Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

The dormitory building was dark when Mateo got back.

It was past midnight. The bus from the stadium had taken longer than expected — traffic in the area around the Veltins-Arena after a Champions League match was its own kind of obstacle and by the time Mateo had showered, changed, and walked back from the team area it was closer to one in the morning than midnight.

He sat on the edge of his bed and opened the system.

The attribute panel was unchanged — no new points since the match, which was expected. Missions produced equipment, matches produced nothing beyond what they'd already given tonight, and training was the only reliable mechanism for attribute accumulation. He wasn't surprised. What he wanted to look at was the equipment bar.

The Reinforced Compression Shorts icon was there, in its designated position. He tapped it.

The item information appeared: Grade Silver, Effect 1 and Effect 2 as established. But there was something around the icon he hadn't fully noticed before the match — a thin circular line, like a progress indicator, currently perhaps a quarter of the way around the icon and moving. Slowly. Visibly.

He watched it for a moment.

[Effect 2: Situational fortune enhancement. Active once per charge cycle. Current charge: 14%.]

So it had a cooldown.

He hadn't thought about this before the Twente match — hadn't even registered the cooldown indicator, had assumed the effect was either passive or random. But looking at it now, with the post-match clarity of someone piecing together a sequence: the effect had activated in the forty-eighth minute, redirecting a Huntelaar power shot into the net. It had been available because enough time had elapsed since the item was first equipped. It wasn't permanently available. It recharged.

Which meant the luck effect was real, measurable, finite, and would be available again — he estimated, looking at the rate of charge, in perhaps three to four weeks. A resource with a longer cooldown than a match cycle but shorter than a season. Something that would arrive again at an unpredictable moment, unless he tracked the charge rate precisely.

He noted this and closed the system.

The dormitory room was quiet. Through the window, the training complex was dark except for the perimeter lights. Somewhere further off, the city was still making the low background noise of a night following a football match — traffic, voices, the residue of fifty thousand people dispersing.

He set his alarm for five and lay down.

Three kilometres away, in the temporary office Carvajal had established in a rented space near the club, the phone hadn't stopped for four hours.

He had a notebook — actual paper, the habit of an agent who had been doing this before digital tools were reliable and he was filling it. Each call got a line: club, contact, figure offered, specific conditions. By the time midnight passed it was three pages long and he was on his second coffee.

The calls fell into three categories.

The first was clubs making straightforward signing bonus offers for a January move — treating the €500,000 buyout clause as an imminent acquisition opportunity before the renewal Carvajal was already negotiating. He noted these and told them politely that the situation was being reviewed and he'd be in contact. What he didn't tell them was that the UEFA registration rule — once a player had appeared in a club competition that season, they couldn't be registered to play in the same competition for a different club — made a January move largely pointless if the goal was Champions League involvement. Schalke were in the group stage. Mateo had already featured. Any club buying him in January would acquire a Bundesliga player who couldn't participate in their Champions League campaign until next season. Several clubs appeared not to have done this calculation. He let them continue not doing it while he noted their figures.

The second category was clubs making longer-range offers — stay until summer, we're ready with a contract and compensation, we want you to know we're serious. This category was genuinely more interesting. A representative from Bayern's recruitment office had called — not a first-team official, but someone with authority and had been specific about the club's interest and the terms they were prepared to offer. A call from a Madrid intermediary — he didn't recognise the specific contact but the connection was genuine — was vaguer but unmistakably real. Several calls from English clubs, some of which were better funded than their position in the European hierarchy suggested.

He wrote everything down and made no commitments.

The third category was the commercial calls — Shoe companies, sportswear brands, a watch company whose representative seemed to have no clear idea why they were calling except that their marketing department had told them to. He redirected these to a secondary line and told them to send proposals in writing. He had a specific filter for commercial approaches now — Mateo had been explicit in his dormitory on the night they'd signed: not interested in deals driven by market size. This narrowed the field. The boots companies were in the field. The watch company probably wasn't.

Around two in the morning, a call came from a number he didn't recognise.

"Mr. Carvajal? This is Carl Weber. I represent Manchester United's scouting operations. I'm — I understand this may be a strange time to call. I've been trying to reach Mateo directly for several hours."

Carvajal set his pen down. Carl Weber — he knew the name. A senior Manchester United scout with a good reputation and, apparently, a persistent streak. He'd been aware of Carl's interest since the Frankfurt match. Mateo had mentioned him.

"It's a fine time," Carvajal said. "What's the situation from your end?"

"Ferguson's position hasn't changed. He's asked me to make clear that the offer from our last meeting stands — it's not a January-only offer, it's an open offer. If Mateo decides at any point that the time is right, we're ready."

"I appreciate the call," Carvajal said. "I'll pass that on."

"Can I ask — is there a renewal in process with Schalke?"

"There's a conversation," Carvajal said, which was technically accurate.

A short pause. "I understand," Carl said. He sounded like a man who had been doing this for long enough to recognise a diplomatic non-answer and respect it.

He ended the call.

Carvajal wrote Carl's name in the notebook with a small asterisk next to it — not because the Manchester United offer was the most financially compelling on the list, but because it was the one that had arrived with the most apparent sincerity, and sincerity was not always the most common currency in his profession.

He closed the notebook at half past two, set his phone to voicemail for the next few hours, and went to find somewhere to sleep.

Tomorrow — today, technically — he needed to be at Reinhardt's office before ten. The renewal was the immediate priority. Everything in the notebook could wait for the outcome of that conversation.

He thought for a brief moment about the player who had produced all of this, and finally let himself drift off to sleep.

Plz Drop Some Power Stones.

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