notes underneath, dated and short.
Preston, 1–1. Started, 90. Cross for the equaliser. Late run cost possession, 73rd minute — noted, not repeated since.
Bolton (h). Off the bench, final 20. Game already won. Used to see it out, not to change it.
Salford (a). Rested. Heavy academy week, Mercer’s call, not injury.
Wrexham (h). Started. Overlap on the right forced the corner for the second goal. Ethan on the bench again. Not happy about it.
A folder was a record. It was not a verdict, and Garcia had learned a long time ago not to confuse the two.
The verdict came from somewhere else.
The window opened without him asking for it, the way it did now for a client on the books rather than a name in a crowd.
Jamie had stopped being someone Garcia had to scan. He was someone the system simply kept.
[CLIENT DEVELOPMENT UPDATE]
Client: Jamie Holt Club: Tranmere Rovers U18 Position: Right Back
Current Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2.4) Potential Rating: ★★★★★ (5.0)
Development Trend: Positive Status: Active academy pathway
Recent Movement: — U18 minutes stabilising — Match sharpness improving — Attacking timing developing — Decision-making under fatigue still inconsistent — Internal competition for minutes remains active
Garcia read it once, then set it against the folder beside it, line for line.
Minutes stabilising. That was Bolton, sixty minutes short of a false story and twenty real ones instead.
Match sharpness improving. That was two months of Tuesday video sessions and Wednesday gym work turning into a body that recovered faster between matches than it had in September.
Decision-making under fatigue still inconsistent — Garcia thought of Preston, seventy-third minute, the run that had nearly cost them a goal. The system had not forgotten it either.
Internal competition for minutes remains active. Ethan. Still on the bench, still watching, still exactly as dangerous as the day Garcia first heard his name.
He closed the folder.
It was not a triumphant gesture. He did not lean back like a man who had won something.
But something in his chest loosened half a turn, because Jamie was not the fire he had been in July.
He had a club. He had a place in a rotation, contested but real. He had a school programme feeding him coursework, a bus full of teammates who knew his name, a right-back’s job that had stopped being an audition and started being a career, however early.
He was not finished. But he was not an emergency.
Garcia let himself sit inside that for exactly as long as it took to reach across the desk and pull Jay’s file toward him.
There was no folder for Jay. Not yet.
Only a file, growing thicker by the week, with nothing in it that looked like rhythm.
He went through it the way he had gone through it a dozen times already, because a missing signature on page three was the kind of thing that stopped a man at passport control, and passport control did not care how good a winger he was.
Passport scan, current, six months clear on the expiry.
Club invitation letter, the crest at the top and a Norwegian phone number underneath that Garcia had already called twice just to hear someone confirm the date out loud.
Return flight, dates matching the letter. Accommodation confirmation, a room in a shared block near the training ground, paid through the fourth week.
Travel insurance. A medical and fitness clearance from the physio Theo’s contact had found at a reduced rate.
Emergency contact — Garcia’s own number, since Jay’s mother could not be reached on foreign lines from a hospital bed.
Representation authority, signed months ago, photocopied fresh because the club wanted a copy dated within ninety days.
Player CV. The highlight package Rafi had cut down from forty minutes of raw session footage to four.
A training schedule, vague on detail but specific on times. Proof that Jay was a free agent, unattached, nothing binding him to anyone.
A data-sharing consent form Garcia had read twice before signing, because he had learned the hard way that the small print was where things went wrong.
Every document existed to answer one question a border officer or a club official might ask. None of them answered the only question that mattered.
Garcia knew exactly what these papers did and did not do.
They got Jay onto a plane, into a country, and onto a training pitch for one month. They did not get him a contract.
They did not get him a squad number or a place on a registration list. If the club wanted him after four weeks, that was an entirely separate conversation, with its own documents and its own weeks of waiting, and nothing he was sending today touched it in the slightest.
He did not say any of that out loud to anyone. It sat in his head the way most of the real parts of the job did, filed under things a client’s family did not need spelled out for them.
His phone buzzed while he was cross-checking the flight date against the accommodation email for the third time.
Rafi: He’s ready enough to get on the plane. That’s not nothing. But drills aren’t a senior pro closing you down at match speed. Norway will tell us if the last two months are real or if they only hold up against me.
Garcia read it twice and did not ask for more.
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